The kooky and eccentric fictional chocolatier Willy Wonka famously sang in the original film adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s novel Charlie And The Chocolate Factory: there is no life i know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free, if you truly wish to be.” The story highlights the journey of a few special children who win a tour through Wonka’s top secret chocolate factory from where the world’s favorite candy and chocolate bars are produced. Along the way they discover the sometime unbelievable world of imagination. One by one, children are taken off the tour when their worldly curiosities get the better of them. Instead of radically accepting the imaginable they reject what they make to be the unimaginable.
Delight in Creation
“The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight,” naturist and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “It infuses a certain volatility and intoxication into all of Nature.” Emerson argued that the imaginative mind is one that helps other people to grow when it expresses what it sees, as poets and other creationists do. Today’s world of neuroscience research, google searching everything, and being exposed to the entirety of the world too soon, leaves little to the imagination. Our world is saturated with predetermined images and facts as man continues on his unending quest for what is real. Too often we forget to take a slow drive down the roads of fantasy in order to ponder not what is real, but what is possible. Even less frequently do we question what is impossible.
For struggling addicts and alcoholics, getting and staying sober feels like an impossible task. Their minds, taken over by chemical dependency, cannot conceive and unimaginable future in which drugs and alcohol do not play a part. Yet, somehow, they are able to put down a drink or a drug for the last time and work towards what they imagine to be sobriety. Most learn that what recovery has to offer is beyond their imagination.
Utilizing imagination as a therapeutic tool throughout recovery helps clients to open their minds and begin to believe in what could be. Immersive experience in nature take beautiful scenery from high definition photographs and turn them into real life memories. Childlike sense of curiosity, wonder, and awe, restore the feelings of euphoria clients used to experience before drugs and alcohol. Ultimately, they realize that the world is a vast and exciting place, begging to be explored. Without sobriety, their world becomes limited in what it will imagine as the possibility for a life.
LEAD Recovery Center employs imagination therapy, adventure therapy, and immersive nature experiences to clients to help them reconnect to the world around them. Each day we see the power of imagination transform our client’s lives. For more information on our treatment programs, call us today at (800) 380-0012.
