ADDICTED TO DRAMA by Dr. Scott Lyons is an interesting and educational look at healing dependency of crisis and chaos in yourself and others. It offers beautiful insight and ways to reduce the chaos and return to your authentic self. Below I have included my favorite excerpts from the book: 

I wanted someone to rescue me and sweep me away from the chaos and hurt. I was looking for a deep reset, like restarting a computer gone haywire.

People who are addicted to drama often are not able to recognize themselves as the origin of the conflict that they unknowingly seek or create.

 They may also feel anxious or bored when things are calm, and feel more alive or thrive under pressure- perhaps filling their schedule to the brim, and then becoming overwhelmed by it. 

 

Drama is the monster in the closet that everyone knows about, but  few can put their finger on exactly what it is.

 

“Being beige” is how they describe other people. They often see themselves as interesting people who make life more interesting for their friends and family. 

 

7 core themes (symptoms) emerged for those addicted to drama. 

• I don’t feel like I can direct my own reality:  lack of control. Many people who are addicted to drama have a tendency to feel, or be, out of control. 

• Like a tea kettle about to go off: always intense. Life is intense for people addicted to drama. The intensity fluctuates, but never goes away entirely. Intensity for people addicted to drama often translates to an unrelenting sense of urgency- without it, something feels wrong. To reinforce the urgency, they create a life that is overfull with commitments, projects, and deadlines, all competing with one another. Even the mundane is filled with this intensity, and thus the simplest tasks seem heavy and burdensome. 

•  never, the best, the worst, perfect: Being prone to overreaction. Extreme thinking, creation of big stories, and the meaning and emotion associated with them lead to overreactions. Those with an addiction to drama generally feel flooded with something, beyond the extent of what they can handle. Daily incidents feel like a big deal and their language reflects these extremes, with such words as always, never, failure, absolute, the best, the worst, perfect, disaster, ruined, impossible, everything, and so on. 

•  no one has my back: feeling alone, isolated, and abandoned. Many people addicted to drama feel that they are walking through the world alone. This feeling of aloneness is easily triggered by other people’s actions, which is often interpreted as abandonment. 

•  there must be something bad on the horizon: a constant sense of uneasiness. One of the Hallmarks of living with an addiction to drama is a constant discomfort or uneasiness, as though something is always about to go wrong. 

•  feeling nothing and too much: numbness and sensory overload. Perhaps one of the most overwhelming and ultimately paralyzing issues of an addiction to drama is a feeling of numbness and sensory overload. 

•  it’s like the air is moving through me: experiencing dissociation and being anchorless. Accompanying a persistent sense of numbness and unease, many people addicted to drama experience variations of disassociation, or a sense of being anchorless, detached from themselves, and lacking solid ground and a sense of stability. 

 

Relationships can become a place to project unexpressed and unprocessed feelings.

 

 Attachment Theory is how early experiences of safety, connection, or disconnections form behavioral patterns that we may act out within our relationships, also called reenactments. 

 

Imagine a young girl who grew up in a house where family members were unpredictable. She wasn’t sure when they were going to yell, ignore, or shame her, or when there would be another big storm. Her intuitive response to the fear and terror was to get small, as small as she could, and hide. If that underlying terror had a voice, it would say, “ find a hiding spot within yourself and don’t let anyone in”.  That is exactly what she did. 

 

An addiction to drama involves layers of numbness and desensitization. To be intimate would mean to let go of the protective numbness- but the fear of letting go of numbness is that the “thawing out” of that deep freeze would be more painful than what caused it. 

 

For those addicted to drama, the processes of creating relationships are like the mayhem of the Big Bang; connections are often fast, exciting, high energy, creative, and intense. In this stage, those with an affinity for drama tend to become their own center of gravity, pulling everything and everyone into their orbit of chaos. 

 

For those addicted to drama, once a connection has been made by pulling people into the whirlwind, there’s only so much time before that person begins to feel overwhelmed with connection and needs to withdraw from the vulnerability that is emerging with sustained contact. 

 

THE DRAMA TRIANGLE:

• The “Persecutor”- finds fault and accuses others, creates superiority, blames, threatens, or charges at others from a framework of injustice. 

• The “Rescuer:”- always trying to be “helpful”, meddling, feeling guilty if not doing, perpetually sharing about all that they do, and enabling (a very classical representation of codependency and an avoidance of connection to self). 

• The “Victim”- will feel oppressed and victimized- and when there is an absence of conditions that justify the feeling, they will seek or create the conditions. As a result of rapidly shifting between these coping strategies, it feels like whiplash and a destruction of any connection that had been formed.

( these are only rules that people who are addicted to drama cycle through subconsciously- or project on other people.) 

