836: Scott Lyons | Overcoming an Addiction to Drama

25:30My whole sensory system is more attuned to the next beep or the next trauma or the next stressor. And if I'm looking for it, I will find it. And if I don't find it, I feel out of sync with the world. So I'm going to go seek it or create it so I feel a sense of being in sync or belonging in the world. And that's what happens in addiction to drama. On the inside, it feels like we're out of sync because we are. Our sensory systems have morphed due to whatever early traumas. And so my reality is actually different from someone else's reality who hasn't gone through trauma. Well, first of all, now it all makes sense, right?

26:12Because if your reality is different, then of course you believe the drama that you've created is real justified yeah justified yeah that makes me have a little bit more empathy for these folks because they're not just doing something where they're like i'm going to screw everything up no for them this is the reality and they're probably wondering why i'm not more worked up about things and more empathetic right towards their which just reinforces the idea of them being a victim yeah like why me uh why aren't you validating my issues yeah the same guy that uh that i was just talking about this sort of drama queen.

26:42I eventually just had to cut contact with this guy for various reasons. But you're still going to send him the book. Yeah, of course. I'll buy a copy and I'll leave it on his porch. The passive aggressive gift book of the year. 100%. Yes, exactly. So a mutual friend of ours, who's also no longer friends with this guy back then said, I don't understand why all my friends cut me off. One of the reasons they're not friends anymore is our mutual friend said, I think there's a learning opportunity here for you because a lot of the situations you're complaining about are of your own making. And instead of going, hmm, I've been friends with these people for a decade and a half.

27:17I should probably take note. It was like, oh, you're the problem now. And then they fired that guy and ended up suing him for some unrelated thing just to sort of be right, if that makes sense. Like, oh, now we have to fire him because he's saying things to me that make me feel unsafe and reexamine my situation in a way that's uncomfortable. He's created a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then even having the lawsuit proves the fact that just how much of a victim he is because there's a defendant and there's a perpetrator in the house. This is also interesting because we had a mediation or an arbitration type situation.

27:53And the lawyer was like, my client's really concerned that this keeps happening. And the mediator's like, but your client filed the suit. So I don't understand. What do you mean your client's concerned that this is negatively blah, blah, blah. Like you filed the suit. Yeah. And the lawyer was like, yeah, you got me on that one. I mean, it was just like, hello, this person was not bothering you and you sued them for nothing out of nowhere. And now you're losing the countersuit. You started that. You punched first. Yeah. What do you mean? Why does this keep happening to me? You're running around punching people.

28:23Yeah. Basically. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. It makes sensation. That's the tagline of the book. It makes sensation. One of the things I wrote from the book was they make the rounds and tell the same story over and over so they can vent continually. I'm like, oh, yeah, check. because each time they do, they get a hit and they get reinforced from the outside through enabling. We don't always think about it as enabling. We think, oh my gosh, I'm here for you. That sucks. That person was such an asshole to you. It's a reinforcement from people on the outside, but really they're enabling it.

28:53They're throwing little logs on that other person's fire and that person is using those logs to continue to fuel themselves in that heightened state. Going back to the carbon monoxide analogy, all the senses form and we are in this constant preparatory stance, this preparatory place for looking for the next drama, the next drama, the next stressor. And it creates a baseline, like a baseline activation. It's their baseline way of operating in the world. They're heightened. They're looking for stressors. Yeah. And if they drop below that, it feels dangerous. Why does it feel dangerous? Yeah. So one of the things that happens with trauma is your barometers of safety get twisted.

29:38And so what it feels like as a kid, even as a young adult or as an adult, when you have had some type of trauma, it's an absolute overwhelm or underwhelm to the nervous system. It's flooding and you feel helpless and it's scary and it's dangerous. And in that moment, it feels like death. Wow. And even a small trauma can feel like death because we feel helpless. And if we don't have the resilience capacity to know that someone will help us, there are tools out there to help us. If we don't inherently know that, it feels like we're going to drown. And so coming into closer contact and relationship with that trauma, which we bottle up, we bottle off, and then we numb around that.

30:24And then we create stressors to avoid making contact with the numbness and the underlying trauma that's there. And the closer we get to it, there's a signal in the brain that says, danger. You're getting too close to death. It doesn't make sense, but that is the primal physiology that we exist in. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Scott Lyons. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell. Introducing your new Dell PC with the Intel Core Ultra Processor. It helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to-do list gets to be a lot. Like organizing your holiday shopping, searching for great holiday deals, customer questions, customers requesting custom things.

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32:54It's not awkward. It's not cheesy. It's not going to make you sort of clench everything up before you do it. It takes about six minutes a day. And many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Once again, you can find the course for free. I don't want your credit card, none of that crap. JordanHarbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Dr. Scott Lyons. It all kind of makes sense. And again, I'm not disclosing this guy's identity, but he was an abused kid. Like there was a whole kind of complicated past to this. And his whole family, his family was very dysfunctional.

33:27They were also, when I read the book, I was like, the family did this too. They would do something where they would call him and say, there's an emergency. You need to fly home from California. Your grandmother is dying. Yeah. And he would book like a seven gazillion dollar flight to fly home from LA and go back to Michigan. He'd be like, where's grandma? She's in the living room watching TV. What do you mean? She bonked her knee on the cabinet getting ready in the morning. Yeah. But you called me and said there was an emergency and she was in the hospital. Yeah, we didn't need to take her to the hospital.

33:58She's got a bruise on her knee. So even he would be like, what the hell? My family's insane. But then he would turn around and do something kind of similar and he wouldn't see it. It's modeled. It's a modeling that he inherited into his nervous system and is acting from what he learned. After reading this book, I have way more sympathy or sympathy slash empathy for what he was going through because I realized, one, he couldn't stop it. Two, it was ruining his life. Three, he'd never had a chance because his whole family, he probably grew up doing this since age five. That was their currency of love.

