A blog written by someone who knows all about LA

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Short and sweet video


affectiondeficitdisorder.tumblr.com/post/10187105763/how-can-sex-and-love-be-addictive-let-me-count#disqus_thread

Also from her blog:
affectiondeficitdisorder.tumblr.com/
I quit smoking 21 years ago. No applause, please; you don’t congratulate someone for escaping a burning building. But I am rather pleased with myself for Ethlie’s Three Tips for Quitting Smoking.

1. The craving to smoke will pass, whether you pick up a cigarette or not.

2. You never need to be 100% willing quit smoking. You only need to be 51% willing.

3. Quitting smoking doesn’t make you angry. You were already angry; you just didn’t notice.

What does this have to do with love addiction? Everything. Because while most of us suffering from affection deficit disorder think we have an emotional problem, we actually have a physical problem. Sex and romance — even the anticipation or illusion of sex or romance — create a neurochemical “reward cascade” in my head that is as addictive to me as nicotine was. Dopamine, oxytocin, PEA, GABA… my brain adores that stuff, and it doesn’t cost me seven bucks a pack and bad breath, either.

Problem is, when the reward cascade stops cascading, it creates withdrawal symptoms every bit as uncomfortable as a nicotine fit.
All love addicts (and most high school students) know what withdrawal looks like and feels like. It looks like you on the floor in a fetal position, generally curled up around a telephone. It feels halfway between stomach flu and chemotherapy — and I know one woman who, having survived both cancer and heartbreak, swears the heartbreak was worse. Withdrawal looks like suicidal clinical depression, and is frequently treated as if it were clinical depression, but I rarely see that approach succeed because withdrawal is not depression. Withdrawal is withdrawal.

What does succeed? The same things that work for quitting smoking.


1. The craving for him/her will pass, whether you pick up the phone or not.

2. You never need to be 100% willing to get over him/her; you only need to be 51% willing.

3. Not having him/her in your life isn’t what made you feel sad, empty and alone. You already felt sad, empty and alone; you just didn’t notice.

And another blog entry:


We all have have collected reminders of old relationships, lovers, and even unrequited crushes. For the normal girl, these reminders tend to be a pressed flower in a poetry book, a nickname that stuck, a favorite recipe, or an REM CD. For your average love addict, it’s more likely to be an oversized t-shirt (borrowed to cover up your clocktail dress for the early morning walk of shame) and a half-empty bottle of Kwell.

More often than pubic lice, though, the men in my life left behind a legacy of words. I love new words; call it an occupational hazard. I still call soft drinks soda pop because of a college boyfriend from the South. I suss things out or get my knickers in a twist because of my British former husband. Thanks to a Texan ex, I can understand everything that Boomhauer on King of the Hill is saying. Okay, almost everything.

And then there are those wonderful moments when someone drops a whole new idea on you. My high school beau told me I had a high IQ and a low EQ - Emotion Quotient, a phrase he coined decades before it became psychobabble. He was right, although it took me most of those decades to figure it out. And then there was the heartthrob not long past who said my motto should be “Ooh, shiny!” and told me: Don’t confuse excitement with happiness.

I was barely over the stage of confusing chaos with excitement — which is damn stressful, let me tell you — when I started wrapping my head around that one. I like Things That Make You Go Wheeee. My interior landscape is a TV commercial for Six Flags Magic Mountain. Exciting equals fun equals happy. Right?

Well… not exactly. What excitement equals is a brain boost of my favorite neurotransmitter, dopamine. Like most addicts, I’m a dopamine junkie to my bones. There’s a good reason for that: like most addicts, I don’t have enough dopamine to begin with. (It’s actually a little more complicated than that; read LOVE ADDICT: SEX, ROMANCE AND OTHER DANGEROUS DRUGS for the science stuff.) Excitement makes me feel good, and that makes me happy. Which all made sense, until….

…some random woman with whom I had no romantic connection whatsoever left me the most profound words of all: Feeling good isn’t the same as being happy.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have spent a major portion of my life trying to feel good — or, at the very least, to not feel bad. Avoid boredom, avoid disappointment… at all cost, avoid pain. But, of course, lack of pain isn’t happiness. Lack of pain is a morphine drip.

What, then, is happy? Joy I know; I have a son. Exhilaration I know; I swim with dolphins. But happy? That one I’m still working on. For now, I’m going with the old Chinese proverb I quoted in my book which, as I said at the time, is probably neither old nor Chinese:

If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing

If you want to be happy for a year, get married

If you want to be happy for a lifetime, be of service

[g]

Oh I'm getting addicted to this woman's blog!!!!!


Party at Ground Zero
A friend and colleague of mine is what we addict types call a “normie,” or “civilian,” She doesn’t have an obsessive-compulsive bone in her body — or, if she does, she manages to keep it well hidden. There’s a lot of that going around.

Anyway, she doesn’t know if she should feel sorry for addicts and alcoholics, or if she should be jealous. Drugs and alcohol (or gambling, or shopping, or sex, or overeating, or whatever is it that turns your particular crank) obviously do something for the people who get addicted to them, or we wouldn’t get addicted to them. Something spectacular. Something they don’t do for my friend. Can it be that, rather than having dodged a bullet, she’s actually missing something wonderful?

Now, I’m not going to tell her that the intoxication of infatuation — my personal drug of choice — isn’t spectacular. It has been. Often. Too often. I will tell her that, scientifically speaking, she’s the enviable one. It isn’t so much that sex and love addicts get a bigger bang (pun semi-intended) out of sex and love than anyone else. It’s that the rest of life is all a little… little, until something jabs you in the ass with a cattle prod. Something like a line of cocaine, or a dozen roses from a secret admirer.

What I jokingly call affection deficit disorder, some serious researchers call “reward deficiency syndrome.” The addict brain is stubbornly resistant to the neurotransmitters that activate what’s known as the reward cascade, a fireworks display of brain cells high-fiving one another in a joyful exchange of dopamine, serotonin, and a handful of other jolly juices. For us, it takes a mega-dose of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to get the party started. My friend can pull it off with some nice French bread dipped in quality olive oil.

So it isn’t that mind-altering substances and behaviors feel so damn good to us. It’s that we can feel them at all. As Dr. Reef Karim says in my new book (insert a plug for the Sept. 1 book release here; you know the drill), “What happens if you’re an addict and you’re not getting enough dopamine is, you feel like ‘Eh, life’s a blah.’ Then you snort coke or have a drink or have sex and all of a sudden….. How many times have I heard ‘Hey, Doc, for the first time in my life I felt normal!’”

And then, of course, we spend the next 20 years desperately chasing that feeling — which, by the way, can never be recreated because the more dopamine that surges through our brains, the more resistant we become to the stuff. Oh, the irony.

You see, dear normie civilian, it isn’t that we get to feel so much better than you when we get high. It’s that we finally get to feel like you. We aren’t going from zero to 60, even if it looks like that from the outside. We’re going from minus 60 to zero.

[primrose]

Great blog G, I really enjoyed it.