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Creative Recovery
- By Misc Author
- Published 03/10/2008
- What Are Your Recovery Options
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By Eric Maisel, Ph.D.
The following is an excerpt from CREATIVE RECOVERY, by Eric Maisel, Ph.D., and Susan Raeburn, Ph.D., to be published Fall, 2008 by Shambhala Press.
CREATIVE RECOVERY
Creative recovery is the way you honor your creative nature by dealing with your addictive tendencies.
Creative recovery is the way you serve your creative nature by recovering from your addiction.
Creative recovery is the way you use your creative nature as part of the recovery process. Creative recovery is the way you create a life that includes both creating and recovery.
And creative recovery is the way you educate yourself about your risks for addiction, your patterns of addiction, and the details of your creative recovery program. Throughout this book we will treat you as a creative person, as someone capable of imagining, feeling, reasoning, playing, daydreaming, concentrating, and everything else that a creative person can do. Some of our exercises might stump another person, but they won’t stump you!
We want to present you with a recovery program that takes into account your individuality, your creative aspirations, your oppositional edge, your drive, and the other personality qualities that make you the person that you are.
We intend to name the extra risk factors that challenge you by virtue of the fact that you are a creative individual and explain how that same individuality and creativity can be harnessed in the recovery process. We hope that you will feel met in our discussions and recognize these as your precise challenges and your best solutions.
What is a recovery program? It is the systematic way that you deal with your addictive tendencies and your addiction problems.
It requires a lot of you because it is predicated on the idea that your addiction is (or might become) a serious problem in your life, perhaps even a life-threatening problem. Your recovery program isn’t something that you do “after everything else” or “when you get the chance”: you live it, you take it seriously, and you organize your life around your desire to live “clean and sober” (whether your problem is with alcohol or with some other substance or behavior).
We come to this work in the following way. I’m a licensed family therapist and a creativity coach and I’ve worked with creative people in these two capacities for over twenty years. I’ve also counseled “drinking drivers” in the First Offender Program, a San Francisco-based, court-mandated diversion program.
Susan is a licensed clinical psychologist, has maintained a private psychotherapy practice in Berkeley, California for twenty years, and was a staff psychologist at the Stanford University Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center before joining the Chemical Dependency Services program at Kaiser Permanente.
She’s been active on panels at music industry conferences like South By Southwest, is on the editorial board of the journal Medical Problems of Performing Artists, and is the daughter of two professional musicians, bandleader Boyd Raeburn and jazz vocalist Ginnie Powell. Between us we’ve worked with lots of creative people and with lots of addicts—often enough one and the same people.
We see recovery as the process of bravely acknowledging and mindfully dealing with an addiction.
Most recovery programs are very helpful and provide important structure and sensible ideas. They demand that you deal with your defensiveness, change habits that have supported your addiction, make recovery a priority, and quickly return to the program when and if you lapse.
Our goal is not to replace existing programs, as they tend to be strong and smart as they are. We only want to add something useful to them: a clear understanding of your special challenges as a creative person and sound advice about how to handle those specific challenges.
Throughout we will keep our eye on the central dynamics that cause the addiction in the first place and that threaten recovery at every step, especially the place of anxiety in the recovery process.
When something manages to reduce our core anxiety and provides us with a feeling of well-being, however fleetingly, we want to repeat that feeling. After awhile, we can get hooked on that feeling and that anxiety relief.
That something might be chocolate, a wager, an orgasm, a fix, a beer, or a comforting belief. We think about Heaven, reduce or mask our experience of anxiety, and produce pleasure—or at least a respite from worry.
We sip our cognac, reduce or mask our experience of anxiety, and feel better. We drive at a hundred miles an hour and, high on adrenaline and thrilled by the ride, produce pleasure and distance ourselves from our worries. Naturally we want that feeling again and again. Who wouldn’t?
People want to reduce their experience of anxiety. The body is set up to help in this regard, turning potato chips into chemical pleasure and relaxation, turning an orgasm into chemical pleasure and relaxation, using an hour of computer solitaire to take its mind off its core anxieties, using the raucous hubbub of a bar to distract it from its worries, embracing the adrenalin rush of a big bet, a huge merger, or a fast drive down the highway.