34:26Yeah, it was. It was intensity. And, you know, when you grow up in a chaotic household, you know, our primal needs as a kid, even as an adult, is to be seen and heard, to feel safe. And so you will go to whatever extremes, intensity, shouting is needed to pierce through the chaos of a family household to be seen and heard, even if it's burning down the house. It's sad because I would imagine this also, of course, infects your romantic relationships. I'm guessing you can't be in a relationship with a normal person most of the time unless they're willing to enable this. Well, the relationships, you know, like, you know, that intensity that happens in the beginning of a relationship.

35:05Yeah, you're like super in love and everything is turned up to 11. Yeah, they thrive in that. And the moment it becomes settled, they start to create tension. They start to find the issues in the relationship. They start to destroy the relationship because outside of that 11 means that you're probably going to start to feel closeness. Yeah, oof. I can't have that. No. I mean, and a lot of us have that. It's not like just some extreme, like, you know, you're addicted to drama, but there, again, there's a lot of ways in which we get in our own way of intimacy because intimacy leads to a sense of connection and vulnerability.

35:47And vulnerability leads us closer to feeling more of what we may not have had a chance to experience in our lives. The analogy you give in the book is blowing out a birthday candle with a fire hose, the disproportionate response to stimulus. I think for a lot of people, it might be hard to define drama. It's like porn. It's like you know it when you see it, but if you ask somebody to define it, it gets hard. Pardon the pun.

36:13But then I think over a pattern, feel free to steal that. I feel like you like that one. The idea is that - I'll use it when I'm on Good Morning America. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. Yeah, I feel like that's the perfect place. Live TV is the perfect place to experiment with something like this. I'm wondering now why, maybe that's why they don't want me on live TV as much. Huh. Yeah, there's a great, there's a really good way to never get invited back to the Today Show. And that's one of them. Oh, have you done that? A long, well, I haven't done that particular faux pas on live TV, but I've definitely done stuff where they're like, don't worry, we have a seven second delay.

36:45And I'm like, oh, what should I not have said that? What did you do? You know, it's so long now. I don't remember. It was really minor, actually. I think I said crap. And they're like, oh, we don't really like that. Oh. Yeah. It was, I mean, this is, you know, housewife TV. Yeah. So they don't really want. They don't want. This is also 10 plus years ago. So maybe now you can get away with that. Back then they were like, the other thing was I kept shifting in my chair and trying to adjust because I was wearing tight pants. And I had like, you know, what happens when you wear pants that are a little too tight?

37:13I remember being like, oh, I hope that's not a problem. They're like, don't worry. We have a delay. And we just kept switching cameras when you do that. Because I mean, you can't, you're sitting on a stool with your crotch out. It's really obvious when you're like rearranging things. Yeah. Many years ago when I was in the arts, I was on a live radio show. I was singing one of my songs for my show, which was, you know, pretty provocative. And they asked me to call, is it the FCC? Yeah. Yeah, the FCC and ask for what are the swear words I can't say. And I had called them and I said, you know, I have this song, you know, there's some words in there I need to know.

37:47And they wouldn't, they said, we can't actually tell you what the words are, but you can ask us. What? Which I loved. So I spent maybe the next half an hour coming up with the most provocative phrases I could possibly come up with. I was in my 20s. I was a provocateur, part of the addiction to drama. Sure. And that was probably one of the funniest times of my life. I mean, I was in a creative high of coming up with the most insane phrases just to see what this individual would say. Oh, my gosh. And she was trying so hard not to laugh. Yeah, I'm sure. She was, bless her heart, wherever she is right now.

38:25She's probably telling that story on a podcast somewhere. If you're listening, please let me know. I will send you a signed copy of my book. There you go. The real prize. Drama keeps us from feeling our real feelings, like turning up the volume on music so you don't hear the screaming coming from inside your soul, essentially. And I love, I don't know if you wrote that or if that's just something I put in my notes, but creating that numbness to what's going on in your life really does seem like the key. You start to really understand people who are addicted to drama when you think of it this way.

38:55And you start to go, huh, what is this person's life like? If you've ever dated anybody who's addicted to drama, I feel like you can never really get to know them. Because there's, first of all, something's always going on and coming up. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. They don't even know them. No. You can't crack the shell. Nope. You're just always kind of bouncing off the outside of this person. Yeah. Because that's what feels safe, by the way. I guess that's what feels safe. Yeah. What I also noticed, and maybe this is a mix of things, there's a couple of women that come to mind with the drama thing.

39:23They would always talk to me like I knew the people that they were talking about. And I always found that so mystifying. And I saw this as a sign of somebody who is not a good person to date where they'd say, oh, Jordan, I can't talk right now because Tom is doing. And I'm like, who's Tom? I don't know who that is. And whenever I sense that weird, you should know everybody who's involved in my life thing, I'm always like, this is a weird signal to run, but I can't put my finger on why. It's definitely a red flag. It's because they project that the movie of their life, everyone is in the know of.

39:57Yeah. What's going on there? Because I always found that to be a red flag. And I'm like, I don't get it. And I've seen this before and I'm out. So they are watching their life from the outside. So they expect everyone else is. That dissociated connection to their life. it's like watching yourself, understanding yourself from a disconnected perspective. There's a projection then that says, oh, everyone else must be watching me the way I'm watching me. That fills in a lot of blanks. And the other thing I noticed about these same folks was they would talk about people they met three days ago, like they've been friends for a decade.

40:31And then you're talking to those people because you're in some group thing. And I'm like, so how long have you known Meg? Oh yeah, we met on Tuesday. Wait a minute. She's talking about you to me, like you're this protective auntie who is always trying to vet guys she's dating. And they're like, oh, because they frigging met at the mall on Tuesday and it's Friday. Yeah. It's so weird. Intense beginnings, extreme endings of relationships, not a lot in between. And there's another piece of it too, when you talk about like someone, they're talking to you about someone you don't even know, is did you ever feel pulled into their kind of tornado of chaos?

