16-A. Trauma Bond Science - Why Do I Keep Going Back? The Brain Chemicals Behind the Addiction - Chaos Addiction Mini-Series Part 3/4

For this episode, we're going to be a little nerdy. We're going to talk about the neurochemicals and the stress hormones in the brain that are the reason for our addiction to intensity, our addiction to chaos. It explains the trauma bond in survivors of narcissistic abuse, on a chemical level. It's going to get a little scientific. Buckle up!

This is the transcript for Episode 16-A.

We're talking about something every survivor of narcissistic abuse deals with, really, especially autistic survivors. It's why we're addicted to intensity, why the body sometimes craves the very things our minds say that we hate, the very things we ran away from. We'll work to explain the trauma bond and why we will leave someone that we cognitively know or believe is hurting us, is hurting our child... But then we might go back later because we're chemically addicted to that person. This description also applies to toxic workplaces, toxic parents, and the like.

So this episode is going to be blunt, science-based, and occasionally funny because I guess laughter is really the only way through the heavy crosses we're bearing.

The first thing we're going to do is call it out

We're not being stupid, we're chemically conditioned. We're talking about a chemical addiction in the brain. People are going to wonder, "why do I keep ending up in chaos?", "Why do I keep dating the same type of man over and over?", "Why do I freak out when things are calm?", "Why do I keep going back?", "Why does it feel wrong when nothing's happening?" Like, "why is it so boring when I'm not in chaos?".

If you're my target audience, yeah, I think all of us have been through this or are in this phase right now. The unromantic scientific truth is that when you've lived in survival mode for a long time (for some of us this dates back to childhood, the way we were raised, for some of us we married into toxicity and chaos, for some of us it's a longer-than-reasonable period of employment in a dysfunctional workplace ) our brains have literally rewired themselves to depend on stress hormones to feel normal.

It's nuts.

The baseline became cortisol, the stress hormone, adrenaline for alertness, oxytocin, that has bonded us, norepinephrin for vigilance, and dopamine for rewards. This is a chemical cocktail that was like our internal Wi-Fi, I guess. The chemical cocktail that we were running on, that we were functioning on, connecting with others through, because it's familiar, it's predictable, it feels at home, even if it's destroying your health slowly.

"The peace that you want, that you seek, that you say you're striving for, it's not just unfamiliar, it's chemically incompatible with your brain at first"

It's messed up.

The peace you want is chemically wrong to what's actually going on hormonally inside your brain

Your brain is going to read calm like, "where's the threat? Why is it so quiet? Something's about to blow." And that's the biology of your brain. The brain is flooded with all of that hormonal mess.

Autistic women, you can multiply all of that by 10

Because autistic nervous systems don't tend to move on from danger. We catalog it, we index it. For those of you who are geeks like me, it's a Dewey decimal system of trauma. You've got sections where you organize various parts of it, pieces of it.That's how the autistic brain deals with threat and danger. So when intensity is the pattern, the ASD brain goes, "ah, yes, order, familiarity, predictable chaos. Yay, this is good.This is what we want."

That intensity becomes the structure

But the calm that we say we want, that's a mystery. And if there's one thing that the brains of autistic women hate more than noise and bad lighting, it's mystery. We don't want that calm and that peace in the beginning.

So let's talk about a - very basic - neurochemical breakdown of that addiction:

1. First of all, we said we've got the cortisol going on. You've got your chronic stress that you've been living in over the years and that triggered chronic, high cortisol production. The brain has adjusted so that that high cortisol feels normal. With all the consequences that it has on your body. There's a book called When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté, in which he talks about the consequences of chronic stress long-term on the body. And he suggests that there may be a correlation between all the degenerative diseases that we see in modern society, and chronic stress and childhood trauma. So this is serious. This is not a joke. Chronically high cortisol levels will impact your physical health. Some people end up with adrenal fatigue, which takes years to recover from! And when we get out of that cortisol-inducing situation, the cortisol drops and the system panics. So that's super fun.

   
   

2. Then we've got the dopamine. We think about dopamine, we think about fun and rewards. And the reality is the arguments, and the chaos, and the drama, and the threats, and the lies, and the hyper-vigilance... All of that produces dopamine spikes. Not because it's fun, but because the brain releases dopamine any time it anticipates a reward. And that reward, could be reaching a resolution to the crisis. That could be the reward that your brain is waiting for. Hence releasing the dopamine. Except that the crisis never resolves.

   
   
   
   

   "Your brain stays stuck in the dopamine chase, thinking that one day one of those crises is going to get resolved. And guess what? You're addicted."

   
   
   
   

3. The next one, and that's the devil in abusive relationships, is your oxytocin. Oxytocin, you've probably heard about it, is this hormone called the love hormone. It bonds you to whoever you feel intimacy with, or whoever makes you feel fear. Trauma plus intermittent affection is the glue. That's where the oxytocin kicks in.Your body literally attached to the person that was hurting you. You see it with hostages, it is called the Stockholm syndrome. It happens to soldiers, it happens to abuse survivors. We bond to the person that is the threat. So when you try to leave the relationship, your hormones scream, "I gotta go back!!!". You're trauma bonded. And a lot of women make the sometimes deadly mistake of going back to their abuser. And that's because of that chemical addiction, because of that oxytocin-based bond.

   
   

When people that have never had to survive anything, never been through an abusive relationship, say, "why didn't she just leave?" "Why did it take so long for her to leave?" "It couldn't have been that bad if she stayed for so long." When I hear that, all I'm hearing is, "I have no idea about what's going down in that woman's brain.I have no idea how addiction works and how these hormonal messages in the brain work." That's all I'm hearing.

When someone says, "why doesn't she just leave? Couldn't have been that bad." Yeah, you clearly don't understand that this woman's brain was flooded with chemicals that bonded her to her abuser. She was addicted to - I don't want to say the thrill - but to the intensity and the chaos and the unpredictability. That's what's going on.

We need to understand it so we can stop shaming ourselves

We can start validating that addiction that we're feeling. It's real. None of you here are stupid or crazy or weird for going back or wanting to go back to what you believe could hurt you immensely. It's those chemicals in your brain running the show.

I'm hoping that this episode explaining to you the nitty-gritty of how it works will help you forgive yourselves, and maybe be better armed to go through the process of breaking that addiction.

Next week we will be talking about precise steps on how we can bring those hormone levels back down to normal levels. We will start to build little bridges from the chaos and the intensity that we're in now, or that we miss, over into the peace and quiet that we say we desire.

I'm hoping you now have more compassion for yourself, for missing the person, or for missing the situation. So you take it one day at a time, and next week we will talk about how to get those neurochemical levels back down. Thank you for being here today.

Please keep in mind that I am NOT a professional of any kind. The information that I'm sharing here is stuff that I've learned through my own research on the internet. If anything resonates with you, please take that information over to a professional who will lead you as far as what to do with that information and how to help you.Take everything I say with a grain of salt, please, or do your own independent research just like I did to produce this episode. Thank you for listening to episode 16A today, and as I always say, please take this life one day at a time.

The contents of this blog are for general education and entertainment purposes only and do not constitute professional advice. I share things that worked for me, from a lived-experience perspective, as well as summaries of generic research I performed online. For professional advice and training seek assistance from a qualified provider.