Using art therapy to combat addiction, depression, and COVID-19

by Patrick Bailey

Many downers in life try to suck every inch of happiness from our existence. Addiction, depression, and COVID-19 are examples of such emotional vampires. They can cause people to be worried, overwhelmingly sad, bored, and lonely. Furthermore, they can cause a person to try to turn to substances such as drugs and alcohol to alleviate the pain. Art therapy is the perfect alternative to turning to harmful substances for a false sense of happiness. It's a tool that anyone can use to combat the conditions and situations mentioned above. Here's some information about it and how it can help.

What Art Therapy Is All About

Art therapy is a method of treatment that involves the arts. It uses a variety of art forms to help people to work through their pain and struggles. Writing or journaling is a form of art therapy, as are painting and drawing. Other examples of art therapy include writing music, playing a musical instrument, sculpting, sewing, knitting, and crafting collages. Many alcohol and drug rehab centers use art therapy to help patients and clients to work through various stages of addiction recovery. Art therapy is also a practice that some doctors use for neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis. Alternatively, sometimes art therapy plays a role in the lives of abuse survivors as they are trying to find the way to their true selves and their new lives.

Why Art Therapy Helps

Art therapy can help people for many reasons. The benefits list is long, but we'll mention some of the most crucial ones. First, it allows the participants to create something new and something beautiful. Many people in art therapy programs have been surrounded by ugliness in their environments. The artistic activities allow those people to become creators and take control of their lives by making it what they want it to be.

Artistic activities center a person's focus as well. It can help keep an individual grounded and calm while that person is going through the withdrawal stage of addiction, for example. Additionally, the act of creating art can give a person a strong sense of accomplishment. It can help a person to feel as if his or her life has real meaning, or to help them express their feelings in a more indirect but healing way. That feeling is especially important in someone who is suffering from a depressive episode.

Art therapy could provide a person with a strong sense of who he or she is. Many people discover that they have artistic capabilities while they're in art therapy. They may have spent so much of their lives catering to other people that they never got the opportunity to develop fully. Art therapy gives them a chance to do that.

How to Get Started With Art Therapy

An individual who is interested in art therapy can use several methods to get started. He or she can contact an individual art therapist who can work with the person to use art in its purest form to help combat life's struggles. A person who is working through addiction can contact rehab drug centers to find a facility that participates in art therapy as a part of its overall program. The best way to find out what a facility offers is to contact the facility directly and request to speak to an administrator. Another way to get started with art therapy is to take an art therapy course.

Another way that person can get involved with art therapy is to go it alone. The individual should take a few days to think about which artistic activity is the most appealing to him or her. The individual should then research (if needed) and write down a list of all the materials that will be necessary to perform the activity. For example, the person might need colored pencils and construction paper for a drawing activity. The person can start any time after he or she gathers the appropriate materials. The best way to do it is just to do it. It will be exciting for the individual to see the lovely creation at the end of the activity.

Start Taking Control with Art Therapy

You've just read a brief description of what art therapy is and how it can be of assistance to different people.

Art therapy can be an exciting new way for you to get in touch with your inner artist and use this process of discovery to work through complex emotions. You might want to give it a try if you're in any of the situations mentioned above. Art therapy may also be worth considering if you've tried other therapies and they haven't worked for you. You can use any of the methods mentioned above to start your journey of using art therapy to help yourself. You'll be a lot happier and healthier in the end. Remember, there's no wrong way to recover. The only wrong thing that you can do is to fail to try.

Author Bio: Patrick Bailey is a professional writer mainly in the fields of mental health, addiction, and living in recovery. He attempts to stay on top of the latest news in the addiction and the mental health world and enjoy writing about these topics to break the stigma associated with them. 

Sometimes Even Old Ladies Get Published

By Brenda Marie Smith

I was sixty-six years old when my novel, If Darkness Takes Us, was published by an independent press—a day of celebration for sure, but also a day I’d often thought would never come. The book drew on many facets of my actual life, coupled with my deepest fears.

Bea Crenshaw is a grandmother who’s worried about the environment, so she secretly stockpiles food, gear, and seeds to prepare for disaster. She’s keeping four grandkids alone when a solar pulse destroys the U.S. grid, taking cars, phones, and running water along with it. Bea must teach these kids to survive before her heart gives out.