41:08I'm trying to remember because it's been so long, but I don't know. I'd be making something up if I said yes or no. Feel free to make it up. Yeah, yeah. It's your show. It's my show. It's your show. Do whatever the hell you want. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's one of the symptoms. It's like those of us on the outside of someone addicted to drama, we feel pulled into their chaos. It is actually true. They are pulling you into their vortex in order to feel a sense of belonging, to feel connected because that is the only safe space. And if I'm in this constant, remember we talked about like my reality is different than yours.

41:43And the underlying experience in me is there's a constant dis-ease if I'm addicted to drama. There's a constant dis-ease. There's a constant sense of being out of sync with the world. There's an anxiousness that's present. There's an urgency that is constant. And if I can bring you into my tornado and there's a contagious response, you're now feeling anxious. You're now feeling heightened. You're now feeling that extreme sort of stress response. Then we're in sync. And that is the closest sense of belonging someone addicted to drama can get. Is this why at the end of dealing with somebody like that, you go home and you go, what the hell is going on?

42:23What happened? Yeah. If you've ever left an experience with someone and you're like, whoa, what just happened? How did we get from there to there? Congratulations. You're dealing with someone who has some level of an addiction to drama. That makes sense. Because I remember talking with my parents, for example, after dealing with somebody like this, and they're like, my mom would be like, I'm confused. So he's mad about what? And you explain it, and it's like, that can't be the reason that they walked out on their employer and threw a plate across the break room. Yeah, good point. Why would that be the thing that happened?

42:55And why am I now involved in this? Yeah, that's a good point. I think it's easy to get sucked into this because you don't notice it. Yeah. And here's where the other piece that I was talking about contagious is called stress contagion. It's an actual physiological process. So evolutionarily speaking, I'm running from a dinosaur going back a few years and you're in the cave that I'm about to run into and you see my pupils, you see my breath, you see the sort of tone of my muscles. you don't know the story. You shouldn't need to know the story. So you have a response immediately. Your physiology goes, oop, we are receiving this.

43:35We're picking it up because there are receptors that are geared towards monitoring someone else's stress response. And you go, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I better get stressed up too in order to deal with what might be happening. And then the dinosaur comes and we're able to both keep running. If you don't have that response, You're going to get eaten by that dinosaur while I'm running away. Interesting. Okay. I mean, humans never existed on the same planet as dinosaurs at the same time. I know. You know, we'll let that slide. Well, thank you, historian. Yeah. You won't let that slide.

44:07What are you, a paleontologist now? I get it. I don't need to ruin - Thanks for making me feel stupid. Yeah. I don't need to ruin the metaphor here. In front of millions of people. That's fine. Nobody listens to this podcast. That's what I always say. I'm just kidding. Being consumed with the news, being consumed with other people's lives, that was something you mentioned in the book. Yeah. That last part seems key. Yeah. That they respond as if they are part of this. Yeah. I'm trying to remember who this was, and I guess it's not really important, but I have noticed that there are a lot of, for example, the accounts are people that are obsessed with reality television.

44:37Yeah. There's a lot of people that write about this, talk about this, do social media as if they are, let's say, friends with the Kardashians, and they're just right adjacent to this thing that's happening. And I'm thinking, you've never met these people in your life, and you never will. Why do you, who cares? And why are you talking about them? Why are you even talking? Yeah. They're your friends. I mean, and that's a huge difference from 10 years ago. Yeah. Where we had gossip columns and, you know, the beginning notes of reality television. And now every celebrity is their own reality TV show on social media.

45:08And so we're constantly exposed to the world of gossip and heightened realities that aren't actually reality. They are extreme versions of that person's life. Yeah. Is there a world in which people don't want things to work out for them so that they have the drama? I mean, it seems like that's the basic. Yeah. Jealousy, you know, is just a fundamental human emotion where we want the worst for people because we can't handle how we feel in relation to them. It's like crisis hopping. Crisis hopping. I talk about in the book of luck. Yeah. Crisis tourism. Jumping from one topic of crisis to the next and never actually being able to settle.

45:48Because again, settling would bring me below that threshold of stress baseline and bring me closer to the underlying trauma, which is dangerous. Yeah. This is more than just a need for attention though, right? I think I want to clarify that. Yeah. It's hard to be on the outside of those who are addicted to drama. So we come up with a conclusion that they're just seeking attention. If they could actually receive attention, maybe that would be true. But they can't actually receive the attention that they might be seeking. They can't receive validation. Like if you said to that guy you worked with, yeah, that sounds like a really painful experience.

46:24He's not going to actually receive that to settle him. He's going to use that as a log to keep him going. That's a very different thing. When we use emotions to keep us revved up versus emotions to help us process something and settle us back down. Is this not exhausting to be around then? Yeah, 100 % it's exhausting. And you will actually go through withdrawal symptoms from it. Not only the person addicted to drama goes through withdrawal symptoms, the come down from the catharsis, the drama explosion, but you as having been pulled into it, as having a contagious stress response, you get that full cascade, that hit of stress, of cortisol, adrenaline, all of it, and then you're going to crash.

47:07Those on the outside feel that as exhaustion. Those on the inside, those who are with an addiction to drama, feel that crash and it is experienced as boredom. And so they're going to need the next hit to keep them going, to feel back more, to feel more alive, to feel that battery pack of stress. This all makes so much sense. I always thought it was a mean-spirited thing when he would create problems, but now it's 100 % obvious that he was just addicted to it. There would be times where it's like, I remember one time in particular, we were getting audited by the IRS, but we had a lawyer handling it.

47:39It was not a big deal. It was just like, hey, we need all these records. The day I was flying to Australia, he was like, emergency. We need every credit card transaction, da, da, da, da. And we sort of knew he was doing this because he did it every time we packed for it. Every time we were going to go on a vacation, there would be something that we had to handle urgently. Yeah. So my wife just called the lawyer and was like, how urgent is this whole thing? And he's like, oh, yeah, like in the next three months. So we were like, cool, we'll handle it in the next three months. and then it was like, no, we need it now.

