The Jordan Harbinger Show - 836: Scott Lyons | Overcoming an Addiction to Drama

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Dr. Scott Lyons (@drscottlyons) is a neuroscientist focusing on cognitive psychology and the impact of mindfulness on mental well-being, founder of The Embody Lab, host of The Gently Used Human podcast, and author of Addicted to Drama: Healing Dependency on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others. [TW // Self-harm and suicide are discussed.]  What We Discuss with Dr. Scott Lyons: What drama addiction is, and why it's so much more than just seeking constant attention from others. How to recognize drama addiction in yourself and others. How to grasp the ways in which drama addiction affects your well-being. How to build and uphold boundaries in our drama-ridden lives. How to heal a drama addiction and live a more peaceful, less chaotic life. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/836  This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals  Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. You know, like if we think about your nervous system as a bank, you get $100. For every trauma, it's like $10 that is no longer in the bank to be used towards adapting to something else. And then that adds up over time, and then you just become less resilient and efficient, and all of a sudden, your entire bank account is depleted.

And you are not adapting functionally to the world anymore. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional organized crime figure war correspondent or journalist turned poker champion. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show,

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that means any interview, any question from Feedback Friday, any promo code for any sponsor, Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI is where you can find it. And let me know if it tells you that my mom is racist or something like that. It does that sometimes. Today on the show, whether we're watching it play out on our screens and social media feeds or experiencing it in our relationships and workplaces, many of us find ourselves exhausted by the seemingly never-ending torrent of drama in our lives. While some of us long to escape the drama, others dive in head first, and both groups desperately need a solution. Today, Dr. Scott Lyons joins me to discuss why some of the drama queens in our lives might actually be addicted to drama, like real addiction. The real deal,

not just like a figure of speech. Some folks thrive on crisis, others manufacture it, but it is just not normal to have your entire life be consumed by chaos, go figure. So in this episode, we'll learn to recognize drama addiction in yourself and in others, possibly even more important to do in yourself, of course, grasp the ways in which drama addiction affects your well-being, and we'll learn how to build and uphold boundaries in our drama-ridden lives, and a whole lot more. And by the way, I had no idea drama addiction was even a thing. So this episode was especially enlightening for me, and it shed a lot of light on past behavior from friends and acquaintances that just makes, well, it makes a lot more sense now. And I think you're going to

feel the same way. So here we go with Dr. Scott Lyons. I didn't know that you could actually be addicted to drama. I mean, we all know dramatic people. Sure. But I didn't know it was like a disease. It's definitely a phenomenon that you can get attached to something that becomes a distractor from pain, just like any other addiction. The distraction from pain thing makes sense.

The reason I wanted to do this episode was I think a lot of people, we either are this person or we know somebody who's like this. And we don't think they're dramatic because they've had a painful traumatic upbringing. And we just think, like, why does he call into work because his roommate got a fender bender in a parking lot? It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And we just can't figure out these people's angle and what their problem is. Yeah.

Why are they making mountains out of mole hills? Right. Yeah. I want to back up, though. How did you even get interested in this? It sounds like you yourself had maybe a little brush with some of this. A little brush with an addiction to drama. Yeah.

And grew up in a family very much. a drama, a whole lineage of it. Ah. My father's father was a drama queen. My father's father's was a drama queen. There's certainly a lot of trauma, transgenerational trauma in my family. And I think one of the ways

it really showed up is through their own propensities, their way of creating chaos and living and thriving in crisis. And you picked that up, what, as a kid? Absolutely. The environment was super chaotic. And the ways they coped with it was like,

crazy humor and making situations bigger than they were. And there was a lot of intensity in the house for when it really didn't need to be there. I read in your book that you tried to run away from home and stay in the hospital. Tell us what's going on there just so people get a flavor for kind of your own flavor of drama. I mean, you know, certainly when I was in high school, I had a really rough time, a rough go with it. I had a lot of learning disabilities. I was going through a lot of my own discovery process of who I was. And there was a lot of challenges at school and at home. And in the extreme desire to get out to break free, I faked my own suicide. How do you do something like that? Yeah. I mean, well, there are other times in my life

where I was pretty depressed and there were serious attempts. But it was this desire to what I call later in the book weaponized empathy, which is if I can get you through creating a situation, big enough to feel what I'm feeling, then maybe I won't be in as much pain. Wow, almost like misery loves company, but on steroids. Yeah. And there's lots of variations of that for those who are addicted to drama. It's like, I can't receive perhaps the validation or the comfort you might be able to offer me because of a lot of different conditions. Because, well, for one, if I received and accepted your compassion, that would probably make me too vulnerable. And the intimacy of that would create too much contact with my own underlying emotions, which feels dangerous. And so I do

whatever I can to get you to feel what I'm feeling without actually feeling or receiving the compassion that you might have for me. This is a little bit complex, so we'll probably have to break some of this down. So when did you find out, okay, I'm addicted to drama? That's the problem. Because I would imagine when you're in these situations, you think, no, this is really an emergency. Yeah. My roommates fender bender in a parking lot in an office building really is cause for me to like quit my job on the spot and run out the front door to go to the hospital where for some reason it absolutely feels justified because that is their reality and so it's really hard to recognize an addiction to drama or the something that feels askew from your response to what's actually

happening in reality yeah i think it was in my late 20s i was in the midst of a big breakup and just really sad, really depressed, having some significant medical conditions. And I realized the only time I felt better, like energized, alive again was when I would contact my ex, which was a pretty toxic situation. Sure. Or I would get into a fight with my parents or my sister or watch a violent movie, something that would get me a stress response. And that hit of stress, I suddenly felt more alive again. And it occurred to me at that time that that's maybe not how I want to live my life. Sure. That I am going for the hits of stress in order to feel awake, alive, feel better. Jeez, it sounds like, and I'm not trying to pin this on you, but it sounds like serial killer

stuff. Oh, wow. We went there. Yeah. You know, like, you ever see that show, Dexter where he's like, the only time I feel focused is what I'm in, you know, talking to the demons or whatever. And he's like, he's throwing another killer over the boat edge. And he's like, this is my time to be alive. It's not the same thing. Isn't that wild that we would love to watch a show where essentially we're watching someone's killing other people? So I stopped liking it. And I was, yeah. And now, I don't watch movies where people get shot all the time. And it's happened sort of after I had kids. It was like, maybe this isn't good for me. Yeah. And I certainly don't want my kids to see it. And when you have little kids, you don't have any time to watch anything anyways. So, yeah, I just haven't

seen that stuff for years. Well, it's kind of amazing. Nobody wants to be involved in drama. Right. But they're interested in watching. on television or being told about it other people's drama. That's not untrue. Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I will say 90-day fiancee makes an appearance here and there in my life. And I'm always like, these are so, these people are idiots. I want to watch the next one.

And yet, yeah, and you're connected to it. You're attached to it. There's still that like, what the hell is going on? Look at the mess you've made in your life. Look at the mess. And yet I can't pull away from the mess. Except that what's wild is their mess has a contagious physiological response in your body. That sort of response really is something that I think is quite fascinating. You would think

that, and I guess it is true that a healthy mind would go, hey, this isn't what I meant by feeling something. And yet it's an unhealthy mindset to have. And yet the mind is like, I'll just cause all this other problems just so I feel, is it dopamine that you get a hit off of or what? Yeah. So if we take it back a few steps, like why would someone create their own suffering? Essentially. Why? Like why, why? Why would you create more chaos and crisis or why would you seek it out? And the reality is it doesn't make sense. It makes sensation. Sensation in the body. And that sensation helps someone feel more alive to an underlying numbness that happens as a response of trauma. It seems like it's a spice of life, but it's almost like there is no dish. It's only spice if you just do this too much, right?

There's no. Well, that's why you have to keep upping it. Oh, like an actual drug. Yeah, that's what makes it an addiction is that we form a tolerance level and then we have to keep upping that spice of life to keep feeling something. That could get pretty messy, I would imagine, if you're talking about, oh, I have to contact my ex. Well, okay, so what's worse than a major blow up inside my family or faking my own suicide? Like you mentioned you tried to do. Where do you go from there if you have to keep stepping it up from there? I mean, at some point, you're just burning everything down. Yeah, you find it. And you burn a lot of villages along the way or a lot of communities or a lot of relationships, however you want to see it.

