Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Scott Lyons on How You Break Free From Drama Addiction EP 294

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Are you tired of constantly being caught up in drama? Do you want to break free from the cycle and find true peace and fulfillment in your life? Look no further than the power of self-awareness and empathy. Join Dr. Scott Lyons as he shares his proven strategies for overcoming drama addiction and achieving profound personal growth and transformation through mindfulness and compassion. Dr. Lyons is the author of Addicted to Drama: Healing Dependency on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others. Dr. Scott Lyons joins me to discuss how to break from Drama Addiction. In this episode of Passion Struck, we'll dive deep into the factors behind drama addiction, its impact on your well-being, and proven techniques to break free from its grip. Join us as we foster compassion and understanding for those navigating the challenges of drama addiction. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-scott-lyons-drama-addiction/  Brought to you by Fabric. Go to Apply today in just 10 minutes at https://meetfabric.com/passion. Brought to you by Hello Fresh. Use code passion16 to get 16 free meals, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/QDvCD8ysvN8  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here:  Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Marshall Goldsmith on How You Create an Earned Life: https://passionstruck.com/marshall-goldsmith-create-your-earned-life/  Watch the solo episode I did on the topic of Chronic Loneliness: https://youtu.be/aFDRk0kcM40  Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  Passion Struck is now on the AMFM247 broadcasting network every Monday and Friday from 5–6 PM. Step 1: Go to TuneIn, Apple Music (or any other app, mobile or computer) Step 2: Search for “AMFM247” Network

Coming up next on Passion Struck. There's an old saying that says, I think therefore I am. And the reality is, that's not quite true. The truth is, I feel therefore I am. I know my existence by the way I experience life, through sadness, through happiness, through joy, through stress, through everything.

We know our existence and meeting making comes out of feeling and experiencing. I know I have meaning in the world, I know I exist by the fact that I can feel myself in it. And when we're disassociated, when we're disconnected from ourself or walled off from ourself, we don't have a sense of existence, and we don't have a sense of meaning. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance

of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week

with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 294 of PassionStruck. Recently, ranked by Apple is one of the top two alternative health podcasts, and thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn, and live better, be better and impact the world. In case you haven't heard, Passion Struck is now on syndicated radio on the AM FM 247

National Broadcast. And you can catch us Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m. on Apple Music, Tune in or wherever you listen to radio. I'll put links to the available stations in the show notes. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. You simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member. We now have episodes starter packs, which are collections of our favorite episodes that give any new listener a great way to understand everything that we do here on the show.

Either go to Spotify or PassionStruct.com slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed it, earlier in the week, I had a very special interview with Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, who I've wanted on the podcast for a very long time. And Marshall is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Triggers and what got you here won't get you there. And we discuss his latest book The Earn Life, which is also a New York Times bestseller. You don't want to miss that episode. And if you like that one or today's, please consider giving us a five-star rating in a review. It goes such a long way in bringing more people into the passion-struck community, where

we can help them lead a limitless life with hope, meaning, inspiration, and connection. And I know our guests love to hear from you too, and hear your comments and what you thought about their episodes. Now let's talk about today's episode. Many of us are exhausted by the constant stream of drama in our lives, whether it's playing out in screens, in our lives, whether it's playing out in screens in our relationships or at work. Some of us try to avoid it while others seem to thrive on it.

In either case, a solution is needed. And my guest today, clinical psychologist Scott Lyons, offers one in his new book, Addicted to Drama. In our interview, Scott provides insights and how to break free from the isolating and damaging effects of living a life that's consumed by chaos. In inner interview, he provides practical strategies who recognize drama addiction in ourselves and others. Understand how drama addiction affects one's well-being,

how to establish and maintain boundaries in drama-filled environments, how to overcome drama addiction and live a more peaceful life. Using research, personal experience, and patient stories, Dr. Lines deconstructs drama addiction and presents a path towards living a more fulfilling, passion-struck life while offering a practical approach to help us all understand and break free from the cycle of crisis. Dr. Scott Lines is a holistic psychologist, educator, and esteemed body-based trauma expert specializing in mind-body medicine. Dr. Lines helps people break free from cycles of pain, trauma, and limiting beliefs, and

is a leader in transformative wellness and trauma therapy. Over the past two decades, he has taught more than 500,000 people internationally how to relieve stress and regain vitality. Thank you for choosing PassionStruct and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so excited to have Dr. Scott Lyons on PassionStruct. Welcome, Scott. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, we are here today to discuss your brand new book, Addicted to Drama, Healing Dependency

on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm so excited to birth it into the world. Well, I always like to start these interviews by trying to give the audience some more perspective on who you are and your upbringing. And you actually start out the book by saying that you were raised in a chaotic childhood and you describe yourself during those years as a walking ghost, fully did school and brought up in a home filled with abuse and addiction. We all have defining moments. How did a faked suicide when you were 13 spark the next chapter of your life? Yeah, so I write about that faking that suicide attempt or dramatizing the pain in my life is another way of saying that.

