And we’re back.  Still working my way through the pile of reader questions from JEZEBEL.  Hoping to have it completed before October, when I will be the Guest Expert of the Month at www.AddictionLand.com (“Easy to get in, but can you get out?”) and the floodgates will open once again.  

So far, the top contenders for my Dear Abby/Ann Landers’ Evil Other Twin name are: MISSED MANNERS, ANN BLUNDERS, DEAR ABBY-NORMAL and the one up there in the header, DOWNTOWN ABBY.  Feel free to add your own.

Minnesota 2012 asks:  Why do I continue to have sex with someone who doesn’t care about me? I know it’s a waste of time, I know I deserve so much better, blah, blah, blah - This doesn’t change that I still do it. Willingly. What is it about the sex act that makes a woman forego all logical self-respect?

It’s not the sex act; it’s the neurochemicals produced by the anticipation of sex (dopamine) and the cuddling afterwards (oxytocin) — not to mention the barrage of endorphins during the delightful bits in between.  And it’s not all women; it’s you.  Also me, and a bunch of us who are addicted to said feelgood brain chemicals.

So while the logical and rational front brain is saying “This guy doesn’t care about me, it’s a waste of time, I know I deserve better,” the lizard brain tucked way in the back is saying “Oh baby, oh baby. harder faster more.”  It’s a contest the lizard brain will always win… unless you stack the deck.  The process of  recovery is learning how to stack the deck: a supportive group, a counselor, contrary action, bottom lines/abstinence, blah blah blah.

You gain self-respect when you behave in a way that respects yourself.  I have to act myself into right thinking, because I can never think myself into right acting.  Stupid lizard brain always gets in the way.

Woman 23 asks: I would love to hear your thoughts on jealousy, open relationships, etc..

When I was in the throes of love addiction, I was pathologically jealous.  I was the kind of girl who would read his journals and freak out over women he was with before he ever met me.  When I was getting clean from cocaine, I gave up four months of sobriety because I saw the guy I liked dancing with another girl.  (I say “girl,” but I was 35 at the time and assume she was about the same.  This isn’t the junior prom we’re talking about, here.)  I never actually cut up anyone’s clothes or burned his car — I know women who have done both — but I have fantasized about it. 

I’m not like that any more, thank God.  I wouldn’t be with a guy I didn’t trust, for one, and I also know that having a man’s attention 100% of the time is not the stairway to heaven.  That being said, open relationships are not for me.  I don’t poke sleeping dogs with sharp sticks, and love addiction is a very large, very dangerous dog.  I could pretend I had no problem with polyamory, either out of sheer denial or in vain hopes of converting the guy to monogamy, but for me that’s just a heartache looking for a place to happen.

And Precious Little of That asks: How do you convince a stubborn Baby Boomer to get into therapy when they don’t want to see a “head-shrinker?” I’m asking for…um…the child of a friend.

You’re singing my song, sister!  I tried to get my hypercontrolling, manic-depressive, gambling addict mother into therapy, into Gamblers Anonymous, into Alanon, into anything that might help her heal.  For probably 20 years.  Not only didn’t she go, but she resented that I judged and criticized her all the time and kept wanting her to change.

Kind of like I resented her all my life for judging and criticizing me, and forever wanting me to change.  Go figure. 

In the end, we can never change anything but our own actions and our own attitude.  The weird thing is, that changes everyone around us.

In your… um, friend’s case, I recommend being as happy as possible and, if asked, credit your tiny, shrunken head.

Erin Gloria asks:I once read that your romantic sophistication/development as a person ends when a long period of never being single begins — say, if a woman spent ages 20-3o hopping from boyfriend to boyfriend and suddenly finds herself single, when she tries to go out and date, she’ll approach it like a 20-year-old would.

What would your experience say to that? Do you believe that constant relationships impede personal development? Did it impede yours?

For most people, I credit this more to acculturation than personality development.  Dating  habits are formed when you were last dating, so you’ll revert to that until you learn new habits.  Other than creating some awkwardness that will make cute dinnertable chit-chat on your next internet date, I don’t see it as a big issue.

In the world of addicts (AdditionLand!  Easy to get in, but can you get out?), however, it’s a different story.  An addict’s personality development and life coping skills stop when they start using.  For most of us, this is smack dab in mid-adolescence because, after all,  there’s nothing to make you need a drink like puberty.  So we begin our “sober dating” life at 30 or 40 or 50… with all the romantic sophistication of a 15-year-old. 

This is past awkward to the point of potentially lethal, like underage driving.  We should all get learner’s permits. 

Informal interview with Los Angeles journalist Jason Stafford covers some FAQ bullet points re: sex and love addiction and recovery…

The old line “Anything an alcoholic has ever let go of has claw marks all over it” applies double for addicts. Especially love addicts. We not only won’t let go of the actual person, we won’t even let go of the fantasy of what the relationship should be, could be, or might have been.

