Everywhere you turn in society, there is seduction that reinforces our insufficiency. There is always the promise of an answer residing in an external solution that will solve all immediate human problems. These problems might be tension, anxiety, stress, depression, headaches, loss of hair, erectile dysfunction, constipation, augmented breasts or genitals, poor self-image, sex drive, rejection by peers, or finding your soul mate online. The advertising that bombards us tells us that there is an answer! You can buy it, feel better, and get relief.
Addictions by definition are self-destructive. They erode self-esteem and cause gradual health problems; they cause social impairments, and can destroy occupational, physical, emotional, and interpersonal functioning. In a sense, all addictions are displays of the underlying Negaholism. Our society condones and reinforces addictive behaviors, until it becomes front-page news.
So much of the social fabric of everything we do involves the acceptance of addictive behavior that they become like smog, we accept it and are unaware of it.
Why Do You Become Addicted?
Over the years, a series of different theories have developed concerning the origin of addictive behavior. The most traditional one suggests that the individual lacks willpower and is unable to control his behavior.
The second theory presents addiction as an illness. This theory removes the moral, judgmental stigma previously associated with addictive behavior. It releases the addicted person from personal responsibility and enables him to seek treatment without embarrassment or humiliation.
The third or biological theory regards addiction as evolving from a genetic (DNA), metabolic, or biochemical disorder. From this perspective all addictions are viewed as physiologically based.
The fourth theory proposes that addiction is a behavioral issue. Addictions are perceived as learned behaviors, are the result of past experiences and current circumstances combined. This theory presumes that everyone has power over his own destiny, and suggests that each person can control his behavior if he learns how to modify it.
There are an abundance of case studies that justify each theory. Examining the microbiology reveals the connection.
The body secretes natural substances that create a feeling of euphoria. This euphoric feeling can become addictive. Whether it is naturally induced or chemically induced, the result is the same, relief from anxiety, and a temporary experience of complete and total euphoria. This feeling is what most addicts are seeking.
The substances are called “Opioid Peptides.” They are short sequences of amino acids that bind to opioid receptors in the brain, act as neuro-modulators and influence the release of neuro-transmitters. They play an important role in motivation, emotion, and behavioral attachment. Some of them are: B-endorphins, B-lipotropin, and enkephalin.
You may be wondering why brain chemistry is related to Negaholism. You may also wonder how self-negation relates to euphoria? If you are a Negaholic, every time you criticize, judge, or beat yourself up, you release similar opioid peptides. The rush that you feel when you punish yourself is an exciting, albeit negative feeling. People want to stop beating themselves up, however, in fact, they feel unable to do it. The reason is that they are addicted to the opioid peptides that allow them to feel this euphoric rush of wellbeing.
Let’s take an example of lateness. You are late once again for an appointment and you hear inside your head, “I can’t believe you’re late! You should have left earlier. You knew what time you should have left, and you blew it. He is probably going to leave, and it will take months to reschedule another appointment with him. He is going to be standing around waiting for you, and you’re not there. How inconsiderate of you. And on top of it, you forgot your cell phone! Unbelievable! You really have no concept of time. You’re always late. You’re always forgetting something you absolutely need. After all the work you have put into this deal, and now you go and screw it up by being late. You idiot! Can’t you do anything right? Maybe you should get out of this line of business, since you can’t manage your time. You’re hopeless!”
Now let’s explore the feelings you have just felt while reading this.
• Did you experience shortness of breath?
• Did your heart rate increase?
• Did you feel a rush in your chest?
• Did you feel anxious, guilty, fearful, or ashamed?
• Have you heard a voice in your head talking to you in this way about something you did or didn’t do?
• Has it happened more than three times with the same situation?
• Did you feel important?
• Did you receive a lot of attention (albeit negative)?
• Did you feel self-consumed?
• Were you preoccupied with your situation?
• Did you feel like the center of attention?
The obvious conclusion would be to avoid ever being late again and thereby avoid the cycle of self-punishment forever. But the reality of the situation is that you have just successfully reinforced all of the negative behaviors that you wanted to eliminate. You probably will be late again, maybe even become habitually late.
You have just acted out the Negaholic Drama. You acted in a self-sabotaging manner, tormenting yourself mercilessly for something, which was not a capital offense. You behaved in a punitive manner, acting out your addiction to beating yourself up, showing that you were unable to stop berating yourself. You were powerless in the situation and your priorities became distorted. Your perspective became skewed, you experienced instant gratification and you were unable to stop your behavior at will. You experienced the opioid peptides in full force. This is self-destructive behavior, and you will continue to perpetuate it, not because you want to, but because you cannot stop it. You have an addiction. You have an addiction because the “Triple Imprint” locked in your behavior patters and you have never been able to break them. The reason intelligent people continue to engage in behaviors that seem easy to stop is because of the Triple Imprint that explains why they appear powerless over their addictions.
