The well-meaning health professionals over at NPR are shocked — shocked, I tell you! — at the latest terrifying “trend” among young people they are calling The Choking Game.  The grown-ups have just discovered that kids too young to buy booze are getting a buzz off temporary oxygen deprivation.  I don’t know what Amish farm these folks live on; my friends and I were hyperventilating and asphyxiating ourselves for kicks back in the Sixties. 

According to a study in the journal Pediatrics, around 6 percent middle-schoolers in Portland, Ore., have tried this choking game, a quarter of them five times or more.  The docs are worried that kids will damage their brain cells, or fatally asphyxiate by accident.  One Centers for Disease Control study estimates that 82 young people died from choking (or what the S&M community calls “breath play”) between 1995 and 2007.  Of course, the study relied on media reports that couldn’t be verified independently.

What’s the point of scaring parents nationwide with yet another Your Child Can Die From This Everyday Activity! news story?  It’s not like NPR is trying to sell papers.  Supposedly, they want to help parents and teachers spot kids at risk and head them off at the pass.  We’re now supposed to look for red marks on kids’ necks, and scarves tied around their bedposts (or what the S&M community calls “bo-ring!”)

Here’s why this project is doomed to failure from the outset.  The 6% of pre-teens who are getting high off spinning in circles, holding their breath, or having a friend compress their chest real fast are the same 6% who would otherwise be getting high off inhaling gasoline fumes or White-Out.  That CDC survey stated flat out that “those participating in the game also engaged in other high-risk activities, such as drug and alcohol use.”

That’s because this 6% are addicts-in-training, if not addicts already.  They’re born that way.  How do I know?  Normal kids do not lose consciousness for shits and giggles.  At least, not more than once.  Trust me; if mom and dad are checking your bedroom for scarves on the bedpost when you’re 12, they’ll be checking your sock drawer for weed when you’re 16.

I wager that they will also — and this is where I eventually come around to the topic of love addiction — scratch their heads in wonder at how you got yourself into such a horrible relationship when you’re 21.  Because if it’s so dark and miserable and lonely in your skull that unconsciousness seems like a good alternative when you’re 12, imagine how desperate the need to get out of yourself is when you’re 18.  Or 30. 

The vast majority of people, when you tell them “that’s really bad for you” or “she’s really bad for you” will stop doing that or seeing her.  It may not be easy; it may require one of those pop-psych books about how to break bad habits or make better choices.  And then there are the 6%.  The ones who don’t have a choice.  The ones like me.  The ones for whom taking that drink or hearing that voice is as vital as breathing. 

Or, if your drug of choice is the choking game, not breathing.

Publicly exposing yourself the way I have — the unvarnished truth way, that is, as opposed to the Chat Roulette way — also exposes a gal to certain risks.  When my blog posts get picked up by AOL, for instance, six or seven hundred strangers leave angry comments accusing me of being an immoral, selfish slut.  And calling me “selfish” really wounds me. 

I just remind myself that these are the same women who cheered for the adulteress Carrie Bradshaw to get back together with the adulterous Big, and that they’re probably not mad at me in the first place.  They’re mad at the husband who betrayed them/ mother who abandoned them/ father who broke their heart.  I try not to take it personally.

Most of all, I remind myself that they’re not who I’m cracking my chest open for in the first place.  I’m doing it for people like Miss J of… let’s just say a popular Midwestern state, from whom I received the kind of letter that makes the ALL-CAPS SCREEDS on HuffPo worthwhile.

J. says: I felt compelled to write to tell you I just finished reading LOVE ADDICT from cover to cover for the third time.  It was — I guess you could say a relief to learn that there is a name and explanation for what has been my so-called “lovelife.” 

I am single again at 50.  I have had  four marriages plus countless engagements and exes in my past.  Although I’m not an athlete or rock star, my number of sex partners are closer to the four-digit number than the three digit.  I would never say I was a real beauty — I was just good looking (and sexy) enough to catch almost any eye I wanted, and catch I did.  I was a master at flirting and the high I got from it would match the best high from any drug around.  My friends compared me to Blanche on The Golden Girls and, more recently, Samantha on Sex and the City.  I never apologized for it.  