Every body knows these anxiety-reducing pleasures; some bodies become addicted to them. If you have big drives, big appetites, big challenges, and big anxieties, this dynamic is magnified many-fold.
We are all would-be addicts, given the right circumstances of biology, psychology, and social setting. Some of us, because we are more at risk, become full-blown addicts and cross over into that place of obsession, compulsion, and loss of control known as addiction.
Even if we don’t succumb to an addiction, the odds are great that we feel a significant loss of control in some area of our life and have trouble maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding hours of Internet surfing, quieting our anxious thoughts, or staying on track with our goals.
In order to deal with challenges of this sort, you need to “recover”: that is, you need to embrace a way of being that acknowledges and forthrightly addresses your addictive nature and your incipient problems.
If you don’t, you might wake up one morning bound head-to-foot with a sturdy rope and murmur, “How interesting! I think I’ll become a circus attraction!”
Others have been down that road and are prepared to warn you against accepting that easy, happy bondage. Charlie Parker explained, “Any musician who says he is playing better on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced is a plain straight liar.”
The poet John Berryman lamented, “Quart of whiskey a day for months working hard on a long poem. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Murderous and suicidal. Many hospitalizations, many alibis.”
David Crosby admitted, “While I was an addict, I didn’t write anything. I didn’t have the attention span or the will.” The happy bondage of an addiction is anything but happy—and not the answer.
Do you hear a beautiful siren’s call to an addiction? The call is powerful and alluring. A golden voice is singing, “Is manifesting your potential hard? Is living authentically hard? Does reality depress you and make you anxious? Enjoy me! I am your best friend. I am your salvation. I can calm your nerves. I can quell your fears. I can take your mind off anything. It’s so easy. Just come over here!”
We want to teach you how to deal with that beautiful siren’s song and live a creative, meaningful, addiction-free life that is characterized by freedom and not bondage.
~ ~ ~
If you would like to be a blog host on the CREATIVE RECOVERY virtual book tour, sponsor a CREATIVE RECOVERY workshop in your area or for your organization or your institution, participate in follow-up research on the addiction issues of creative people, or have a question, thought, or comment, please contact Eric Maisel.
www.ericmaisel.com
Article republished here with kind permission of the author.
The following is an excerpt from CREATIVE RECOVERY, by Eric Maisel, Ph.D., and Susan Raeburn, Ph.D., to be published Fall, 2008 by Shambhala Press.
CREATIVE RECOVERY
Creative recovery is the way you honor your creative nature by dealing with your addictive tendencies.
Creative recovery is the way you serve your creative nature by recovering from your addiction.
Creative recovery is the way you use your creative nature as part of the recovery process. Creative recovery is the way you create a life that includes both creating and recovery.
And creative recovery is the way you educate yourself about your risks for addiction, your patterns of addiction, and the details of your creative recovery program. Throughout this book we will treat you as a creative person, as someone capable of imagining, feeling, reasoning, playing, daydreaming, concentrating, and everything else that a creative person can do. Some of our exercises might stump another person, but they won’t stump you!
We want to present you with a recovery program that takes into account your individuality, your creative aspirations, your oppositional edge, your drive, and the other personality qualities that make you the person that you are.
We intend to name the extra risk factors that challenge you by virtue of the fact that you are a creative individual and explain how that same individuality and creativity can be harnessed in the recovery process. We hope that you will feel met in our discussions and recognize these as your precise challenges and your best solutions.
What is a recovery program? It is the systematic way that you deal with your addictive tendencies and your addiction problems.
It requires a lot of you because it is predicated on the idea that your addiction is (or might become) a serious problem in your life, perhaps even a life-threatening problem. Your recovery program isn’t something that you do “after everything else” or “when you get the chance”: you live it, you take it seriously, and you organize your life around your desire to live “clean and sober” (whether your problem is with alcohol or with some other substance or behavior).
We come to this work in the following way. I’m a licensed family therapist and a creativity coach and I’ve worked with creative people in these two capacities for over twenty years. I’ve also counseled “drinking drivers” in the First Offender Program, a San Francisco-based, court-mandated diversion program.
Susan is a licensed clinical psychologist, has maintained a private psychotherapy practice in Berkeley, California for twenty years, and was a staff psychologist at the Stanford University Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center before joining the Chemical Dependency Services program at Kaiser Permanente.