 

The Baseline of an addiction to drama is built upon layers of coping responses that are encasing deeper layers of numbness and pain:

•  First, innermost layer: the unmet primal need of being seen and heard

•  Second layer: isolation pain that leads to an undeveloped sense of self- a lack of personal identity, or sense of who you are

•  Third layer: numbness, which keeps pain from being felt

•  Fourth layer: sensation seeking, the response to being numb

 

LAYER 1: NOT BEING SEEN OR  HEARD

Being seen, heard, connected to, and allowed to authentically express oneself are primal needs. When those needs are met, we feel safe and loved; when they’re not, we feel unsafe and isolated. This primary need of feeling connected can be affected by the presence or absence of trust, accountability, safety, respect, expression, honesty, consistency, patience, security, and cooperation. The feeling of being unheard and unseen become a core experience that sits within the foundation of who they are. It is a soil from which all things grow. In particular, a sense of isolation and disconnection- from both their inner emotional world and their outer world- tends to take root. This disconnection becomes an invisible and pervasive pain that drives this person’s life, as do their strategies of coping with it. 

 

LAYER 2: BOUNDARIES ARE BROKEN AND THE SELF IS LOST

(Shame)  toxic shame leads to a feeling of being Unworthy of connection, bonding, and belonging. it creates a deeply rooted sense of being flawed and worthless. These beliefs get integrated into beliefs around the self, ceiling in the original moment of shame- the original rupture. Because the original rupture or trauma is held in the body as implicit memory, it is experienced as though it’s continuing to happen in the present moment, and the person is stuck in the same spiral. Long-term shame leads to long-term numbness- it becomes more difficult to handle challenges and sensory input from relationships, and our fundamental stress response becomes impaired. 

 

LAYER 3: BYE BYE FEELINGS, BYE BYE SENSATION…HELLO NUMBNESS

Numbness is associated with psychological disassociation in which someone is essentially taking a vacation from their body. When numbness becomes a habit, a part of baseline functioning, it creates challenges. This is often why those who are addicted to drama seem like they are “ performing”- there’s a  palpable distance between the bigness of their feelings and behaviors and what’s happening within themselves. People addicted to drama have some version of disassociation in which a part of them is continually cut off from the rest. One person described it as “like having one foot in the door of myself and one foot out- all the time”. 

 

For the person addicted to drama, craving sensation becomes part of their baseline.  Drama is not about making sense, it’s about making sensation.

 

THE STRESS RESPONSE CYCLE: Activation or Arousal, Mobilization, Deactivation, and Restoration. 

Activation- first stage of the stress response, is the state of preparing ourselves to engage with the stressor and adapt. Our nervous system and endocrine system respond by releasing stress hormones that make our pupils dilate, cause our blood vessels to contract, and put non-essential (digestion) on hold. Our field of vision narrows, so the stressor comes sharply into focus. Often referred to as a fight or flight response, it’s a stage most of us are familiar with: we feel the tightening of our muscles, our heart pounding, and energy building inside of us as our body gets ready for action. 

Mobilization- When the surge of energy is used. that could include running, jumping, moving forward or away, ripping, pushing, and so on. mobilizations are by no means violent in nature; they are simply the action of response and adaptation. the part of our nervous system that controls our skeletal muscles kicks into action, allowing the physical response.

 Deactivation-  is like a coming down process. A relaxation reflex occurs, which includes a shift of blood pressure, heart rate, digestive function, hormonal levels, and attention as a counter response to activation. Your muscles lessen their engagement, tunnel focus begins to expand out to include the periphery, and you are more tuned into underlying feelings and sensations. This is the “rest and digest” stage, when you process or digest the feelings of activation and mobilization. 

Restoration- is the final stage. You are recovering and rebuilding resources that will be used to fuel the next stress response cycle. If you’ve ever worked out, you might know that you should have a rest between sets so that you can restore and lift the next round more effectively. Similarly, restoration is the means that allows us to continually adapt and navigate the dance of life.

 

Dr. Selye was the first person to prove the existence of generalized biological stress (ongoing stress) as distinct from acute stress (the response to an occasional stressor, after which we can recover). 

 

 The secret of health and happiness lies in successful adjustment to the ever-changing conditions on this globe; the penalties for failure in this great process of adaptation are disease and unhappiness.

 

When our stress response system gets messed up and the cycle is left uncompleted; that manifests as disease in the body. 

 

Some people are more resilient to stressors, while some have less capacity to adapt- and they look outside themselves for ways to keep going in the face of stress. resilience is often thought of as the ability to bounce back from adverse situations. Imagine a blow up punching bag, like a clown that you can bop around. From the outside, every time you hit it, it bounces back to its original stance… therefore it must be resilient, right? What we don’t see if we’re simply watching it bounce back is the significant impact of each hit on the inside of that punching bag. Just because someone or something stands back up does not mean that there isn’t an unseen lasting imprint of that hit. Resilience is not the ability to bounce back from adversity, but the capacity to be present, to inhabit the moment, with an awareness and felt connection to what is happening in one self and in the environment. Resilience allows us to be responsive and flexible, to be able to change, move, and adapt to whatever the situation demands, and to glean meaning and purpose.

