Dr. Scott Lyons
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Scott Lyons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I think some of the more common ways we recognize that people are addicted to stress, addicted to drama, addicted to busyness is they are constantly doing. They are in constant motion. They are in a constant state of anxious, even though they may not realize it, other people can see it. And so you'll notice it's in the language they use. They're making mountains out of molehills.
They're venting, they're gossiping, they're overscheduling. It's always about the doing. It's taking up space where they are not being in the space within themselves. It's an avoidant technique and it is a form of control.
So whether it's an avoidance of their emotions, whether it's an avoidance of intimacy and relationships, whether it's an avoidance of having to deal with things in their life, how are you using that nether version of busyness To keep avoiding should be out of touch with the things that need to be held, seen, supported, and felt within yourself. What are you avoiding in yourself still?
Especially with people who are really attached to being in stress. And I know that sounds so wild because who would want to be attached? Who would want to be connected all the time to a sense of stress? But when we go into the science of it, you'll realize we all actually do that.
even if they're busy, they're most likely not getting things done, at least not in the expanse of their life. Maybe it's one particularly focused thing, like, oh, I'm really good at filling my schedule, or I'm really good at this one aspect of work. And they really hyper focus on and they obsess. And yet all the rest of their life, their house, their apartment, their bedroom is a mess.
Nothing else is getting done except the thing that they're choosing or they've chosen to hyper focus on to avoid themselves or the feelings underneath or their relationships or the fear and vulnerability of intimacy.
when you like go to the underneath surface, like what's underneath the pattern? What's underneath the survival strategy? And I think about this quote or this proverb that says, a child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.
A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. meaning what will we do to get the thing that's so deeply missing in us And that's the most surprising thing about addiction to drama. You can get so distracted and see like, okay, that person's always busy. They're always making challenges that are unnecessary.
Their emotional responses are totally disproportionate to what's actually happening into the environment. We all recognize that and we can go, okay, that's just who they are. They're a drama queen. They're addicted to the stress. They're addicted to the chaos. They're just constantly of chaos and crisis.
But the reality is underneath the surface of that is a deep wound that is desperately trying to be filled, that is desperately trying to be avoided simultaneously. And that's the tension here. That is such a unique tension of going, I want you, I want connection, I want to be less alone, I want to be healed. And at the same time, that connection,
That intimacy, the techniques or the tools of healing feel so dangerous. And so they're just running from themselves consistently. It is a way to survive and burning down the village to try to get any sense of sensation and experience aliveness because the numbness it takes to avoid that underlying pain is so significant that you have to do something extreme to feel alive above that.
there's a lot of really interesting research that we can unpack. And it all comes back to why any addiction? And Gabor Mate is this brilliant physician and addiction specialist. And he says, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And that is the lead in for understanding what's happening in the brain. You know, we register emotional and physical pain in the exact same way.
It's not discerned. A heartbreak is significant pain. A abandonment wound is registered in the same way that when we break an arm. And it's important to understand that because our basic human nature is to get relief from suffering.
And we have this whole physiological process called endorphins. Endorphins are those things that are releasing into your body to help you feel more pleasure, to feel pain relief and emotional warmth, actually. And it makes us feel more connected to each other. And those chemicals in our brain and our body are so significant for helping us relieve some of that underlying suffering.
And if we've had childhood wounds or trauma like most of us, yeah, we're running on a continuous process of unprocessed trauma that it constantly elicits a sense of pain. It's in our brain, we're going, we are in constant pain. That is being registered. And so Understanding that we are in constant search for the things that could relieve us from that pain.
One of the other components of addiction is dopamine, right? It's a neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation and pleasure again. Notice how we're talking about those two neurotransmitters are about pleasure seeking or moving away from pain. And that's so essential. And even busyness. Yeah, I'm doing more and more and more and more. I'm going to all these social events.
I'm doing all these work activities. I am doing... And the doing keeps me away from the feeling. And so I get another dopamine hit because the feeling that I would be feeling if I could is likely the things I've been avoiding for a long time. And that's painful.
So if you think about maybe some of your earliest environments, the ways in which you became familiar with your family, with the people around you, with the environment, and we call that the baseline experience. Yeah. So if I grew up in a chaotic household like I did, where there was a lot of physical abuse and alcohol and drugs, that was my baseline way of knowing how the world works.
And there's a way in which I'm going to find that I'm going to seek it out consistently. You know, we can think of, Freud talked about it as repetition compulsion. We keep going towards the familiar in hopes that we can eventually find something else. That's why we keep entering into these same relationships over and over again, hoping that next one will be a better person.
But the reality is until we've addressed the why we're seeking those people unintentionally, we're going to keep repeating the same pattern. So, Chaos is a familiar hell. And we will always chase the familiar hell because anything else feels like an attack to our nervous system.
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