48:09And my wife was like, tell him we'll do it and then just don't do it because we know that he's just doing this so that we have a miserable flight. That's what we thought. We thought he wanted us to have a bad flight or a bad time. And now after reading the book, it's like, no, he just was bored. His sense of timing, don't forget, is urgency. There is no slowness that's allowed. And so even something that is three months from now feels immediate. And so you get bulldozed because of that. We really thought, talk about trying to put yourself as the center of attention. We really thought like he's just trying to ruin our vacation.

48:42This is so typical of him. But now I realize, well, he can't help himself. Like this is his operating system. This is the operating system. Absolutely. It makes me have much more sympathy for him because at first it was like, why is this guy always doing this stuff to other people? It's really, it's the team hated it. Obviously our staff could not stand to work with him. He had high turnover on his side of the business. Surprise, surprise. eyes and now i'm thinking oh you actually you have like a disability yeah you can't have normal interactions with people relationships with people he didn't have so much choice how is having sympathy for him in this moment like is that is that relieving it actually feels pretty nice because it's like oh it wasn't it was nice to read this and go so he wasn't just bullying me and my wife or and all of our team for the hell of it like he couldn't he just couldn't do it he He didn't have another way to interact with these people.

49:31So there's a way the stories you formed around it got to release a little. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And there's like a real healing in that, I imagine, of not having to hold on to the stories that you created. It does make me feel dumb for having put up with all of it for so long. But I also. When someone tells you there was no dinosaurs and people. Not that dumb. That, I mean, that's really dumb. No, no. Like, hello, sixth grade science. No, I'm just kidding. But it does make me think like, wow, I put up with that for so long. Now, granted, you do crap in your 20s. You're in a business with somebody.

50:09You let stuff slide that you wouldn't. If him and I were just buddies, I would have cut the cord a long time ago. But we had a successful business. So it's like, what are you going to do? Yeah. And at the moment, it was like, well, I have no choice. And also, it was like, well, for years, I was like, wow, this guy has terrible luck. Yeah. Look at all the bad things that happened to him. I just, I'm lucky. I don't have all these problems. That's such an interesting point. It's like, there's always something happening to that person. And there are circumstances like they can't, you know, control the fact that they got into a car accident and the next day they got robbed.

50:40But it's the response to it. It's the inability to get out of those experiences. They get sort of engrossed in them and it becomes all that they are and all that occupies their attention. You mentioned the withdrawal, that stuff, it seems like it makes it harder to get away from this. The relationships I'm imagining can never really be stable until they get therapy for this kind of stuff, right? Because you said before, as soon as they settle in, they start to destroy the relationship. And that is probably going to happen with every relationship that they're in, wouldn't it? Absolutely. Oh man.

51:11That's another thing that makes me feel sad because there were many times where he would get a really nice girl and I thought like, oh, things are great now. Because finally she's grounding him and that didn't really, the breakups were extreme oh yeah it was wild my breakups are always like you know you moved i moved or like you know this isn't really gonna work out and it's like oh let's try oh let's not okay well bye there's not an ex that i would have to cross the street to good for you deal with wow i would probably be happy to see most of them honestly yeah many of my exes i'm like hey what's going on i see you had a new job that must be awesome and they're like yeah and it's just polite sort of like arm's length, whatever.

51:51For him, it's like, you have to not go to this thing because this person is in the same room as you. And if she sees you, you're going to lose an eye because of the way you handled that situation. Damn. Yeah. It was always like, holy smokes. Yeah. And I remember seeing some of his exes back when we were in college and she'd be like, I just want you to know, you don't have to worry about coming to my bar where I work. You and I are cool, but I cannot, if he comes in, and I'm like, wow. And this is like, I didn't hear about what happened between you two. And it's, I heard a different version of the story, I think, or whatever it is.

52:27Probably wildly different versions where the friend who was more addicted to drama was the victim. Yeah, a hundred percent. And would find all of these facts that could be just, and justify the victimness by these just cherry picking everything that could possibly support their belief system that they're the victim. I just remember a couple of occasions where I'd be like, no, you don't understand. What happened was he brought this other guy to the party and that guy started the fight and then he just went home and he was kind of drunk, so he turned his phone off and she's like, oh, I see we're gonna have to have a conversation about what actually happened.

53:01And I'd be like, oh, yeah, maybe we do because that's what I heard. And it's like, oh, that's not the whole thing, man. That's not really what happened. No. It was a big mess. But most of us do that. We filter out the information that doesn't confirm our own experience. It's a confirmation bias. It seems almost like narcissism, right? Because everything revolves around you, but it's not quite the same thing, huh? Yeah. There's an aspect of narcissism because from the inside, you feel trapped in yourself. You can't actually make connection with other people. You can't reach out to someone else.

53:36And so it is self-centered. It is self-focused because there isn't the capacity to be an intimate relationship. But also you can never really admit that you're the one who made a mistake or something, right? There's a lot of deflection or projection involved. There's a lot of strategies to reinforce the belief system or reinforce the reality. Because we all know that there's nothing more chaotic or frustrating or dangerous to some degree than a skewed reality. It feels cacophonic. It feels crazy making if our reality is challenged. And so that's for everyone. whether you have an addiction to drama or not.

54:13If you said the sky is blue and I said, maybe, maybe not. I think there's actually a bit of green in it. It's confronting. So saying to someone, whoa, I get that you responded this way, but it actually, this isn't what was actually here. This isn't what is in reality. And they will go to whatever lengths they need to, to protect themselves and protect their reality. In the book, there's a drama triangle. Can you go over this a little bit? I thought this was quite interesting, especially because even if you're not the one who's involved in the drama in a way that you think is, is you're not the source.

