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

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 peopleand 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 recoveryan informative, insightful, and valuable book.

Library Journal

ABOUT THE BOOK

For writers, artists, musicians, and creators in every field, this book offers a complete addiction recovery program specifically designed for the creative person. Full of explanations and exercises, this book presents ways to use your own innate creative abilities in service of your recovery and at each stage of the recovery process. Topics include: the biological and developmental risks unique to creative people; the special personality traits that can inform the recovery process; ways to approach your recovery much like your art; and exercises that promote your creativity and art that aid the recovery process. This book gives a clear picture of the relationship between creativity and addiction and lays out a complete program so that you can live a fully creative and addiction-free life.

To find out more about one of the authors, visit his website: www.ericmaisel.com.

ERIC MAISEL, PhD, 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.

SUSAN RAEBURN, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist. She maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Berkeley, Calif., and is a staff pschologist in the Chemical Dependency Services program at Kaiser Permanente.

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Creative Recovery

A Complete Addiction Treatment Program

That Uses Your Natural Creativity

Eric Maisel, PhD

Susan Raeburn, PhD

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2011

The information contained in this book is based on the personal and professional experiences of the authors. It is not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician or other health-care provider. Shambhala Publications and the authors are not responsible for any adverse effects or consequences resulting directly or indirectly from the use of any of the suggestions discussed in this book. All matters pertaining to your individual health should be supervised by a health-care professional. The names, locations, and certain other identifying details of the clients mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their identity.

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2008 by Eric Maisel and Susan Raeburn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maisel, Eric, 1947

Creative recovery: a complete addiction treatment program that uses your natural creativity / Eric Maisel, Susan Raeburn.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2206-1

ISBN 978-1-59030-544-7

1. AddictsRehabilitation. 2. Recovering addicts. 3. Creative thinking. 4. Creative ability. I. Raeburn, Susan. II. Title.

HV4998.M32 2008

616. 8603dc22

2008016972

Contents

Eric Maisel

First I would like to thank my coauthor, Dr. Susan Raeburn, for taking on this project, for her expert contributions, for her dedicated work on this book in the middle of a busy psychotherapy practice, and for her great good humor. Thanks, Susan! Second, I would like to thank our literary agent, Janet Rosen, for finding this book such an excellent home at Shambhala Publications. Third, I would like to thank Jennifer Brown, our editor at Shambhala, for cocreating this book by providing a steady vision, engaging in rigorous developmental and line editing, and demanding that we get things right.

For the rest, it is impossible to name all the individuals who have contributed to this book: all of my newsletter subscribers who responded to my call for information with stories of their challenges with and successes over addiction; all of my Art Calendar magazine readers who responded in a similarly helpful way; and all of my creativity coaching clients and workshop participants who, in our work together, have educated me about the addiction struggles that creators deal with on a regular basis.

Last, three words to my wife, Ann Mathesius Maisel, as we pass the milestone of our thirtieth anniversary: Thank you, love.

Susan Raeburn

My heartfelt thanks go first and foremost to Eric Maisel, my irrepressible friend and colleague, for his generous invitation to collaborate on this book. Working closely on the project deepened my long-standing experience of Eric as a smart, authentic, funny, emotionally mature, and thoroughly delightful person. I know I am not alone in considering him a force of nature. Thank you, Eric. Thanks to Janet Rosen, our agent, and Jennifer Brown, our editor, for their belief in the merit of our book and their perseverance in bringing it to life. Additional thanks, Jennifer, for your patient stewardship and vision for