There's a lot of destruction that happens as part of this addiction. Jeez. But then, of course, how do you come back from that? Because if you take all the spice out of the food and your tolerance is through the roof, it'd be like quitting heroin, cold turkey or whatever. That is a variation of what it felt like. Wow. Yeah.

When I stopped engaging in revving myself up or finding the situations or stop. to stop talking to the friends who would kind of enable that. Life felt really boring. I felt like no one was going to like me. I wasn't going to be important in the world. I was just going to be like a blob on the couch for the rest of my life. So you're worried other people will also think you're boring. So not only are you bored, you're like, everyone else thinks I'm boring too.

My life is over. Yeah, I remember saying to my therapist along the way, I was like, I'm not really engaging in getting that hit from the stress and trying to fill myself up again from the stress, I'm afraid I'm not going to be funny anymore. Will you still want to see me? Your therapist is like, you know I'm getting paid for this, right? You know you're paying my kid's college tuition with this, right?

Yeah, my mortgage is coming through. You're still welcome in the office. Yeah, exactly. So this is, drama is like any other drug, but you, the problem is you make it yourself. So not only does it hurt you from the supply side and the demand side, but also you can't just like delete your dealer's phone number or whatever people do to get off drugs.

You can't just move to a place where you don't know any suppliers because you are the supplier. You are the supplier. So wherever you go, there you are and you're just causing problems. You can move to China and you're creating your own crap over there.

Well, that's the hard part. It's like, oh, wherever I go, there's always so much chaos with people and they're always attacking me and I'm a victim to the world. And it's really hard to like turn the focal point and be like, oh, wherever I go, there I am. Right.

And this is a continual. situation, maybe I'm the seed of that. What's the common denominator to all these problems in my life? Oh, it's me. I'm the problem. Yeah. I mean, Taylor Swift's song, you know? She nailed it. It does certainly, the whole book sort of sounds, seems like a Taylor Swift song at some point. I hope she sings it something. Yeah, yeah, you can charge for that. You pay for your therapy bills. All right. So what are some symptoms of being addicted to drama? Can we list a few so that people I think can identify it? Yeah. So there's the symptoms from the outside. And then there's a symptoms from the inside. And the outside is like how we from, you know, being in relationship to

people who are addicted to drama, we'll see it. So there's always an intensity. There's always a speed, a rushing, a bulldozing. There's a extreme in the response. The, the situation and the behavior don't match up. Okay. From the outside. Meaning what? Like I mentioned, the example was a roommate gets a fender bender. Dude runs out of work, quits job on the job on. the spot. So the, what am I looking for? Like, the reaction is disproportionate to the stimulus. Exactly. So, like, my mom gets a text that her haircut gets canceled because it's, there's a snowstorm. And her response is, oh, my God, why does this always happen to me? I needed that haircut today, and everyone always cancels on me. Interesting. And so it's like, you know, you go back and you slow it down and you're

like, oh, so it's disappointing that she had to cancel. But the disappointment is this extreme response that becomes globalized to one's entire life. Is it catastrophizing? Is that part of it? Because I can imagine, like, I needed that haircut today. And if I don't have it, then when I go to this thing tomorrow, everyone's going to think I'm schleppy, which means they're going to think I'm not qualified for the job, which means I'm going to get fired or not promoted, which means that I'm going to die homeless.

Exactly. The story just like, you're putting logs on the fire of the story, and it just builds to this extreme heat that you can't actually deconstruct it back to what was the underline emotion that I bypassed by going into the extremes. But not everybody who catastrophizes is addicted to drama, right? Some people just think of the worst case scenario like yours truly. And I'm not, I don't enjoy that. I know that some of it is my attempted problem solving, but it doesn't happen to every,

like every time in my life. It happens when. Well, drama is a survival strategy. Okay. And so we all have the capacity to utilize a survival strategy. Gotcha. Have you ever, I don't know, thought about an ex? Yeah, sure.

For no apparent reason or gone back and just read the text messages. That I've not done, no. Good for you. Me either. Of course not. I've never done that. But it's like going back into what will obviously create a little suffering. Oh, I see.

I see. No, I have not done that. Or, I mean, so many people have done that or some variation of like replaying what happened at work over and over again, changing the story slightly, trying to be the hero of the story or what you would have said. and you're having a stress response just by thinking it through. Just by reading those texts, you're getting that hit of cortisol. You're being flooded with it.

And why are you doing it? You don't have to do it, but something is driving you towards it. That is quite fascinating. And I think a lot of people listening right now are watching right now are probably like, oh my God, I do that. Yeah, for sure. But there's a difference between people who do that occasionally because they're going through something and people who do it habitually with, they're out of eggs.

I can't believe it. Why does this always happen? Right? And then there's other people who are like, but this breakup is terrible. So of course I'm looking at our photos or whatever. Yeah. It's a scale. Like anything.

It's a scale. And so it's like we all had the capacity to go and do that. Yeah. Why am I looking at their photos when I could go towards something of like peace? It's the same question of like, why am I going towards something that's going to create more suffering in me or those around me? I don't have to actually go back and reread that text for the 10th time. I don't. And it's a choice. What you're describing is the lack of choice for those addicted

to drama. I keep going back into it. It's like throwing yourself down a hill and just rolling in the momentum of it. You can't stop. You mentioned before it's because we're trying to distract ourselves from trauma. So does being addicted to drama sort of allow us to focus on outside events instead of our unmet needs? Needs, feelings. I'm thinking of people who, you know, people cut themselves or otherwise do stuff like that. And you find there's a thing with little kids where they bite themselves sometimes. Yeah. And you find out it's because they can't manage whatever stressful emotion.

But if they're doing it a lot, doctors are like, what's going on in your house where your three-year-old keeps biting himself and he's bleeding? Yeah. My kid, when he was two, if he get really mad, he would bite his own hand. And he did that a few times. And I was like, oh, my God, I've read about this. He stopped. But I know that some kids were in, let's say, abusive situations that they'll do this.

And adults who were in bad situations will cut themselves. Is this kind of just another version of that, self-harm? Absolutely. It's a way of distracting. It's a way of sort of flooding your brain with something else that is perceivably less vulnerable, less dangerous than the underlying emotions that are involved in some aspect of trauma. Gosh. And so when you hear about things like cutting, for example, some of it's really bad.

I've did an episode recently on human trafficking, and they're talking about these young girls from like Vietnam or whatever, Burma. Yeah. And they're being forced into gross, you know, sex work in these casinos on the Lausian border and they're cutting themselves. And it's because they're being abused all the time. And so this sounds like a, I don't want to say lesser version because drama can also destroy your life, but it's maybe a less sort of obvious version.

It's a less obvious version. And the other component of the cutting is to also feel something. Yeah. Okay. It acts in dual purpose of distraction and sensation building. So, you know, part of trauma response is to grow a layer of numbness around it. And it's like an inflammatory response. We protect ourselves.

And in that protection, we feel less. And, you know, that old saying, like, I think therefore I am, it's not quite right. I feel, therefore I am. I know my existence in this world because I feel feelings. I feel sensations. I can taste food, whatever it is. It lets me know, it reaffirms my aliveness. And when that deadens, as it does in response to protecting ourselves from underlying trauma,

we feel dead in the world. We feel like a walking ghost. That's how I used to refer to myself as a kid. To my parents, I said, I would say, like, I feel like I'm a walking ghost. Of course, they didn't know what I was talking about. Yeah, it's hard to relate to because I'm like, what does that mean to not feel anything? I don't think I've ever had that. Yeah.

We all had the capacity to dissociate, to disconnect, at least to some degree, from the intensity of what we're feeling. Hmm. Okay. Or distract ourselves. Sure. That's... You know, that's probably more easily relatable for some than others. Definitely.

But, you know, dissociation is like, essentially, like, I take a vacation for my body. I disconnect in a way so I don't have to feel what's here. You hear about that with people who are abused or, like, trafficking victims or abuse victims. Yeah. Yeah. It's a brilliant survival mechanism that becomes a pattern of a way of existing in the world. Wow. Okay.