And it wasn't actually until maybe my late 20s that are reflected back on that moment to go, whoa, I was an enormous amount of pain. And for some of us, we go to ending that pain. And for others, we want other people in our lives to feel that same pain. And later in the book I call that weaponized empathy, it's a way of basically saying, I need you to relate to me. And the only way I can coordinate that is by creating the conditions or the experience where you might feel the same ache, the same underlying pain that I'm in. And so that became an important understanding of what an addiction to drama is and the sort of tools that are used to maintain this condition, this phenomenon of the

addiction to drama. You open up the book by saying that for most of your life, you assume that bad things just happen to you and drama knew just where to find you, can you describe the person you were at that time and how you were using stress to survive? When we talk about like a chaotic household, it was also filled with love, which feeds into the chaos. Sometimes it's more helpful for a nervous system to understand consistency than inconsistency. And so sometimes when there's love and then there's chaos and pain, that creates a certain preparation in the nervous system to be constantly on guard in a different way

than the expectation that something is going to happen. It's expecting the unexpected. And sometimes when we're expecting the unexpected, we might create the conditions to satisfy that. We might go and seek the drama. We might go and create the drama to sue that part of our nervous system that's in preparation for it. And that was a big part of my childhood, was I was seeking or creating it, but I used to say drama just knew where to find me, because I couldn't see myself in relationship to it.

I couldn't see myself that I might have been the root cause or creating the conditions around me for that drama to be there, for that crisis, for that constant ache that there was always something, some type of struggle, some type of frustration, some type of interpersonal challenge that was always there. And I think it's really easy for a lot of us to project out and say, oh, that person's creating this issue. Or this issue just like randomly appeared. We don't necessarily realize our own contributions to that suffering, to the challenges that we're facing. And part of the addiction to drama that I realized was,

ooh, I may be more responsible for my frustrations, for my stress that I was also feeding off of, than I could have ever imagined. I like how in the book you compare drama to its own type of storm and also the monster and the closet that everyone knows about, but if you can put a finger on, can you explain those comparisons? Yeah, for sure. I think when we think about drama or stress,

specifically, we all know about it. And then, John, I might even turn it around to you. Do you know someone addicted to drama or have ever seen someone addicted to drama? Yeah, a friend of mine's sister, when I was reading the book, very much came alive to me when I was seeing her and her actions and the disruption that it causes on her relationships,

I saw a number of the telltale signs. Yeah. And I think it's so common. We all know someone, at least one person, maybe that's us. Most likely we'll assign someone else in our life as the person we know who's addicted to drama. And it's this thing that we all know and yet has been so elusive. And for me in my life in exploring the addiction to drama, like when I figured out what I was doing, the pattern I was stuck in, essentially creating conditions that were always so stressful as a form of distraction from my own underlying pain. And when I started to realize what I was doing as my own adaptive survival strategy, I went and I was like, where's all the research? We all know people who do this, but there was no studies.

There was no interviews out there. There were no books to talk about the big, bad monster in the closet that we all know about, but when we open the closet, no one's there. So part of what I wanted to really do was open the closet door and really offer something that's tangible, that's concrete, that's not some elusive creature that we all know about, that we all fear or get frustrated by, but can't quite name and identify. And in terms of dress, and it's also the big bad monster in the closet, there isn't one pop psychology article that sort of names stress as something really terrible in our life. And unfortunately, that's a big misunderstanding of what the physiology of stress is.

Basic way to say this, if we didn't have a stress response system, we would be dead as humans. It is actually the way we adapt to stimulus in the world. So stress has always been this big mad monster in the closet, and when it holds that sort of categorization, we don't really get a chance to understand it or understand what an addiction to it looks like.

So an addiction to it looks like, and that's part of an addiction to drama, because we're thriving off the stress hormones, and we're constantly getting flooded by them is in a typical stress response, there's basically four stages, we get activated. It's that flood of hormones, cortisol, adrenaline, the things we know about. And that gives us energy. That's its main purpose. It's like when you wake up in the morning, you have that cortisol spike. It's an energy boost. It's part of getting you up and ready to move through your day.

And so the same thing in a stress response. It gives us the sort of boost of energy to adapt. And that next stage of adaption is called mobilization. We mobilize that energy to navigate the circumstances or the stresses we're facing. Then we deactivate. We have a release of the hormones, we have a release of the engagement of the muscles, and we're more in the feeling sense. We're feeling more of how we are in response to the stressor. And then we go into what's called restoration, and we rest. We build up just like you go to the gym, you're building up the muscles, you need to take a day off from doing chest so that you can

do it again the following day or whenever. Or you take a break between sets so that you can rebuild. It's the same thing with our stress response and that's why it's a cycle. Now for those who are addicted to drama, they stay in that first and second stage. They stay in the activation. They're constantly engaging in ways that flood their system with that stress response, but they don't continue on. They don't use it to functionally adapt to the stressor because they are reacting in such a way that isn't true to the amount of stimulus. It's like putting out a birthday candle with a fire hose.

