Relapse Trigger Review¶
Relapse review procedure — instantiates Associative Cue Redesign
Reviews the episodes where the old response came back to find which cue, context, or substitution failure was responsible — turning each recurrence into a targeted repair.
Relapse Trigger Review is the backward-looking procedure that keeps a cue redesign from being a one-time event. When the old response returns, it treats that recurrence not as a personal failure but as data: it examines the specific episodes where the old behaviour came back and diagnoses which cue slipped back in, which context the redesign never covered, or which substitution quietly failed. Its distinctive product is not a new cue but a diagnosis — a pointer to exactly which part of the redesign to repair next. It does not itself remove or re-place cues; it tells the mechanisms that do where to aim.
Example¶
After a company's security-awareness programme, most staff stopped clicking phishing links — but a stubborn minority kept falling for them, in training simulations and in the wild. Instead of re-running the same training, the security team runs a Relapse Trigger Review on the repeat episodes. Tracking the recurrences shows a pattern (the monitor); cataloguing their contexts surfaces the common threads — an "urgent invoice from the CEO" framing, late-afternoon fatigue, and email read on a phone where the sender address is hidden (the context inventory); and a substitution check asks whether the warning banner added last quarter actually helped or merely trained people to click through banners reflexively (the substitution check). The review's output is not a lecture but a targeted finding: the mobile-email context and the authority-urgency cue are where the redesign leaks — handing Trigger Removal and Prompt Redesign a precise next repair.
How it works¶
- Collect the recurrences, not impressions. Work from actual episodes where the old response returned, gathered as they happen, rather than from a general sense that "it's slipping."
- Inventory the context of each. For every episode, record the cue, timing, setting, and state that surrounded it, so hidden or uncovered triggers become visible across cases.
- Test the last fix. Ask whether a previous substitution or added cue genuinely held or merely displaced the response — distinguishing a real repair from a moved problem.
- Hand off a diagnosis. Convert the pattern into a specific instruction for the intervening mechanisms: which cue to remove, which prompt to re-place, which context to cover.
Tuning parameters¶
- Review cadence — from continuous monitoring to a scheduled retrospective. Frequent review catches drift early but can over-read noise as relapse; rare review sees clear patterns but acts late.
- Episode threshold — how much recurrence counts as a relapse worth reviewing. A low bar catches slippage early but floods the review; a high bar waits for a clear signal.
- Attribution depth — how far the review digs past the proximate cue to the context that let it return. Shallow attribution is fast but repairs symptoms; deep attribution finds the leak but costs time.
- Blame stance — whether recurrence is read as a redesign defect or an individual failing. Treating it as design information keeps the data flowing; treating it as fault dries up the reports.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is that it closes the loop: a cue redesign inevitably leaks somewhere the first pass did not anticipate, and this review converts each leak into a specific repair instead of a vague sense of backsliding. It is the mechanism that makes cue redesign durable rather than one-shot — much as near-miss reporting turns harmless recurrences into prevention before a real failure.[n1]
It misleads when it curdles into blame or hindsight. Read recurrence as personal weakness and the episodes stop being reported, starving the review of its only input; over-fit to the last incident and you patch one cue while the pattern moves on; and a review run to assign fault rather than locate the leak produces a scapegoat and no repair. The discipline is to keep the stance non-punitive, work from a body of episodes rather than the most recent dramatic one, and always end on a design change rather than a verdict about a person.
How it implements the components¶
relapse_monitor— it tracks whether and where the old response returns, providing the recurrence signal the whole procedure works from.trigger_context_inventory— it catalogues the context surrounding each recurrence, surfacing the hidden or uncovered triggers a single-pass redesign missed.unintended_substitution_check— it tests whether a prior fix genuinely held or merely displaced the response to a new cue or route.
It does not itself redo the redesign it recommends — removing the culpable cue (cue_removal_or_substitution → Trigger Removal) or re-placing the prompt (replacement_cue → Point-of-Action Prompting); it diagnoses which repair to make.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Associative Cue Redesign — it is the monitoring-and-diagnosis loop that keeps the redesign honest over time.
- Sibling mechanisms: Trigger Removal · Prompt Redesign · Point-of-Action Prompting · Habit Loop Mapping · Behavior Substitution · Context Restructuring · Environmental Cue Change · Friction or Salience Adjustment · Implementation Intention Script · Safety Cue Redesign
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Assessment, Review & Assurance
Rationale: Relapse Trigger Review operates as a bounded evaluation of existing evidence or work that produces a finding or disposition because it reviews the episodes where the old response came back to find which cue, context, or substitution failure was responsible — turning each recurrence into a targeted repair.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Relapse Trigger Review as 'Reviews the episodes where the old response came back to find which cue, context, or substitution failure was responsible — turning each recurrence into a targeted repair', so its operative form is Assessment, Review & Assurance.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Psychology
Origin pattern: Cross-disciplinary synthesis
Present-day reach: Multi-domain
Rationale: Analyzing recurrence episodes for cues and failed substitutions is characteristic of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral psychology.
Related originating lineages:
- Medicine & Healthcare — Clinical relapse review in addiction and chronic-disease care materially shaped episode-based repair.
Review resolution: Both blind reviewers agree that psychology is the primary historical origin. Explicit reconciliation of alternate origin disagreement, origin mode disagreement, encyclopedia synthesis disagreement adopts reviewer_a's evidence: Analyzing recurrence episodes for cues and failed substitutions is characteristic of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral psychology. The selected record uses alternates=medicine_healthcare, origin_mode=cross_disciplinary_synthesis, and domain_reach=multi_domain; the other review proposed alternates=cognitive_science, origin_mode=single_lineage, and domain_reach=multi_domain. The selected combination better preserves the mechanism-specific formative lineages and calibrated scope; broader present-day use is not treated as proof of additional historical origin.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
Notes¶
Relapse Trigger Review is deliberately a diagnostic, not an intervention: it locates the leak but hands the repair to the mechanisms that remove, replace, or re-time cues. Keeping the two separate is what lets a team improve where it intervenes next without re-litigating the whole redesign. In clinical or personal-recovery settings this framing is an illustration only, not treatment guidance.
[n1] Near-miss reporting is the safety practice of investigating events that could have caused harm but did not, on the principle that recurring close calls signal a systemic weakness worth fixing before it produces real damage. A relapse review applies the same logic to a cue redesign: each recurrence is a close call to be learned from rather than punished. ↩