Healing from emotional addiction: Psychologist shares tips

“The body can become dependent on stress hormones like adrenaline or cortisol making us unconsciously seek stressful, chaotic, or dramatic situations to feel anything at all,” Nicole LePera wrote about emotional addiction.

Emotional addiction refers to the situations when people seek stressful or chaotic situations and wants to become a part of it to feel anything at all. This comes from the upbringings of having lived the childhood in dysfunctional homes. When we are brought up in traumatic circumstances, we become dependent on stress hormones such as adrenaline or cortisol. Hence, we cannot stay in normal circumstances since it does not trigger the production of these hormones. We keep seeking dramatic situations to get a hit of these hormones. Psychologist Nicole LePera addressed this situation and spoke of how emotional addiction functions - “When we have cycles of emotional addiction, we are most comfortable and unconsciously seeking a core emotion we feel most comfortable within. Ironically, many of us feel most comfortable within stress,” read an excerpt of her post.

Healing from emotional addiction: Psychologist shares tips (Unsplash)

Nicole further added a few situations of how emotional addiction works:

Numbness: Often people who are emotionally addicted, feel numb or bored unless there is a dramatic experience.

Dynamics: Emotionally addicted people seek unpredictable highs and lows in their relationships, leading to changed dynamics and unhealthy patterns.

Workaholism: These people over work and over deliver in order to fill up every space of their day, so that they do not sit back and relax and get numb again.

Substance: Emotionally addicted people often get addicted to substance or activities to numb themselves, which ultimately lead to more stress.

To heal from emotional addiction, we need to understand two core ideas of it:

Distraction: We need to distract ourselves from the internal pain and focus on better things.

Core emotions: We need to identify the core emotions that our bodies are familiar with so that we know how to deal with them.

“Healing is about learning how to feel a wide variety of emotions and teaching the body how to feel safe in stability or a state of ease,” Nicole wrapped her post.