When Dopamine Fks Up your Life

I have been struggling with coming here to write lately.  So much is shifting in my understanding of my life and who I am within it.

I had a mentor tell me once I had incredible courage.  They were referring to what I wrote here in my blog.  As I grow up and learn more I feel embarrassed sometimes with what I have shared here about myself.   Obviously Lady Vixen is not my real name, its who I refer to as my addictive self.   But I do post these links to my personal facebook page and those who know me well,  read them.

I struggle more then just sharing with my friends who I am and where I am at.  I struggle with looking back over my thoughts and realizing how off I was at certain points and just how crazy I can indeed get.

 It embarrasses me to know that I can swing the pendulum from a fairly intelligent articulate woman, to a bat shit crazy, hormonal, raging teenager.   But again, I am learning why this is and it eases my feelings and invokes the need to come here and share with you why I am the way I am.  In hopes that if you suffer from bat shit crazy too,  you can find peace in your own mind through my public crazy.

Dopamine Spikes.

Thats why I am bat shit crazy.

I have a new Therapist.  After my last post and all the excitement of finally having a therapist that is picking up on my patterns and ready to pounce on them...... she has passed me off to someone more qualified to deal with me.   A therapist that is an expert in the field of addictive personalities.

This whole blog has been about me learning to express my feelings in a healthy.  Thats what Narcotics Anonymous taught me was my problem if I was a drug user.  So learning to cope with my feelings is what I put my focus on.  Which is not entirely wrong I do need to learn to deal with my feelings.  However deeper then that is the cycling of my addictions.

My pattern is this.

Food   (overeating to the point of almost 250 lbs),
Drugs   (starting with weed working my way up to Meth),
Sex     (starting with a single guy who rocks my world working up to strangers in the park)
Love    ( finding the guy that shows me love and draining him until I am begging for a thimble drop                from a man with the look of pity in his eyes.)

Then I get angry at all these patterns and purge all addictions and become a workaholic at the continued neglect of my daughter and self.

Binge, Purge, Binge, Purge.

I get as much high from the Purging as I do the Bingeing.    There is a serious high that comes from doing a food fast.  And there is always an addictive reason behind everything I do.   Even in my purges.

Its nothing but a huge elaborate process to keep my dopamine spiked, once its been triggered to spike.   After a crash, my chemicals return to my normal and I am back to happy, articulate, humbled B,   ( The crash is never pleasant for me or those I take down around me)

So this new therapist is setting me up on a program to help me break this cycle once and for all.  My hopes are that I will be so fully aware of my patterns that I can stop them before they trigger a dopamine response.  But if that spike hits without warning, which it does often, that I will be able to slam on the breaks and crash myself before I need to travel around crazy town firing shit up.

The belief that a relapse starts way before the actual relapse has been wiped out of my mind.  Its not an inaccurate belief,  its just not accurate for me all the time.  Sometimes the most sexy man will walk into the room and my hormones will flare and I will be off and running without any warning or prep time.  This may be the difference between addictive personalities and those people wishing to get out of painful feelings.

I think, As we evolve as humans so do our medical afflictions.   What was once coined as the devils drinking disease and was limited to men and whiskey has now evolved into a bat shit crazy myriad of symptoms infecting us in every corner of our minds.  As people we are getting more sick, committing deeper crimes and we as a society have more diagnoses to create to solve these ills of society.

 My anger at my abuser and all that were involved at that time grows and deminishes at the precisely the same moments of understanding.  Am I part of the problem or solution.... or is the problem itself the solution?

This is why I truly struggle with this blog.  Am I just creating a space in cyber world that is a dumping ground for my ills thus infecting those in the pages close to me.  Or am I processing and healing the illness inflicted upon me when I was too young to defend myself and your on that beautiful journey along side me?

Well whatever may be, it will be.  Today I still find comfort within these pages.  So write I still shall.  Till next time when maybe I have an even deeper awareness of what an addictive personality does to get past the label and on to living a full and complete life free from dictating chemicals.

How many times in therapy before there is a break through?

Have you ever went to Therapy for your Mind and or Emotions before?

I have.  Three different times now.

Once when I was in my early twenties and a young mom of a baby daughter.   I knew even then that I did not want my child carrying on my patterns or the patterns of my parents.  So I decided to get counselling for my childhood abuse right away before it ever became a problem for me in my later years.

That didn't work.

I seen my counselor for two years and we never got past a timeline assessment.  Thats a chart they draw out with you outlining ever single attack and experience you had from birth to now.  Dreadfully painful and personally to me a waste of energy.   But, She was a social worker for Catholic family services.  Nice lady.  I liked her.

The second time I hit the counselling button.

 Was just after I came into drug abuse recovery.   Again,  another two years and we never got past teaching me about my feelings and proper use of them.   Great lessons,  Still grateful today.

 Yet still nothing was discovered in my patterns repeating problem. A problem that was now plaguing my life.  The life I didn't want at twenty and tried to fix then.          ....... And now!    I have two daughters and a son to live the patterns with me.   Great.

So I quit my second counselor.

Then last summer.   Holy shit balls hit the fan,  and my world was smothered in shit.

Thats when I met my new counselor.  After a deeply sobbing phone conversation with her, she agreed to take me on as her client.  This past year she has watched me.  I recognize when she is observing me and when she is having light fun and truly friendly conversations with me.  (If I met her outside the psychology realm I am certain we would be great friends.  She is close to my age and similar life situations.  Thats a plus in a counselor I think.)

While I have been observing her, observing me.  She has been tracking my patterns.

Finally!   After all these years of wanting an issue I knew was there but didn't have the vocabulary or understanding to know how to identify it, is going to be resolved.   Twenty years later!!

I have blogged lots in this last year about mental illness.  I have seen a psychiatrist that was so bloody quick to prescribe me bi-polar love.  I get he probably seen a pattern and was sure to fix that through a couple of pills.  But he didn't look deeper.

Another,  walk in mental health counselor showed me a diagram once.  Of normal ranges of feelings and the range of feeling in a person with ADD.   My body LIT up when she explained it to me.  Its the same as bi-polar but a person with ADD gets stuck in the high or low.  Once they cross the boundary line they are trapped there until the crash.

That seems more fitting of me.  But waite.

Yesterdays session with my now deeply respected and completely trusted therapist, was all about addictive personalities.  No secret I have some addictions, two for sure.  I remember a very respected guy I tried to latch on too just after I left my ex, who was a non practicing psychologist, used that label with me a couple times.  His exact words were..."your gonna to exhaust your kids with that addictive personality".

I wasn't just LIT up as she showed me a picture of a wheel on the addiction cycle,  I was off my seat too.  This was it, that was my life.  It was like looking at my time line with new eyes, phases and stages of not the substance or action i was addicted to.... but the Dopamine spikes and drops that spun my cycles for the past thirty years of my life.

She was laughing.   I was laughing.   This was it.  Or if its not what it is then its the next level of my understanding.   Because let me tell you, my patterns over the past year have changed my therapists belief that sex addiction can and will destroy your life if you get to,.... High.