You mentioned other sort of symptoms, I guess, or... in the book, filling your schedule to the brim and then feeling overwhelmed by it, which is something I think a lot of people can relate to. It's like, wait a minute, that's something I'm using as a coping strategy. And when you think about it, it could be. Some people overbook themselves and other people do it because then subconsciously they're like, there's so much going on. Well, yeah, you booked 14 hours of work in an eight hour day. Yeah. And then complain about it. Right, nonstop. Yeah. And then have to vent. And even the venting about it is another hit of that cortisol response. Oh, that's interesting.

living in the future or the past rather than the present through compulsive worry or grudges. Tell me about that. That's something I think a lot of people do. Yeah. You've interacted with people who are addicted to drama. Sure. And maybe you've even said sorry to them. But the sorry can't be accepted because they're in the constant replay of it, the situation.

You know, part of them, of course, wants the apology, but a bigger part of them wants to stay in the pattern. And so whatever you say is actually fuel on the fire. You know, I'm starting to recognize this in a former business partner of mine. I used to say, like, why are you always so mad at everybody about all these little things? And he would justify it and I would go, huh, yeah, I guess he's just really upset about this. But over a period of years, it was like, you couldn't get anything right with this guy. And I realized it wasn't just happening to me. It was happening to everybody.

So it'd be like, hey, Jordan, can you bring Chinese food home when you come back? No problem. Tell me what you want. You bring it back. and then three months later or three weeks later, it's like, all you ever get is the same cheap Chinese food. And you're like, am I crazy or did you tell me to do that and then get mad at me doing? And you lose track of it because you're not a crazy person. But if you write it down, which I started doing, I started to realize, wait a minute, he's like setting these situations up with me or whoever it is so that there's always something to complain about.

It's like, normally you go, oh, they got the Chinese order wrong. who cares after like a few hours. This would be days and weeks of this person always does this and they're doing it on purpose. And the reason they're doing it on purpose is because this. And I'm thinking, wow, you're so smart. You really read this person. I never would have guessed that they're getting your order wrong specifically to make you mad so that you perform worse so that they can get ahead of you at work.

That's an amazing deduction. And now I'm like, that's 100% bullshit. Yeah, 100% bullshit. They're globalizing it. They're victimizing themselves in the situation. and all of those are devices of drama. And it's a way of essentially, again, not actually having to be in the intimacy of relationship

and maintaining a certain activation in their whole system. And I'll explain what that looks like. Sure. Which is, have you ever had a carbon monoxide detector, you know, one of those that, and then there's the beeping when the battery is about to die? Oh, yeah. It's so annoying. So annoyed.

So I got here to L.A. And there was a beeping carbon monoxide detector, and I could not find it. It turned out to be in like a kitchen cabinet. Of course. Which is where you always have carbon dioxide. Next to the bowl, cereal bowls is where the source of all your carbon dioxide issues. Yeah.

And had I gone into the drama of it, I was like, why does this always happen to me? I didn't. I was just like, well, this is annoying. Which just, you know, is my own progress in this. You have to burn down your apartment. I absolutely burned down the house, just so we're clear about it. So the beeping is like every 45, 60 seconds, right? Yeah.

But who's counting? I'm like vicariously annoyed just thinking about how irritory. That would be. You're having a contagious stress response. Yeah. We'll talk about that. Okay. That's a fun one.

Yeah. But in the beeping, in the time in between, you're getting into a preparatory stance. Like my muscles are starting to engage. I'm like, you know, anticipating the next sound. And my whole body starts to adapt to that anticipation. And what's really interesting here is that my senses, the way I smell, the way I hear, the way I see, even my sense of time, the way all of the way. of those are organized and the filters to which the information from the world comes in, the filters

of those senses change. They start to morph in relation to this. So if the beeping, for example, is trauma. And I'm always anticipating the next trauma because I've had one. I'm bracing in the space between a stressor or a trauma. My senses start to change. So, for example, my sense of time starts to speed up. This is a trauma response. Speed up, interesting. So my perception, we have the same. We're both driving 30 miles an hour down the road.

My sense of time is actually different than your sense of time. I feel like we're going too slow. Or we're behind a car in traffic, for example. And even though we're not late, I feel a certain lateness and anxiety in me. Like we're going to be late. Well, you're like chill. And my sense of taste, I'm. I'm all of a sudden more sensitive to bitters.

My auditory processing, I'm going to be more attuned to high-pitched noises. My whole sensory system is more attuned to the next beep or the next trauma or the next stressor. And if I'm looking for it, I will find it. And if I don't find it, I feel out of sync with the world. So I'm going to go seek it or create it so I feel a sense of being in sync or belonging in the world. And that's what happens in addiction to drama. And the inside, it feels like we're out of sync because we are. Our sensory systems have morphed due to whatever, you know, early traumas.

And so my reality is actually different from someone else's reality who hasn't gone through trauma. Well, first of all, now it all makes sense, right? Because if your reality is different, then of course you believe the drama that you've created is real. It's justified. Yeah, justified. Yeah. That makes me have a little bit more empathy for these folks because they're not just doing something where they're like, I'm going to screw everything up. No. For them, this is the reality. And they're probably wondering why I'm not more worked up about things.

And more empathetic towards there, which just reinforces the idea of them being a victim. Yeah, like, why me? Why aren't you validating my issues? Yeah. The same guy that I was just talking about this sort of drama queen. Yeah. I eventually just had to cut contact with this guy for various reasons. But you're still going to send him to book.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, no. I'll buy a copy and I'll leave it on his porch. Yeah. The passive aggressive gift book of the year. 100%. Yes. Exactly.

So a mutual friend of ours who's also no longer friends with this guy back then said, I don't understand why all my friends cut me off. One of the reasons they're not friends anymore is our mutual friend said, I think there's a learning opportunity here for you because a lot of the situations you're complaining about are of your own making. And instead of going, hmm, I've been friends with these people for a decade and a half. I should probably take note. It was like, oh, you're the problem now.

And then they fired that guy and ended up suing him for some unrelated thing just to sort of be right. Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah. Like, oh, now we have to fire him because he's saying things to me that make me feel unsafe. Yeah. And reexamine my situation in a way that's uncomfortable. He's created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And then even having the lawsuit proves the fact that just how much of a victim he is because there's a defendant and there's a perpetrator in the house. It's so, this is also interesting because we have. a mediation or an arbitration type situation. And the lawyer was like, my client's really concerned that this keeps happening. And the mediator's like, but your client filed the suit. So I don't understand. What do you mean your client's concerned that this is negatively blah, blah, blah, like you filed a suit.

Yeah. And the lawyer was like, yeah, you got me on that one. I mean, it was just like, hello, this person was not bothering you and you sued them for nothing out of nowhere. And now you're losing the counter suit. You started it. You punched first. What do you mean? Why does this keep happening to me? You're running around punching people.

Basically. It doesn't make sense, but it makes sensation. That's the tagline of the book. It doesn't make sense. It makes sensation. One of the things I wrote from the book was they make the rounds and tell the same story over and over so they can vent continually. I'm like, oh, yeah, check. Because each time they do, they get a hit and they get reinforced from the outside through enabling.

We don't always think about it as enabling. We think, oh, my gosh, I'm here for you. That sucks. That person was such an asshole to you. It's a reinforcement from people on the outside, but really they're enabling it. They're throwing little logs on that other person's fire, and that person is using those logs to continue to fuel themselves in that heightened state. Going back to the carbon monoxide analogy, all the senses form, and we're in this constant

preparatory stance, this preparatory place for looking for the next drama, the next drama, the next stressor. And it creates a baseline, like a baseline activation. It's their baseline way of operating in the world. They're heightened. They're looking for stressors. Yeah. And if they drop below that, it feels dangerous.

Why does it feel dangerous? Yeah. So one of the things that happens with trauma is your barometers of safety get twisted. And so what it feels like as a kid, even as a young adult or as adult, when you have had some type of trauma, it's an absolute overwhelm or underwhelmed to the nervous system. it's flooding and you feel helpless and it's scary and it's dangerous and in that moment it feels like death wow and even a small trauma can feel like death because we feel helpless and if we don't have the resilience capacity to know that someone will help us there are tools out there to help us if we don't inherently know that it feels like we're going to drown and so coming into closer contact

and relationship with that trauma, which we bottle up, we bottle off. And then we numb around that. And then we create stressors to avoid making contact with the numbness and the underlying trauma that's there. And the closer we get to it, there's a signal in the brain that says, danger. You're getting too close to death. It doesn't make sense, but that is the primal physiology that we exist in.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dr. Scott Lyons. We'll be right back back. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, and now I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This course is all about improving your relationship building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. The course does all that in a very super easy, non-cringy, down-to-earth kind of way.

it's not awkward, it's not cheesy, it's not going to make you sort of clench everything up before you do it. It takes about six minutes a day. And many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Once again, you can find the course for free. I don't want your credit card, none of that crap. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

Now, back to Dr. Scott Lyons. It all kind of makes sense. And again, I'm not disclosing this guy's identity, but he was an abused kid. Yeah. Like there was a whole kind of complicated past of this. And his whole family was very dysfunctional. They were also, when I read the book, I was like, the family did this too. They would do something where they would call him and say, there's an emergency.

