Drama Addiction With Dr. Scott Lyons

My brilliant guest, Dr. Scott Lyons, is a trauma expert who has studied what is really going on in the brain and body when we’re addicted to drama. He breaks down what trauma does in our body, why addiction forms in response, and what exactly is happening in our nervous system when we seek out stress, busyness, and drama. This Talk is full of major “aha” moments that will help you better understand trauma and how stress affects you, whether you are addicted to drama or know someone who is.

Transcript

Hello to all of my Insight Timer friends.

My name is Michelle Schelfant and I'm delighted that you're here with me today.

Welcome to my latest talk.

And as always,

After the show,

I love to hear your comments.

So make sure you leave a comment so I know how you liked it.

We'll talk soon.

And here we go with the latest episode.

We have a very,

Very interesting topic today.

We're talking about drama,

Not just drama,

But what do you do if you are addicted to drama?

Now you can actually interchange that word drama with chaos,

Busy,

And all the words that feel like that.

So I want you just to think about how are you showing up in your life on a daily basis?

Do you feel drawn to creating or find yourself in some sort of chaos every day or drama?

Or again,

Are you finding that you are plugging in busy things when you have space of nothing to do?

Right?

So I'm sure most of us can relate to this.

I certainly related to this big time.

I remember even one of my teachers way back when shared with me,

You know,

Michelle,

You might be addicted to suffering.

So all of these things can go into the same category as drama under this umbrella of drama.

So this is such an important show.

I remember when I had seen that Scott put this book out,

I was like,

We are getting him on the show.

And that's what we're doing today.

So he has a brand new book out,

Dr.

Scott Lyons.

It is called Addicted to Drama,

Healing Dependency on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others.

And boy,

Oh boy,

We got into it today.

We talked about so many great things.

Like what exactly does it mean to have an addiction to drama?

And he broke it down so beautifully,

Not only in what an addiction is,

But he went deep into the drama aspect of it and common symptoms and impacts of drama addiction.

We also talked about how does it affect friends,

Family,

Colleagues,

Even if you are either the person that has a drama addiction or someone that is in your life that has this addiction How do you handle that?

How do you set boundaries around that?

We talked all about these things as well as if this sounds like you,

How then do you break free and heal your addiction to drama or chaos or busyness or suffering,

Whatever it might be?

How do we break our addiction to these kinds of things?

Because boy,

He shared some statistics around this on how it is just increasing even in over the last 10 years,

Of course,

Because of cell phones,

Because of internet and all of these things,

How,

Oh my goodness,

We have addictions to these kinds of things.

But what do we do if we are,

How do we break free?

So it's such a really interesting show and gosh,

You're going to want to listen to this show and definitely share it with people in your life because I guarantee you,

I certainly know of many people that I'm going to share this show with because so many of us are suffering with this sort of addiction.

So such a great show,

But let me tell you a little bit more about Dr.

Scott Lyons.

He is a licensed holistic psychologist,

Educator,

And author of the book,

Addicted to Drama,

Healing Dependency on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others.

As a renowned body-based trauma expert and mind-body medicine specialist,

Scott helps people to break free from cycles of pain,

Limiting beliefs and trauma.

Scott is an innovator in transformative wellness and trauma therapy,

Teaching over half a million people internationally over the past 20 years,

How to relieve stress and restore vitality.

Scott is the creator of the Embody Lab,

The largest online learning platform for body-based trauma therapies,

And he's the developer of somatic stress release,

A holistic process of restoring biological resilience taught in over 20 countries.

Scott is also the founder and progressive designer of Omala,

A wellness brand dedicated to creating sustainably sourced tools for transformation.

Wealth of information right here.

Let me just tell you,

Wealth of knowledge is what Dr.

Scott Lyons is bringing to the show today.

So I look forward to you hearing all about the show.

And here we go with talking all about Addicted to Drama.

So welcome to the Adult Share Podcast,

Dr.

Scott Lyons.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yes,

I am so excited to have you.

In fact,

I was just saying to you,

I don't think there is another book on this topic.

No,

I wish there was,

Which is why I wrote it.

I think it's great that there's not,

Which is great why you wrote it because we need it so desperately.

What a powerful topic,

Addicted to Drama.

Yeah,

It's kind of amazing to me just to go to that idea that nothing had been written about it.

It's because we all know someone addicted to drama.

Usually it's not us,

Never us,

Usually not us,

But we definitely like our mother-in-law,

Our siblings,

Our spouses,

Like that friend from high school.

We all know someone and we have this like visceral response even to like,

You know,

If I were to say to you,

Who do you know addicted to drama?

And before you even could think of the person or maybe simultaneously,

You have this whole like visceral response of what it's like to be in interaction with them.

And so it's wild to me that we all know it.

We all know someone and yet there was no deconstruction.

There was no unpacking or understanding of something we all know so inherently.

So true.