Love addicts spend an inordinate amount of time rescripting the past, perseverating (I just learned that word. Cool word!) on things like ”If I hadn’t slept with him on the first date, things would have worked out. I should have done X, then he would have done Y, then I would have done X, and he would have fallen in love with me.” Or, “I should have turned down that expensive dessert at dinner. I could have said X, and he would have said Y, and I would have blushed X, and he would have said ‘Where have you been all my life?’” Or “I wish I had appreciated Johnny in high school. We would have gone to X, and I would have told him Y, and he would have said X, and we’d be married today.”

Love addicts also squander a lot of brainpower trying to read minds. “Does he think I’m too needy/too independent?” “Did I scare him away when I said I liked big families/hated children?” “Does he think my ass is too fat?” The most common one, the one women ask me all the time — as if I’m somehow a better mindreader than they are — is simple: “Why doesn’t he call?”

I say “he” because a woman will call you to tell you why she’s not calling    ;-)

“Why doesn’t he call?” I’ve asked it myself. Some guy will go to heroic lengths to get my phone number… and then not use it. Another will barrage me with IM’s and, as soon as I agree to a cup of coffee, disappear from the face of Facebook. Why do they do that?

If it makes you feel better, my studies have revealed two possible reasons why they do that. One is anthropological, the other neurological. I would love to include the experiential and hear from some men on the topic but, A, half the time they don’t know the answer themselves and, B, who knows any men who will call and tell you anything?

Anthropologically, men are conditioned to hunt and conquer. Much of this still lingers in mating behavior. Getting the phone number is itself a victory; they don’t need to follow up on it with an actual call or, riskier still, an actual date. Quit while you’re ahead, Oh Great Warrior. Getting the consent for an encounter is as satisfying as the encounter itself.

There’s hard evidence that the latter is physiologically true, as well. Recent brain studies on gamblers showed that, particularly among compulsive gamblers, almost getting a slot machine jackpot lit up the dopamine receptors every bit as much as actually getting a jackpot. (Dopamine is part of the brain’s reward system; addicts never have enough of it.) So if the gentleman caller you’re concerned with has some addict tendencies — and, knowing you, he probably does — just knowing that he can call you is as satisfying as making the call.

More study needed, and I really would like to hear from some men on the topic. But right now, I’m playing with the concept of wanting a cigarette after fantasizing about sex….

Imagine for a moment that you went to a movie.  The movie was about an alcoholic who wanted a bottle of whiskey.

That’s it.  That’s the whole plot.

He gets close to his scotch, becomes thirsty, mishaps keep him from it, and he hurts other humans, damages them in his obsessive need to get to his scotch.  He encounters huge obstacles.  But through wit, charm, and deceit, he at last secures it, and drinks it down.

Is that a happy ending? 

That’s the beginning of a blog post on “Addiction and Relationships” at www.RiparianChurch.com by a fellow called Otter.  Yet, notes the Otter, isn’t that the plot of every romantic comedy every filmed?  And more than a few supernatural dramas, we might add.  Unlike any other form of intoxication, the giddy high of romance is never condemned, only celebrated.  Obtaining the object of obsession is the goal, and when that goal is reached —- “kissed and kissed often, by someone who knows how” (to use the G-rated Gone With the Wind wording) – bluebirds sing and the end credits roll.

Now imagine those soft-focus sunsets accompanying a scene of the ingénue shooting heroin.  The euphoric neurological response is identical, after all.  But no.  Leonardo diCaprio finding ecstasy with Kate Winslett in Titanic, we like.  Leonardo diCaprio finding ecstasy with smack in The Basketball Diaries, not so much.  Never mind it’s the romance that actually proved fatal.

Popular culture glorifies only one addiction, the addiction to love.  There are no feel-good movies about anorexia.  Drugstore cowboys and cocaine kings do not get any happy endings.  Even the shopaholics in Sex and the City knew their spending habits were dangerous, no matter how deep their denial about their romantic lives.  

I realize that I am powerless to be hold back the tide of songs and movies celebrating addictive love, so I’ve decided to do the next best thing:  I’m going to even the playing field.  Better yet, we’re going to even the playing field.  We’re going to come up with some titles praising the less-lauded addictions out there.  I’ll start.

“I Can’t Live, If Living is Without Booze”: a full-throated power ballad about an alcoholic and his Jack Daniels.

Speed: a documentary about the daring backyard chemists who mix up methamphetamine in the washtub.

“I Wanna Hold Your Hair”: a classic tune about a bulimic and the loyal friend who keeps her ponytail out of the toilet. 

Codependence Day: a big-budget special effects movie about siblings with mushy boundaries.

“The Gambler”: this time, the country ditty ends with the old guy winning the railroad in a card game.

We close with a musical medley to nicotine junkies everywhere: “Every Breath I Hack”/”When Smoke Gets in Your Lungs”/”You Light Up My Pipe”

Now it’s your turn.  Go!

THEY’RE ALREADY AT IT:

Britt suggests:  Along Came Xanax….My Best Friend’s Needle….The Wedding Drinker….When Heroin Met Sally….

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.

 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.

