How to spot and deal with emotional addictions to drama, stress, and chaos

Unlike any other addiction, this type of addiction almost always goes under the radar for years until it can surface and you can start noticing how your self sabotaging with it.

For anyone that had the impostor syndrome and thought that it’s the worse self-sabotaging mechanism, you can have, prepare for something even more deeply ingrained in our mind: the addiction to drama, stress, and chaos!

Impostor syndrome, as I have mentioned in a previous article, comes from a trauma of being bullied, criticized, and not validated as a kid. But while trauma is a unique event in the life of a person that can create damage in the future personality up to the point of affecting the present state of affairs to a degree that is directly connected to the intensity of the trauma, having multiple traumas connected to one another creates the messy mesh of what psychologists call complex trauma.

The role of complex trauma in establishing emotional addictions

With EMDR therapy that works of handling traumatic events, patients get to work on specific time slots in their personal history where they faced a traumatic event and heal the wound caused by that specific event. The problem with complex trauma is that it’s not just one event but a series of events of different intensities and in different moments of someone’s life that are usually linked because they are caused by the same caretaker. This link enables them to form a system of reference for how we experience life experiences even in the absence of this caretaker and usually last a long time throughout the life of the patient until they are able to pull the red string that connects the dots and heal these wounds one by one.

Complex trauma plays a role in forming reference systems that guide the person who experienced them throughout their life. The one tool that can help with discovering this domino effect and allow the patient to start releasing the tension behind the complex mesh of traumatic events is reframing.

Reframing beliefs about something we are certain of enables us to see things from a different perspective. This cognitive intervention allows the patient to start questioning their own reality. Once a patient becomes uncertain about their own emotions, the domino effect can be triggered. In times of uncertainty, people are more prone to be open to reconsidering their perspective as things are changing anyway and there is a perceived lower risk to lose something by “trying” out something equally discomforting. As such, invoking reframing in a time of chaos is actually the best moment to start questioning the reason why that chaos was triggered, to begin with.

Emotional addiction, on the other hand, might be a “loyal soldier” that protects your ego from wanting to admit that the reason why that chaos was started had no external factors. We will call this a “storm in a glass of water”. This effect is caused by the firm belief that you deserve to have that chaos in your life in the first place.

The stakes are high, so emotional addiction will defend the ego from seeing everything it has created crumble in one move of the domino effect. For someone who experienced complex trauma, their entire identity is built on the premise that those stories of their childhood trauma will serve them as reference for how to attract the attention of others for their entire life. The type of emotional wounds caused by complex trauma is hard to untangle but there are dedicated therapies for each of them. I wrote a previous article on how to choose the right type of therapy according to the type of emotional wound you faced.

Homeostasis is the first type of early trauma that can affect us and cause the chain of reactions mentioned above. As described in a previous article about the ways in which someone can “hack” our biology, homeostasis is caused by an imbalance in body temperature. The first type of receptors from the environment, even before we form any other sense in the wound is temperature. Also, psychical touch, which is the way to calm down an infant when they cry is connected to body temperature regulation by pressing the baby to the mother's chest for them to feel their warmth. This is probably the most basic type of need of a newborn that can leave a serious mark on the way a child grows up if not met enough.

There were many studies on infants who were abandoned by their mothers and left in orphanages where the nurses would not pick the babies up to cuddle them and caress them enough and surviving only with food caused the babies to die.

The connection between human touch and the ability of the mind to regulate its emotions goes directly through the ability to reestablish homeostasis.

As such, humans need physical touch and warmth not just to prevent the body from getting cold but also to regulate emotions and form a secure relationship with the caretaker.

Most of the patterning that you observed in your household growing up will reflect in how you deal with situations as an adult. Being able to identify when the pattern takes over is the key to emotional intelligence and enables you to change your brain wiring. The problem is that you need first to do emotional regulation and calm your brain before you are able to identify the emotional intelligence to step in.

Reassuring someone can function as emotional regulation when their own resilience is not working.

Mel Robbins talks about these aspects as an ability gained by people who learn to communicate their emotions through words. While words are powerful on their own, there is a bigger and even more powerful tool that we can use in relationships to deal with such issues: physical touch!

“Center them with physical touch” — Mel Robbins

That is the one most effective technique to help someone struggling with anxiety to calm down and ground them. Then enable them to detail what they feel and where they feel allows them to have the space to feel listened and validated. In the end, emotional regulation is much more about the physical body than the mind because all our emotions get stored in the body. Our parasympathetic system is triggered by the body more than the mind. The trauma is also stored there. So enabling people to heal comes from validating both mind and body. We work too much with cognitive methods to calm anxiety and we rely too little on the body’s capacity to regulate our emotions from interacting with the environment at the moment, in the NOW.

Being connected to your body releases generational trauma

Sometimes though, the trauma we might have stored in our body is not ours, to begin with. It is called generational trauma. We inherit it from the bodies that created us without knowing about it because it’s already there before we got to create any other reference system in the world. We have no system to compare it so we believe that is the correct reference system without ever questioning it.

The problem with such trauma is that it takes a lot more time and self-awareness about our own body to understand that things we think we feel in our mind can be searched through meditations and scans of the body without really finding any current sensation about it in the body because it was never in our own body, it was in our genes. And when I say genes, I don’t mean a genetic code, but rather a behavior book of the family we grew up in. With that we take a real deep dive into the chaos and drama and experience new traumatic events, just to “feel” alive. That type of “contamination” is the only thing we know how to handle so even if we don’t have much drama going on, we will attract it with our thoughts.

The inconsistency between warmth and coldness gave our caretakers the homeostatic impulse in the body that kept them to release the cortisol in the body. This stress hormone is so powerful that even without ever being triggered in a newborn in such a big amount, it can be passed on from the caretakers in a moment of such intensity. A caretaker that has lived such a life will certainly re-enact their trauma in the life of their own child if they haven’t worked on their own ability to regulate their emotions first. A baby will then register this hormone and repeat the cycle every time they need to feel connected to their “source”. The caretaker will impact the way a baby is able to regulate its emotions by this simple dynamic of response:

• If the caretaker will respond to the baby’s crying, then the baby will know that if they cry there is someone there to pick them up
• If by contrast, a caretaker is inconsistent in their response to the crying of the baby, the baby will learn that they are either “alone” which creates abandonment issues or that they are doing something wrong which makes the baby refrain from expressing needs this way because they don’t think they will be “saved”

Should we think of the first category, then we’re talking about either a secure attachment style or we are talking about a baby that will not have problems expressing their needs later in life with the full confidence that they will be heard and seen by others.

Should we think of the second category though, this is where we either get codependency or emotional addictions or both.

Once we are able to detect the initial wounds, a lot of these frameworks will be automatically disrupted. Schemas are shattered when the core reason why they exist ceases to be the engine of those repetitive cycles of patterns. Being able to detect the slightest changes in your body typically through a practice of meditation allows you to connect to the “engine” behind these patterns and stop them.

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