I think that I might be one of the people that was addicted to drama.

Welcome to the club.

You're like,

We know someone.

I'm like,

I think it was me.

I used to call it chaos in my twenties,

But we can call it.

So let's start right there,

Which is what the heck?

Let's start.

What is addiction to drama?

Well,

Let's start out with this.

What is drama?

How would you define it?

Let's define drama.

Let's start there.

Drama is considered the unnecessary turmoil,

The unnecessary chaos and crisis,

The intensification and exaggeration of response that is indirect conflict with the amount of stimulus.

So yeah,

Unnecessary is kind of the key word here.

And that definition really comes more from an outside perspective.

And we'll talk about that because the outside conception of what an addiction to drama looks like or feels like is quite different than how it is from the inside.

But before we go into that,

Because you asked such a great question,

What is an addiction to drama?

Is let's go with what is an addiction.

And there's an old school thought that essentially it's a disease.

It's a idea that you are have this particular disease and you have a chemical dependency on whatever it is that happens to be part of your disease,

Whether it's alcohol or cocaine or drugs,

Substance usually.

Then along came years later,

Like,

Oh,

Maybe there's more things that we might be attached to besides substance,

Which then became more like behavioral addictions,

Like gambling or sex that have become more accepted.

But for a while,

They were not accepted ideas of addiction.

And then we've stepped even further into understanding not the dependency from just a illness perspective,

But why does this dependency form?

And that's really like the work of Gabor Mate and so many others who have been really trailblazing a newer conception of addiction,

A more holistic,

Empathetic,

Humanistic idea of addiction.

And essentially as any part of trauma,

And trauma can be a event or a series event,

Or a lack of event,

A lack of love,

Like an emotional desert can be a trauma.

And that has an impact on the body.

And the way we respond to injury,

Like if you've ever fallen down,

You get inflammation,

Right?

Your whole body sections off to protect yourself.

And so in trauma,

That impact,

That injury happens in the same way.

We section off so as not to be overwhelmed and essentially perish in the painful experience of the trauma.

And it creates a void.

We are not able to be present in this area.

We dissociate,

We disconnect,

And it creates a space.

And in that emptiness,

We experience emptiness.

And so how do we fill it?

And we fill it with the things that create distraction or pain relief.

And we become attached,

Dependent on those things that do that exact job.

And when we think about it that way,

Of course,

We become dependent on getting high as a way that helps us avoid making contact with the underlying void or the pain that resides in that space as well.

And stress does an amazing job at both helping us avoid ourselves and offers pain relief.

We think about like when you go for a run,

Yeah,

That endorphic high you get,

That's from a stress response.

And so the first part of a stress response is a release of endorphins,

Is a release of pain relief.

It creates pain relief in that way.

And so we become attached,

Dependent on wanting hits of things that give us essentially that constant stream of pain relief,

Avoidance.

And here's the really interesting third piece,

Which it helps produce enough sensation to rise above the threshold of that numbness that gets created as a protection from the trauma and helps us feel that we are alive.

Because part of the result of trauma and the numbness that protects us from being swept away by the pain is that we become numb to the world,

We become numb to ourselves.

And in the book,

I refer to myself in that state as a walking ghost.

You used to tell my parents all the time as a kid,

I was like,

I don't understand.

I feel I didn't quite have the language I have now,

But I would say like,

I don't feel big.

I don't feel dimensional.

I feel like I'm a ghost in the world,

Like a walking ghost.

And of course,

They sent me to therapy going,

This is kind of crazy.

We have no idea what he's talking about.

But essentially,

I was saying I was so dissociated as a mechanism of surviving my traumas that I didn't know how to find my way back home.

And so that's addiction in a nutshell.

And the idea that we become dependent on stress,

Which is a synonym sometimes for chaos,

Crisis and drama,

The unnecessary amount of stress,

Because it actually serves a purpose of filling that void of giving us enough sensation rise above the threshold and helps us avoid ourself in the contact of the pain that resides there.

What a definition.

That was really good.

Beautifully said,

Beautifully said.

So I liked when you said to that drama is,

You said,

It's the chaos.

So how does that happen?

I hear you with addiction that we're really we're feeling that I get that.

How would someone know other than raised awareness that they are sitting and living in drama and addicted to drama?

How would someone listening to this say,

Oh my goodness,

That sounds like me?

Because I remember a therapist said to me,

I think you're addicted.

I started having this awareness.

My husband,

When I first had my children,

I stayed home just for a couple of years before I started working again.

And he would come home and my emotions were like up and down.

That's how I grew up though.

Up and down,

Emotions,

Italian,

Up and down,

Up and down,

Up and down,

Up and down.

New York,

Italian,

All over the place.

Right?

That's just how I was.

I get it.

Yeah.

Like that's how I was.

And then my husband would come home and it was like flatline,

Like really not any emotion.

How was your day?

