The Framework for Creative Living: Health, Networking, and Growth

If we are living the creative life in recovery, what does that look like?

How can we set up our life so as to enhance our chances at staying clean and sober? What is the framework for the creative life in recovery?

Traditional recovery frameworks

With traditional recovery, you might find a framework such as this:

1) Daily meetings

2) Sponsorship

3) Stepwork / self discovery / inventory / journal writing / etc.

4) Recovery literature

Or you might find someone else who is using a different sort of framework:

1) One-on-one counseling or therapy sessions

2) Group therapy

3) Drug therapy or maintenance

4) Long term treatment

In each case, the person who is recovering uses a few main strategies as their recovery program. These strategies make up the framework of their recovery program, because it gives them a baseline of actions that they can engage in.

As we progress in recovery, our framework should shift towards something closer to this:

1) Helping others in recovery

2) Caring for our health – in all areas of our life (physical health, emotional balance, spiritually, etc.)

3) Seek personal growth

You will notice the framework gets a bit more broad at this point and that is fine. If you interview a group of people that all have at least 10 years in recovery, you will find a wide variety of recovery strategies. For example, one person might focus their program very heavily on meditation, while another might not meditate at all (but instead, uses daily exercise to accomplish much the same thing).

Other examples include looking at the different ways that people give back and help others. Some people will be heavily involved in the 12 step fellowships and sponsorship, while others might have other ways of connecting with people in recovery.

The framework you use for recovery is a set of basic guidelines that can point you in the right direction. But we each have to find our own path and make it our own as we learn a new way to live.

If you are very early in recovery I would not recommend that you try to figure out your entire life and organize such a framework yourself just yet. Better is to seek support from others and ask for suggestions on how to live at this stage of your recovery.

Later on when you get your footing in sobriety is the time when you can start to plan out your long term recovery and how you want to live. Doing this too early in the game almost always results in relapse. So you have to be careful in very early recovery. Take direction from others first, you can design your own plan later.

Recommended Reading

• Overcoming Addiction
• Are You Holding Yourself Back From Personal Growth in Your Recovery?
• Creative Recovery Tackles the Balance Between Self Acceptance and Growth
• “When You Fall in Love with a System You Lose the Ability to Grow”
• Holistic Addiction Treatment Center

Tagged as: creative living, health, networking, personal growth