You need to fly home from California. Your grandmother is dying. And he would book like a $7 billion dollar flight to fly home from L.A. and go back to Michigan. He'd be like, where's grandma? She's in the living room watching TV. What do you mean? She bonged her knee on the cabinet getting ready in the morning.

But you called me and said there was an emergency. and she was in the hospital. Yeah, we didn't need to take her to the hospital. She's got a bruise on her knee. So even he would be like, what the hell of my family's insane? But then he would turn around and do something kind of similar

and he just wouldn't see it. It's modeled. It's a modeling that he inherited into his nervous system and is acting from what was what he learned. After reading this book, I have way more sympathy or sympathy slash empathy for what he was going through

because I realized, one, he couldn't stop it. Two, it was ruining his life. Three, he'd never had a chance because his whole family. He probably grew up doing it. this since age five. That was their currency of love. Yeah, it was. Intensity. And, you know, when you grow up in a chaotic household, you know, our primal needs as a kid, even as an adult, is to be seen and heard, to feel safe. And so you will go to whatever extremes, intensity, shouting is needed to

pierce through the chaos of a family household to be seen and heard, even if it's burning down the house. It's sad, because I would imagine this also, of course, infects your romantic relationship, I'm guessing you can't be in a relationship with a normal person most of the time unless they're willing to enable this. Well, the relationships, you know, like, you know that intensity that happens in the beginning of a relationship? Yeah, you're like super in love and everything is turned up to 11. Yeah, they thrive in that.

And the moment it becomes settled, they start to create tension. They start to find the issues in the relationship. They start to destroy the relationship because outside of that 11 means that you're probably going to start to feel closeness. Yeah, oof. I can't have that. No. I mean, and a lot of us have that. It's not like just some extreme, like, you know, you're addicted to drama, but there, again, there's a lot of ways in which we get in our own way of intimacy, because intimacy leads to a sense of connection and vulnerability. And vulnerability leads us closer to feeling more of what we may not have had a chance to experience in our lives.

The analogy you give in the book is blowing out a birthday candle with a fire hose, the disproportionate response to stimulus. I think for a lot of people it might be hard to define drama. It's like porn. It's like you know it when you see it, but if you ask somebody to define it, it gets hard, pardon the pun. But then I think over a pattern, feel free to steal that. I feel like you like that one. The idea is that...

I'll use it when I'm on Good Morning America. That's a good idea. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, they love that kind of thing. Live TV is the perfect place to experiment with something like this. I'm wondering now why, maybe that's why they don't want me on live TV as much. Huh. Yeah, there's a great, there's a really good way to never get invited back to the Today Show, and that's one of a.

Oh, have you done that? Well, I haven't done that particular faux pa on live TV, but I've definitely done stuff where they're like, don't worry, we have a seven second delay, and I'm like, oh, what should I not have said that? What did you do? You know, it's so long now. I don't remember. It was really minor, actually. I think I said crap and I'm like, ooh, we don't really like that. Oh.

Yeah. It was, I mean, this is, you know, housewife TV. Yeah. So they don't, they don't really want. They don't want. This is also 10 plus years ago. So maybe now you can get away with that. Back then they were like, mm-hmm.

The other thing was, I kept shifting in my chair and trying to adjust because I was wearing tight pants and I had like, you know, what happens when you wear pants are a little too tight. I remember being like, oh, I hope that's not a problem. They're like, don't worry, we have a delay and we just kept switching cameras when you do that. Because, I mean, you can't, you're sitting on a stool with your crotch out. it's really obvious when you're like rearranging things. Yeah. Many years ago when I was in the arts, I was on a live radio show.

I was singing one of my songs for my show, which was, you know, pretty provocative. And they asked me to call, is it the FCC? Yeah. Yeah, the FCC and ask for what are the swear words I can't say? And I had called them and I said, you know, I have this song, you know, there's some words in there. I need to know. And they wouldn't, they said, we can't actually tell you what the words are, but you can ask us. What?

Which I loved. So I spent maybe the next half an hour coming up with the most provocative phrases I could possibly come up with. I was in my 20s. I was a provocateur, part of the addiction to drama. Sure. And that was probably one of the funniest times of my life. I mean, I was in a creative high of coming up with the most insane phrases just to see what this individual would say. gosh.

And she was trying so hard not to laugh. Yeah, I'm sure. She was, bless her heart wherever she is right now. She's probably telling that story on a podcast somewhere. If you're listening, please let me know. I will send you a signed copy of my book. There you go. The real prize.

Drama keeps us from feeling our real feelings, like turning up the volume on music so you don't hear the screaming coming from inside your soul, essentially. And I love, I don't know if you wrote that or if that's just something I put in my notes, but creating that numbness to what's going. on in your life really does seem like the key. You start to really understand people who are addicted to drama when you think of it this way. And you start to go, huh, what is this person's life like? If you've ever dated anybody who's addicted to drama, I feel like you can never really get to know them because there's, first of all, something's always going on and coming up. Yeah.

Yeah, you're right. They don't even know them. No. You can't crack the shell. You're just always kind of bouncing off the outside of this person. Yeah. Because that's what feels safe, by the way. I guess that's what feels safe. Yeah. What I also noticed, and maybe this is, is a mix of things. There's a couple of women that come to mind with the drama thing. They would always talk to me like I knew the people that they were talking about. And I always found that so mystifying. And I saw this as a sign of somebody who is not a good person to date where they'd say,

oh, Jordan, I can't talk right now because Tom is doing, and I'm like, who's Tom? I don't know who that is. And whenever I sensed that weird, you should know everybody who's involved in my life thing, I'm always like, this is a weird signal to run, but I can't. put my finger on why. It's definitely a red flag. It's because they project that the movie of their life, everyone is in the no-of-off. Yeah. What's going on there? Because I always found that to be a red flag and I'm like, I don't get it and I've seen this before and I'm out. So they are watching their life from the outside. So they expect everyone else is. That dissociated connection to

their life. It's like watching yourself, understanding yourself from a disconnected perspective. there's a projection then that says, oh, everyone else must be watching me the way I'm watching me. That fills in a lot of blanks. Oh, okay. And the other thing I noticed about these same folks was they would talk about people they met three days ago, like they've been friends for a decade. And then you're talking to those people because you're in some group thing. And I'm like, so, how long have you known Meg? Oh, yeah, we met on Tuesday.

Wait a minute. She's talking about you to me, like you're this protective auntie who is always trying to vet guys. she's dating and they're like, oh, because they've friggin met at the mall on Tuesday and it's Friday. Yeah. It's so weird. Intense beginnings, extreme endings of relationships, not a lot in between. And there's another piece of it too when you talk about like someone, they're talking to you

about someone you don't even know, is did you ever feel pulled into their kind of tornado of chaos? I'm trying to remember because it's been so long, but I don't know. I'd be making something up if I said yes or no. Feel free to make it up. Yeah, yeah. It's your show. It's my show. Do you ever about how you want?

Yeah. Yeah, well, that's one of the symptoms. It's like we, those of us on the outside of someone addicted drama, we feel pulled into their chaos. It is actually true. They are pulling you into their vortex in order to feel a sense of belonging, to feel connected. Because that is the only safe space. And if I'm in this constant, remember we talked about like my reality is different than yours. And the underlying experience in me is there's a constant dis-ease, if I'm addicted to drama.

There's a constant dis-ease. There's a constant sense of being out of sync with the world. There's an anxiousness that's present. There's an urgency that is constant. And if I can bring you into my tornado, and there's a contagious response, you're now feeling anxious, you're now feeling heightened. You're now feeling that extreme sort of stress response. Then we're in sync. And that is the closest sense of belonging someone addicted to drama can get.

Is this why at the end of dealing with somebody like that, you go home and you go, what the hell is going on? What happened? Yeah. If you've ever left an experience with someone and you're like, whoa, what just happened? How did we get from there to there? Congratulations. You're dealing with someone who has some level of an addiction to drama.