Every day for 10 years was great.

And I used to think,

Why can't I have a great day?

Like I'm up and down and I'm high and I'm low and I'm all over.

And then I had this awareness like,

Wow,

I feel so,

I think a friend of mine who was a therapist said,

You live in so much drama,

But it's like your childhood.

And it was like light bulb for me.

And then of course I was like,

I love to work on myself.

So then I went to therapy.

I'm like this,

I will work on,

But I didn't know it.

No,

I did not know.

And I thought that was normal because my Italian household growing up was up and down and crazy dramatic.

So that's my norm.

So how would someone know?

Well,

I just want to really normalize your normalization of it.

So of course it would seem normal.

You're mirroring the chaos in your ecosystem.

The inconsistency that is up and down the,

You know,

In my,

The chaos in which I grew up in the ecosystem where you never knew when you were going to get hugged or slapped or door slammed or loved unconditionally or ignored,

You know,

The inconsistency really keeps you on guard and that creates a vigilance and it never lets you settle and rest in your nervous system.

Yes.

And then settling and the resting suddenly become danger.

And so you have a built in system that an alarm system that when you start to settle in your body,

It goes,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No.

That's a threat and you will be unprepared for the next actual threat because when you grow up with trauma,

When you grow up in chaotic households,

You have to have your antenna up all the time and your whole nervous system,

All your sensory organs change and adapt to that.

They're on constant alert.

They're on constant scanning for the negatives of the world because in the negatives of emotion is potential threat.

So they're,

You know,

Your smell,

Your touch,

Your sense of time,

All change to be on the lookout for threat.

Your cues of safety get ignored for cues of threat that occupy your attention.

And so when we talk about normalization of like,

We would never know it was us because here's the thing in our nervous systems,

Our exaggerated responses are justified if we're addicted to drama.

Because if our television of our brain is constantly stuck on the channel of bad things always happening because that's what we're filtering in,

Then the intensification of our response makes sense to us.

It doesn't make sense on the outside because they're not inside stuck on the channels of threat.

And when we talk about what is regulation or self-regulation and dysregulation,

Self-regulation is the ability to know how much energy,

Attention,

And emotion to utilize in our system to properly adapt to a stimulus.

That's what regulation means to keep us in optimal functioning and adapting to the situations at hand.

Dysregulation means that we don't have the barometer or the capacity to truly identify how much energy,

Attention,

And emotion is needed to functionally adapt or navigate a situation.

And so it always seems performative and intensified and exaggerated on the outside,

But on the inside,

It's normal.

It makes sense.

It makes so much sense.

Yeah.

And so that's why we,

When I say an addiction to drama looks different on the outside than what it feels like on the inside.

On the outside,

People are going to be like,

Oh,

That person is overreactive,

Hypersensitive.

They get bored easily and need stimulus constantly.

They make situations bigger than they are.

They make mountains out of molehills.

They're always being provocative.

They're really stuck in the news and replaying it as though they're part of the news or the stories on their television.

They feel abandoned by others constantly.

They feel that they're the victim.

Bad things always happen to them.

You might hear them saying things like,

It's always something.

Yes.

Yes.

The favorite line.

What about busy?

I've talked to so many people recently.

They're like,

I'm busy.

I'm so busy.

I'm like,

Good God,

You're busy all the time.

And even I've noticed with people in my life that are chronically busy,

When there's a space of downtime,

Boom,

It's filled like right away.

Absolutely.

It's the same physiological mechanism.

Someone asked me recently,

Well,

Isn't that just being a workaholic?

I said,

Well,

What does being busy through work serve biologically?

It serves the same function that in the space,

In the time of settling,

What happens for those of us who have some propensity for an addiction and drama,

Which by the way,

Is all of us.

Let me back up and just say,

Have you ever been to a meditation class,

A yoga class,

Sat in a bathtub,

Gone to a garden,

Had the opportunity to rest,

Settle,

Find quietude,

And suddenly been thinking about your ex or your child or your job or something that disrupts the potential for that piece.

It raises you up,

It stresses you up,

It revs you to a degree that you are no longer settling.

That reflex,

Which I call activation reflex,

Is the very mechanism that keeps those who are addicted to drama,

Quote unquote,

Safe and vigilant.

And we all have that.

We all do it.

Or like,

Have you ever been sad and went and played an even sadder song?

Why do we flood ourselves with more emotion than we already have?

Does it actually help us process or does it help us avoid by flooding ourselves?

Ooh,

That's a good question.

Right?

Flooding.

We're flooding.

We're flooding.

Oh,

Wow.

Because in a way,

When we flood ourselves with stimulus or busyness or emotion,

It is actually a means to avoid the underlying contact with ourselves.

Wow.

Wow.

Ooh,

This is hitting home for me.

I'm sure it's hitting home for a lot of people listening right now.

