My recovery from an addiction that I didn’t know I had, and the prohibition that had me see it.

Addiction

Hi, my name is Chantelle, and I’m an addict.

Not the kind of addict you’re thinking of though;

I am an emotional addict. 

You see, in part because of my childhood and in part because of the relationships I had growing up, I am used to things going a certain way.

There is usually grandeur, drama, stress, and always a good story to tell. 

I am addicted to the rush of the big highs, and the dip of the deep lows. The more I have to work for love and affection in my relationships, the better I feel. Especially in the romantic ones.

Anything that doesn’t have this big drama has me feeling dull and numb inside. The unpredictability of someone’s actions keeps me on my toes and feels exhilarating. Calm and consistent are therefore boring to me.

To make it worse, my very favorite “drug” is the trauma bond, a bond that is neurochemically reinforced in my brain by means of reward (giving love) and punishment (the removal of love). 

I of course am not conscious of any of these things.

On the outside I choose only the stereotypical bad boys and can manage a whole array of human emotion and experiences. From staying up all night fighting, to being whisked away on lavish trips, I am all in.

Not only can I handle it all, but I am very much enlivened by the entire process. The more mysterious or “wrong” the higher the hit. Red flags therefore often appear as an enticing green to me.

When I’m not living the experience, I am a master at gossiping about it for hours with my girlfriends.

The stories!!!

What I don’t know and can’t see, is what is happening on a chemical level in my brain. 

The sudden dump of dopamine or a spike in cortisol, surges through my system and keeps me coming back for more.

I am so used to this heightened state of living that my brain can’t exist in the mundane of every day. And it frankly isn’t interested in it either.

This, is my story of recovery.

Much like a drug addict, I had no awareness of the depth of my addiction. In fact, I had no idea there was even such thing as,

Emotional Addiction. 

As Dr.LePera explains in her book “How to Do the Work“, emotional addiction creates a “need to seek out the same kind of emotional hit again and again. Even if an emotion makes us stressed or sad, it often feels familiar and safe because it provides the same type of release that we experienced as children.”

She then goes on to say that even though in our minds we may want something more secure and trustworthy, us addicts will keep “returning to the same relationship dynamic because it feels exciting. Addicted to the cycle of unpredictability and the powerful biochemical response ‘we’ get from it, ‘we’ can’t pull away.”

I was blissfully ignorant to my addiction’s hold on my daily choices, behaviors, patterns, and who I ultimately would choose as my partner/s.

I naively thought I could conquer my addiction by simply removing the “drug”.

Enter my divorce.

I did it. I left my husband. Phew.

That pattern was behind me. 

For good. Yup. Or so I thought.

9 months later I end up reconnecting with a wonderful man.

A man that I had had a summer fling with back when I was 18.

A Maritimer with a huge heart and an equally glowing smile, his family knew my family and so he felt safe right from the beginning.

My Maritimer (MM) was full of life and energy. I quickly remembered that sparkle of excitement I had felt inside my chest way back when I had first met him as a teen.

I was having the same feeling all over again, and I was over the moon.

And so, under the same East Coast sky with the same deep red sand under our feet, we started a new romance 22 years after that original summer from our youth…

Painfully aware of my recently failed relationship, I was determined not to repeat any of my same mistakes. 

The saying “a different pair of pants, same guy” was NOT going to apply to me, you watch. 

I had this one in the bag. 

No repeating patterns for me. Nope.

Upon inspection of these two men (my ex and my new partner), I could see that they could not have been more DIFFERENT.

As I sat back and evaluated my mental check list, I couldn’t help but sigh with relief.

There’s no way I’ll f*#k this one up.

They couldn’t be more different. He’s perfect. I’m safe. Aaaaaahhhh.

My mind did a beautiful job of convincing me that I could bypass my sh*t and be ok. 

And I believed my mind entirely.

After about 2 years of dating, living together because of covid and inevitably falling back into our patterns of behaviour, stuff started to pop up. 