That was me.  I could tell you about the “love of my life” — he had a wife and three children.  Or the gorgeous lifeguard on St. Thomas, almost 30 years younger than me.  At least I sent that one away!  I have slowed down, a little, but it’s still there.  That never-ending quest for the feeling of infatuation, whether short-lived or not…. there was no name for it - until now.  

I am going to Alaska this summer.  Am I going to stare at Mt. McKinley?  Not so much.  I’m more excited at the prospects of saucy Alaskan men to flirt with, you betcha.  I know that might sound desperate, but I shouldn’t be desperate.  I have a job, many friends, a close family, and a beautiful daughter… even a grandson that my heart bursts with love for.  Yet the addiction for that feeling of infatuation, or as you say “limerence,” still consumes me.

Thank you again for a very enlightening, funny, and well written book.  Best to you - J.

Okay, maybe it isn’t as wholesome as the math teacher who does it for the excitement a kid feels when he finally understands long division.  Or as graceful as the ballet teacher who stumbles under the weight of two-dozen long-stemmed thank-you roses.  But when someone puts down my book and announces “My name is J. and, damn it, I’m a Love Addict…” well, my eyes just well up with tears.

What can I tell you?  I’m an immoral, sentimental slut.

 Therapist and author Rob Weiss, who does some cutting-edge thinking about the intersection of technology and (mostly sex) addiction, tweeted an article from the NY Times today called The Brain on Love   An interesting piece.  It depressed the hell out of me.

Now, author Diane Ackerman didn’t mean for the article to be depressing.  In fact, as someone who recently helped her husband recover from the effects of a stroke, she meant for her story about the plasticity of the brain — its ability to make new connections, to rewire itself as we have new life experiences — to be a positive thing.  Her premise is that good relationships change our brains for the better.

And as someone with a broken brain (that’s not self-deprecating, by the way.  All addicts have short circuits in our brain wiring), I am always happy to know that my neural network can repair itself.

In fact, there’s no better news for a love addict than that, even if on a purely biomedical level, some knight in shining armor really can fix me. Isn’t that what we’ve all been holding out for, whether we admit it or not?

Here’s the problem.  “Thanks to advances in neuroimaging,” writes Ackerman, “we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain.… The body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt, and longs for its adult equivalent.”

Brain scans of long-married couples show that “in the opiate rich sites linked to pleasure and pain relief, and those associated with maternal love, the home fires glowed brightly.  A happy marriage relieves stress and makes one feel as safe as an adored baby.”

Aww.  That’s sweet.  But what if you weren’t an adored baby?  What if  your body had no oneness with Mother in the first place?  What are you going to recreate then?  You might have been unwanted, adopted, or abused.  Premature, underweight, or incubated… the no-heartbeat beat goes on.  We’re longing for something we have never felt.  How pathetic is that?

Me, I was born in an auditorium before an audience of medical school students.  Apparently, I was an usual breech presentation.  Apparently, too, I have been seeking a fresh audience ever since.  Mother had rheumatic fever, then post-partum depression, then bipolar disorder, then a colorful series of suicide attempts.  Adoration was not part of the picture, and it was rarely what you’d call safe.

This is where the now-popular “biopsychosocial” model of addiction becomes important.  Love addiction, nictotine addiction, alcohol addiction — I’m not picky.  Yes, addiction starts out as a brain disease, whereby the nerve endings don’t pump the joy juice properly and the white matter isn’t firing on all cylinders.  But, as the NY Times points out, the brain (biological) can rewire itself… if it has a supportive emotional framework (psychological) to build on.  Like, for instance, healthy family and friends (social). 

It’s complicated.  I hate complicated.  I would prefer that PrinceCharming.com wave a magic algorithm and make us all feel like adored babies overnight.

Las Vegas is a counterintuitive place to hold a conference of substance abuse counselors in the first place.  Choosing St. Patrick’s Day weekend to do it is total cognitive dissonance.  Still, if it weren’t for the lingering pall of cigarette smoke — the entire state smells like a stale ashtray — and the lingering sting of nasty comments directed toward me on the Huffington Post, I’d say the trip was a hoot and a half.