Like,

Ooh,

That was so good.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

So we have this way in which addiction and drama on the outside really,

You know,

There's a sense of urgency.

They'll bulldoze,

You know,

With needing to get things done.

They always need to feel important or without that.

They talk about being alone,

But it's hard for them to feel intimacy.

Yeah.

They pull people into their crisis all the time,

Which is a way for them to feel like they're in relationship with other people.

That's the only safe way of intimacy is to synchronize the internal chaos and creating the conditions of crisis around them so that people get pulled in as a way of feeling a false sense of belonging.

Wow.

That tornado of chaos that we all know so well that we've either created ourselves or been pulled into,

That is a sad cry for a sense of connection.

To self you're saying or other.

And I'll just say real quick on the inside,

It feels,

I mean,

You can maybe even add to this having been on the inside of the addiction drama,

But like,

It feels like there's a constant rush,

Like no matter where you go,

Something is working against you.

That really,

Truly no one has your back,

That the world is against you,

That bad things always happen.

And it is a hard world in which living on the inside of it.

You just,

You took the word out of my mouth.

I was going to say,

I remember it like in my twenties and thirties,

Even it just felt hard,

Like really hard.

Yeah.

Life was hard.

It was exhausting too.

Exhausting.

Because we don't have the ability to optimize our energy,

Our attention and our emotion in a way that's self-sustaining.

And I remember going to my therapist in my late twenties and I just said,

I can juggle grad school and I can juggle working two full-time jobs and I can juggle all these higher order things,

But I can't mail a letter.

It would take me weeks to mail a letter.

And I said,

I think that there's something a little weird about that.

The things that aren't keeping me so generative,

Like stressed out is hard for me.

And we didn't quite get to the heart of it,

But we started it.

And looking back now,

I'm like,

Of course,

Everything just was hard unless it was serving a purpose of getting me revved up.

So,

Okay.

I'm sure everyone listening is going,

Yep,

That's me.

That's a little bit me or that's a lot of me.

You know what,

Can I tell you something that surprises me?

When I wrote the book,

I've gotten so much feedback from people that they're like,

I had people write into me,

They're like,

I kind of hate you.

I read your book and I realized I'm addicted to drama.

And I'm so surprised by that.

I honestly am.

I thought people would read the book because it's also a book about how do you deal with family members and relatives and friends and coworkers who are addicted to drama?

How do you survive that?

Because it's also depleting to your whole system.

And I thought I would have more people write in and be like,

Thank you for helping me deal with my boss or my partner or my mom.

But I've had more people write in and they're like,

I kind of hate you.

Realize I'm addicted to drama.

Damn you.

Wild.

I'm wondering,

Because there aren't other books on this out there.

And there's been studies done because I would think as soon as the internet was created,

This became a bigger addiction for most people with a cell phone,

Like just having a cell phone.

That's really hard to separate self from cell phone or computer.

Like,

Are you finding or did you find that at all that in the last,

You know,

A couple of years,

In the last,

You know,

10 to 20 years that this has actually gotten worse?

Yeah.

Well,

My favorite chapter in the book is chapter nine,

Which is looking at how 30 years ago,

We can actually use a lot of data points and research to identify 30 years ago,

Those who were addicted to drama had an attachment or dependency on crisis and stress and chaos were in smaller pockets.

Like it was not as big of a,

It was present.

We can actually track back all the way to Freud,

Like reports of the symptomology of an addiction to drama.

But it happened,

You know,

There's a certain conditions that it takes to become dependent on drama.

And I'll just say like,

You know,

People always ask me why drama?

Why not just do drugs as their addiction?

And my response is drama is free.

You can seek it,

Create it,

Manufacture it wherever you go.

It's hard to find cocaine in the middle of the desert,

But you can certainly create a story for yourself that never lets you find peace.

Yeah.

So true.

So true.

It's,

You know,

As a 12 year old,

I didn't have access to drugs and alcohol.

I had access to drama and the manufacturing of all these stories and gossiping and stirring things up in the school lot,

You know?

And so it makes a lot of sense actually that it would be our most available quote unquote drug of choice.

So yeah,

What we have found is that the ways in which media and social media specifically operate have replicated the conditions of an addiction and drama,

But on an endemic scale,

Which is scary.

So buckle your seatbelt,

We're going to unpack it.

So we know in any part of an addiction,

There are a few things that have to be there.

Like you have to build a tolerance level to it,

Meaning that you hit a threshold and you need more to get more high or you need more to feel more.

And we know that there are things like withdrawal symptoms,

That that has to be present in any addiction.

Now,

When I was in my twenties,

I used to think,

Oh,

I am so capable of holding so much stress and I can just manage it.

But what I didn't realize was that I had just built up a higher threshold for stress to get the actual benefit that I was craving.

And in my twenties,

I was dealing with some serious illnesses.

I had a stroke.

I had a bunch of other,

I was in a very unhealthy relationship.

