Emotional Addiction & The Nervous System

Emotional Addiction is the real addiction behind the chocolate, cigarettes, cake, coffee, cookies, gambling, gossip, flirting, dating, anorexia, binging, workaholism, alcoholism, perfectionism, bungee jumping – although there are actual physical co-factors.

Emotions are not completely ephemeral. We experience emotions thanks to our miraculous nervous system, a complex system that includes the brain and branches of dendrites. Neurons (nerve cells) are actually far apart from each other and send various chemicals, or neurotransmitters, to tell them what to feel – heat, cold, pain, etc., and what part of the body, or entire system, to act upon. There’s a neurotransmitter for putting our foot down and another for releasing it. There’s one for love and joy, one for fear and anger. They are sent from one dendrite to the next, and the cells accept the input based on their receptor sites.

Exchanges between cells are much like a lock and key – one cell has the key for a particular lock on another cell, they join, things are exchanged.

The cost of emotional addiction is severe. We age and become malnourished, acidic. Toxic.

Cells like all life have built-in survival mechanisms, and that includes meeting demand. If we constantly demand them to accept the neurotransmitters for anger and frustration, they will create more receptor sites for these emotional chemicals and fewer for our other options such as love and joy until they have fewer receptor sites left even for nutrition and put our entire bodies at risk. Our neurons start downgrading in order to fulfill our huge emotional needs.

Soon we need higher and lower extremes in order to feel anything. We drain our adrenal glands of adrenaline, finally exhausting it so much we can hardly get out of bed.

The pattern of emotional addiction is like this: the craving; the denial & resistance; the caving in for the big “ah.” To illustrate, let’s say you want chocolate cake, but you’ve listed it as something you cannot ever have because you wish to lose weight, your current weight is abhorrent to you. So you want the cake, you crave the cake, the cake becomes your whole world. You start beating yourself up for wanting the cake, wretched humiliation. You can’t hold out any longer – gotta have that cake! You take your first bite. Ah! Redemption. Release. This tates sooo good. But wait, what have I done? Oh the guilt! And the cycle of judgment and humiliation continues. Sound familiar?

Workaholics do the same thing with deadlines. They choose jobs with severe deadlines like publishing. Gotta make the deadline, gotta make the deadline. Oh no, I’m going to miss the deadline! The article is IN I’ve succeeded! Woo hoo! I feel great. One brief moment of peace and then it’s back to worrying about the next deadline.

I had a boss that did this cycle every Friday and Monday especially, as that was when we had to make sure every class was covered by a teacher and books were sent out properly all across the LA basin. He would terrorize the entire office. Get this done, get that done. After awhile I refused to feel the same urgency, as week after week we met each challenge successfully. For me it became routine, but the damage was already done – I’d burnt out. I often wonder when he’ll burn out. We all have a day of reckoning when we’re living out of balance.

This is a great way to live if you don’t want to have to deal with yourself, your family, your past, your present, your future.

So one stage of healing is fasting from our emotional addictions. At first, it’s difficult to feel anything but depression, because we are physically incapable of feeling anything else. And our nervous systems go crazy – where are the highs and lows? We feel antsy and a strong desire to find something else to obsess about, because our neurons don’t want to have to die in favor of a new cell with different receptor sites.

Once our nervous system learns we want cells with receptor sites for love, joy and nutrition, it starts to create them. Finally, we have more of them than the ones for frustration, anger, and states of tranquility, joy and flow become effortless. But first, we have to make it clear that this is what we want.

We must learn to detach, to value tranquility and laughter, and to write off anything that doesn’t affirm these values, including the toxic people in our lives. Don’t worry, as soon as you decide to change your ways, they will sense it and find someone else to feed their frenzy. Toxic people are like sharks, they need the smell of blood to be happy. If you stop being their carcass they’ll soon find another. So you may be friendless for awhile, but your new friends will be the sort to keep you laughing. :)

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