It doesn't actually make sense. The reaction doesn't coordinate with the amount of stimulus. So they stay. They're constantly revving themselves up. They're thinking about thoughts. They're recreating stories. They're venting to their friends. They're gossiping. They're thinking about thoughts, they're recreating stories, they're venting to their friends, they're gossiping, they're getting into fights. Things are always harder than they need to be. They're over-scheduling themselves. All of these little things that

keep them revved up in that first stage of a stress response. And I'll explain why they do that in a little bit. This is the mechanism of what they're doing. They never complete the stress response. They never complete adaptation. They never get to actually restore themselves. They're just being flooded, which leads to a lot of physiological and psychological damage. Yeah, and just for the audience, I was going to discuss how you described addiction to drama,

just to take what you just said and put it into a succinct statement. In the book, you describe it as being out of sync with chasing sensation to feel alive and seeking crisis as a way of validating the unidentifiable and insatiable discomfort. And I wanted to ask, now that you've described this and I put that definition out there, how, if you're a listener, can you tell if someone you know or you yourself have an addiction to drama? What are some of the common symptoms? Yeah, that's an important understanding because we have the outer symptoms of what it looks like. If I thought you might be addicted to drama Which I'm not so sure about that John

There's things that I might recognize that you do But if I'm addicted to drama, there's a whole different set of Experiences symptoms that arise for the person who is addicted to drama and then we can go from there into the definition you read of why, why are they doing, why are they stuck in this cycle of suffering essentially, why are they stuck in this cycle of not being able to relax and find ease in their life. So from the outside perspective, addiction to drama symptoms might look like

making mountains out of mollholes, making a situation bigger than it is. Getting into fights, like with a partner for no parent reason beyond, that makes them feel a little bit closer. Other symptoms include, from the outside, you feel like you're pulled

into their crisis. They pull you in, and that's that tornado we were talking about a little bit before. It's like their own storm system where they're pulling people in to their constant crisis, and they go from one crisis to the next, what I call crisis hopping. to the next, what I call crisis hopping. And there are a lot of other ways this shows up over scheduling, making things more complicated than they need to be finding people that also review up. So that could be through gossiping, and that could be through venting your story over and over again

to a lot of different audiences. Basically, retelling stories where you're not processing the story, you're just using it to get yourself amped back up, getting that next hit of that cortisol that stress response. In the book, there's a whole quiz you can take that also lists a lot more of the external sort of ways we might recognize in Diction and Trauma, but it's a lot of intensity, it's a lot of extremes. They don't seem to be able to relax, they seem anxious, they seem, there's always a rush or an urgency, so they go all those through life. Now that's from the outside. From the inside, that over exaggeration, that intensity,

feels justified because that's how they're truly perceiving the situation in the world. They're reacting the way that they're actually perceiving it, which feels out of sync with how other people perceive what they're doing. One of the other things I'll say from the outside, if you, I don't know if John, with your friend's sister, if you've ever been like, whoa, what just happened? Like how did we get from here to here? That's wild. That doesn't make any sense. Often something, someone who's on the outside of someone who's addicted to drama will

either think in their head or say out loud of, whoa, how did we get here? This doesn't feel right. Yeah, I just see the way that she causes the havoc with her friends, with her family members in and out of relationships on a fairly continuous basis, can't find grounding in where she wants to go, blaming others for misfortunes, constantly when we're getting get-togethers needing to be the center of attention and putting herself there purposely. So those were some of the things that I saw when I was going through your symptoms list.

Yeah, and that's a great addition to the things we recognize on the outside. It's like there's a center of attention, even if they say they don't want it. Yeah, just stirring things up where there doesn't need to be. Like creating more challenge, more drama than the situation deserves. So from the inside, because I've straddled both,

I've lived from the inside of the addiction and I've lived as a therapist, working with a lot of people with an addiction to drama. So I can really talk about the outside inside experience. And on the inside, it feels awful. It feels like there's a constant sense of deadness. And the only thing that gives us a sense of aliveness from that numbness is more sensation.