I was directing an opera with some of the biggest members of a rock band in the world.

I was in grad school.

There were,

I was dealing with a couple of other things.

And this is not me trying to like,

Oh,

Look at my trauma Olympics here.

It was,

I was still functional because I had built a threshold,

A tolerance level for how much stress I could hold.

And the moment I broke up with that person,

It passed the threshold.

Yeah.

Into the point where I basically OD'd.

Where it was too much for me.

It went way past my threshold and I basically collapsed for months.

And so when I talk about a threshold,

A tolerance level,

This is a really important piece for understanding how we,

Social media is generating an endemic of an addiction to drama.

So we live in what's called an attentional economy,

Meaning that your attention,

Your focus is the hottest commodity out there.

If I can control your attention,

I control what's being purchased.

So I'm not selling you something.

I'm taking something,

Which is your attention and your focus and directing it.

And those who hold the power of your attention hold the power for profit.

And what,

So this is not a theory I made up.

This is since the late eighties,

It's called attentional economy.

But they weren't neuropsychophysiologists.

So they didn't quite under,

They're economists.

So they didn't understand what is the physiological mechanisms for capturing and maintaining attention.

And as you might anticipate,

How you capture and maintain someone's attention is to induce a stress response.

You trigger their amygdala,

You capture their focus.

Their focus goes from broad to centralized and specific to whatever it is that you are directing them to.

So we don't live in attentional economy.

We live in a stress economy.

And that 10,

20 years ago,

The amount of stress,

And by stress,

I mean,

We're using specific language,

Imagery,

Sex,

Violence,

News stories that are inductive,

Induce anger,

Rage,

Sadness,

Fear,

All of these things.

They're just tools to capture and maintain your attention.

The amount it took 10 years ago is about a fourth of what it takes now,

A fourth.

So the amount of stimulus coming at us is three to four times more than it was 10 years ago to capture our attention.

That means it is flooding our nervous system.

We have built a tolerance to essentially get more and feel more.

So if I'm running a media station,

I know that I have to keep upping the ante to maintain your attention,

Which I don't care as I'm making all the money.

So I don't really give a shit about your nervous system and the health of your nervous system.

I mean,

I personally,

Scott do,

But not as a media conglomerate.

It's not their main concern.

But there is a physiological flooding and we are all subject to it.

If we're on social media,

If we're watching the news,

Because negative information,

Fear,

Anger,

Sadness will be more capturing of our attention than positive news.

And there's always an effect of that.

We are more likely in watching the news to believe bad things will happen to us,

Even though they won't.

Then if we don't watch the news,

Those who watched the Boston bombing were more traumatized because of the amount of times it was repeated on the news,

That the level PTSD was higher than those who were there and experienced it and didn't watch the news.

Oh my gosh.

I didn't know that.

Wow.

What are we doing as a culture to people's nervous system?

It is severe and it is creating a dependency because what happens when we don't have that constant stream of flooding in our nervous system,

We start to have withdrawal symptoms which show up as anxiety and boredom.

And how do you avoid the withdrawal symptoms?

You go bite the dog that bit you.

You go seek,

Create,

Manifest stressful conditions that keep you at what has become the new normal of your nervous system.

Wow.

This is big.

Really really big.

I just,

You know,

You know,

When you say that I realize the numbing out like that we need more and more and more and more.

It's like,

Ooh,

It's so true.

Anyway,

I have like a million thoughts going through my head.

Like,

Okay,

Talk about how does drama addiction affect friends and family?

And you talked about that a minute ago and colleagues like talk about that a little.

How does it affect other people?

So there's something called secondary stress,

Which is actually one of my favorite subject matters because if you've ever been in a room with someone who just loves you,

You feel love.

It just,

It resonates.

Your whole body mirrors something.

And so part of what's called mirror neurons.

And so it replicates,

It resonates and you have that experience.

Now wouldn't it be nice if love was the most potent resonant feeling we had?

It would be.

Unfortunately,

That's not how our evolution has developed as humans.

The most contagious state is a stress state.

And when I say contagious,

I literally mean if I'm in a stress state,

Then you are too.

Just by being in proxy to me.

We know this,

Like if you've ever watched someone who is like afraid of public speaking and you watch them,

These,

These are the studies,

Some of the studies that are done and you're whole,

Your heart's like throbbing,

You're sweating yourself.

You might think it's empathetic.

It's on behalf of them,

But you're actually mirroring their stress response.

So and why that happens is let's say you're out foraging,

I don't know,

Mushrooms for us for dinner and you run into a bear and that bear starts chasing you.

You run into our little cabin where you and I are,

You know,

Partying for the weekend with our mushrooms.

This turned out to be a weird story.

Anyways,

You run in and your eyes,

Your pupils are dilated,

You know,

Your heart's racing,

Your posture's leaning forward,

Your breath is really heavy and shallow,

You know,

You're sweating all the signs of a stress response.