That makes sense because I remember talking with my parents, for example, after dealing with somebody like this. and they're like, my mom would be like, I'm confused. So he's mad about what? And you explain it and it's like, that can't be the reason that they walked out on their employer and threw a plate across the break room. Yeah, good point. Why would that be the thing that happened? And why am I now involved in this? Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think it's, it's easy to get sucked into this because you don't notice it. Yeah. And here's where we, the other piece that I was talking about contagious. It's called stress contagion. It's an actual physiological process. So evolutionarily speaking, I'm running from a dinosaur, going back a few years. And you're in the cave that I'm about

to run into. And you see my pupils, you see my breath, you see the sort of tone of my muscles. You don't know the story. You shouldn't need to know the story. So you have a response immediately. Your physiology goes, oops, we are receiving this. We're picking it up because there are receptors that are geared towards monitoring someone else's stress response. And you go, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I better get stressed up too in order to deal with what might be happening. And then the dinosaur comes and we're able to both keep running. If you don't have that response,

you're going to get eaten by that dinosaur while I'm running away. Jeez, interesting. Okay, I mean, humans never existed on the same planet as dinosaurs at the same time. I know. You know, we'll let that slide. Well, thank you, historian. Yeah, yeah. What are you a paleontologist now?

I get it. Thanks are making me feel stupid. Yeah, I don't need to ruin the metaphor here. In front of millions people. That's fine. Nobody listens to this podcast. That's what I always say. I'm just kidding.

Being consumed with the news, being consumed with other people's lives, that was something you mentioned in the book. Yeah. That last part seems key. Yeah. That they respond as if they are part of this. Yeah. I'm trying to remember who this was, and I guess it's not really important.

But I have noticed that there are a lot of, for example, the accounts are people that are obsessed with reality television. There's a lot of people that write about this, talk about this, do social media as if they are, let's say, friends with the Kardashians and they're just right adjacent to this thing that's happening. And I'm thinking, you've never met these people in your life and you never will.

Who cares? Why are you talking about them as though they're your friends? I mean, and that's a huge difference from 10 years ago where we had gossip columns and, you know, the beginning of reality television. And now every celebrity, is their own reality TV show on social media. And so we're constantly exposed to the world of gossip

and heightened realities that aren't actually reality. They are extreme versions of that person's life. Yeah. Is there a world in which people don't want things to work out for them so that they have the drama? I mean, it seems like that's the basic. Totally. Jealousy is just a fundamental human emotion

where we want the worst for people because we can't handle how we feel in relationship. to them. It's like crisis hopping. Crisis hopping. I talk about the book of luck. Crisis tourism. Yeah. Crisis tourism. A jumping from one topic of crisis to the next and never actually being able to settle. Because again, settling would bring me below that threshold of stress, baseline, and bring me closer to the underlying trauma, which is dangerous. Yeah. This is more than just a need for attention, though, right? I think I want to clarify that. Yeah. It's hard to be on the outside of those who are addicted

drama. So we come up with a conclusion that they're just seeking attention. If they could actually receive attention, maybe that would be true. But they can't actually receive the attention that they might be seeking. They can't receive validation. Like if you said to that guy you worked with, yeah, that sounds like a really painful experience, he's not going to actually receive that to settle him. He's going to use that as a log to keep him going. That's a very different thing. When we use emotions, like to keep us revved up versus emotions to help us process something and settle us back down. Is this not exhausting to be around then? Yeah, 100% it's exhausting.

And you will actually go through withdrawal symptoms from it. Not only the person addicted to drama goes through withdrawal symptoms, the come down from the catharsis, the drama explosion, but you as having been pulled into it as having a contagious stress response, you get that full cascade, that hit of stress, of cortisol, all, adrenaline, all of it, and then you're going to crash. Those on the outside feel that as exhaustion. Those on the inside, those who are with an addiction to drama, feel that crash, and it is

experienced as boredom. And so they're going to need the next hit to keep them going, to feel back more, to feel more alive, to feel that battery pack of stress. This all makes so much sense. I always thought it was a mean-spirited thing when he would create problems, but now it's 100% obvious that he was just addicted to it. there would be times where it's like, I remember one time in particular, we were getting audited by the IRS, but we had a lawyer handling it. It was not a big deal. It was just like, hey, we need

all these records. The day I was flying to Australia, he was like, emergency, we need every credit card transaction, da, da, da, da. And we sort of knew he was doing this because he did it every time we packed for, it was like every time we were going to go on a vacation, there would be something that we had to handle urgently. So my wife just called the lawyer and was like, how urgent is this whole thing? And he's like, Oh, yeah, like in the next three months. So we were like, cool, we'll handle it in the next three months. And then it was like, no, we need it now.

And my wife was like, tell him we'll do it and then just don't do it. Because we know that he's just doing this so that we have a miserable flight. That's what we thought. We thought he wanted us to have a bad flight or a bad time. And now, after reading the book, it's like, no, he just was bored. His sense of timing, don't forget, is urgency. Right. There is no slowness that's allowed.

And so even something that is three months from now feels immediate. And so you get bulldozed because of that. We really thought, talk about trying to put yourself as the center of attention. We really thought, like, he's just trying to ruin our vacation. This is so typical of him. But now I realize, well, he can't help himself. Like, this is his operating system. This is the operating system.

Absolutely. It makes me have much more sympathy for him because at first it was like, why is this guy always doing this stuff to other people? It's really, it's the team hated it. Obviously, our staff could not stand to work with him. He had high turnover on his side of the business. Surprise, surprise. And now I'm thinking, oh, actually, you have a disability.

You can't have normal interactions with people, relationships with people. He didn't have so much choice. How is having sympathy for him in this moment? Like, is that relieving? It feels pretty nice because it's like, oh, it wasn't, it was nice to read this and go, so he wasn't just bullying me and my wife and all of our team for the hell of it. Like, he just couldn't do it. He didn't have another way to interact with these people.

So there's a way the stories you formed around it got to release a little bit. Yeah, I think so. And there's like a real healing in that, I imagine, of not having to hold on to the stories that you created. It does make me feel dumb for having put up with all of it for so long. But I also... Dumb, like when someone tells you there was no dinosaurs and people. Not that dumb. That, I mean, that's really dumb.

No, like, hello, sixth grade science. No, I'm just kidding. But it does make me think like, wow, I put up with that for so long. Now granted, you do crap in your 20s, you're in a business with somebody, you let stuff slide that you wouldn't. If him and I were just buddies, I would have cut the court a long time ago, but we had a successful business, so it's like, what are you going to do? Yeah. And at the moment, it was like, well, I have no choice. And also, it was like, well, for years, I was like, wow, this guy has terrible luck.

Yeah. Look at all the bad things that happened to him. I'm lucky. I don't have all these problems. That's such an interesting point. It's like there's always something happening to that person. And there are circumstances. They can't, you know, control the fact that they got into a car accident. The next day they got robbed. But it's the response to it. It's the inability to get out of those experiences. They get sort of engrossed in them. And it becomes all that they are. And all that occupies their attention. You mentioned the withdrawal. That stuff, it seems like it makes it harder to get away

from this. Yeah. The relationships I'm imagining can never really be stable until they get therapy for this kind of stuff, right? Because you said before, as soon as they settle in, they start to destroy the relationship. And that is probably going to happen with every relationship that they're in, wouldn't it? Absolutely. Oh, man.

That's another thing that makes me feel sad because there were many times where he would get a really nice girl. And I thought, like, oh, things are great now. Yeah. Finally, she's grounding him. And that didn't really, the breakups were extreme. It was wild. My breakups are always like, you know, you moved, I moved.

Or like, you know, this isn't really going to work out. It's like, oh, let's not. Okay, well, bye. There's not an ex that I would have to cross the street to deal with. I would probably be happy to see most of them, honestly. Many of my exes, I'm like, hey, what's going on? I see you had a new job. That must be awesome.

And it's just polite sort of like arms length, whatever. For him, it's like you have to not go to this thing. Because this person is in the same room as you. And if she sees you, you're going to lose an eye because of the way you handle that situation. Damn. Yeah. It was always like, holy smokes. Yeah.