The intensity of the emotion, the extreme of the emotion, gives us a sense of being alive in a way where we feel like a walking ghost in the world disconnected from ourselves, disconnected from other people. There's a pervasive sense that something's going to happen. It's always like the next shoe will definitely drop. And you might hear someone who's addicted to this drama say, it's always something. It's always something. And it's true because they will always find that next something. And that is where their attention always will go is on the negative. There's a deep negative bias towards what they attend to. So that agitation, that frustration, and what you name before, that sense of being out of sync with the world. One of the reasons people feel out of

sync with the world is because the way they are interpreting and registering the world is focused, is attuned towards threat. And so if you don't have a lot of trauma on your background, you may not know what that's like. You may be able to stop and smell the roses to enjoy a moment. But when you've had a significant trauma or grew up in a chaotic household, what you're looking for, you're constantly on the look for looking, which you're constantly on the lookout for, is when is the next bad thing? How do I keep protecting myself

from the next bad thing? Like I said before, if it isn't there to satisfy that sense of looking, you will go and find it, or you will go and create it. And that makes you feel in sync. Because let's say like we're in a garden together, John, and you're having a great time. You love the daffodils, you love the orchids. I don't know why the daffodils and the orchids are in the same garden, but they are. But for me, I've had trauma, I've had in this, and I've used this strategy of addiction to drama to avoid my trauma. It's a pattern that's really set in its way as a distraction technique. And I'm going to be looking for, I don't know, there's something in me, there's an agitation

that something is going to go wrong. I don't know what it is. So maybe I'll go, oh, wow, those flowers over there look like they aren't watered. And then I keep going where I'm like, clearly, the person who's gardening this isn't taking good enough care of the garden. And I think that's awful. How could they be so negligent in the world? I bet they don't even care about people. You could see how I could start to spiral down and that spiraling and all the sudden I'm in this narrative, this story and then I'm gonna pull you into it.

And then you're gonna enable that story and keep me revved up in my activation, my stress response. And all of that that lets me feel in sync, connected to the world, connected to you. Through that chaos, I am able to, for the first time, feel connected to the world, feel connected to you. Because otherwise otherwise it would feel too vulnerable Just to be able to do this like we're doing which is we're looking at each other we're talking we're connecting It's a very intimate experience and for those with an addiction to drama that feels like a threat and

That thread there's a whole reaction in their physiology that they're not aware of Fred, there's a whole reaction in their physiology that they're not aware of. That vulnerability, that softening, that settling that is possible for us to do feels dangerous. So it's what's called an activation reflex. In a meditation or mindfulness practice, your breath starts to deepen, the weight of your body starts to rest more into gravity. Even you can hear it in my voice, my voice starts to drop as I relax. And with someone who's addicted to drama,

which is, there's a lot of us out there. When we start to settle, when we start to relax, we start to think about, oh, did I leave the stove on? Hey, or I start to think about that story, I start to replay that issue with my boss, or that fight with my friend, or that thing I saw on television. And I don't even recognize it, but I am revving myself up away from that relaxation, from that settling. And that keeps me on guard for whatever the next threat might be. And that is truly at the heart of an addiction to drama. And so we might, even in that description right there, more of us might go, oh, I do that. Oh, shoot,

that might be me whenever I meditate. I start to think about things and get myself a little amped up and it's hard for me to relax because that's truly at the heart of an addiction to drama. We might use a lot of other techniques to keep us revved up, but at the heart of it is the inability to settle and relax because underneath that relaxation, if we really relax, we're settling into ourselves. And if we settle into ourselves, we are more likely to feel what is present within ourselves. And that would be too dangerous, especially when there's been, whether it's a chaotic household or trauma in our life, we have built an entire safety mechanism

to avoid feeling that. Because in trauma, we're flooded with overwhelm, we're flooded from the experience. It's too much for our nervous system to process and metabolize. So we section ourselves off. We build walls. We build literally inflammation in our body to protect ourselves from being in that state of overwhelm and possibly die. When it doesn't get to be processed, especially as kids, we live with that sort of wall, that armoring, and that numbing. And so we are basically entrapped within ourselves. And that's what I talk about in my book, that walking ghost, because in that numbness, not only was I cut off from feeling the trauma, but I was cut off from feeling myself and

everyone else in the world. I became out of sync with the world, disconnected, isolated alone, which is I think a feeling a lot of us can relate to. Like, why do we feel this loneliness? Because especially how can we feel lonely in a world that's so populated? And often that loneliness is because we're armored off or walled off from ourself. There's some type of protective mechanism that we didn't even know came in to divide us from a stress or a trauma, but actually it also divides us from other people and ourselves. us from other people and ourselves. And I wanted to take this to the topic of purpose and meaning. You just brought up the numbness that a person who's addicted to drama feels, the loneliness.

You also describe it as anchorless. Yeah. Can you explain how when you're in this state, it impacts your sense of purpose and meaning? Yeah. And you explain how when you're in this state, it impacts your sense of purpose and meaning. Yeah. So there's an old saying that says, I think therefore I am. And the reality is, that's not quite true. The truth is, I feel therefore I am. I know my existence I know my existence by the way I experience life, through sadness, through happiness, through joy, through stress, through everything, we know our existence and meeting making

comes out of feeling and experiencing. I know I have meaning in the world. I know I exist by the fact that I can feel myself in it. And when we're disassociated, when we're disconnected from ourself or walled off from ourself, we don't have a sense of existence, and we don't have a sense of meaning. The meaning is it can be a sensation, it can be a state of mind and experience. I know I belong here, meaning in belonging, go hand in hand. I belong here. I have meaning. I have purpose. I am doing something. All of that is allowed when we can experience and feel ourselves, when we're disconnected, when we're again, when we're walled off, when we're in a numbness,

