A Toxic Relationship with Dopamine
Below are a few contextual items that will assist you in getting to know Dopamine:
Dopamine is a molecule, more specifically, a hormone that is part of the catecholamine family. Catecholamines function as hormones or neurotransmitters or both. Catecholamines activate the amygdala, the “smoke detector” of the nervous system.
Like nearly every chemical in your body, especially neurotransmitters, dopamine plays multiple roles including: motivation, memory, movement, mood and attention. High or low levels are connected to Parkinson’s disease, restless legs syndrome and ADHD.
Dopamine is associated with the sympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system (ANS). In other words, it is involved in the fight or flight part of your ANS. The release of dopamine is activated when a threat is perceived.
Our ancestors needed dopamine to keep them alive. It helped them to “memorize” - via an anticipation-inducing excitatory circuitry - where food and mating was to be found. In essence, we are wired to look to the past to infer the future.
Dopamine acts on anticipation. This means that dopamine is not released when we get the desired object as is erroneously portrayed in pop culture. It is, therefore, not the pleasure hormone after all; it’s an anticipation hormone as it is released in the process of wanting the desired object.
When we get the desired object, an entire cascade of molecules are released that bring us back down from the “high” of dopamine and “down” into the here and now. This is critical for us to feel the pleasure of getting the food, of finding a mating partner, primally speaking.
The psychological equivalent of a toxic neurochemical addiction to dopamine is called Global High Intensity Disorder, also known as addiction to intensity.
Dopamine is the chemical foundation for Addiction to Intensity and Addiction to Fantasy.
Eventually, the future becomes the present. Or does it?
Being the only animals on the planet capable of overriding our biology, we have created systems within our individual bodies, and therefore, in the external world where we are disrupting inherent cycles. Disruption of these cycles - more specifically, the completion of them - is deleteriously affecting the very essence of our nature. The incompletion of the dopaminergic cycle is no exception. There’s a huge cost of doing business this way. That cost is the loss of being able to drop into the present moment, The Eternal Now in spiritual terms.
From a psychobiological and trauma perspective, an unconscious biohacking of dopamine served a survival purpose early on: it allowed us to escape our terrible reality; it gave us a temporary fantasyland with which we could get away from the physical abuse, the neglect, abandonment and enmeshment. As we’ve talked about in previous AoH content, the mechanisms that served us in surviving when we were young nearly always begin to interfere with living a peaceful life in middle age.
When as a child, we felt trapped and engulfed with our abusive reality, a rush of dopamine created the aliveness, passion, choice and pleasure that oppressive caretakers took away from us. This aliveness and passion rose when we dreamed of a world of possibility. In a cruel twist of fate, mother nature would suddenly pull us from this state when she beckoned us to complete the cycle, i.e., come down to reality; to be in the here and now. For those who did not experience relational trauma, completing this dopamanergic cycle was a pleasurable experience, for it likely meant that mom or dad were there to offer grounding, completion and repair, if needed.
But, for those who faced chronic developmental trauma, we found a magical parallel world - we could get away from the tyrant. So, of course we honed this neuropathway. We became world class dreamers, visionaries, revolutionaries and evolutionaries in our mind’s eye. The universe, however, is asking us to live in both worlds: the physical and metaphysical, the dopaminergic and the here and now. If you have unresolved developmental trauma, facing reality is unconsciously bound up with loss of choice, fear and terror. When we were younger, we attempted to avoid reality it all costs and this created a viscous and costly feedback loop. We became the rat constantly bar-pressing for more and more and more. Dopamine has an insatiable appetite.
Sadly, individuals who have created a habit of continually bar-pressing the dopamine button become so entangled with the high, that the only way to come down - to face some sort of reality - is to numb via nervous system depressants (alcohol, marijuana, Benzodiazepines). This can become a wild cycle of swinging from an extreme on one end (dopamine), to the other extreme (substance-use). In this frenetic pacing, there is no space to drop down and find intimacy with oneself. And, to answer your question, yes - this transfers over to relationship with others (especially romantic): a back and forth, cycling of breaking up, making up, intensity and fervor.
For, as we know, relationships are the mechanism nature uses to mirror to us when and how we are out of homeostatic equilibrium. All romantic relationships have an upper limit on the thrilling, dopamine-filled high that most of us experience during the “honeymoon period.” When this threshold is reached, we are asked to come to the here and now and into companionate love. For the dopamine addict, this means he must face reality, including his childhood reality. For some individuals, this is too much to bear, so they leave the relationship for another dopamine hit. This topic is a blog unto itself. More dopamine blogs to come!