Creative Recovery: A Complete Addiction Treatment Program That Uses Your Natural Creativity

Description

This is a complete programme for addiction recovery specifically designed for the creative person. The authors show readers how they can use their own innate creative abilities at each stage of the recovery process to secure behaviour change for long-lasting recovery. They also present the particular challenges that self-identified creative people face with substance abuse and how they can use their creativity in the service of their recovery.The book presents the relationship between creativity and recovery in a few main ways: it explains the biological and development risks unique to creative people; it shows readers how their personality traits, such as imagination, can help inform the recovery process; it shows how readers can approach their recovery in much the same way they approach their art - with regularity, honesty, commitment, and so on; and, it presents exercises to promote and engage readers in the creative and expressive arts in the service of recovery. For writers, artists, musicians, and creators in every field, this book offers a clear picture of the relationship between creativity and addiction and lays out a programme that creative people can follow to live a fully creative and addiction-free life.

Eric Maisel is a licensed marriage and family therapist and creativity coach with degrees in philosophy, creative writing, and counseling psychology. He has written over thirty books including Fearless Creating, The Van Gogh Blues, and Coaching the Artist Within.

"Creative Recovery is a boldly challenging, rich, and comprehensive guide to positive, healthy growth for anyone with creative talents or the desire to look inward for potential and possibility. The authors have provided a 'how-to' map to target your creative energies toward self-reflection and action that will enhance your well-being and health, and reinforce and recharge your creativity. They show you how to cultivate, harness, and direct all forms of creative energy towards the positive; how to take the healthy path when you reach the 'Y' in the road. Above all, the authors show you how to wake up, pay attention, and to live with integrity and self-honesty. This is a practical and useful guide."-Stephanie Brown, PhD, Director, The Addictions Institute, and author of A Place Called Self: Women, Sobriety and Radical Transformation "Creative Recovery presents a rock-solid recovery program that anyone can use and that writers, painters, musicians, and other creative people will find invaluable and for some, even life-saving."-Bonnie Raitt "Even seasoned clinicians working with individuals in the creative professions will appreciate the utility of the exercises and questions for cultivating new avenues of inquiry around the process of change related to addiction. I particularly liked that Creative Recovery encouraged inquiry about change and addiction from multiple perspectives and across multiple types of creative activities."-Nancy A. Piotrowski, PhD, President, Division 50 (Addictions), American Psychological Association "As lifelong musicians and radio hosts who have interviewed hundreds of singer-songwriters, we know firsthand what havoc addiction plays in the lives of creative people-and how beautifully Creative Recovery will serve musicians and other artists looking for a recovery program tailored to their special needs."-Vivian Nesbitt and John Dillon, producers and hosts, Art of the Song Creativity Radio "The authors emphasize that recovery is an ongoing, lifelong process, and they expand upon and reinforce the role played by creativity, which provides an artistic outlet to express the hope, strength, and wholeness of continued recovery-an informative, insightful, and valuable book."- Library Journal