CREATIVITY IN RECOVERY PART 2 – ONE80CENTER’s Executive Director Stephen Dansiger, PsyD, MFT discusses balancing sobriety and creative fulfillment

CREATIVITY IN RECOVERY Pt. 2 – Stephen Dansiger, PsyD, MFT

In our previous blogpost with ONE80CENTER Executive Director Dr. Steve Dansiger, (READ HERE), he discussed his development as a musician, his experience hitting bottom as an addict, and the creative hiatus that followed in the first years of his sobriety.

Stephen Dansiger PsyD, MFT

180: When you got sober, did you experience a lapse in creative flow? Were you scared to play music and write?

SD:  For me, it was less about fear of the artistic process and more that I was afraid I wouldn’t stay sober if I didn’t give it up for a while. I was in a position where maybe I would have ended up touring as a musician if I kept going, and that didn’t feel safe. I was getting offers to play at the same time I was trying to get sober on my own…putting two weeks together at a time, curled up in a ball on my apartment floor. I just couldn’t do it.

180: Did you have any notion that the creative impulse was still there?

SD: I needed to heal for a couple of years in order to even know what the hell that was. I’d gotten to the point where music (and creative expression) was meaningless. It was free drugs and alcohol and women…but the creativity part was gone. I couldn’t even listen to music. And then it broke naturally. The way it manifested was like, “I don’t want to play drums anymore…I want to write songs.” I needed to drop everything and release my preconceived notions about what it meant to be a creative person and then it naturally started to form. And later, when my friend asked me to play drums with her along the way, I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds like fun, let’s try that.’

So I started writing songs and released a single that garnered attention called The Ballad of John Parker. I put together an album and another band, got another record deal and developed momentum for a second time. But in the end, I didn’t get the label support to keep it moving forward and things fell apart. Then my friend who had started the band I played drums for, she got a book deal and broke her band up and it was like the universe was saying, ‘Go ahead and try to be a songwriter, try to be a drummer…but sorry, you can’t have either one.’

180: Which leads to the nervous breakdown..

SD: Right. I couldn’t shoulder the disappointment of things not going the way I’d wanted. At the same time my musical career was going down the tubes, I’d also been teaching and working with high school kids in diversity training, which involved a lot of conflict resolution, anger management, prejudice reduction work–this was in the aftermath of the Crown Heights race riots. And even though I felt that the work had value, I was experiencing burnout from that as well. All of it led to a deep depression, which led to three different psychiatric hospital stays, each one worse than the last. My official diagnosis was depression with psychotic features. My friend Josh came and visited me at one point and told me years later, “After that visit, I thought you were one of the lost ones…I didn’t think you were coming back.”

At the time, I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had a positive future-based thought. It was dark.

It was like the Universe was saying: ‘Go ahead…

…try to be a songwriter, try to be a drummer…

…but sorry, you can’t have either one.’

180: How did you get out from under it?

SD: I had been to a spiritual retreat at a Zen monastery early in my sobriety, so I’d had some exposure to Buddhism, and had been practicing what I’d learned by the time the depression hit. And when it got bad, it (the depression) was so beyond oppressive that any idea of something that could help lift it was out the window.

However, while I was at St. Vincent’s (psychiatric hospital), the one thing that I had said to Josh was, “I think I might get better if I go live at the monastery.” And since it was the only glimmer of hope I’d expressed, the doctors and my friends and family made it happen.

180: We talk about hitting physical, mental, and spiritual bottoms in treatment, recovery and sobriety a lot. When did things start to change?

SD: Twenty one days into my stay at the monastery, something specific happened that imploded / exploded the depression. I’d been working with a Zen monk who happened to be a Jungian psychologist, as well as a Zen master and doing a tremendous amount of mindful work: gardening, mopping the floor…basically whatever was in front of me. I was sitting on a cushion–still thinking very dark thoughts–but the idea came to me that maybe when I was done at the monastery, I’d teach kids how to do this meditation thing. And it was the first thought I’d had in months that indicated I’d have a life in the future. And then this wave of thoughts came out of that: ‘Maybe I’ll go back to the city, maybe I’ll have my apartment and my friends back, maybe there’s a woman…maybe I’ll have a life again.’ And later, during a walking meditation, I grabbed one of my friends and dragged him into the bathroom–which was where you went to talk and break the silence–and I said, “I’m OK!!” Because I got it. And he said he knew I was.

In the third and final blog, Dr. Steve talks about reshaping a creative identity, so stay tuned…