54:46Yeah. You might be kind of a part of it. Yeah. Like I was, and I, I, I never would have thought, oh, I'm a part of this problem. Yeah. I was just kind of like, oh yeah, you know, he's my roommate. So, uh, so you mean like how you're kind of being part of someone's story, you're helping them fulfill their story, their belief system that they're the. Yeah. I mean, you have persecutor, rescuer, and victim. Maybe that's The drama triangle, that drama triangle. Yeah. Essentially, there are different roles we take. We kind of filter through, I'm the perpetrator, I'm the hero, I'm the victim. These roles that one takes keeps them out of actually being, again, in relationship to themselves.

55:23If I'm the hero, like I'm causing trouble, I'm stirring shit up in the office, for example. I'm the one gossiping. And then there's tension that happens and I come in and I'm the hero. So I've created the drama and then I've been able to position myself as the hero or people come at me at work because I stirred all this crap. I was gossiping and suddenly I'm the victim. Or I can absolutely be the prosecutor where it's like I stir them, the stir the drama, I'm creating the gossip. People are mad at each other. And I say something like, hey, creating this tension in the workplace is wrong. You're really harming other people.

56:04So there are different roles I can take to sort of justify what I'm stirring. Does a lot of this depend on environment? You talk about the rat paradise experiment. Speak to that a little bit. I thought this, at the very least, the rat experiment was interesting. Yeah. So that comes from understanding a new model of addiction. So in previous experiments, you put a rat in a cage where they were alone, and you gave them the option of water or water with heroin in it. They're going to go and they're going to party with the heroin and likely die. Like there's a high morbidity rate. That was our understanding of addiction for a long time.

56:41Oh, they just they're genetically predisposed. It's just about the genetics. They got a brain disease and they just go for the heroin. They get a taste of it. And it's actually just about the drugs. Then later, there was more experiments to go, hey, what would happen if we created a environment that felt really good for the rats? like a park, a playground with other rats and toys and really good food, what would happen in terms of their choice making? And what they found was when there was like a safe environment to which they could play and grow in, they didn't ever choose the heroin water. And if they did, they didn't go back for much.

57:24There was little if no death rates to those rats from the heroin overdose. And so it really demonstrated that the issue was not in the drug. Just like the issue is not necessarily in the drama, what was the circumstances that made them get attached to it? What was the purpose that attachment was serving, which is to essentially fill in the gap of a lot of void, emptiness, pain, trauma. And we know that safe environments, which may or may not have happened for us in our own childhood will create the circumstances that allow us the choices we will make or the voids we will or will not need to fill.

58:06Got it. Okay. So as part of treating people who have an addiction to drama, I assume you have them attempt to set up a safe environment somehow? Yeah. Well, this is the tricky part, right? Because if we're talking about how a safe environment and being around people, a sense of belonging, is really what we're talking about, creates the conditions to feel better, to feel supported, to fill themselves up with something better than the void. Then they can get out of the addiction. But the problem is, is they keep burning down all the relationships. They keep destroying the ecosystems to which they enter into.

58:42This is the challenge. This is the problem with the cycles. They keep destroying that which could support their healing process. I mean, as a therapist, and I've talked to a lot of other therapists, these particular individuals are challenging in therapy because it's like the moment you start to validate them, they don't take it in. They only want to hear that they're right, that their reality is right. And if you start to challenge it to be able to slow the thinking down, to slow the addiction down, to be able to get to underneath, they'll attack you. Not physically, but they'll say like, oh, you're always judging me.

59:17You're always, you don't believe in me. And they destroyed that relationship that could offer them the guidance in towards healing. It's a long process of building a lot of trust. You mentioned that sometimes the drama doesn't always have to be extreme, right? Sometimes it looks just like ADHD. You mentioned your friend who you visited and she just starts scrolling on her phone. Tell me about this. Yeah. I mean, wherever we can get a stress hit, we'll take it. And so it might be scrolling through the internet. It might be just listening to a couple of friends gossip. It doesn't have to be this extreme of getting into a massive fight with someone.

59:55There's all different entry points or devices of drama. That's a funny story where my friend essentially was, you know, she just had a kid and we were catching up and she got pulled into the rabbit hole of the internet and was just scrolling and like going mindless, but also getting, you know, having some, it's not like we're just mindless. it's we're getting entrapped in social media is that you call like revving where you're just juicing your engine up revving is definitely juicing your engines and so you might stop and look at something of like oh a picture of an ex or like someone else's story or even a nice emotion a nice experience on someone it's still you're gonna have a reaction to it and in that story i i couldn't get her attention and i was telling her a story about what was going on with my family and so i just turned on some music and did a striptease to get her attention as one does As one does.

1:00:46Dr. Scott Lyon, your daddy issues, everybody, on full display. Yes, you're enabling. Yeah. That's really funny. I'll have to remember that trick. Yeah, no, it works. It definitely... It's a good way to get kicked out of an airport lounge, though. Is it? I've gotten invited into airport lounge just because of that. Surprise, surprise. All right. Depends on the airline, I guess. Wow. But that's... Right. That goes back to that threshold statement again. It's like, it takes that much more to pull someone's focus. This is a bigger issue around media and the ways in which there's an up-leveling of capturing and maintaining your attention through heightened stimulus, through violence, through sexual innuendos, through intense language, all of these ways that essentially say, we're going to capture your attention so we can sell to you.

1:01:42this is the jordan harbinger show with our guest dr scott lyons we'll be right back if you like this episode of the show i invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do which is take a moment and support one of our sponsors all the deals discount codes and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals you can also always search for any sponsor using the ai chatbot on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash ai thanks so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Scott Lyons. It's wild though, that she's so sucked into whatever Instagram that you're like, all right, guess I'm taking my pants off now.

1:02:23Like that. You couldn't just say, Hey, Rachel, Rachel, I'm remember we were talking about something you had to be like, and I'm naked. Right. I mean, that's just, I mean, imagine what you, the amount of force you need to pull this woman away from her phone. Well, most of us, I mean, like if you just walk down New York city streets, it's like how many people are bumping into other people because they're stuck in their phone. They're not noticing the world anymore. It's a little dangerous in New York and fall through a fricking manhole. But that just proves like the technology and the engineers of that technology to capture your attention in this attentional economy are proficient at their job.