when we're a walking ghost, we don't get to actually experience the actual embodied felt sense of meaning and purpose. We might cognitively have an idea like, oh, my purpose in this world is to do X, Y, and Z is to have a podcast or to have that garden. But the truth is, unless I can feel connected to it, that purpose, that meaning will always crumble. And we will live in a state of unhappiness and unfulfillment, which is pretty sad. Yeah, it's very sad. And I think we've done a really good job of defining what this addiction to drama is and what it feels like. Where I wanted to go with this next was I think one of the things we're missing today,

because of a lot of things is human connection. And I want to discuss how this drama addiction impacts different elements of that. The first one I wanted to tackle was how does drama addiction look like an impact in intimate relationship? I think we all know that one, but I'm asking this here. I think we've all probably been at some point in relation to someone addicted drama, and it feels exhausting. The fights, the intimacy, is replaced with intensity. And red flags become the thing that feels like home, with someone addicted to drama. to speak, come the thing that feels like home with it and someone addicted to drama. And so there's this way in which there's a fight might bring us closer for those addicted

drama. It doesn't necessarily make sense because it's about making sensation. So if I say to you, like, oh, things are feeling a little status quo in our relationship. So I'm going to spice it up. I'm going to get unintentionally into a fight or I'm unable as someone, those of us who have or are addicted to drama. Because of that numbness I talked about earlier, there's a huge gap, a distance between being able to be in contact with what they're actually feeling, but their actual needs are. They might have big explosions of emotions, but those are not the underlying core emotions and needs that are actually here.

They're a distraction from feeling it. I was working with a client the other day. She was like, I don't know why. I got into a fight all weekend with my partner. I kept picking on him, I kept telling him all the things he did wrong, and I just went at him. And now I'm thinking about my ex partners and my ex-wife friends, and maybe they were a better choice. And just spy really. You can hear it in my voice. I feel like maybe he's cheating on me and just really creating stories out of thin air. Things that feed into this drama. The momentum of the drama. We worked together for some time. We went through the steps of coming back to,

okay, right before that first fight. What were you noticing? What were you feeling? It took some time. Oh, he left on a work trip. I felt really abandoned. Oh, okay. So if we were to stay with the feeling of abandonment, which is a very familiar feeling for this individual, what happens next? And the tendency in that was like, stay for it for just a brief moment and then jump back into, but he keeps going on so many work trips

and we'll never find intimacy if he keeps going on these work trips and he should quit his job and the crisis hopping. But if he quits his job, then we won't have enough finances and come back to the core feeling of abandonment. I know that's hard. I know that's hard to sit with. There's a lot of history around abandonment. I know that's hard. I know that's hard to sit with.

There's a lot of history around abandonment here. And so the longer we could hang out and tolerate the underlying feeling, the narratives, the stories, the need to fight and create chaos, tripped away. There was no need for it. Now, this is someone I've worked with for a couple of years. So, when we first started,

it would take weeks to get towards a core feeling. Now, we can do it much more quickly. But you can see how it's not that they want the attention or they want the fighting. It's that A, it's a way of reflexively avoiding their underlying feelings and needs, which are hard to attend to. Second, if we grew up in a family of chaos or a family of neglect. So there was either too much going on or not enough going on. How did you gain the attention needed to survive, to be seen and heard? And that becomes the currency for love. You use that. Whatever strategy you figure out as a kid, that becomes the underlying currency of love for you as an adult. So getting really big, getting into fights, causing a commotion gets the attention to feel seen and heard, then you're going to use that as often as you need to.

So relationships, I think, are such a clear depository for a lot of people's who are addicted to drama, who have had drama. It's a depository, a place to create that friction, a place in which they're navigating the challenge of intimacy. Because, like I said before, intimacy creates vulnerability. Vulnerability feels like a threat. So I'm going to avoid deep intimacy, but I'm in a relationship, so

there's a bind here. So what are all the ways in which when I'm feeling vulnerable, I create distance, or I create friction to fill in the gap of that vulnerability, to create a wall, a protection. It's a faux wall of protection, but a wall of protection. And if I pull you in, if I pull you into my tornado of chaos, that is the safest way that I can feel related to you and yet not be in that state of vulnerability. This is for the listeners. When someone's pulling you in, trying to bring you down the hill of drama and just roll

with you, what they're doing is at the heart of what they're doing is actually trying to be in connection. Yeah, you describe it in the book as a tornado of extreme feelings, reactions, and behaviors. And as you were just describing that, I can just picture the ramifications of this in a group of friends or how this can cause huge conflicts in work environments as well. Oh yeah. We go from where do we spend the majority of our time as adults in an office. We're going to replicate the same patterns we did with our families and our partners in a workspace environment. And yet, within a partner, we can really go out each other in terms of that fight or that de jealousy or the spine or all the techniques we might do to avoid the intimacy