I am not going to wait for you to explain to me what has happened.

I immediately go into the same response so that I too can be reactive to the potential threat.

So if I'm waiting for you to tell me there's a bear chasing you,

That's right behind you,

It's too late.

That bear is also on top of me.

So our whole biological evolution has been to attend to stress response so that we can be adapted together.

Unfortunately,

That also means if I'm in a constant state of crisis and chaos and stress and I move through the world,

It is contagious.

So it's important to recognize when navigating,

Whether it's a boss or a colleague or a teacher or a friend or a lover or a parent who's addicted to drama,

Who's in that constant state of activation,

It has an effect on your nervous system.

There is no neutral interaction here.

And so it is paramount that you start to gain more awareness and control of your own physiological states.

They're going to pull the ground out from underneath you.

How do you practice just feeling the weight of your body anchored back in your own self with your own emotions and needs?

Because they're doing exactly what the media does.

They pull you out from you.

They siphon that energy like an extra battery pack that helps them stay in the tornado of chaos and stay in for these moments,

These brief moments relationship.

And it has an effect on you.

A serious effect.

You become further and further away from your ability to attend to your own feelings and needs,

Just like the media is as it's pulling you out from yourself into whatever it wants to curate your attention towards.

You become less attuned to your own feelings and needs.

You unintentionally become more suppressed and repressed.

And that is also part of what happens in addiction and drama.

You are so out of tune with your fundamental needs that you go chasing these bigger emotions to try to identify where and how you are in the world.

So boundaries,

I know you speak about boundaries in the book,

Right?

I know with myself,

Like once I was able to work with my own,

Really,

It was an addiction to drama,

Like drama,

Chaos,

Suffering,

The whole,

The whole gamut that I had.

We all love the suffering.

Yeah,

That was a good one.

Well,

Yeah.

Yeah.

Suffering is our love language.

I mean,

When it is the currency for love as children,

Then we mirror it and we replicate it as adults.

We seek it out as hoping to get more love.

Like as a child,

If you were loved and attended to when you were sick and things were wrong more than when things were right,

You will mirror that.

That is becomes the currency of love.

You're reading my mind.

You totally just read my mind because I,

When I was growing up,

I remember and I felt loved growing up,

But I have to admit when I was sick,

I remember you just,

I was having a visual when you were just talking,

When you were speaking.

It's like when I was really sick on the couch and home from school,

Oh my gosh,

My dad would come up like kissing me on the forehead.

And how are you?

And I love you.

Is there anything I do?

My mother would make me whatever I want.

It was all of it like overdone.

Like,

And I had that thought so much when I was an adult,

Like,

Good God.

Like,

I think that this was created as a child.

Of course it was,

It was a program,

Right?

So you're,

You're reading my mind right now.

I got a lot of attention.

I was sick growing up.

So of course let's unconsciously create suffering as an adult.

That made perfect sense.

Right?

And how many times do you call a friend to say,

Hi,

Things are just going great.

I don't have anything to vent about.

I have nothing to gossip about.

I just wanted to say,

You know,

I love you and I love myself.

Like how often do we do that?

What a boring conversation.

What a boring conversation because it doesn't garner attention and doesn't garner that,

That currency of love.

Yeah.

And to,

To your point about the news,

This is why there's no,

I think there was years ago,

I think Oprah or somebody had tried to put out a positive news channel.

It didn't work.

Nope.

Nobody wants to watch positive news.

We want the drama.

We want the drama.

We want the drama.

We want the drama.

Yeah.

But here's the question.

So we do,

We want the drama,

But then I have to admit,

Because I did so much nervous system work with myself for so many years.

And I'm finally in this place of much more balanced.

And I think it's something I will always work on,

But now I protect myself from drama.

Like I don't watch the news.

I don't,

I,

And if someone's talking about that or politics or whatever that good is,

I'm like,

No,

Thank you.

But I'm very protective of that.

So talk to us about boundaries around this.

How do we.

How do we protect ourselves?

Cause sometimes I get irritated and I'll snap at people.

I'll say,

I told you,

I don't want to talk about that,

But I'm doing it from a place of,

I am protecting myself because I don't want to go back into the roller coaster of drama and suffering and chaos.

So talk about the,

The,

The boundaries.

Yeah.

Well,

Like you,

I stopped watching the news.

Um,

When I was 2001.

Wow.

I didn't start then.

That's a long time.

It was after it was after nine 11.

So I was,

I was a few blocks away and the towers.

And,

Um,

I remember my parents.

Well,

First of all,

We couldn't get ahold of each other for almost 24 hours.

And when they finally got ahold of when we got ahold of each other,

They're like,

We're coming to get you.

The world is falling apart.

And 24 hours after the event,

Like I was crying on the street and laughing on with people and like processing and like,

It didn't feel like we were in a threat state.