1:02:59Sure. Yeah. You mentioned September 11th and how the drama affected people around you. Tell me about that. Yeah. So it was my first day of school as an undergrad and I lived a mile away just by, are you familiar with New York? I am. Yeah. Okay. So it was in Washington Square Park where I was living. I went to NYU. So I was walking to my first day of school and saw a plane go into a building. My first thought was like, whoa, that's an expensive movie set. Yeah. Because there was It looks so real. It looks so, I was like, that's so real. Incredible. Yeah. There's no way that could happen. Like my, right.

1:03:33Your brain isn't computing that this is a real thing. No. And then I got to school and then we learned what happened and we all know what happens in terms of the second building, et cetera, and the falling. And, um, the phones weren't working for one. So I couldn't actually reach my family. And so they had no idea. They actually believed that I was in the building, even though they knew cognitively, You know, like I was a mile away, but to them, it was all the same. And they watched the news over and over again. Part, you know, part of their fear response and their own catastrophizing was like, we're going to get the news that my son was in the building.

1:04:12And they watched over and over and over again, like the videos that were coming in of the plane going into the building. And, you know, I just want to give a little trigger warning for those who are listening. this is intense and so i just want to you know the trauma therapist no no it's fair take a breath if you need it or pause the pause the audio and i i called my parents when i was finally able to get through to my parents which was i don't know 10 hours after the initial event and they said we're coming to get you your dad is already has already made it to chicago basically wow in his car.

1:04:48We're coming to get you. You're coming home. And I said, no, no, I'm safe. I feel safe. I feel fine. The event is over. It ended 10 hours ago. And in their mind, it hadn't ended because they kept rewatching it over and over again, getting that hit every time it was displayed on the television. And their physiology tricked them into essentially thinking it had not ended because I didn't watch the news. I wasn't going to go rewatch that. I lived it. And I also experienced something remarkable, which was community in New York City. People would walk up to you on the street and just give you a hug.

1:05:28It was wild. Especially in New York. I mean, all places to have that happen. I was taking a bus the next day and this woman turned to me and she just said, did you lose anyone? Wow. And we just gave each other a hug and we cried. It would never happen in New York any other time. No. And my parents didn't have any of that. All they had was the constant exposure of the images. Right. The replays. The replay. And they were glued to the television. And there was no balance between what they were taking in and adapting and moving all that energy, all that stress energy. It was like sitting heavy in them and overwhelming them to a point that they couldn't even coordinate or organize or even understand.

1:06:11Where I was on the street, I was like moving around. I would walk all the way uptown and then back downtown just to do something. And we know in trauma work, especially, overwhelm is like the sense that the experience just floods you. And then you don't have the ability to mobilize, to motor that energy out. And that's what gets like stuck in you. And I can explain the physiology more of that if need be, but it's that stuckness that starts to slow your whole system down. It has a lot of different causational effects. If we think about your nervous system as a bank, you get$100. For every trauma, it's like$10 that is no longer in the bank to be used towards adapting to something else.

1:06:57Then that adds up over time, and then you just become less resilient and efficient. And all of a sudden, your entire bank account is depleted and you are not adapting functionally to the world anymore. Yikes. I know a lot of families and groups, they create or cause drama to bond with each other. That's like my friend's family growing up that I just mentioned, or a former friend, I should say. That was just the way they related to each other was like, let's cause some shit and stir it up and then make everybody's life upended as a result of it. drama bonding gives a false sense of belonging. But is it a false sense though?

1:07:31How is it a false sense of belonging? Yeah, I can deconstruct that. So let's just define drama bonding. It's essentially when one person, and we can give lots of examples in our culture in the last many years, including trolling culture. Trolling culture. I never even heard that, but I know exactly what it is somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Where it's like, oh, we find something that other people are already a little activated around. And so we find something that there's already a little stoked about, a little flame, because we're a little stoked too. We find them and then we're able to bond together. We're able to connect around what we're both having a little issue about.

1:08:08And then all of a sudden, we create a bigger flame than what was initially there. We're engulfed in that flame. So they're drama bonding. They're utilizing each other's experiences in life or what they're already kind of preemptively disturbed about or stressed about to connect. And then that builds something bigger than what was originally there. I give the example in the book. I'm changing the names for a minute. Sure. Then the actual person. So I was at a family friend's house and I was with my mom. And the kid came home who lived in that house and shared with us a story of this math teacher.

1:08:47You know, she's a teenager. And she's like, oh, he's so unfair. He gave me a C. I deserved an A. I worked so hard in studying, da, da, da, da, da. And I know because I offered to help. Oh, that's funny. Front row seat. Front row seat. And, you know, I did my like, you know, friend is a therapist thing. So it's like, you know, empathize with her. That sounds really hard and frustrating. I know how it goes, da, da, da, da, da. And then she disappeared. She went downstairs and we heard yelling. And she was on a Zoom call with all her friends who are in that class who also maybe didn't get A's or were like just supporting her and then but have also been frustrated with that teacher.

1:09:28And they were drama bonding. Kids use Zoom? That's what I'm taking from this. Are you sure it was in FaceTime? Wait, that's what you're taking from this story? Kids use Zoom? Yeah. For fun? What a miserable. I don't know. They learned it in the pandemic and now that's how they talk. That's so funny. I had no idea. And you could hear them screaming and getting louder and just like, you know, drama bonding. He did this. And then I heard this. And I heard he, you know, like kills his plants. And they're just making up shit at this point because they're drama bonding. It doesn't involve truth. It involves a way of creating more stress response.

