by Ted Perkins, CEO Recovery Movie Meetups
In our previous blog, we explored an idea at the heart of neuroscientist Anil Seth’s Being You: we do not experience reality directly. Our brains continually interpret the world, combining information from the outside with predictions generated on the inside to create what Seth calls a “controlled hallucination.”
Whether or not you define reality as a hallucination doesn’t really matter. Either way, it gives us a helpful way to think about the transformation that addiction and mental health treatment delivers. We all know that transformation isn’t just about removing a substance, stabilizing a condition, or changing a behavior. It’s also about helping your clients imagine (i.e. "hallucinate") a better future, and then gradually build an entirely different way of living and being in the world.
In short, to build and inhabit a different reality.
But imagining a new reality can be difficult at first, especially for someone who hasn’t used their imagination in a very long time. Addiction, trauma, depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions can shrink a person’s world until nearly all their energy is focused on surviving the present. Over time, the ability to imagine a future can grow quiet from lack of use.
But it rarely disappears entirely.
Slowly, in early recovery, new possibilities begin to emerge: repairing a relationship, returning to school, changing careers, making art, becoming a better parent, helping others, or finally attempting something that once seemed impossible.
For the first time in a long time, a client may begin to believe: Hey, I really can do this.
But then come the harder questions:
Where do I start?
What should I do?
What if I get it wrong?
In principle, clients may now be able to go almost anywhere and do almost anything. But “in principle” really matters. Recovery doesn’t erase financial problems, health limitations, family responsibilities, discrimination, trauma, lost time, or the consequences of past decisions.
Not everything is possible for everyone. Pretending otherwise can turn hope into pressure, pressure into shame, shame into triggers, and triggers into self-medication and possible relapse.
Self-doubt can quickly follow. What if they choose the wrong path? What if they try and fail? What if the life they pictured never happens? What if they disappoint their families, their treatment team, or themselves? What if they don’t even know what they want?
There are tools that can help and people who can offer guidance. But anyone setting out to create a different life must first be able to picture it, explore it, question it, and sit with its possibilities. In short, they must pre-visualize a possible future. And this requires imagination.
But having imagination isn’t always as easy as it sounds.
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Recovery Begins as a Blank Page
As a screenwriter who is also in successful recovery, I made my living inside this tension. Every screenplay began with a blank page: an immense opportunity to create almost anything, accompanied by the fear that none of it would work. An idea could become something bold, original, and exciting. Or be misunderstood, rejected, or ridiculed after months, sometimes years, of work. That endless swing between possibility and self-doubt was exhilarating, but it was also terrifying.
(Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether living with that uncertainty, and trying to quiet the fear that came with it, was one of the reasons I became addicted to alcohol in the first place.)
Writers deal with that uncertainty in different ways. Some imagine the ending first and then work backward, building the choices that will lead their characters there. Recovery can work that way too. A client pictures a healthier relationship, a new career, a repaired family, or a year of sobriety—and begins identifying the steps that could make it possible.
Other writers discover the story as they go. They begin with a character, a conflict, or a direction. The characters surprise them, and the plot takes turns they never anticipated.
Recovery can work that way too. A client doesn’t always need a fully formed vision of the future. Sometimes they need only a direction, meaningful support, and the courage to take the next step.
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Why Movies Matter Here
This is one reason we believe movies can play such a powerful role in addiction recovery and mental health support. Every movie begins as an act of imagination. Before the characters ever appeared on a screen, someone (sometimes a screenwriter just like me) had to imagine who they were, what they wanted, what stood in their way, and how their choices might change them.
Today, filmmakers can use sophisticated previsualization—or “previs”—tools to see how a scene might unfold before committing the time, money, and energy required to shoot it. They can explore different angles, test choices, identify problems, and imagine alternatives while everything is still open to change.
So in a very real sense, movies become the ultimate previs tool in a Recovery Movie Meetup session. Clients can watch entire lives unfold in compressed form before making choices about their own. They can try on new perspectives, explore unfamiliar emotions, consider different directions, and imagine new ways of responding, all from the safety of someone else’s story.
They watch characters reach forks in the road. They see choices create consequences. They recognize familiar patterns and begin asking: What if I chose differently? What might my life look like then?
Identification matters too. A client may see something in a character that makes them feel less alone. A scene may give language to an emotion they’ve never been able to name. A story may lower their defenses just enough for an honest conversation to begin.
Movies also remind clients that a life is a developing story, not a final verdict.
The past matters, but it doesn’t have to dictate every scene that follows. A character can make a terrible choice without becoming nothing more than that choice. A story can change direction. What once appeared to be the ending can become the turning point.
For clinicians, this creates a powerful opening. Instead of asking clients to immediately explain themselves, the conversation can begin with someone else:
What is this character afraid of?
What is keeping them stuck?
Where does the story begin to change?
What could they do next?
Gradually and safely, the conversation moves from the character’s story to the client’s own.
Helping Clients Imagine the Next Scene
Recovery isn’t a screenplay. Clients and clinicians can’t control every character, remove every obstacle, or guarantee a happy ending. Real life is much messier. It includes setbacks, losses, relapses, illnesses, injustices, contradictions, and events no one would ever choose to write.
But clients still possess creative power.
They can imagine something different. They can decide what the next honest action will be. They can challenge the story that says they are permanently broken. They can ask for help when the plot takes a dangerous turn. They can revise goals that no longer fit. They can allow other people to influence the story without handing them the pen.
Through Recovery Movie Meetups, clients can begin rekindling an imagination that addiction or mental illness may have dimmed. They can picture a life worth moving toward, a story worth creating, and a future worth pursuing, even if that future changes along the way.
Then, one choice, one relationship, and one scene at a time, they can begin turning an imagined life into the life they are actually living.
