In 12-step programs, a story is told to newly recovering addicts about a person who walks down a street absentmindedly and falls into a pothole. If the person is an unrecovered addict, he keeps walking down the same street, falling into the pothole, evoking Einstein's definition of insanity: "doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."
An addict further along the recovery process sees the pothole and tries to circumvent it, sometimes successfully, s