This weekend, March 15-17, I present two workshops on sex and love addiction at the Counseling Advances Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.  It seems an odd location for a conference of addiction professionals: Las Vegas, ground zero for all manner of behavioral and substance abuse.  Maybe they want easy access to field research.

            My MacBook and I will give a slideshow on THE TOXIC TRIO: LOVE, LUST AND LIMERENCE, followed immediately by ADVANCES IN NEUROSCIENCE: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON LOVE.  My throat and I will be talking almost non-stop from 1:45 to 5pm.  That’s not the part that scares me.  The part that scares me is that my audience knows what I’m talking about.

            These aren’t the readers from, say, the Huffington Post, still convinced that calling snorting cocaine an addiction is just a get-out-of-jail-free card for willful misbehavior.  No, I will be speaking alongside the very people who schooled me in my own recovery.  John Bradshaw, the dean of the codependency movement, will be there.  Remember the ‘80s?  Remember your inner child?  I still have the teddy bear.  Dr. Patrick Carnes, the man who wrote that first daring book about sex addiction, OUT OF THE SHADOWS, will be there.  I quote him extensively in LOVE ADDICT: SEX, ROMANCE AND OTHER DANGEROUS DRUGS, not because I’m lazy, but because he’s the man with the research.  I’ve got what you call empirical data — a.k.a., been there, done that.

            And that, it was pointed out to me, is my strength.  It’s exactly what I do have to offer this audience of professionals, who may have all the data in the world but no idea what it feels like to look at a guy who looks like the guy you like and feel your brain boil, expand and burst through your skull.  I was in therapy for years, jumping from one hopeless affair to the next, wrapping my arms around my knees and rocking my self to sleep night after night before the shrink finally said “I think you may be a love addict.”  The minute I read the characteristics of love addiction I snarked, “No duh!  Why didn’t you tell me this before?”  “I only just found out about it myself,” he replied.

            The workshop is for him.  Okay, not him specifically.  But for those like him with a client or patient or victim with a weird mental twist when it comes to sex and love affairs.  Otherwise smart, capable, successful, even-self-aware people who have a massive blind spot in this one area.  These therapists can’t help if they have a similar blind spot.  My job is to point out the red flags.  I will bring pictures.  Here’s a photo of My Big Gay Boyfriend - that should have been a clue.  Here’s a photo of Younger Man Number One, and Younger Man Number Two, followed by Married Man, followed by Guy Living Overseas, followed by Married Man Living Overseas,  followed by Younger Man Number Three… stop me any time.

            Please stop me any time.

Here’s why I love 30 Rock: Amid the show’s caricatures, cartoons and buffoons, they still manage to slip in a Temple Grandin porno pun.  They did go with the “rammed in” wordplay, and I would have riffed off “gangbang”… but each to their own poor taste.

 The point is, it served to remind me of HBO’s The Temple Grandin Story, about the austic animal behaviorist, and also of a fascinating blog I read on www.WrongPlanet.net about Aspberger’s Syndrome — one of many neurological hues on the autism spectrum — and how it relates to love addiction.

My research leads me to believe that, biochemically, love addiction is closer to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder than what most people would characterize as love.  If you read this blog, you already know that interaction of dopamine, oxcytocin and serotonin and what we think of as attraction, affection and attachment — or, for us slightly sicker souls, Lust, Limerence and Longing.  If the blog isn’t enough, I also have a book on the topic.

Turns out, the same neurochemicals play a role in Asperger’s Syndrome.  

“Research showed similarities between serotonin’s role in OCD and the role serotonin plays in neurochemical bonding, more commonly known as ‘love,’” wrote blogger Alexander Plank.  “You could say that the lovestruck couple going to prom together for the first time have actually fallen into OCD with each other.

“Serontonin is the chemical that plays a role in causing aspies to pursue their special interests, and similarly causes people with OCD to be obsessive or anxious. Certain levels of serotonin are also linked with the autistic tendency of ‘stimming.’” 

Plank continues by quoting the Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology,which published a study in 2003 entitled Oxytocin Infusion Reduces Repetitive Behaviors in Adults with Autistic and Asperger’s Disorders.  As the title indicates, researchers found that if you dose an autistic adult with oxytocin, he is less likely to do things like rocking, tapping, or counting,  This is what Plank calls stimming, and which I contend is hiding somewhere behind the love addict’s obsessive text messaging, drive-bys, or writing “Mrs. Davey Jones” 100 times in your notebook.

I think it also explains why I find Freecell computer solitaire so damn soothing.  All those lovely numbers piling up and floating off, mindless yet logical, click click click until that blessed mental dial tone… anyone with Asperger’s would recognize this as stimming behavior.  It’s no wonder that the most basic digital game outside of Pong still resident on Microsoft computers.  Observers have long surmised that Bill Gates has Asperger’s.  I have no idea whether he also has (and successfully controls) love addiction.

If he has, I would like some hints.  A research grant would also be nice; I’m dying to stick a bunch of  love addicts in an fMRI.  I would ask him for a new computer, as well, but I use a Mac.