And I remember seeing some of his exes back when we were in college. Yeah. And she'd be like, I just want you to know, you don't have to worry about coming to my bar where I work. You and I are cool. But I cannot, if he comes in, and I'm like, wow. And this is like, I didn't hear about what happened between you two. And it's, I heard a different version of the story, I think. whatever it is. Probably wildly different versions where the friend who was more addicted in drama

was the victim. Yeah, 100%. And would find all of these facts that could be just and justify the victimness by these just cherry picking everything that could possibly support their belief system that they're the victim. I just remember a couple of occasions where I'd be like, no, you don't understand what happened was he brought this other guy to the party and that guy started the fight and then he just went home and he was kind of drunk so he turned his phone off and she's like oh i see we're going to have to have a conversation about what actually happened and i'd be like oh yeah maybe we do because that's what i heard and it's like oh that's not that's not the whole thing man that's not really what happened no it was a big mess but most of us do that we we filter out

the information that doesn't confirm our own experience yeah it's a confirmation bias it seems almost like narcissism, right, because everything revolves around you, but it's not quite the same thing, huh? Yeah. There's an aspect of narcissism because from the inside, you feel trapped in yourself. You can't actually make connection with other people. You can't reach out to someone else. And so it is self-centered. It is self-focused because there isn't the capacity to be an intimate relationship. But also, you can never really admit that you're the one who made a mistake or something, right? There's a lot of deflection or projection involved. There's a lot of strategies to reinforce the belief system or reinforce the reality.

Because we all know that there's nothing more chaotic or frustrating or dangerous to some degree than a skewed reality. It feels cacophnic. It feels crazy making if our reality is challenged. And so that's for everyone, whether you have an addiction to drama or not. If you said the sky is blue and I said, maybe, maybe not. I think there's actually a bit of green in it. It's confronting.

So saying to someone, whoa, I get that you responded this way, but it actually, this isn't what was actually here. This isn't what is what is in reality. And they will go to whatever links they need to to protect themselves and protect their reality. In the book, there's a drama triangle. Can you go over this a little bit? I thought this is quite interesting, especially because even if you're not the one who's involved in the drama in a way that you think is, you're not the source, you might be kind of a part of it like I was. And I never would have thought, oh, I'm a part of this problem. Yeah.

I was just kind of like, oh, yeah, he's my roommate. So you mean like how you're kind of being part of someone's story, you're helping them fulfill their story, their belief system that they're the... Yeah, you have persecutor, rescuer, and victim. Maybe that's something else. Oh, the drama triangle. Yeah. Essentially, there are different roles we take.

We kind of filter through, I'm the perpetrator, I'm the hero, I'm the victim. These roles that one takes keeps them out of actually being. again, in relationship to themselves. If I'm the hero, like I'm causing trouble. I'm stirring shit up in the office, for example. I'm the one gossiping. And then there's tension that happens, and I come in and I'm the hero.

So I've created the drama, and then I've been able to position myself as the hero. Or people come at me at work, because I stirred all this crap, I was gossiping, and suddenly I'm the victim. Or I can absolutely be the prosecutor, where it's like, I stir them, the stir the drama, I'm creating the gossip, people are mad at each other. And I say something like, hey, creating this tension in the workplace is wrong. You're really

harming other people. So there are different roles I can take to sort of justify what I'm stirring. Does a lot of this depend on environment? You talk about the rat paradise experiment. Speak to that a little bit. At the very least, the rat experiment was interesting. Yeah. So that comes from a understanding a new model of addiction. So in previous experiments, you put a rat in a cage where they were alone, and you gave them the option of water or water with heroin in it. They're going to go and they're going to party with the heroin and likely die. There's a high morbidity rate. That was our understanding of addiction for a long time. Oh, they're genetically predisposed. It's just about the genetics. They've got a brain disease. And they just go for the heroin. They get a taste of it,

and it's actually just about the drugs. Then later there was more experiments to go, hey, what would happen if we created an environment that felt really good for the rats? Like a park, a playground, with other rats and toys and really good food? What would happen in terms of their choice making? And what they found was when there was like a safe environment

to which they could play and grow in, They didn't ever choose the heroin water. And if they did, they didn't go back for much. There was little if no death rates to those rats from the heroin overdose. And so it really demonstrated that the issue was not in the drug. Just like the issue is not necessarily in the drama, what was the circumstances that made them get attached to it? What was the purpose that attachment was serving,

which is to essentially fill in the gap of a lot of void, emptiness, pain, trauma. And we know that safe environments, which may or may not have happened for us in our own childhood, will create the circumstances that allow us the choices we will make or the voids we will or will not need to fill. Got it. Okay. So as part of treating people who have an addiction to drama, I assume you have them attempt to set up a safe environment somehow? Yeah, well, this is the tricky part, right? Because if we're talking about how a safe environment and being around people, a sense of belonging is really what we're talking about, creates the conditions to feel better, to feel supported, to fill themselves up with something better than the void, then they can get out of the addiction. But the problem is, is they keep burning down all the relationships. They keep destroying the ecosystems to which they enter into. This is the challenge. This is the problem with the cycles. They keep destroying that which could support their healing process. I mean, as a therapist, and I've talked to a lot of other therapists, these particular individuals are challenging in therapy because it's like

the moment you start to validate them, they don't take it in, they only want to hear that they're right, that their reality is right. And if you start to challenge it to be able to slow the thinking down, to slow the addiction down, to be able to get to underneath, they'll attack you, not physically, But they'll say like, oh, you're always judging me. You're always, you don't believe in me. And they destroy that relationship that could offer them the guidance in towards healing. It's a long process of building a lot of trust. You mentioned that sometimes the drama doesn't always have to be extreme, right?

Sometimes it looks just like ADHD. You mentioned your friend who you visited and she just starts scrolling on her phone. Tell me about this. Yeah. I mean, wherever we can get a stress hit, we'll take it. And so it might be scrolling through the internet. It might be just listening to a couple friends gossip. It doesn't have to be this extreme of getting into a massive fight with someone.

There's all different entry points or devices of drama. That's a funny story where my friend essentially was, you know, she just had a kid and we were catching up. And she got pulled into the rabbit hole of the internet and was just scrolling and like going mindless, but also getting, you know, having some, it's not. like we're just mindless. It's we're getting entrapped in social media. Is that you call like revving where you're just juicing your engine up? Reving is definitely juicing your engines. And so you might stop and look at something of like, oh, a picture of an ex or like someone else's story or even a nice emotion, a nice experience on someone. It's still, you're going to have a reaction to it. And in that story, I couldn't get her attention. And I was telling her

story about what was going on with my family. And so I just turned on some music into the strip teas to get her attention. As one does. As one does. Dr. Scott Line, your daddy issues, everybody, on full display. Yes, you're enabling. Yeah. That's really funny.

I'll have to remember that trick. Yeah, no, it works. It's a good way to get kicked out of an airport lounge, though. Is it? I've gotten invited into airport lounge just because of that. Surprise, surprise. All right. Depends on the airline, I guess.

Wow. But that's, you know, that could. back to that threshold statement again. It's like, it takes that much more to pull someone's focus. This is a bigger issue around media and the ways in which there's an up-leveling of capturing and maintaining your attention through heightened stimulus, through violence, through sexual innuendos, through intense language, all of these ways that essentially say, we're going to capture your attention so we can sell to you. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dr. Scott Lyons.

We'll be right back. If you'll like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support one of our sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also always search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Thanks so much for supporting those who support the show.

Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Scott Lyons. It's wild, though, that she's so sucked into whatever, Instagram, that you're like, all right, guess I'm taking my pants off now. Like that you couldn't just say, hey, Rachel, Rachel, we were talking about something. You had to be like, and I'm naked, right? I mean, that's just, I mean, imagine what you, the amount of force you need to pull this woman away from her phone. Well, most of us. I mean, like, if you just walk down New York City streets, it's like how many people are bumping into other people because they're stuck in their phone. They're not noticing the world anymore.

It's a little dangerous in New York and fall through a freaking manhole. But that just proves like the technology and the engineers of that technology to capture your attention in this attentional economy are proficient at their job. Sure. Yeah. You mentioned September 11th and how the drama affected people around you. Tell me about that. Yeah.

So it was my first day of school as an undergrad. Wow. And I lived a mile away just by you're familiar with New York. I am, yeah. Okay. So I was in Washington Square Park where I was living. I went to NYU. So I was walking to my first day of school and saw a plane go into a building.