In the same way.

Right.

And two days later,

My parents were still like,

We're coming to get you.

You don't have any choice.

You got to come home.

New York is under attack.

And I was like,

It's not under I'm here.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But for them,

It hadn't ended because they were so glued to the television.

And I said to them,

Um,

At that moment,

I was like,

Do you have the television on right now?

They're like,

You were,

We can't pull away.

We need to know you're safe.

And I said,

I'm telling you I'm safe,

But you're never going to believe it.

If you keep watching that replay over and over again,

And that's what you're replaying is not my current experience.

It was my experience days ago.

And it just like dawned on me in that moment of like,

You know,

Lecturing my parents who were just so scared and trying to be so sweet.

I was like,

Oh my gosh,

This is not okay.

I am.

And I just stopped watching the news and you know,

For people who think I'm naive to the world,

Fine.

I don't really care because I'm healthier and I feel okay.

And I actually understand as,

As someone who also went to school for writing,

I understand the very tools you use to capture an audience's attention.

I've written plays.

I've written books.

I understand the tools and technologies you do.

And it's manipulative if you want it to be.

And so like it's,

It's to me when I see the news,

I'm like,

Okay,

It's hard to distill the performance and the drama tools from the actual facts.

True.

Very true.

And I'm not sure they can either at this point,

You know,

I,

You know,

Yikes.

So boundaries that I think it's a really healthy boundary to start to go.

Where can you minimize your flooding?

Start to build awareness of what it feels like to be like that in your body.

And when you've hitting a limit,

They're going to keep pushing you past that limit because they're not observing your individual process there.

All they have is a general concept of flood in terms of media and social media.

So,

And other people like,

You know,

Someone who's a drama is not going to be like,

Should I stop now?

You seem overwhelmed.

This is not going to happen.

So you have to attend and care for yourself.

And that is what a boundary is.

So whether it's saying to a friend who's constantly venting and gosping,

You say,

Look,

I only have 10 minutes today to hear you.

I want you to know you're loved,

But that's the timeframe I have for you today.

Or I'm happy to listen,

But we're going to go take a walk because I'm not going to be cornered in a room with you roping me in.

Or,

Hey,

I'm happy to listen to your experience.

What I'm not okay is listening to what they said and what they did.

I'm really happy to hear how you're feeling and what you need.

Yeah.

No moving it out of the sort of devices that feed the fire of drama.

Keep re-grounding yourself.

That's a boundary and keep attending to your feelings and needs.

If you don't know what you're feeling and you can't identify what you need,

Then you have to step back from the,

This,

The interaction.

Yeah.

And notice where you're enabling them.

That is a boundary to yourself.

If you're asking,

If a friend calls you and they're like,

Oh my gosh,

You will not believe what just happened.

Shirley from down the block said this at the grocery store and the digital.

And then you go,

No,

She didn't tell me more.

Tell me everything.

Give me the tea.

You are enabling this addiction to drama and you are actually feeding your own.

So true.

It's on both.

It's both.

Tell me more that you're opening that door and you want to hear it.

Stop trying to be a martyr.

Stop trying to fix those with an addiction to drama.

Stop trying to get in the middle to protect them.

These are all forms of your own addiction to drama and your boundary is.

Take care of you.

That's that's powerful.

And I know hard for so many of us that aren't used to really redirecting back to self.

You know,

We're not,

We're so good at looking outside of self.

So if I'm listening right now and I'm thinking to myself,

Wow,

I have an addiction to drama.

Can you just give us a few things right now?

Other than by the book.

Number one,

Go by the book.

Number two,

What can I do starting immediately?

Like when this podcast is over,

What can I start doing right now to start healing my addiction to drama?

Probably the audio book.

Yeah.

I mean,

Here's the easiest thing that I invite people to do is notice where you disrupt and interrupt your sense of peace,

Stillness,

Tranquility,

Ease in your life.

And if you can't notice where you do it and notice where it happens.

And then look at how you're a contributor to that later on.

And that will give you the beginning of awareness of where you rev yourself up and all the strategies you,

You utilize to do that,

Which might be like turning on the news.

That is your,

Still your responsibility.

You're still contributing it by simply turning on by doom scrolling,

By leaving comments on other people's posts,

Knowing it might be antagonistic.

Does your opinion really need to be seen and heard?

I'm serious.

Like,

Yes,

Yes.

In you,

But in leaving a comment where someone's going to comment back and it's just going to create more drama.

Is that really what you're seeking in life?

Is that really what you're hungry for in your life?

And if so,

Well,

You're addicted to drama.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

But I think too,

The next step,

And I don't know,

I want your opinion,

But I would say to add it from my therapy coaching background is,

Um,

Sit in and feel the emotions that are going to rise up when you don't leave that comment.

When you don't ask your friend,

Tell me about Shirley at the grocery store and what just happened when she told you off.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's one step in between that.

