In the context of substance abuse, it's not hard to see the original implication of the now-largely meaningless aphorism: People trying to beat an addiction have to work very hard to keep from falling back into the habit. An addicted person will often find him or herself doing the same things (hanging out with the same enablers, doing the same activities that surround substance abuse) and expecting things will be "different this time."

Thus the admonition that someone is "insane" if they expect change when they are doing the very same things they did when they were dependent.

Interesting. I always saw the meaning as directly related to relapse, which is a huge theme in recovery groups. That is, people get sober for a few months, think they have "fixed" their addiction and get drunk again, thinking that they won't become the same awful drunk they were before recovery.

Sometimes, but rarely, that happens though. Remember, they may have created more contacts or added rules to prevent abuse.

Never been to any rehab and recovery groups, but I used to hear this all the time in real estate training, and self-help seminars. These days, it's life coaches who love this quote.

The intersection of all five of those sets is surprisingly high

I'm starting a self-help seminar for real-estate agents on ice. I hope you're right.

That's called NA.

My experiments on myself in reprogramming my brain as part of my recovery from addiction have led to a surprising conclusion: an addict can perform the same behavior with a different mindset and get different results. The problem is when the addictive behavior is performed in order to escape/numb their emotions (or whatever problematic motivation was driving them in their addiction).

Also, the phrase requires predicting the future of a complex adaptive system, aka. a human. If 12-step groups besides Codependents Anonymous actually spent time looking at codependency, they'd be able to catch the glaring future-tripping nonsense in the idea.

Is this your justification for why it's safe for you to drink?

While your "complex adaptive system" may have escaped addiction, others usually don't, and that statement is useful for them.

For addicts, religion or saying and thinking about life in religious ways and mantras, work surprisingly well for beating the addiction. It's difficult for me to say it being a "hard-core atheist", but this is something I've seen from my close ones. Of course, now in my eyes they have another problem, but it's not substance addiction anymore.

Indeed, in the article, the first verbatim use in print is in NA material from 1981.

I used to hear this from my dad. He wasn't involved in rehab/recover, though he is a doctor (pathologist) so... maybe he heard it from other doctors who are involved in rehab/recovery?