She’s been active on panels at music industry conferences like South By Southwest, is on the editorial board of the journal Medical Problems of Performing Artists, and is the daughter of two professional musicians, bandleader Boyd Raeburn and jazz vocalist Ginnie Powell. Between us we’ve worked with lots of creative people and with lots of addicts—often enough one and the same people.
We see recovery as the process of bravely acknowledging and mindfully dealing with an addiction. Most recovery programs are very helpful and provide important structure and sensible ideas. They demand that you deal with your defensiveness, change habits that have supported your addiction, make recovery a priority, and quickly return to the program when and if you lapse.
Our goal is not to replace existing programs, as they tend to be strong and smart as they are. We only want to add something useful to them: a clear understanding of your special challenges as a creative person and sound advice about how to handle those specific challenges.
Throughout we will keep our eye on the central dynamics that cause the addiction in the first place and that threaten recovery at every step, especially the place of anxiety in the recovery process.
When something manages to reduce our core anxiety and provides us with a feeling of well-being, however fleetingly, we want to repeat that feeling. After awhile, we can get hooked on that feeling and that anxiety relief.
That something might be chocolate, a wager, an orgasm, a fix, a beer, or a comforting belief. We think about Heaven, reduce or mask our experience of anxiety, and produce pleasure—or at least a respite from worry.
We sip our cognac, reduce or mask our experience of anxiety, and feel better. We drive at a hundred miles an hour and, high on adrenaline and thrilled by the ride, produce pleasure and distance ourselves from our worries. Naturally we want that feeling again and again. Who wouldn’t?
People want to reduce their experience of anxiety. The body is set up to help in this regard, turning potato chips into chemical pleasure and relaxation, turning an orgasm into chemical pleasure and relaxation, using an hour of computer solitaire to take its mind off its core anxieties, using the raucous hubbub of a bar to distract it from its worries, embracing the adrenalin rush of a big bet, a huge merger, or a fast drive down the highway.
Every body knows these anxiety-reducing pleasures; some bodies become addicted to them. If you have big drives, big appetites, big challenges, and big anxieties, this dynamic is magnified many-fold.
We are all would-be addicts, given the right circumstances of biology, psychology, and social setting. Some of us, because we are more at risk, become full-blown addicts and cross over into that place of obsession, compulsion, and loss of control known as addiction.
Even if we don’t succumb to an addiction, the odds are great that we feel a significant loss of control in some area of our life and have trouble maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding hours of Internet surfing, quieting our anxious thoughts, or staying on track with our goals.
In order to deal with challenges of this sort, you need to “recover”: that is, you need to embrace a way of being that acknowledges and forthrightly addresses your addictive nature and your incipient problems.
If you don’t, you might wake up one morning bound head-to-foot with a sturdy rope and murmur, “How interesting! I think I’ll become a circus attraction!”
Others have been down that road and are prepared to warn you against accepting that easy, happy bondage. Charlie Parker explained, “Any musician who says he is playing better on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced is a plain straight liar.”
The poet John Berryman lamented, “Quart of whiskey a day for months working hard on a long poem. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Murderous and suicidal. Many hospitalizations, many alibis.”
David Crosby admitted, “While I was an addict, I didn’t write anything. I didn’t have the attention span or the will.” The happy bondage of an addiction is anything but happy—and not the answer.
Do you hear a beautiful siren’s call to an addiction? The call is powerful and alluring. A golden voice is singing, “Is manifesting your potential hard? Is living authentically hard? Does reality depress you and make you anxious? Enjoy me! I am your best friend. I am your salvation. I can calm your nerves. I can quell your fears. I can take your mind off anything. It’s so easy. Just come over here!”
We want to teach you how to deal with that beautiful siren’s song and live a creative, meaningful, addiction-free life that is characterized by freedom and not bondage.
~ ~ ~
If you would like to be a blog host on the CREATIVE RECOVERY virtual book tour, sponsor a CREATIVE RECOVERY workshop in your area or for your organization or your institution, participate in follow-up research on the addiction issues of creative people, or have a question, thought, or comment, please contact Eric Maisel.
www.ericmaisel.com
Article republished here with kind permission of the author.
