Creative Recovery

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.“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 JournalEric 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.