 

Your capacity to adapt and your level of and resiliency to stressors will be different from someone else’s, based on genes, where and how you are raised, and environmental conditions.

 

The stress people feel falls along a scale of reactions, from “good stress”, which motivates you; to distress, which is when you’re overwhelmed and can’t adapt; with “tolerable” in the middle. 

 

It’s worth noting that the key determining factor is the person, not the event- the exact thing that causes good stress for one person could cause distrust for another.

 

 There are several main contributors to the stress response, typically early in life, that shape our nervous system, direct our thoughts and behavior, and can disrupt capacity and resilience. Some of the main factors that determine how we respond to stress include the following:  early adversities in life, transgenerational experiences and hereditary predispositions, interactions with the environment, and attachment styles.

 

Consider the exploratory study evaluating the adverse child (ACE)  of a group of Chilean girls placed in foster care. The study found that girls who were exposed to experiences such as emotional and physical neglect, sexual and/or physical abuse, household dysfunction- which could include household members who are substance users, imprisoned, mentally ill, or  suicidal- were highly vulnerable to developing behavioral and psychological issues. The cumulative exposure to such adverse experiences- trauma- also resulted in poor quality of life, poor physical well-being, poor psychological well-being, challenges with autonomy and parent relationships, and poor life outcomes. 

 

If someone had four or more ACEs,  they were 12 times more likely to develop risky behaviors and diseases in adulthood.

 

 Very early childhood stressors, both before birth and after, profoundly affect adult stress responses and have long lasting effects on the central nervous and endocrine system. In 33 research studies that evaluated how adversity in children in utero to age five influence their response to a controlled stressor, the results showed abnormal responses to the stress hormone cortisol. Even children who are too young to have language to describe what was happening registered stressors in the early environment and responded to them. Other stressors, such as poor nutrition, economic uncertainty, and fear- and the resultant stress responses- elicited reactions that fell outside of the normal cortisol levels. People with severe adversities before or after birth may have a baseline that is not (nor ever has been) stable and resilient. For them, adult decision making serves to maintain the dysregulated baseline because dysregulation is familiar and normal. 

The child of a parent with a history of trauma or distress does not have to have an adverse experience to show a disrupted stress response. It is as though the adversities of the parents or grandparents leaves a biological memory of the unprocessed trauma. We might call this a trauma imprint. 

 

How does transgenerational trauma manifest? Research suggests that it is highly likely that people inherit a vulnerability to stress. This can produce a person who is  continually vigilant, on high alert for stressors and their environment, like prey species constantly scanning the horizon for the predator. A person who is searching for crisis as a means of matching their inner chaos is a person who is addicted to drama. 

 

The ways in which these relationships ( or not formed)  help create the lens that guide someone’s perceptions and actions throughout life.

 

 Early adversities in life, transgenerational trauma, and challenging interactions with the environment influences that person’s resilience and capacity to navigate stressors. 

 

Addiction is highly correlated with low self-esteem. Low self-esteem and sensation seeking share a lack of feedback to the self and an absence of the self at a fundamental level. It’s like trying to fill an unfillable void. 

 

Within all addiction is some form of trauma or pain deriving from loss in childhood. That loss can be something tangible- an adverse experience or the absence of something good, such as bonding or the supportive presence of a caregiver or the environment. The loss affects the neurodevelopmental processes of reward and, in addition, the individual will seek that reward somewhere else. The addictive behavior either soothes pain or is an escape from pain. 

 

Stress responses can far outlast the presence of the stressor. 

 

I began to study and research the long-term effects of information overload, specifically information that was repeatedly activating. No matter what generation we are, we have seen significant events repeated throughout multiple media sources: the assassination of JFK, the murder of George Floyd and others, and the stories of those dying from Covid-19. A 2013 study on the Boston Marathon bombing explored the stress response of those who had direct exposure to the event versus those who experienced it through the media. Those who were exposed to many media sources several hours throughout the day had a more acute stress response than those who were directly exposed to the event. The onslaught of images and retelling of the narrative kept the stressor more active and alive. The repeated exposure of these types of events sustains the audience’s attention and is linked to an increased and extended stress and trauma related symptoms. 

 

The commodification and manipulation of our activation has been hijacked by a global enterprise that doesn’t care about the well-being of our nervous system or the long-term effects of overstimulation. 

 

When anger is denied, it becomes rage.

When pain is denied and unprocessed, it becomes numbness, depression, and hopelessness.

When loneliness is denied, it becomes helplessness.

When fear is denied, it becomes panic, mistrust, and paranoia. 

 

One significant practice that can counter being locked in a negative perception is what I call “ marinating in the good.”  you can remind yourself, “ that was then and this is now”.  imagine the lights of the past dimming, and only the light of the present moment is shining.

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