Getting Better Is a Little Bit Like the Frog in the Boiling Water, Right?

Getting better is a bit like the frog in the boiling water, right? Baby steps. Is getting worse the same way? Do these things happen incrementally or if an addict falls off the wagon, is it just with a thud? I'm not really sure what my question is other than to say that there's a working assumption that once you're an alcoholic, you're always an alcoholic,. You're always in recovery, right? And then there's this other sort of school of thought, I have some friends who went through something called RR School recovery because the AA thing didn't quite work for them. Are there many, many, many ways to try and get to a place where