Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, whilst he is away, spends the day weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father, Laertes, but then spends the night undoing it.
This is just like where I work the programme very hard and ostentatiously in one part of my life, or on some days of the week, then deliberately engage in destructive thinking or behaviour, until I can’t stand it anymore, and come back with my tail between my legs. Essentially, there is no real surrender, only tediously working through the cycle, of relapse and pseudo-recovery, just like with drinking and full-blown relapse:
“Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which they see others taking with impunity. After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.” (Doctor’s Opinion, Big Book)
… the well-known stages of a spree …
Over time the pendulum swings have diminished, and the result is more stability.