Triple Imprint
Physiologically speaking beating yourself up activates the opioid peptides, which creates a physical rush. This is not in and of itself a euphoric or desirable state, but the feeling that is created as a result of the release of opioid peptides is an addictive chemical reaction. When you grow up in a dysfunctional home, and as a result have low self-esteem, you draw to you negativity that reinforces your self-image and gives you the ammunition with which to diminish yourself. Every time you do this, you re-stimulate the rush of opioid peptides. The experience is similar to the release of endorphins that a runner experiences when running. This feeling is an addictive rush that feels simultaneously both positive and negative.
Emotionally you drive yourself into fear , anxiety, and panic. You are caught between feeling totally stressed or shutting down to your overwhelming feelings. The insufficiency, emptiness, and deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, fear, and loneliness, which are rooted deeply in your self-concept, are satiated and validated every time this nasty mechanism clicks into gear. It is as if the reaction of your cruelty toward yourself is an appropriate response to what you were repeatedly told in childhood. The self-punishment is seen as a kind of atonement of the “wrongdoing” that you have perpetrated. Taking yourself to task is supposed to force you to behave properly in the future. This backfires, since the volume of the negativity only reinforces the pattern. Volume is the key. The louder the voice, the deeper the reinforcement.
Psychologically we all require attention. Whether you are the star of the class, the math nerd, the athletic jock, or the computer geek, we all find a way to get the attention we require. In your childhood, if you couldn’t receive positive attention you unconsciously and automatically gravitated to negative attention. As an adult you are still locked into the behavior of gravitating to negative reinforcement because it has been imprinted and reinforced over decades. The preoccupation with the self, the feeling of self-
importance, and the huge amount of attention (albeit negative) that you receive creates a state, which feels like your personal soap opera, and you become the star of your movie!
When someone beats him or herself up, the triple imprint engages and locks in the addictive pattern. This is the reason why perfectly intelligent, productive, successful, and resourceful people become trapped into behaviors that they don’t want. The triple imprint is at the root of Negaholism, or “Hole in the Soul” syndrome.
Negaholism is at the root of most compulsive and addictive behaviors. If someone wants to change their attitudes and behaviors, he or she must deal with the core issues and not the symptoms. Stopping smoking, drinking, watching TV, or drinking coffee will only morph into another addiction if it is never addressed at the cellular level. It is possible to overcome Negaholism, but in order to do it, you have to be connected with your feelings.
Feelings play a key role in transcending Negaholism.
In Chapter Four, you will see why feelings are so important, and what you can do about them.
4
To Feel or Not To Feel
That really is the question. Are you willing to start feeling?” I’m talking about a way of life that is committed to experiencing, communicating, and expressing your feelings. Specifically, it means being painfully honest, not brutally honest. It means honoring your own reality.
Barbara’s Breakthrough
Barbara had fallen in love with Jerry. They had been seeing each other, making plans for the future, and generally having a lot of fun. One night, Jerry took out Barbara’s roommate without informing Barbara. One thing led to another, and they ended up spending the night together. Barbara was devastated. In our coaching session, she eventually admitted her feelings to me. She felt humiliated, hurt, and embarrassed beyond belief. She had really fallen for Jerry, and she was beating herself up for caring so much about him. She was upset and on top of that she was angry at herself for being so upset. She didn’t want to feel all the feelings that had surfaced. They spanned the spectrum from hurt to rage, from loss to revenge, from feeling victimized to apathetic. None of these feeling were desirable to her; they exposed her and left her vulnerable to criticism and more hurt. She wanted to cut off her feelings, shut them down, and become a rock, impenetrable and strong.
She considered lying and claiming that she never really cared about Jerry in the first place, that he never mattered to her, that it was only a casual affair. She was searching for the part of her that could say all this and save face with her friends who were judging her extreme reactions. She thought that if she was detached and unemotional she could distance and protect herself from the entire situation.
I probed. “Barb, what do you want? Are you willing to feel those feelings?”
She argued for all the reasons to suppress her feelings. She explained that when her friends had gone to Jerry and confronted him about his behavior toward her, he has said it was no big deal and she was overreacting.
I reminded Barb that the choice was up to her, and I asked her in the long run what would really serve her. She broke down and said, “I don’t want to walk around like a human puddle. If I let myself feel, I may never stop crying. Then I’ll be no good to anyone. Why did I let myself fall in love with him anyway, when he didn’t care at all about me? What kind of an idiot am I?”
I asked her if she could be just a little gentler on herself. Falling in love with someone is not the worst thing in the world, even if it is unrequited. I asked her if she could permit herself to have fallen in love with a man who didn’t love her back, to feel all the feelings which were real and true for her in this moment, and to let herself be a vulnerable, caring human being. She thought about it, and let me know that it would be really difficult, but that she would do her best.
The choice for Barbara was whether to feel and honor her inner reality, or to save face, cut off her feelings, be strong, cold, and tough. She weighed the pros and cons carefully before she chose. Barbara chose to take the risk of being human and allowing her true feelings. This was a turning point in her life. She made a deliberate choice to feel and honor her inner truth rather than be cool and behave in a socially acceptable manner. This was a breakthrough for Barbara.