My first thought was like, whoa, that's an expensive movie set. Yeah. Because there was no. It looks so real. It looks so. I was like, that's so real. Incredible, yeah. There's no way that could happen.

Like my, right, your brain isn't computing that this is a real thing. No. And then I got to school and then we learned what happened and we all know what happens in terms of the second building. et cetera, and the falling. And the phones weren't working, for one. So I couldn't actually reach my family. And so they had no idea. They actually believed that I was in the building, even though they knew cognitively, you know, like I was a mile away. But to them, it was all the same. And they watched the news over and over again. Part of their fear response and their own catastrophizing was

like, we're going to get the news that my son was in the building. And they watched all. over and over and over again. Like the videos that were coming in of the plane going into the building. And, you know, I just want to give a little trigger warning for those who are listening. This is intense. And so you just want to, you know, the trauma therapist is meeting.

No, no, no, no, it's fair. Take a breath if you need it or pause the audio. And I called my parents when I was finally able to get through to my parents, which was, I don't know, 10 hours after the initial event. And they said, we're coming to get you. Your dad has already made it to Chicago, basically. Wow.

In his car. We're coming to get you. You're coming home. And I said, no, no, I'm safe. I feel safe. I feel fine. The event is over. It ended 10 hours ago.

And in their mind, it hadn't ended because they kept rewatching it over and over again, getting that hit every time it was displayed on the television. And their physiology tricked them into essentially thinking it had to, not ended. Because I didn't watch the news. I wasn't going to go rewatch that. I lived it. Yeah. And I also experienced something remarkable, which was community in New York City. Yeah. People would walk up to you on the street and just give you a hug. Wow. It was wild. Especially in New York. I mean, of all places to have that happen. I was taking a bus the next day. And this woman turned to me and she just said, did you lose anyone? Wow. And we just gave each other a hug and we cried. It was like,

That would never happen in New York any other time. No. And my parents didn't have any of that. All they had was the constant exposure of the images. Right, the replays. The replay. And they were glued to the television. And there was no balance between what they were taking in and adapting and moving all that energy, all that stress energy.

It was like sitting heavy in them and overwhelming them to a point that they couldn't even coordinate or organize or even understand. where I was on the street, I was, like, moving around, I would walk all the way uptown and then back downtown just to do something. And we know, in trauma work, especially, overwhelm is like the sense, the experience just floods you. And then you don't have the ability to mobilize, to motor that energy out. And that's what gets, like, stuck in you. And I can explain the physiology more of that if need be, but it's that stuckness that starts to slow your whole system down. It has a lot of different causational effects. You know, like if we think about your nervous system as a bank, you get $100.

For every trauma, it's like $10 that is no longer in the bank to be used towards adapting to something else. Okay. And then that adds up over time. And then you just become less resilient and efficient. And all of a sudden, your entire bank account is depleted. And you are not adapting functionally to the world anymore. Yikes. I know a lot of families and groups they create or cause drama to bond with each other. That's like my friend's family growing up that I just mentioned, or a former friend, I should say. That was just the

way they related to each other was like, let's cause some shit and stir it up and then make everybody's life upended as a result of it. Drama bonding gives a false sense of belonging. But is it a false sense, though? How is it a false sense of belonging? Yeah, I can deconstruct that. So let's just define drama bonding. It's essentially when one person, and we can give lots of examples in our culture in the last many years, including trolling culture. Trolling culture. I never even heard that, but I know exactly what it is somehow.

Yeah. Yeah. Where it's like, oh, we find something that other people are already a little activated around. And so we find something that there's already a little stoked about, little flame, because we're a little stoked too. We find them and then we're able to bond together. We're able to connect around what we're both having a little issue about. And then all of a sudden, we create a bigger flame than what was initially there.

We're engulfed in that flame. So they're drama bonding. They're utilizing each other's experiences in life or what they're already kind of preemptively disturbed about or stressed about to connect. And then that builds something bigger than what was originally there. I give the example in the book. I'm changing the names for a minute. Sure.

Then the actual person. So I was at a family friend's house. and I was with my mom, and the kid came home who lived in that house and shared with us a story of this math teacher. You know, she's a teenager. And she's like, oh, he's so unfair. He gave me a C. I deserved an A.

I worked so hard in studying. Dada, da, da, da, da. And I know, because I offered to help. Oh, that's funny. Front row seat. Front row seat. And, you know, I did my, like, you know, friend is a therapist thing. So it's like, you know, empathized with her.

That sounds really hard and frustrating. I know how it goes. Da, da, da, da, da. And then she disappeared. She went downstairs and we heard yelling. And she was on a Zoom call with all her friends who are in that class who also maybe didn't get A's or were like just supporting her and then, but have also been frustrated with that teacher.

And they were drama bonding. Kids use Zoom? That's what I'm taking from this. Are you sure it was in FaceTime? Wait, that's what you're taking from this story? Oh, boy. Kids use Zoom? For fun?

What a miserable. I don't know. They learned it in the pandemic and now that's how they talk. That's so funny. I had no idea. And you could hear them screaming and getting louder and just like, you know, drama bonding. And he did this. And then I heard this.

And I heard he, you know, like kills his plants. And they're just making up shit at this point because they're drama bonding. It doesn't involve truth. It involves a way of creating more stress response. And it feels good. They feel alive. They feel connected. And they feel a false sense of belief.

longing, which I'll get back to in a second. Then she comes upstairs and she's fuming. She's at a 12. And when she came home from school, she was at like a five or six. She is more heightened from drama bonding than she actually was from the response. From the event. And I tried to intervene. And that was probably the worst mistake I could have made, especially with the teenager. And she was like, you don't ever believe me. You're not helpful. Why are you always against me? You don't know anything. You're not a good therapist. And my mom leans over to me and she's like, just ride it. Don't say anything.

This is what's going to happen next. She's going to finish yelling at you. She's going to go have one more Zoom call. They're going to rile each other up. She's going to do some crazy cathartic response. She's going to cry and throw shit. And then she'll come back and it was like nothing ever happened. And I was like, no way.

Absolutely. I was like, I'm a therapist. I know how this goes. Right. Yeah, like, mom, calm down. I have a degree in this. Mom, I got like degrees up on walls and stuff. Yeah.

And my mom was right. It is exactly what happened. She had to go through this whole cycle, this explosion, this downward spiral. And then it was like, kind of nothing happened. Yeah, I'm fine now. I'm fine. I don't know what you were talking about. It was fine.

It was just a math quiz. Yeah, no big deal. And my mom turned to me and she was like, teenagers invented addiction to drama. Yeah, they probably did, yeah. Why don't you write about that in your book? Yeah, throw that. anecdote in there. So that's the drama bonding and the false belonging is that it doesn't, it's not sustainable. They're connected in the moment, that heightened moment of stress, but not necessarily after

because they can't sustain connection. And that's why it's false belonging because it's not sustained. Okay. Interesting. The book does have a lot of strategies for people who are addicted to drama. One thing that you wrote that I thought was really interesting, you said emotions are meant to be momentary. Any emotion that's longer than it needs to be becomes a story. Tell me what that means because I was like, oh my God, that's brilliant. I'm writing that shit down. Yeah, so emotions, like a wave of an emotion lasts about 30 to 90 seconds. Anything after that is the story we're feeding to maintain it.

We're trying to keep that emotion active. And we're feeding off the emotion as opposed to processing or metabolizing it. We're not letting it go because there's some belief system if we let it go will be victims. If we let it go, we won't be safe. Whatever it is, why we won't let go of the emotion. A wave of an emotion, and we might have multiple waves of sadness, multiple waves of joy, is in movement. It lasts 30 to 90 seconds before the next sort of wave of something, or it might be a different

emotion that could come after. But certainly, you know, for those who are addicted to drama, they are feeding off the emotion and trying to do whatever they can in adding all these narratives that never let them process through. What do we do if we find ourselves sucked into the whirlwind of somebody else's drama? What's sort of the practical exercise of, okay, I need to unplug from this, but not find myself suffering from withdrawal and going back? Basically, how do I get out of the toxic thing? Yeah, how do I get out of there? And of course, if you're the one who's addicted, that's one thing. But if you're just near someone who's addicted, it's probably a little easier to get away from them,

I would hope. Yeah, if you're the bystander, the one who's been dealing with secondhand drama. Yeah. So the first is like, ground yourself. Create a little boundary. Imagine, I mean, I, you know, for those of you who like imagery, you might create a little like wall or a little bubble, as I like to think about it, a protection. And then ground yourself, take some breaths, feel your feet on the floor. If you're sitting, feel your butt on the chair. Get back into your own body because what they've done is pulled you out of your own body. They pulled you out of your own presence and into their drama. It's, again, their way of being able to feel connection and belonging, false belonging. So come back to yourself, check in, just even asking yourself, what am I feeling?

