Do you know someone who seems to thrive on chaos? Maybe even yourself? It may be drama addiction.
Holistic psychologist Dr Scott Lyons explores the stress-related condition and offers advice for healing in his new book Addicted to Drama.
Dr Scott Lyons with his new book, Addicted to Drama Photo: Supplied
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Dr Lyons defines addiction to drama as "dependency on crisis and chaos in yourself and others".
While ''the bigness, the extremeness, the intensity" of people who seem dependant on it may look like intentional attention-seeking, it isn't, he says.
People dependent on drama are actually unable to really take in the attention of another person: "That would be too vulnerable, too intimate, for those individuals to receive the attention people think that they want."
In pulling another person into their drama, addicts create for themselves a "false sense of belonging", Dr Lyons says.
"They exist with so much pain internally and so much loneliness that the only safe way they feel like they can connect with other people is if other people are in the same misery or pain or chaos that they're in. So when they're pulling you in it's their unintentional way of saying 'be with me'."
Those with a dependency on chaos tend to focus on the negative – what someone did, what went wrong – and someone in conversation with them may feel as if they're being pulled off their own axis and into a tornado.
Dr Lyons' advice: Keep calm to keep space between your words to not throw logs on their fire.
"Let them burnt themselves out through the extremes of their reactions and then be there for them when they're really truly going to o look at the underlying emotional issue which they've most likely been avoiding as a way of protecting themselves."
Photo: Karolina Grabowska / Pexels
On a neurobiological level, an addiction to drama is indistinguishable from an addiction to generating your own stress hormones, he says.
Those with this dependency don't feel physiologically safe enough to enter a state of stillness or relaxation.
"This is the physiology that's embedded with an addiction to drama. They never truly get to rest in ease."
We all are familiar with some variety of this tendency to frequently interrupt our own peace with a reflexive stress response, Dr Lyons says.
"That stress response allows the brain to stay vigilant to the next potential threat so we never really get to find ease."
Unsurprisingly, it is in childhood that drama addiction has its origins.
In an environment where there is "unpredictability of love", children don't learn to sufficiently regulate their own emotions, attention and energy, he says.
"Typically in a household where there's a lot of chaos, what does a child need to do to pierce the noise of the chaos in order to be heard? That is what becomes their own pattern, their own currency of love.
"If they have to be sick, if they have to be extremely loud to be heard in a family where there is a lot of drama, that gets internalised as 'I am loved when I'm sick' or 'I am loved when I'm loud and overbearing'."
When a parent has an addiction to drama, their child does one of two things to survive, Dr Lyons says – either join in or collapse (have a hard time with boundaries, be more depressed and more emotionally repressed).
If you have someone in your life with a drama addiction, Dr Lyons recommends pulling away physically and using mindfulness practices to reground yourself when you feel overwhelmed.
Talking while walking can also reduce the risk of being pulled into another person's drama.
"You might say 'Hey, I have a little bit of capacity for that but I also need to focus on what's going well, in my day and in your day, and balance it out."
Dr Scott Lyons "comes from a long lineage of those who have a propensity for an addiction to drama". He hosts the podcast The Gently Used Human.