Ceil’s Choice
The choice which Barbara faced was not unique. Ceil had a similar one to make. When her mother died, she handled all the funeral arrangements, the disposal of personal effects, and the affairs of the estate. There was so much that had to get accomplished over a short period of time that she didn’t want to take the time to feel. She thought that her time would be better used if she were goal-oriented. She felt that she needed to be resourceful and focus on the urgent tasks at hand. She did not process her feelings by feeling them, allowing them to be, and releasing them when they surfaced. She put a lid on her grief, loss, sadness, hurt, anger, and abandonment, and held them all tightly within herself.
Years later Ceil sat in my office wondering why she had difficulty feeling joy. She had lost her spark somewhere on the road of life and she couldn’t find it. Ceil had choice. Did she want to start feeling, to give herself permission to be a real human with legitimate feelings, and claim her right to have and release them? Or did she want to be just an efficient, task-oriented machine that was disconnected from her feelings?
Ceil had been stuffing her feelings for so long that the situation looked completely overwhelming to her. She was afraid that she would have to take each situation from childhood, and go through them one by one, experiencing her feelings. I let her know that she didn’t need to quit her job and make this her life’s work, but rather to make the choice to feel moment to moment as her feelings surfaced. Relieved, she was willing to consider “one moment at a time” as her new motto.
Don’t Rock the Boat
There are a variety of reasons not to feel. Society frowns on expressing feelings at work, and those who are emotional are often regarded as weak, unprofessional, or self-indulgent. A client of mine felt that if she allowed her feelings to show and addressed them, she would threaten people around her.
I asked her what she meant, and she replied, “It’s much easier to go along with whatever is being said or done rather than speak up for myself. So often my feelings are out of step with what is happening around me that if I spoke up I would be creating messes everywhere.”
Another person told me, “I don’t really trust my feelings, so when I feel something funny, in my stomach, I think something is wrong with me.”
Others believe feelings are time consuming, messy, painful, and don’t have a return on the investment. Some are afraid of others judgments, and others are living out the fantasy picture of the perfect families on TV.
Feeling Left Out Hurts
Mary was self-employed and had two female partners. They were all very close until some problems in the business started to surface. Mary was constantly irritated with Dee Dee, one of her partners. She found fault with everything Dee Dee did, criticizing her suggestions and judging her actions. Mary wanted to find out why she was so upset with Dee Dee.
In our coaching session, we explored the recent past and discovered an important clue. Until the fall everything had been great, and then things started to become strange. I asked what had happened in the fall, and Mary couldn’t recall. We looked through her date book and reviewed the month of November day by day. It jumped out at her. November was the month that Dee Dee got married. I asked Mary if this was important, and she replied, “I wasn’t invited to her wedding.” I asked if she had expected to be invited.
She said that it was a small wedding, only the immediate family was invited, and Dee Dee had none the less shared this with her, but her feelings were deeply hurt. She felt left out. I asked her if she ever told Dee Dee how she felt, and she replied, “No, I was too embarrassed to bring it up. What Dee Dee did was understandable, and I was acting childish.”
I pointed out that this incident, small though it may seem, might be the w
ithheld communication and feeling, that had started all Mary’s issues with Dee Dee. A seed was planted that would later bear poisonous fruit.
Feelings Are Not Thoughts
Feelings and thoughts are different. Thoughts, by definition, are rational, reasonable, and logical, and located in the cognitive part of the brain. Feelings by definition are subjective emotional responses that connected to the affective part. Feelings are not right or wrong, they just are what they are. People spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what their feelings mean, whether they are legitimate or not, when the truth about feelings is that they don’t make sense. Childish misunderstandings and miscommunications happen every day. People get hurt, sad, angry, and upset, which is not the issue. The real issue is how we deal or don’t deal with the feelings that are ours.
Creative Case-Building
Tim and Jay worked together in the same company. Tim was responsible for sales and Jay was responsible for the service department. There had been historic problems between the two departments, and a cold war had polarized them into two separate camps. As a consultant to the company, it was my task to see if there was a way to bring all parties together, figure out what the issues were, and try to resolve them.
In the meeting, we started tracking back to when things went from good to bad, and we stumbled upon an incident, that had occurred six months earlier.
Sales finally landed an account they had been working on for almost two years. When it got passed to the service department, some problems were mishandled and the account went elsewhere. The problematic situation then backfired on the sales department. Tim was furious and tried to get Jay on the phone. Jay was out of town, in constant meetings, and busily putting out fires. The account was a top priority for Tim, but unfortunately it wasn’t for Jay.
Tim decided that the service department didn’t care about the sales department, nor did service care about the customer. Tim started making offhand comments about the service department that his staff picked up on and this added fuel to the fire. The schism between sales and service grew until the tension could be felt by everyone.
Negaholics Page 8