Addiction: weird and wacky workbook

 

Introductory Mumbo Jumbo

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***Please notice the Weird and Wacky Workbook for Recovery isn’t available yet.***  To receive updates about the book, sign up to follow (there’s a link on the right) or contact the author using the Contact Page.

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Dr. Rosenthal humbly introduces the “Weird and Wacky Workbook for Recovery” (WW), a substance abuse treatment manual featuring unusual artwork, informal language, humor, and outside-the-box thinking.   

Substance abuse counselor, creativity guru, brain coach, and humorist in one, WW balances evidence-based medicine with that right-brained energy needed to get past addiction and create a life worth living.  The workbook takes the reader on a 5-month journey through a land where life is explored intensely.

The task is sobriety.  At the core the person in recovery need to stay sober and clean.  But recovery is so much more than quitting and staying quit.  It’s about a healing brain.  It’s about a healing life.  It’s also about playfulness, creativity, and passion, about replacing one’s drug of choice with something healthy and amazing.  WW gives the reader the tools to stay clean and sober.  It also shares a five-month path working towards the biggest goal of them all: creating a life worth living.  This is the first in a series of five-month block workbooks.

WW features 200 pages of illustrated worksheets, including:

• 55+ clinically-oriented recovery and coping skill worksheets.  These vary from traditional treatment approaches, mindfulness, and gratitude lists to the esoteric.  
• 40+ creativity sheets and projects, including artwork, alter egos, fiction & poetry writing, invention, and a Recovery File.
• A slew of cognitive tasks (puzzles, brain-teasers, mazes, oh my!).  Studies suggest “mental rehab” can jumpstart concentration, thinking, and memory in people with drug-related brain damage.
• Some Strange Stuff (not addiction-related).  People struggling to distance themselves from drugs and alcohol need a bit of joy, or distraction at least. Strange Stuff is about cow-drawing personality tests, badly humored quizzes, coloring pages, and much more.

The authors aim to finish the book ASAP but reckon reality counts as something and tends to slow things down.   Stay tuned.  For now, you’ll find a few sample handouts below.  These are rough drafts and subject to change.

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Examples of handouts:

Addiction: screen-writers wanted, the Good Guy versus Addiction.  Based on narrative therapy, this odd worksheet uses movie-writing as a tool to examine your relationsship with addiction from a distance.

Addiction: loving life again (starting with mourning the loss of addiction) Recovery ain’t easy, and sometimes people miss the good old times.  This 8-page worksheet is a colorful and odd guide to getting past grief and making life beautiful without drugs and alcohol.

Addiction – Getting to know yourself after recovery – a 2-page journey.  This is a unique two-page worksheet to help a person who’s early in recovery create and celebrate a drug-free identity.

Addiction – glamorizing drugs and alcohol.  This handout discusses addiction-related “war stories.”

Addiction – Relapse prevention plan.  Need rescue from cravings?  This is a two-page, artsy worksheet aimed at helping people in recovery get through the hard times.  Also, consider checking out the article, Addiction: 4 ways to battle cravings.

Addiction/self-knowledge – if you could live your life over.  If you could repeat your life, this worksheet looks into what you’d repeat and what you’d do differently.  What you would “do differently” gives you a roadmap for the future.

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*Evidence-based Recovery Work.  Addiction worksheets are based on motivational interviewing, cognitive behavior therapy, relapse prevention, the Matrix Model, and dialectical behavioral therapy.  There’s a strong emphasis on positive psychology and more than a pinch of psychoeducation and narrative therapy.  WW also appreciates 12-step philosophy and features an optional activity each week called “12-Step Corner.”  Everyone is invited.  Everyone should feel at home here.