            There was a lot of interest in my workshop on love addiction, if only because there’s a big mushy overlap between people in the “helping professions” and people in the “codependency addictions.”  Plenty of card-carrying (or, in this case, badge-wearing) therapists are themselves romance junkies.  There were also plenty of attendees interested in the workshops on sex addiction, because so many more people are being identified as sex addicts these days… and not all of them self-identified, either.  Parents nationwide are throwing their hands in the air and throwing their teenage boys into sex rehab.   

            From the Fall of Rome until the Rise of the Internet, anyone desirous of a sexual encounter had to first raise cash money, then leave the house, and risk embarrassment, exposure and even arrest to meet his or her fleshly needs.  Those barriers to entry no longer exist.  In the digital age, all anyone needs is a smartphone and, voila, hot and cold running sexual fantasies 24/7.   For many teenage boys, this often translate as, well, hot and cold running sexual fantasies 24/7.

            You can’t fault the parents for freaking out.  In their workaday world, someone who spends all day every day beating off to porn probably would be a sex addict.  In their kids’ virtual world, there’s a 94% chance it’s just a combination of curiosity, hormones, and habit.   It’s the 6% with the genetically addictive brains that I deal with, and those brains don’t usually even resolve themselves until about the age of 25.

            Here’s an example.  One of the things that traditional mental health centers do that drives me crazy is what they call “harm reduction.” Get the patient to do less of the bad behavior.  But anyone from the 12-step recovery world knows that telling an alcoholic to drink less, or a cocaine addict to just use on weekends, is useless.  Addiction is, sorry to report, an all-or-nothing proposition.  

            And yet the counselors at the conference did have some success getting kids to cut down their hours of internet porn.  My favorite story was about the kid who was persuaded to switch from porn sites to Angry Birds.  He really just wanted to zone out on the internet; the digital content was less an issue than the digital delivery.

             Harm reduction works great if you’ve picked up a bad habit.  Therapy works great if you’ve developed self-destructive behavior patterns.  But if you’re an addict, one of the lucky 6% with a chronic and relapsing brain disease characterized by the compulsive use of a mind-altering substance or behavior with negative life consequences, the most you can hope for is that you’ll switch to a different addiction and get your parents off your back.  

            Hardly anyone ever nags an exercise addict.

Lucia interviews Ethlie this Sunday 11/6/2011 on The Art of Love — live at www.latalkradio.com on channel 1  3pm PT/6pm ET.  You can hear the show in real time by clicking on:  Click to Listen Live  or catch up later in the archives.  It gets podcast via iTunes, too. 

I think we’ll be talking about Cougars and Cubs.  Sounds like fun to me!

I had emergency root canal surgery yesterday.  I tell you that, first, to make you go “awwww, poor baby” and feel sorry for me and, second, to explain why I had a wackadoodle Harlequin Romance dream last night

Here’s the connection: As a former drug addict, I avoid all mind-altering substances when humanly possible.  As a root canal patient, I will take a painkiller as prescribed.  The endodontist sent me home with a temporary filling and a handful of Vicodin.  Now, I haven’t had a drink or a street drug in more than 20 years (23 years, 7 months, and 13 days, to be precise) and one hydrocodone probably isn’t going to send me to the nearest bar or dope dealer.  But it can — and did — trigger my addiction.  I had a love addict slip dream.

Clean and sober addicts and alcoholics know what a slip dream (or “using dream”) is. It’s when you don’t actually drink or use drugs, but you have such vivid dreams about it that you wake up thinking you did.  Slip dreams are pretty common early in recovery, and tend to lighten up over time.  But when I quit smoking, I kept dreaming about snorting cocaine.  And when I swore off married men, I found myself dreaming about smoking cigarettes.  Just another day in the life of that cosmic whack-a-mole game that is addiction.

Last night I came down off Vicodin, and I dreamed a fairytale love-at-first-sight romance with… okay, the details are fuzzy.  I remember he was tall and tousled with a golden tan — I think he was the handsome heir to a Greek shipping fortune or something equally exotic.  There was a beach, and horses.  What I do remember is that it felt sexy and sunny and warm and I never wanted to leave.  We were in love and it was utter bliss.  It felt like… Vicodin.