and rev ourselves up. In a workplace, there's more permission to gossip, to hit each other against each other to pit people against each other or to create stories in our head about, ooh, they got this raise, but they're lazy where the jealousy plays out into stories. And then I take those stories and I spread them around

like gossip because it makes me feel important and powerful because that's what gossip does. It's an agent to create belonging and a tool to create a sense of power. And if I tell you a secret, John, it's just between you and I granted there's a couple hundred thousand listeners. This is just between you and I. I create an in-groupness. I create a sense of belonging and exclusiveness that it's something only we share, which feels, oh, I matter. I feel power. In the same way that actually creating

a stress response, all that activation gives me a sense of power. If you've ever gone on a, done a big workout. Yeah. And you've, yeah, I feel strong, or you felt like really angry. And in the height of the anger before it's the cathartic release of it, you actually feel strong. It's that same sense of power that comes in all of these stress responses, whether it's congocoping or extreme sports or extreme emotion. And that sense of power is a medicine for those who are addicted to drama who feel powerless, hopeless, helpless in their lives, which I mean, there's a lot of us who hasn't felt those things.

Yeah, this made me think about a person that worked for me when I was at Dell. And this person was always wondering why he wasn't being promoted and would bringing it up constantly in our one-on-ones. And I don't think he understood the chaos that he was causing in different situations, both within his peer group, but also within the business community who we were supporting as an IT group.

And so because of these fires that he would create everywhere, the rest of us had to come in there and keep putting them out. Oh gosh, yeah. Sorry about that. No, but it's just an example of how this can manifest itself and the consequences of it. What were the consequences for you of having to chase the fires and put them out?

The consequences for me were I was spending time on things I didn't need nor had the time to actually deal with. So by creating these situations, it was in some ways undermining what we were trying to do, especially with the business community. And in the peer group, it caused all kinds of conversations that I had to have with each of his peers that just created this sense of a lack of trust and other things which were impacting not only my ability to lead the group but the confidence that they had in that peer to do what he said he was going to do.

There's a way in which I really hear your experience and I just go, that sounds exhausting and inefficient. And so, and it creates an ecosystem of chaos. And it creates an ecosystem of stress, which is unintentionally what they're doing. It's not like they're just creating the issues. They're also creating ecosystem so that they feel in sync with the world. Like the world around them is chaos. And they can relax a little bit because all of a sudden,

there's a normalcy when your inner world is chaos and the outer world is calm, it feels very disorganized. Oh, it absolutely does. And in chapter 9, you introduce this concept of the global drug of drama. And it's something I wanted to jump into because I've recently done a few episodes around the attention economy with Isowatsyn and Guy of Ernstine where we discussed the global impact caused by digital addiction.

However, you suggest that although we live in an attention economy, you don't think it's as much as an attention economy. You don't think it's as much as an attention economy. You think it's an activation economy. And I wanted to ask you, what is that link between attention and activation because I found this quite fascinating? Yeah. So we know that we exist in an attention economy that's about consumerism, capitalism is about

gaining and maintaining a consumer's attention. The longer I can maintain your attention, the more I can sell to you. Your attention is one of the most important commodities out there. Now, we need to take it a step further, which is what are the neural mechanisms to get and maintain your attention. And we all know we've all probably heard the word amygdala that part of our brain that's filtering out and is more tuned towards negative stimulus than positive stimulus. And negative stimulus will always, from an evolutionary perspective we'll always get our attention.

So in a stress response, we know the amygdala is stimulated because it's getting ready to filter in that information and decide how to adapt and respond. So to get attention, you have to create a stress response. So we don't live just in an intentional economy. We live in a stress economy. We live to create. There is a need to create a constant stream of a stress response in order to maintain and capture someone's attention. And there are consequences to this. Many years ago, we didn't really see the consequences of dumping toxic waste into the ocean. And the same way, we do not have enough information

out there, it's starting to about dumping toxic information into our nervous systems, into our ocean. And this is the problem that we're facing now because it is replicating the conditions, forcing you into the conditions that create an addiction to drama. You are overstimulated and under process, under metabolized. It's not just, here's the amount of stress response we need to give you to maintain and capture your attention. Five years from now, we need to triple that because you as a human build a tolerance level for the amount of stimulus or stressors that will get your attention. So every bit of time, we need to keep dumping in more extremes, more intensities, and you, in your life, become numb to a certain amount of stimulus.

