The Abstinence Violation Effect
The abstinence violation effect is the set of cognitive and emotional reactions to a lapse that make a full relapse more likely. It was named by Alan Marlatt and Judith Gordon in Relapse Prevention (Guilford Press, 1985), and the variable that decides the outcome is attribution. Somebody who reads the slip as information about the situation carries on. Somebody who reads it as information about themselves usually does not. The progression from lapse to relapse was never automatic, which is the hopeful finding inside a literature that is usually reported as a grim one.
What it is
Marlatt's model is about the moments after a breach. A person with a rule, a plan or a period of abstinence behind them breaks it once. What happens next is not determined by the breach. It is determined by how the breach gets explained.
Attribute it to circumstance, to a bad week, to a work trip, to an illness, and the rule survives the exception. Attribute it to personal failure, to not being the sort of person who can do this, and the odds of a full relapse rise sharply. The self-blaming reading does the damage, not the missed day.
Alan Marlatt, 1941 to 2011, was Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington and the central figure in relapse-prevention research from the 1980s onward. The concept also appears in review form in Collins and Witkiewitz's entry on the abstinence violation effect in the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine.
The boundary with all-or-nothing thinking, which has its own page. The abstinence violation effect is the specific relapse mechanism: what happens in the moments after a breach. All-or-nothing thinking is the broader cognitive pattern that grades performance as success or failure with nothing in between, and it is present in how the plan was framed long before any lapse occurs. One is a thinking style and the other is what happens after a breach. They are distinct, neither should be folded into the other, and the distinction is written on both pages so it survives whichever one a reader arrives at first.