Back in high school in 1971, everyone assumed I would have a long, bright career as a writer. I was runner-up in a national short story contest, I took second place in a statewide poetry contest, I was editor for the school literary magazine and editorial editor for the newspaper. I won a full-ride university scholarship. I was also painfully shy. It was a sin in Oklahoma in those days to show your brains, especially for a girl. I hid my talents, terrified of being taunted for being uppity.

 The Hippie Days

And so, I did what so many young people did back then. I dropped out and took off hitchhiking across the country with the man I would soon marry while I was still only eighteen. We visited all the hippie hot spots—Boulder, the California redwoods, the Oregon coast, Haight-Ashbury. After that, we lived with my husband’s parents in a tiny Louisiana town. I had time to write again, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

We moved to the Arkansas Ozark Mountains and lived off the grid, drank from an artesian spring by the back door of our tar-paper shack, and grew a garden. We read spiritual books by lantern light, and my husband burned my poetry in the woodstove, saying I needed to purge my ego. I was stunned, but I was too naive to realize what an absolute bullying act that was.

From there we moved to a hippie vegan community in Tennessee called The Farm. We continued to live off-grid and grow vegetables, and I gave birth to two sons, delivered by midwives. Because we cooked our food from scratch, hauled water, chopped wood for heating and cooking, and lived in households crammed with babies and toddlers, there was no time to think, much less write. I didn’t realize it then, but I was racking up experiences that would later fuel my writing. People often comment on how much research I must have done for my novel, but my life was my research. 

Austin

In 1980 we came to Austin, Texas, and started a tofu salad business. I got involved in the anti-nuclear movement and met cool people who liked the fact that I was smart. I finally realized I was married to the wrong man, but I married a bigger bully soon after. It took me until 1990 to extract myself. I was a single mom to two sons, working a high-stress management job for a student housing co-op, and I did reams of business writing.

At last, I met the right man for me, Doug, the furnace repair guy at the co-ops, and we fled to Las Vegas to get married in 1995 on the lucky day of 7/7. My sons were almost grown by then, and Doug had three tweener sons. I raised teenage boys for seventeen years and somehow survived, though sometimes I wondered if the testosterone levels in our house might kill me.

I quit the high-stress job in 2000 and started doing bookkeeping from home. That’s when, at age 47, I finally got the chance to take fiction courses from UCLA online. I seriously believed I’d be making a living as a novelist in no time. After all, I’d been praised as a business writer for years. How hard could it be to slam out some novels and make piles of money? Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Finally, I Write

Turned out, writing a novel was the hardest endeavor I’d ever undertaken. I pumped out a tome that was 170,000 words long, not realizing that no one but Stephen King and David Foster Wallace got novels published of that length. I submitted that novel to Penguin-Putnam in a contest. They liked the book but said it needed editing—biggest understatement ever. An agent referred me to a teaching editor. He tore that novel up and scrawled across the page, “A plot. A plot. My kingdom for a plot!” Hilarious now, but I cried for a week.

Yet this editor said I had talent, so he took me to school on the craft of writing drama. He was tough on me. I cried every time I talked to him—he even critiqued my emails—but he forced me to learn to accept criticism and lectured me about stakes, stakes, stakes. He charged me a small fortune, money I had to borrow, but I chalked it up to a relatively cheap education, specific for my writing needs.

I rewrote the novel over and over. The story was still too long, and I didn’t know how to write a good query. Then I got an opportunity to make more money than I’d ever made, doing accounting for a two-hundred-million-dollar insurance claim. I shelved the book and worked 60-hour weeks for three years. I was too tired to write at night, so I read hundreds of novels, lots of classics, hoping to absorb good writing by osmosis, even while half-asleep.

I guess it worked, because at the end of it, I knew how to fix my novel. Two old friends were also writing novels so we started a writing group, and that got me inspired again. I tossed out all my rewrites, went back to the original novel, and stripped it down until I got to the actual plot, hidden beneath excess verbiage.

Publishing

I was scared of hunting for an agent, so I decided to self-publish. I raised the money with crowd-funding, where, like Charles Dickens, I pre-sold books to friends and relatives. And thus, my first novel, Something Radiates, was born, a paranormal thriller based on hippie spiritual lore. It’s still too wordy, but it’s sexy, scary, and unique.

