Abstract
Chemical dependency addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Addiction interferes with an individual’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual development. This qualitative study focused on women who have relapsed from previous attempts at sobriety and investigated how art may allow for deeper personal exploration and emotional expression. Each participant was given the opportunity to express her concerns about her multiple attempts in recovery and the use of art for clarification of her needs. The women were interviewed regarding their ideas of harm reduction, relapse prevention, and motivation in recovery. Using a heuristic philosophy for the collection of data and materials, this study profited from empirical information acquired through observation, inquiry, and content analysis of daily journals. Using a grounded theory approach, the interview style changed according to the individual’s needs and as additional material and responses was collected. These interviews, discussion of personal art, observations made during the session, and content analysis of journals from both therapist and client were triangulated to find common themes about these women’s ideas about the recovery process from addictions. The benefits of art therapy with people with chemical dependency addictions were gleaned from the nine weeks of qualitative research.
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