My subconscious simply can’t tell the difference between one addiction and another, an empirical observation which is currently being confirmed by hard science.  In Nick Kristof’s New York Times op-ed column last week, he talks about the latest research by neuroscientist David J. Linden in a book The Compass of Pleasure.  The brain’s pleasure circuitry, Linden found, is all interconnected. Writes Kristof:

“Brain scans suggest that everything from sugar to sex lights up the brain’s pleasure circuitry. These all can have neurological consequences that correspond to what we think of as addiction. Lab rats can develop an addiction to exercise on a wheel. Orgasm, in men and women alike, lights up the pleasure centers much like cocaine… Gambling and overeating can be addictive behaviors, analogous to narcotics addictions. In particular, foods with sugar or fat seem to trigger cravings that then rewire the brain’s pleasure circuitry to amplify that craving.

“One study found that rats fed foods like cheesecake and chocolate showed differences in brain circuitry after just 40 days. The impact was that the pleasure centers of their brains were numbed, so they apparently needed to gobble even more cheesecake to generate the same satisfaction. Whether it’s sugar or heroin, the body steadily ratchets up the quantity necessary to provide the same high.

“Cravings are complex phenomena with strong ties to brain chemistry and genetics. Maybe that’s why President Obama has shown astounding self-discipline in his political career while enduring a long struggle with nicotine.”

Neurological Whack-A-Mole.  It explains why Ethlie pops a Vicodin and dreams about Prince bloody Charming.  But it doesn’t make me like it.

This newswire story landed in my inbox a few times, as you can imagine:

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Dutch prosecutors are charging a 42-year-old woman with stalking after she allegedly called her ex-boyfriend 65,000 times in the past year.

The 62-year-old victim from The Hague filed a police complaint in August due to the persistent phone calls. Police arrested the suspected stalker Monday, seizing several cell phones and computers from her home in Rotterdam.

Hague prosecution spokeswoman Nicolette Stoel said Thursday the woman argued to judges at a preliminary hearing she had a relationship with the man and the number of calls she placed to him wasn’t excessive. The man denied they had a relationship.

The court ordered her not to contact him again.

It’s the kind of story that makes a love addict wipe her brow and exclaim, “See!  I don’t have a problem.  She has a problem.”  It’s analogous to the feeling of relief a closet drinker has when a Skid Row wino cleans his windshield with a dirty rag. “See!” he smiles through the streaky window,  “I don’t have a problem.  He has a problem.”

Old joke:

Him: Hypothetical question: Would you have sex with a stranger for a million dollars?

Her: A million dollars?  Yeah.  Sure I would.

Him: Great!  How about having sex with me for fifty dollars? 

Her: Are you nuts?  What do you think I am?

Him: We already established that.  Now we’re negotiating price.

The point is… it’s all matter of degree.  Fifty bucks is a whore; a million is a Robert Redford/Demi Moore movie.  Sixty-five thousand phone calls is a stalker; 65 is an episode of Gossip Girl.  Where do you draw the line?  Can you honestly say that you never called someone a second (or third) time when they didn’t return your call the first time?  After all, they might have accidentally deleted your message.  Or the cell phone might have cut out — it’s AT&T; it happens.  Or maybe they lost your digits.  Or lost their phone.  Or they did call you back, but you didn’t get it because… um, it’s AT&T.  It’s amazing the excuses the addict brain will come up with and the urgency to which it attaches making that call.

I feel that Dutch woman, unable to go ten minutes without at least hearing the sound of his voice on his voicemail.  I relate to that urgency; it’s like drowning and suffocating at the same time.  Withdrawal in love addiction is as physical and palpable as a nicotine fit, and she had a three-pack-a-day crush.

You might only smoke half a pack a day; that doesn’t mean you’re not a nicotine addict.  Just because you don’t make 65,000 phone calls, but only peek at his Facebook page sometimes… or occasionally drive past her house… or just happen to join the same gym… don’t think that none of this applies to you.