The Arts & Healing network has an interesting interview with Eric Maisel and Susan Raeburn about their new book Creative Recovery: A Complete Addiction Treatment That Uses Your Natural Creativity

"Mary Daniel Hobson: How is the creative person's recovery from addiction a unique path? 

Eric Maisel: It’s my and Susan’s belief that the very individuality of the creative person is a risk factor for addiction. If you are basically conventional and can buy into the norms and activities of your society, you will have less trouble with meaning and less anxiety about your place in the universe, and so be at a reduced risk for using addictive behaviors or substances to deal with those problems. On the other hand, if you are born individual, see meaning as a challenge and a problem and not a given, and experience anxiety about your place in your society and in the universe, you are also likely to feel the need to meet those challenges with some behavior or substance that takes your mind off of them.

Mary Daniel: Can you talk about how art and the creative process can be used to heal addiction. Why, in your view, is creativity such a potent healing force?

Eric: It has been long known that making art can heal. This represents a time-honored understanding of the power of creativity and it explains why the arts have always found a place at the table wherever healing, rehabilitation and recovery are promoted. Trauma victims are encouraged to make art. Patients in mental institutions are encouraged to make art, to such an extent that their efforts have led to a branch of art known as “outsider art.” The field of art therapy sprang up based on the twin ideas that art media can be used for diagnostic purposes and that the use of art media promotes insight and healing.

Creating in this simple but important sense—expressing yourself with pastels, writing in your journal—is, among other things, action; and, in the context of healing and recovery, taking action in the service of your recovery is better than brooding about your situation. It can be liberating to get your worried thoughts and feelings out as your fingers, heart, and mind work in tandem to produce a quilt, a song, or a poem. It can also open your eyes, as art therapists believe, because you may learn something about your situation when you examine the finished quilt and discover that its pattern and imagery actually reveal something important about your situation.   

Mary Daniel: In your book, you describe creating as  "a danger that a creative person must risk." What is dangerous about creativity in the recovery process? And why is it nevertheless essential?

Eric: Active recovery provides you with the opportunity to do decades of creative work while sober. This may not seem to you like a blessing in the first months of sobriety or even in the first year or two, as you struggle to work your recovery program and wish you had a few drinks or a fix to help you with your current novel or painting. Ultimately though, as you find the way to access your emotions, go deep without fear, and tackle the challenges of the creative life without recourse to addictive substances or behaviors, you will discover that you have not only saved your life but saved your creativity as well.

Jeff Tweedy, founder and lead singer of Wilco, described his relief in learning that sobriety had only helped his creative life: “Since I went through the process of being in the hospital and getting healthy, its been a huge anxiety for me to know if there was some kind of zero-sum game that would be played out in terms of can I create without this tension, this anxiety within myself? When we first started recording and things began happening in the way they’d always happened, lyrics came the same way they had always come for me, songs just felt like, wow, where did that song come from? Things started happening and once everything became apparent that things would be the way they’d always been, that I didn’t have to trade health for creativity, it was an enormous relief.”

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