So that you're separating yourself from the bigness of their feelings. You know, sometimes it is really hard. I'll be honest, even as a therapist, as someone who's gone through all this, who teaches people, there's sometimes still where someone's tornado vortex is so strong, especially if they're kind of attacking you and you want to justify it, what happened. it might take a couple times of keep coming back to the image of the boundary, keep coming back to feeling your body, bring your attention to somewhere else. Okay, I'm looking around the room here and I'm seeing the color red, the color white, I'm seeing the color of your eyes, your shirt,

whatever I can do to shift my attention away from them, even if I can't bring it back to myself yet. Interesting. Is our mindfulness techniques? Yeah, mindfulness techniques. That's interesting that that's the antidote, but it also makes sense because if you're getting swept up in something, the antidote to that is to unswept sweep. Yeah. To grab onto something. And it's a, the metaphor's work, right? It's a whirlwind. Well, what are you going to do? Grab onto something stable. Yeah. Like the chair. Anchor yourself. Yeah. It seems like a lot of the problem with being addicted to this stuff is, do these people know who they are without the drama? It seems like the identity is kind of wrapped up in all this. The identity is

absolutely part of this. You know, I often ask clients who are dealing with this. Who are you if you're not important? Yeah, like, what is the, what is all the suffering you're doing? Giving to you, doing for you. Who are you if you're not the victim? Who are you if you're not in a state of suffering? Who are you, et cetera? And these are hard questions because they don't know. But they're questions as an invitation to start to find out.

And it takes a lot of time for those addicted to drama to recognize to even be aware of the pattern is happening. They need at least a little bit of space, a little witness to be able to go, whoa, I think I might have just created more of an issue. than what was needed. I think that reaction wasn't as big as it needed to be in order to get what I wanted. How do we know if we're the person who's addicted to drama? Because I think a lot of folks will be like, no, my stuff is real. I mean, that's what we covered earlier in the show, right? Are there sort of telltale signs like, fine, I sort of created this if I'm being honest with

myself. And then I definitely wanted to post it on Instagram and complain. You know, is that, are there sort of obvious signs that were the issue? Yeah. I mean, if it's like, you know, do you, that? constantly. Do you find yourself changing the stories? Do you find that wherever you go, there's always something that's wrong or happening? Do you find yourself believing the other shoe will always drop that no matter how good things are, something bad is going to happen?

Is it hard to like soak and marinate in the good of life? Do you find yourself crisis hopping? Like all of these things start to bring some awareness. You're not going to have the awareness in a cycle of drama. If you're in it, we will have no idea that that's what you're doing. The best we can do is start to interrupt it in the beginning, in the revving phase. I see. When we start getting those hits of stress response, when we start pulling things in before we get into a full state of disorganized activation or disorganized stress response. Getting away from this pattern is tough. And I know, I know this because when I ended my friendship with the person who was also sort of the addicted to drama, my wife for a while who worked with all of us.

She'd be like, why are you doing that? Oh, so-and-so does that. And I realized, like, oh, my gosh, I totally got this pattern from him. Not that I was causing drama, but I would vent a lot. And it was almost like the dopamine hit or the whatever of having crises fall in my lap

every third day that we're totally manufactured. It's almost like that was gone and I needed to fill it with something. Yeah. I wasn't causing problems, but man, was I making mountains out of molehills? My wife would be like, chill out, man. Who cares?

We just booked the flight for an hour later, you're like calm down. And I'd go like, what is wrong with me? You were going through withdrawal. Yeah, I was going through withdrawal. And it's creepy to think about that. Yeah. You had a secondary drama response.

Yeah. You had the contagious experience. It shifted your physiology, not to the same degree as the individual who's addicted to drama, but it shifted your physiology enough to have a tolerance level, to have withdrawal symptoms. And so you filled in the gaps. And that happens.

Yeah. Here's another weird phenomenon. We noticed that there was another person, in our team who, as soon as the crises stopped coming from one side, they kind of did it. I was like, why is this person acting up all of a sudden? And it was probably the same thing, a little bit of withdrawal because they didn't have to solve an emergency situation. And then they started causing these things all together.

We're like, hey, we can just have a smoothly running business. You know, that's allowed to happen. And I remember us all kind of laughing about this because it's like, yeah, maybe we should go ahead and try not having a problem that requires an all-hands meeting. every three days. How's that for a change? Yeah. And now we are like that, but it was just, it was almost funny because some days my wife and I all go, man, it's been a long time since something really bad happened and we'll laugh and knock on wood, right? But it's not entirely unreasonable because we really were stuck in that pattern. The whole, and everyone around you,

whether they like it or not, is really getting sucked into that. Absolutely. And they're going to start to add a little spice when they get bored or when that withdrawal symptoms start to set in. because something feels wrong. Because the crisis became status quo. Right. It did feel like something was wrong. What are we missing? Why are we finding the problems anymore?

Oh, wait, they're just not there. Yeah. And so we seek or create them. Well, the appendix of the book is full of practical therapy exercises for people to do. There's a lot more, but obviously, in the interest of time, I've got to let you go. But thank you so much. This is really interesting. Thank you for having me.

And just I think what we all know as a result of this episode is that dinosaurs and humans were never on the planet at the same time. You're an asshole. Well, we knew that. No surprise there. Thank you. Thank you so much. They weren't.

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with a former pimp and how he uses mind manipulation. A pimp teaches a woman how to manipulate men. So I'm teaching her. But what she notices after the teachings or during the teachings that, hey, you're a man, too. so it's only natural that she works these feminine wiles on you. A smart prostitute will make a fool out of a stupid pimp any day. So any vice you may have, they're just hooks. It gets to the point where you become a narcissistic sociopath.

You become empty, you become hollow. You experience no joy, you experience no pain. You want no love, you want no hate. You're just an empty room. You can't love money. You can't hate it. See, the puppet master cannot have any interest, any wants, any lust, any desires, any dreams, any goals, nothing. Why? So he can control your lust, your dreams, your desires. You don't

do anything so that you can become everything. I have an aversion for women who are six feet tall. And like one woman said, in my heels, I'm six, five, you're five, seven, but I find myself looking up to you. See, I'm 10 feet tall around her. And she's all powerful in my presence, so we can't separate. Anything that was insecure about you that you thought it evaporates. You know, I've been shot twice. I've been stabbed once. Mexican mafia tried to kill me in my sleep. I've done three bank robberies in my life, two on purpose, one by accident.

Knowing what I know, the scars I've received, the consequences that I pay, would I do it all again tomorrow? Yeah, I would. It was that good of a ride. I would not be strong enough to resist the allure. It does have a deep psychological effect, and the only way to avoid the effects is to stay there. Even the woman I told you who lives in the $11 million house. We just got quiet one time, and I said, you ever miss it? And she said, every day.

For a chilling peek into the shadow world and the life and mind of former pimp Mickey Royal, check out episode 548 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Love this episode, really changed the way I look at people who are overly dramatic. I had no idea why people did that. I thought they just were bored. Turns out there could be a lot more to the story. The book has a lot of practicals on what to do. If you're the dramatic one, there's a lot of little quizzes like,

If you're addicted to drama, how do you know if somebody else is addicted to drama? How do you set up your boundaries? How to address this in therapy if you need to? How to get somebody else to maybe address this in therapy if they need to. Really, really useful, practical stuff in the book. We didn't have time to go through all that today. I didn't want this to be like a crap load of quizzes for people who may or may not even need that stuff. All things, Dr. Scott Lyons will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com.

You can also ask our AI chatbot if you have questions. Transcripts are in the show notes. advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I've said it once, but I'll say it again. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

The best things that have happened in my life and business have come through my network. That includes you. And I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for yourself. In our six-minute networking course, the course is 100% free. It's not like a gross thing. It's not schmoozy. I don't want your credit card. you can find it on the thinkific platform at jordan harbinger.com slash course.

It's stuff I wish I knew 20 years ago. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And when you're in there, you're going to be in smart company. So give it a shot over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogartie, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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