And so you and yourself also need to create more sensation, to feel more. And we know, to feel is to know we're alive, to feel is an experience that we have meaning and purpose. So they are creating a force condition. They, typically the engineers of attentional economy, are forcing us into the same mechanisms, building up a threshold of stress response and then needing more to feel more. And having withdrawal symptoms. So if you don't get that amount of stimulus, you start to go into a relaxation, you start to settle, and that no longer feels okay. You feel boredom, you feel like something's missing, you get that itch, like why haven't I looked at the social media, you start to decrease the amount of dopamine and

either neuromones that give you that sense of goodness in your life that have come from all of that stimulus. So it's a sticky situation for sure. It's a sticky situation for sure. Why I call it the global pandemic is because not only are engineers doing this to us, creating the conditions that replicate an addiction to drama to capture and maintain our attention, but we are also doing it. We are in a rat race of attention. And what gets the most amount of attention?

More exaggerated stories, more exaggerated photos, even more exaggerated humor doesn't really matter. It takes more to get more people's attention, the likes, which is its own dopamine response because we feel at some level that we're getting attention and that feels good. We get that external validation. And especially if there is a strong core sense of self, that starts to fill in the gap of who we are. That sense of, if we don't know who we are and we don't feel that sense of internal validation

and motivation in life, we rely on the likes, people pressing like, the comments on our social media all of that and Then we're in a rat race against billions and millions of other people also trying to do the same So we're fighting against these engineers of How they are manipulating basically stressors and stimulus and overwhelming our nervous systems to maintain our attention. And we are also in a battle with each other to do this as well.

That is a lot of overwhelm to our nervous system. That's crazy how much this is just completely disintegrating human connection causing loneliness all over the planet. Like right now, third of the people across the globe are in a state of loneliness. It's considered one of the most severe endemic issues that we are facing as humans right now, because loneliness is the precursor to depression. And then it's a cycle that we can't get out of bed, we can't go make friends, we can't go connect. And it becomes more and more. And then when we feel lonely, we might rely on other techniques to feel connected with people,

including gossiping, including other forms or tools that we have seen previously in an addiction to drama. Because we know, and this is a wild fact, we know that chaos is a bonding agent. If you and I go through a hard time together, or something intense, we're gonna feel closer than if we both threw a neutral or happy experience together. So where does that leave us in a huge global issue of loneliness, where chaos becomes a bonding agent, the bonding agent. That's really powerful, really powerful statement there. Scott, we're wanted to take

the final portion of the interview was oftentimes, and I'm sure listeners who might be tuning in feel stuck in their situation, just like you were feeling stuck in your situation. And I wanted to ask you, what led you to making the choice that things needed to change? What was the first step that you took and what are some of your tips for healing? Yeah, often the pain of not healing has to be greater than the pain of all the issues or all was really in a place in my life where I took several months off from work, from I quit my jobs in the arts. I isolated myself and I started to notice all the ways in which I was creating more suffering for myself. So, awareness is a big first step. And when I created space for myself,

I started to feel into all the underlying things I never addressed. I could feel something underneath the hood of my car, so to speak, that wasn't quite right. But I was going on so many joy rides of life that I never looked under the hood. And when I made space for myself, I went, oh, whoa. And not only am I creating suffering out here in the world for other people in myself, but there's actually an underlying thing that is very hurt in me, apart of me, that's very hurt. And so I just started noticing, gosh, what are all the ways I overcomplicate life? What are all the ways that I am not letting myself find ease and comfort, enjoy and life? And slowing the reflex down to not engage in those things. That took some time. Reflexes are just that,

that they're unconscious, we do them. So as they became more conscious, I was able to go, ooh, I am not going to gossip. I am having this emotion. I'm not going to call five different people and tell them that story. I'm going to stay with it myself.

I'm going to slow down my thoughts and connect to my underlying feelings. And when I was able to start to do that gave me an access to starting to process the underlying traumas, the ways in which the chaos of my early childhood really were residing in my body still as body memories, unprocessed body memories. And I started to work through those. And as I started to work through those,

a lot of the need to avoid myself and avoid my underlying feelings felt dumb and useless. I was like, oh, I could go get into a fight with my sister. Like I would have done before, but I'm like, I don't need that. I don't crave that anymore. And so they started to rip away. And that is what happens when we start to process the underlying elements, the memories

of our life, the protective mechanisms we use to avoid those no longer feel relevant or necessary or interesting. So in relationships that translates to, oh, all those folks where I would go date, people who were addicted to drugs, or very severely, mentally unstable, or toxic suddenly started feeling boring to me. Where before I was like, this is what love feels like. And I was like, this is what love feels like. And I was like,

this is boring. This is not interesting to me. It really does start to drip away in that way. And you start to become more attuned to the nuances of life. Like an apple tastes sweet, all the sudden. And that may seem like out of nowhere, but it's like when you're pushing so much in your life and you're doing such extreme reactions and things, the nuance is the flavors of life, you bypass. Because drama is much stronger overwhelming smell and taste, then the nuances and flavors that are actually in life. That was a big turning point for me when I could really just start to taste the subtleties of things and feel the subtleties of things, to feel disappointment that didn't turn into rage or a little bit of sadness that didn't turn into a feeling like the world was going

to end. That's what I would say is like there's a process and then there's a when the final stage is we form an identity around our experiences and around our adaptive survival strategies. I'm a tough person because I win through this and that's my identity. I'm a tough person because I win through this. And that's my identity. I'm a tough person or I win through all this and then I feel overwhelmed by the world. So I'm a victim. And that's the identity I carry around with me. And one of the final stages of healing is letting go of the identity we formed that emerged from our traumas, emerged from our experiences, emerged from the ways we adapted and compensated from those experiences.

