Alan Marlatt
G. Alan Marlatt, 1941 to 2011, was an American-Canadian clinical psychologist and the central figure in relapse-prevention research from the 1980s onward. He is the first author of Marlatt and Gordon (1985), Relapse Prevention, Guilford Press, which is where the abstinence violation effect comes from. The part of his model that travels furthest outside addiction is the attribution finding: a lapse becomes a relapse largely through how the person explains the lapse to themselves. Blame the situation and the thing survives. Blame yourself and it usually does not.
Who they are
Born in Vancouver, Marlatt was Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington and founded its Addictive Behaviors Research Center. His work runs across harm reduction, brief interventions and relapse prevention, including BASICS, the brief alcohol screening and intervention programme for college students he developed in the early 1980s, and later work on needle exchange, housing programmes and mindfulness-based relapse prevention. He died in Seattle in 2011.
He is the reason the abstinence violation effect is a cognitive and attributional account rather than a neurobiological one, which is a distinction this site keeps rather than smooths over. See the abstinence violation effect, where both readings are set out.
Key papers
Marlatt, G. A., & Gordon, J. R. (1985). Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors, Guilford Press. First author. The source of the abstinence violation effect.
Collins, S. E., & Witkiewitz, K. "Abstinence violation effect", in the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. The concept in review form, by later researchers.
A note on how this citation arrived. This vault carried the abstinence violation effect from another book for a year with Marlatt's name flagged as untraced and explicitly barred from publication, on the rule that documentation rather than confidence decides what gets printed. The 1985 citation was confirmed on 11 September 2026 and the bar lifted.
Key ideas
A lapse is not a relapse. The progression from one to the other is not automatic, and the model is about what makes it likelier.
Attribution is the variable. Attributing a slip to personal failure rather than to circumstance sharply raises the odds of a full relapse. That is a hopeful result and it is usually reported as a grim one.
The model was built for addictive behaviours. Applying it to a missed training session is an extension rather than a finding, and this site marks it as one. The exercise-specific literature is all-or-nothing thinking, and it is under a year old.
The boundary matters. The abstinence violation effect is the specific mechanism operating after a breach. All-or-nothing thinking is the broader cognitive pattern present in how the plan was framed beforehand. Neither should be folded into the other.
Concepts on this site
The Abstinence Violation Effect, the mechanism he named
All-or-Nothing Thinking, the broader cognitive pattern it sits inside
Self-Compassion, the counterweight to the self-blaming attribution his model identifies
Motivational Interviewing, the clinical tradition that grew up alongside relapse prevention
Sources
- Marlatt, G. A., & Gordon, J. R. (1985). Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors, Guilford Press.
- Collins, S. E., & Witkiewitz, K. "Abstinence violation effect", Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine.
- Vault verification record, 2026-09-11. Citation confirmed and the publication bar on his name lifted.