1:10:02And it feels good. They feel alive. They feel connected. And they feel a false sense of belonging, which I'll get back to in a second. Then she comes upstairs and she's fuming. She's at a 12. And when she came home from school, she was at like a five or six. She is more heightened from drama bonding than she actually was from the response. From the event. And I tried to intervene. And that was probably the worst mistake I could have made, especially with a teenager. And she was like, you don't ever believe me. You're not helpful. Why are you always against me? You don't know anything. You're not a good therapist.

1:10:39And my mom leans over to me and she's like, just ride it. don't say anything. This is what's going to happen next. She's going to finish yelling at you. She's going to go have one more Zoom call. They're going to rile each other up. She's going to do some crazy cathartic response. She's going to cry and throw shit. And then she'll come back. And it was like nothing ever happened. And I was like, no way. Absolutely. I was like, I'm a therapist. I know how this goes. Right. Yeah. Like, mom, calm down. I have a degree. Mom, I got like degrees up on walls and stuff. Yeah. And my mom was right. It is exactly what happened.

1:11:16She had to go through this whole cycle, this explosion, this downward spiral. And then it was like kind of nothing happened. Yeah. I'm fine now. I'm fine. I don't know what you're talking about. It was fine. It was just a math whiz. Yeah. No big deal. And my mom turned to me and she was like, teenagers invented addiction to drama. Yeah. They probably did. Yeah. Why don't you write about that in your book. Yeah, throw that anecdote in there. So that's the drama bonding. And the false belonging is that it doesn't, it's not sustainable. They're connected in the moment, that heightened moment of stress, but not necessarily after because they can't sustain connection.

1:11:51And that's why it's false belonging, because it's not sustained. Okay, interesting. The book does have a lot of strategies for people who are addicted to drama. One thing that you wrote that I thought was really interesting, you said emotions are meant to be momentary. Any emotion that's longer than it needs to be becomes a story. Tell me what that means because I was like, oh my God, that's brilliant. I'm writing that shit down. Yeah. So emotions, like a wave of an emotion lasts about 30 to 90 seconds. Anything after that is the story we're feeding to maintain it. We're trying to keep that emotion active and we're feeding off the emotion as opposed to processing or metabolizing it.

1:12:29We're not letting it go because there's some belief system. If we let it go, we'll be victims. If we let it go, we won't be safe. Whatever it is, why we won't let go of the emotion. A wave of an emotion, and we might have multiple waves of sadness, multiple waves of joy, is in movement. It lasts 30 to 90 seconds before the next sort of wave of something, or it might be a different emotion that could come after. But certainly, you know, for those who are addicted to drama, they are, they're feeding off the emotion and trying to do whatever they can and adding all these narratives that never let them process it through.

1:13:05What do we do if we find ourselves sucked into the whirlwind of somebody else's drama? What's sort of the practical exercise of, okay, I need to unplug from this, but not find myself suffering from withdrawal and going back. Basically, how do I get out of the toxicity? Yeah. How do I get out of there? And of course, if you're the one who's addicted, that's one thing. But if you're just near someone who's addicted, it's probably a little easier to get away from them, I would hope. Yeah. If you're the bystander, the one who's been dealing with secondhand drama. Yeah. So the first is like ground yourself, create a little boundary.

1:13:35Imagine, I mean, I, you know, for those of you who like imagery, you might create a little like wall or a little bubble as I like to think about it, a protection and then ground yourself, take some breaths, feel your feet on the floor. If you're sitting, feel your butt on the chair, get back into your own body because what they've done is pulled you out of your own body. They've pulled you out of your own presence and into their drama. It's again, their way of being able to feel connection and belonging, false belonging. So come back to yourself, check in, just even asking yourself, what am I feeling?

1:14:08So that you're separating yourself from the bigness of their feelings. You know, sometimes it is really hard. I'll be honest, even as a therapist, as someone who's gone through all this, who teaches people, there's sometimes still where someone's pull, someone's tornado vortex is so strong, especially if they're kind of attacking you and you want to justify it, what happened. It might take a couple of times of keep coming back to the image of the boundary, keep coming back to feeling your body, bring your attention to somewhere else. Okay, I'm looking around the room here and I'm seeing the color red, the color white.

1:14:42I'm seeing the color of your eyes, your shirt, whatever I can do to shift my attention away from them, even if I can't bring it back to myself yet. Interesting. Is there mindfulness? Mindfulness. Yeah. That's interesting that that's the antidote, but it also makes sense because if you're getting swept up in something, the antidote to that is to unsweep. Yeah. To grab onto something. Yeah. And it's the metaphors work, right? It's a whirlwind. Well, what are you going to do? Grab onto something stable. Yeah. Like the chair. Anchor yourself. Anchor yourself. Yeah. It seems like a lot of the problem with being addicted to this stuff is, do these people know who they are without the drama?

1:15:17No. It seems like the identity is kind of wrapped up in all this. The identity is absolutely part of this. You know, I often ask clients who are dealing with this, who are you if you're not important? Yeah, like what is all the suffering you're doing, giving to you, doing for you? Who are you if you're not the victim? Yeah. Who are you if you're not in a state of suffering? Who are you, et cetera? And these are hard questions because they don't know, but they're questions as an invitation to start to find out. And it takes a lot of time for those addicted to drama to recognize, to even be aware of the pattern is happening.

1:15:53They need at least a little bit of space, a little witness to be able to go, whoa, I think I might have just created more of an issue than what was needed. I think that reaction wasn't as big as it needed to be in order to get what I wanted. How do we know if we're the person who's addicted to drama? Because I think a lot of folks will be like, no, my stuff is real. I mean, that's what we covered earlier in the show, right? Are there sort of telltale signs like, fine, I sort of created this if I'm being honest with myself. And then I definitely wanted to post it on Instagram and complain. You know, is that other sort of obvious signs that were the issue?