What is it?

That's the step of putting space between,

Um,

Stimulus and response.

So before we can get to the underlying emotions,

Before we can look what's underneath the hood of the car,

So to speak,

We need to interrupt the reflex,

That activation reflex that I was talking about.

The one that goes,

I'm not going to let you settle.

It's the alarm system that goes off as you start to find quietude or stillness.

And so interrupting all the ways in which you are disrupting your piece.

When I just noticed I was about to call my friend and vent again.

I was just about to like do that.

And then I'm creating space.

Got it.

And in that space,

That's when we get to go,

Okay,

What's actually here in the space?

What in me hasn't been recognized,

What hasn't been felt.

And that's when we start to get into more layers of trauma work and where we can start to go into the things that have been avoided that are actually fueling the addiction to drama,

That are fueling the avoidance itself.

Interesting.

And so when we can start to process that,

It starts to take the fuel out of it.

We'll still repeat the behaviors for a while.

It will start to feel like empty.

Like I go and I repeat a story and I'm like,

I really didn't need to retell that story again.

Yeah.

That story's already been processed.

Like I,

With clients,

I would,

When they repeat a story that doesn't have any juice to it,

I usually say,

Does the sandwich bag actually have a sandwich in it?

Have you already eaten your lunch?

And they're like,

Oh,

It's an empty sandwich bag,

Scott.

You're right.

You're right.

Or,

Oh,

There's some crumbs left that haven't been processed.

All right.

Can we let go of the story and address the crumbs?

Yeah.

Oh,

That's really good.

I like that analogy.

And yeah.

And sandwich in the sandwich bag.

I have no idea.

I just said it one day to someone.

They're like,

I get exactly what you mean.

I'm still carrying around this bag and sandwich in it.

I was like,

Okay,

Well clearly we'll just keep going with this analogy and hope it works for other people.

And so you'll repeat the behaviors for a while until the,

It just feels like the behaviors feel so empty and vacant of the original fuel.

And that's,

You know,

That's when we start to really address identity formation.

So as part of living in a world.

In which you feel like everyone and everything is against you.

No one has your back.

You become,

You identify as the victim.

And you carry it around with you like a suit and a name tag.

Right.

And it means letting,

So releasing our identity.

A victim means that we release a lot of who we think we are or who we are.

And it is the radical shift of perception of how we are in relation to the world.

And it changes our reality.

Of who we are and who we are in relation to the rest of the people around us.

And it is not an easy thing to let go of our identity.

It's not,

No way.

Especially the identity of the,

I am a victim.

Yeah.

Because it's,

It like seeps into ourselves and our cells have that name tag even that I am a victim and we respond as such.

So after we've addressed,

You know,

Navigating the identity release,

Then,

Then we get into the deeper belonging.

So when I talk about addiction,

There is that void.

That void is the absence of where we should be.

Because of whatever trauma pushed us out of ourselves,

Or we dissociate out of ourselves,

Leaving this vacancy where we,

We really should have been,

Have been if we had been given the time space,

Permission,

Support to stay in our experience and have processed it.

So belonging or the reduction of addiction is coming back home and reoccupying that space with ourselves.

That is the curative to an addiction and it is belonging.

And when we belong to ourselves,

Then we can start to lower the drawbridge and feel intimacy,

The safety for intimacy and belonging to other people in the world that we live in.

Ooh,

Beautiful,

Beautifully said.

I love that.

Belonging to self.

That's really beautiful.

Thank you so much.

This is,

This has been wonderful.

Really,

Really wonderful.

Where would people find you?

On the interwebs.

On social media after I just totally denounced it.

You can find me on my website,

Drscottlyons,

So Dr.

Scott Lyons,

L Y O N S.

I am on Instagram.

I heard I'm on TikTok.

Oh,

I don't know.

Someone,

Apparently someone on my team put me on TikTok.

Um,

But I,

I post often on Instagram and,

Um,

Um,

As well.

And I have a podcast called the gently used human,

Which is a snarky,

Fun,

Um,

Jokey place to go into the depth of what it's like to be a human.

Who's just been lived.

I love it.

I love it.

Well,

Thank you so much.

Where would we find the book?

Is it on your website and Amazon and all places?

Yeah,

Hopefully all places books are sold.

Uh,

So your independent bookshop hopefully has them.

Amazon,

Uh,

Target my website.

You can go and find links as well.

Awesome.

Well,

Thank you so much for being on today.

Really,

Really appreciate you and your book.

Thank you.

Oh,

Thank you so much for having me and thank you for your sweet vulnerability and honesty.

Even recognizing your own propensity for it.

I think it,

It gives those who are listening more safety perhaps and recognizing it in themselves.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

I wish you a beautiful week and I'll see you next week for the next show.

Reviews

A must listen to podcast! Drama adddict here and I had no clue! Thanks for the info and tips how to overcome!