In 2013 I started If Darkness Takes Us during NaNoWriMo. Life kept sidetracking me with money and health issues, but by 2016 I was shopping the book. I entered agent-showcase contests and placed in three of them, but got no bites from agents. Most online contests are focused on YA, and these agents weren’t interested in an apocalypse starring one old woman and written by another. That’s when I realized I was a Southern literary writer, and I‘d been approaching the wrong agents.

I kept rewriting the book. Twice, I scraped up money for development edits, and I queried more than one hundred agents and small publishers. I got mild interest but no success until…

Finding Home

I saw an ad on Twitter for a novel contest from Southern Fried Karma Press, looking for unique Southern voices. I entered the contest and actually won it. I was floored. The prize was a publishing contract. The publisher called to say, “You have found your literary tribe.” And that’s what it felt like—finally a publisher who gets me!

The editing process was hard on a partly-disabled old woman, but I made it through and have a beautiful book as a result. If Darkness Takes Us came out in October 2019. I attended my book launch event in a borrowed wheelchair—I can walk but can’t negotiate the biggest indie book store in Texas on foot. I practiced my reading for weeks. My old-lady voice is scratchy and shaky, and I was so nervous I kept losing my voice. My hubby said, “You talk loud all the time. Just do it.” The book launch was wonderful, family and friends came to town. I cried when I started reading, but I did alright. I never would’ve had a book at all without the endless help of other writers.

In 2018 during NaNoWriMo, I slammed out the first draft of a sequel, writing 120,000 words in 26 days. This book, If the Light Should Come, is told in the voice of Bea’s eighteen-year-old grandson, Keno. It’s a coming-of-age in an apocalypse story. I never knew I had a teenage boy living inside me until he came spewing out. I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with him. Now I have a contract for the novel to come out in June 2021, from SFK Press’s new imprint, Hearthstone.

My parents, who were always my biggest fans, didn’t live to see me get published, but they saw me start writing again, and they were thrilled. I only wish I’d started sooner. Now I have so many ideas and so little time. But, hey, I got published, which is a dream come true for me. My novel is out in the world with its sequel on the way, I have some fans, a big loving family, and life is good—well, except for pandemics, hurricanes, wildfires, racists, and murder hornets.

Thank you, Mindy, for giving me space to tell my story. I hope it will inspire others to get started on their dreams of writing and to NEVER, EVER give up. 

Anica Mrose Rissi on Intense Friendships--and Lies--in Fiction

by Anica Mrose Rissi

I grew up in a very small town: the kind of place where everyone knows everything about you, or thinks they do. A place where news travels quickly, and rumors travel faster. Where you have the same classmates from preschool through high school, and many of those classmates’ parents have known one another their whole lives too. It’s a place where neighbors look out for neighbors—and also have their eye on them.

Or so it felt to me as a teenager.

Being an adolescent is all about figuring out who you are and what you believe. But how do you grow into the person you want to be—how do you try out new versions of yourself and move on from things you’ve outgrown—when everyone around you still treats you like the person you were before?

For me, the answer was camp. Every summer, I escaped my normal life for a few blissful weeks, and made new friends who knew me only as the person I was in that place, in that moment. All they heard of my past were the stories I told them. All we were to one another was: everything.

These summer friendships were essential and intense. They allowed me to be what felt like the purest, truest version of myself, and the friendships themselves shaped who I was, both during the summer and after. Including one key friendship that turned out to be built on lies.

One of the themes I explore again and again in my writing is the depths and boundaries of essential and defining friendships, especially female friendships. Inspired by those summers where people who’d known me for so little time seemed to know me best, I wanted to probe the truth of that feeling. What does it mean to really know someone? How well can we even know ourselves? And does a friend who lies show us less or more of who she truly is through the stories she invents?

In Nobody Knows But You, a novel told in news clips, texts, a court transcript, social media posts, rumors, interviews, and unsent letters written by one friend to another in the aftermath of a summer cut short by murder, I dig into these questions. Some of the answers I found surprised me. Others thickened the plot. All of it was ridiculously fun to write.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.

Anica Mrose Rissi is the author of more than a dozen books for kids and teens, including the Anna, Banana series; Love, Sophia on the Moon; and Always Forever Maybe. Her essays have been published by The Writer and the New York Times, and she plays fiddle in and writes lyrics for the band Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves.

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