1:16:28Yeah. I mean, if it's like, you know, do you vent constantly? Do you find yourself changing the stories? Do you find that wherever you go, there's always something that's wrong or happening? Do you find yourself like believing the other shoe will always drop? That no matter how good things are, something bad is going to happen. Is it hard to like soak in and marinate in the good of life? Do you find yourself crisis hopping? Like all of these things start to bring some awareness. You're not going to have the awareness in a cycle of drama. If you're in it, you will have no idea that that's what you're doing.

1:17:04The best we can do is start to interrupt it in the beginning, in the revving phase. I see. When we start getting those hits of stress response, when we start pulling things in before we get into a full state of disorganized activation or disorganized stress response. Getting away from this pattern is tough. And I know this because when I ended my friendship with the person who was also sort of the addicted to drama. My wife for a while who worked with all of us, she'd be like, why are you doing that? Oh, so-and-so does that. And I realized like, oh my gosh, I totally got this pattern from him.

1:17:37Not that I was causing drama, but I would vent a lot. And it was almost like the dopamine hit or the whatever of having crises fall in my lap every third day that were totally manufactured. It's almost like that was gone and I needed to fill it with something. I wasn't causing problems, but man, was I making mountains out of molehills. My wife would be like, chill out, man. Who cares? We just booked the flight for an hour later, like calm down. And I'd go like, what is wrong with me? You were going through withdrawal. Yeah, I was going through withdrawal. And it's creepy to think about that. Yeah.

1:18:06You had a secondary drama response. You had the contagious experience. It shifted your physiology, not to the same degree as the individual who's addicted to drama, but it shifted your physiology enough to have a tolerance level, to have withdrawal symptoms. And so you filled in the gaps and that happens. Yeah. Here's another weird phenomenon. we noticed that there was another person in our team who, as soon as the crisis stopped coming from one side, they kind of did it. I was like, why is this person acting up all of a sudden? And it was probably the same thing. A little bit of withdrawal because they didn't have to solve an emergency situation.

1:18:42And then they started causing these things all together. We're like, hey, we can just have a smoothly running business. That's allowed to happen. And I remember us all kind of laughing about this because it's like, yeah, maybe we should go ahead and try not having a problem that requires an all hands meeting every three days. How's that for a change? Yeah. You know, and now we now we are like that. But it was just it was almost funny because some days my wife and I'll go, man, it's been a long time since something really bad happened. And we'll laugh and knock on wood. Right. But it's not entirely unreasonable because we really were stuck in that pattern.

1:19:18And everyone around you, whether they like it or not, is really getting sucked into that. Absolutely. And they're going to start to add a little spice when they get bored or when that withdrawal symptoms start to set in because something feels wrong. Because the crisis became status quo. Right. It did feel like something was wrong. What are we missing? Why are we finding the problems anymore? Oh, wait, they're just not there. Yeah. And so we seek or create them. Well, the appendix of the book is full of practical therapy exercises for people to do. Yeah. There's a lot more, but obviously in the interest of time, I got to let you go.

1:19:51But thank you so much. This is really interesting. Thank you for having me. And just I think what we all know as a result of this episode is that dinosaurs and humans were never on the planet at the same time. You're an asshole. Well, we knew that. No surprise there. Thank you. Thank you so much. They weren't? you're about to hear a preview of the jordan harbinger show with a former pimp and how he uses mind manipulation a pimp teaches a woman how to manipulate men so i'm teaching her but what she notices after the teachings or during teachings that hey you're a man too so it's only natural that she works these feminine wiles on you a smart prostitute will make a fool out of a stupid pimp any day.

1:20:36So any vice you may have, they're just hooks. It gets to the point where you become a narcissistic sociopath. You become empty. You become hollow. You experience no joy. You experience no pain. You want no love. You want no hate. You're just an empty room. You can't love money. You can't hate it. See, the puppet master cannot have any interest, any wants, any lust, any desires, any dreams, any goals, nothing. Why? So he can control your lust, your dreams, your desires. You don't do anything so that you can become everything. I have an aversion for women who are six feet tall. And like one woman said, in my heels, I'm six, five, you're five, seven, but I find myself looking up to you.

1:21:18See, I'm 10 feet tall around her and she's all powerful in my presence. So we can't separate anything that was insecure about you that you thought it evaporates. You know, I've been shot twice. I've been stabbed once. Mexican mafia tried to kill me in my sleep. I've done three bank robberies in my life, two on purpose, one by accident. Knowing what I know, the scars I've received, the consequences that I pay, would I do it all again tomorrow? Yeah, I would. It was that good of a ride. I would not be strong enough to resist the allure. It does have a deep psychological effect, and the only way to avoid the effects is to stay there.

1:21:54Even the woman I told you who lives in the$11 million house. We just got quiet one time and I said, you ever miss it? And she said, every day. For a chilling peek into the shadow world and the life and mind of former pimp Mickey Royal, check out episode 548 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Love this episode. Really changed the way I look at people who are overly dramatic. I had no idea why people did that. I thought they just were bored. Turns out there could be a lot more to the story. The book has a lot of practicals on what to do. If you're the dramatic one, there's a lot of little quizzes like if you're addicted to drama, how do you know if somebody else is addicted to drama?

1:22:31How do you set up your boundaries? How to address this in therapy if you need to? How to get somebody else to maybe address this in therapy if they need to? Really, really useful, practical stuff in the book. We didn't have time to go through all that today. I didn't want this to be like a crap load of quizzes for people who may or may not even need that stuff. All things Dr. Scott Lyons will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. You can also ask our AI chat bot if you have questions. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:23:02I've said it once, but I'll say it again. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. The best things that have happened in my life and business have come through my network. That includes you and I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for yourself in our six minute networking course. The course is 100 % free. It's not like a gross thing. It's not schmoozy. I don't want your credit card. You can find it on the Thinkific platform at jordanharbinger.com slash course. It's stuff I wish I knew 20 years ago.

1:23:32I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And when you're in there, you're going to be in smart company. So give it a shot over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. And if you know somebody who is addicted to drama or related or close to somebody addicted to drama, definitely share this episode with them.

1:24:06In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.