And when we let go of the identity, oh, it's such a relief. It's, oh, I can just be in the world without the identity of being a hero or a victim. And the stories of the experiences of my life are no longer filtered through that identity. And so we start to experience life as it is as opposed to how it could be through our identity formations. Well, thank you so much for sharing that and for the audience. Today, we've just touched on the surface of Scott's book. And I

would highly encourage you that if this is something that's resonating with you, the book does an excellent job in the first section of laying out what drama addiction is with lots of quizzes and examples that Scott uses throughout it to illustrate the points. And the second that Scott uses throughout it to illustrate the points. And the second part really goes into how this behavior impacts the person who has the addiction, but also others around them and how you can look and see people in your life who might be experiencing this as well and how to handle that.

And then the last section really goes into, as he was just talking about the five stages of healing and how you can use the addicted to drama archetypes that he lays out in the book to heal yourself. Scott, I had one final question and that would be if you had one thing or two things that you wanted a listener of the podcaster reader of the book to take away from it, what would they be? listener of the podcast or reader of the book to take away from it, what would they be? I think the two main points I would take away is one is empathy that I think we talked about like your friend's sister and we all know someone addicted to drama at some point and it's overwhelming to us. We often might go, ooh, they just want attention. Why are they doing this?

And so one of the things I would say is, I hope this brings some level of empathy to go, oh, this is why they're doing this. This isn't in their control. If they could make life easy and that felt safe, they would. Which might, for the person who's around, the person addicted to drama, give them some relief and know that it's not their fault or that they need to also do their own work because one of the hardest challenges we face is that as more and more people are addicted to drama, as we're seen in an endemic of drama, is that it's contagious, that we have what's called secondary stress responses.

So you as the person around that person addicted to drama are having a biological stress response, and you need to also take care of yourself. And that's really important, so you don't get sick, so you don't get sick, so you don't get overwhelmed, so you don't get exhausted. And so that you don't also need that same level of stress to feel alive.

Thank you, Scott, for sharing that. If there's a place you would like to direct the listeners to, where should they go to learn more about you? Yeah, thanks. So my website is a great place with a lot of resources. And a free quiz of are you addicted to drama or do you know someone addicted to drama? And that's www. I know we don't have to say www.

But I like the sound of it. So www. Dr. Scott Lyons. So it's dr ScottLions.com. You can also find me on Instagram as well, where I have a couple almost daily, a little bits of information and support there as well. Well great. Well Scott, thank you so much for joining us today. And congratulations on the launch of this great new book. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Scott Lines. And I wanted to thank Scott Heshet books Congratulations on the launch of this great new book. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Scott Lines. And I wanted to thank Scott Hashtet Books and Emma Van Bern for the honor and privilege of him being a guest on the show. All links to Scott will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links in the show notes if you purchase any of the books from the guests

that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to the show and making it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles and PassionStruck Clips. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, we are also now on syndicated radio, money and Friday from 5 to 6 pm on the AMFM247 National Broadcast. Links will be in the show notes. Advertiser deals and discount codes are difficult to remember so we put them in one convenient place at PassionStruck.com slash deals. I am on LinkedIn where you can subscribe to my weekly newsletters or you can also catch me at John Armiles both on Twitter and Instagram where I post daily. You're about to hear

a preview of the passionstruck podcast interview I did with Dr. Peter Singer dubbed the world's most influential philosopher by the New Yorker magazine. Peter has written, co-authored, edited, or co-edited more than 50 books and 25 languages, including practical ethics, writings on an ethical life, the life you can save, and so many more. We discuss animal liberation now, which is an update to his famous book, Animal Liberation, which came out in 1975,

and is often credited with starting the animal rights movement. His TED Talk on this topic has over 2.25 million views. The more difficult question, how can we change this? I think what it takes is a critical mess of people who are prepared to make that change. It takes the pioneers who are prepared to go out and the limb and challenge the conventional beliefs and views about what we're doing. And when you get

enough of them, then there's safety in numbers. People will find it more easy to join, whereas for the first few people to do that, it's really hard. And one of the positive things about the rising in vegan eating over the last 10 or 20, is I think we're getting closer to that critical mess. We're not quite there yet, but when I started in this thinking about animals, nobody knew what the word vegan meant. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends or family members

when you find something useful or interesting. If you found today's episode on overcoming drama useful, then please share it with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, Ash and Strut. you