Feelings of resentment, miscommunication, me feeling irritated over silly things, trying to make My Maritimer the bad guy over and over again, and then one day, my tummy started to ache.

Uh oh. I’ve felt this before. I’m anxious. I feel nauseous. My body is trying to tell me something. What is it? 

At the time, I thought it had to be an outside source. Again, I was naïve to my own programming and trauma responses (more on that later).

This naivety had me misinterpreting what I was feeling as being caused by My Maritimer and not my own wiring.

As Dr.Lepera explains,

“My body became so accustomed to adrenaline, cortisol, and other powerful hormonal responses that I continued to unconsciously seek them in adulthood to repeat the emotional baseline established in childhood. Without them, I felt bored and agitated.”

So, naturally I thought MM was the source of my angst.

I proceeded to make him undoubtedly wrong for me and one morning I decided to break up with him.

I believed it was the right thing to do. That even though I was very much still in love with him, I didn’t feel I was being fair to him by being so wishy washy all the time.

I’d go from feeling deeply safe and loved in a way that hit me to the very depth of my soul, to being agitated and nit picking everything about him. 
I’d swing between these two realities frequently, and it was always from one opposition to the next. 
How exhausting (and truly unfair to my Coastal boy).

I was unconsciously creating a physical reality that matched the internal drama that I was chemically familiar with in my brain. 

Nicole mirrors this when she says,

“If there was peace in my relationships, if there wasn’t some impending crisis, I’d feel irritated and restless and I’d make sure to initiate some stress.” 

Ah self-sabotage…how I know and loathe thee.

My Maritimer was consistent, he did not waver, he loved me unconditionally, he was reliable, he always showed up when he said he would, he was funny, kind, full of life and was open and willing to do his own work.

And I, was bored.

Dr.LePera outlines this perfectly by stating,

“When we are conditioned to associate love with a trauma response, we feel dull and numb without it.” 

So, I thought I was solving my problem. I did what I always do which is say “I’m out” when things get uncomfortable. And I thought that feeling in my tummy would magically disappear…

I thought the feeling was telling me to leave.

Flee Chantelle, fleeeee

Well, it turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong.

After breaking up with him, something literally broke inside me.

I’ve never cried like that before in my life.

The tears were endless streams of saline that literally wouldn’t stop. I’d wake up and start crying, cry all day and then go to bed crying. 

This continued for days and days and days.

Interlaced with the crying was the uninvited and very much unexpected arrival of daily panic attacks. 

I’d be driving and would need to pull over because I was hyperventilating and hysterical. I’d be busy at work taking care of my patient and boom!

These attacks would strike without warning and were unrelenting. No matter how much I tried to center myself or breath through them, I couldn’t control them. They had a hold of me.

I went to my doctor to get meds to help me manage this sudden onslaught, and I even asked my ex to watch the kids. Was I burnt out? Maybe? Maybe that was it…

I knew that I couldn’t work or take care of my kids and I knew I needed help. 

When I say I was out, I mean it. 

This was really confusing to me. 

• A) if I had made the right decision for me, then why was I so sad? Why was I having panic attacks?
• B) I’ve literally never cried like this before in my 43 years of life, why now?
• C) I removed the drug, I’m safe, aren’t I?
• D) I’ve done years of talk therapy with my counsellor and processed all my trauma, so why aren’t I ok?
• E) I’m a nurse and know better, don’t I?

I was grappling.

It begged the question that something else was going on.

Why did I feel worse after doing the thing that I thought would undoubtedly relieve my pain? 

Thank the lord god my very best friend is a brilliant social worker and counsellor. Enter: My Best.

After one of my panic attacks, I called her from my car.

“I think something else is going on here Chantelle. This isn’t just sadness from a breakup. Your panic attacks aren’t triggered by anything specific, and you’ve been getting worse each day. There is more layered in here, I think it may be a trauma response.”

Huh? Wtf is that?

“But Best, I’ve done all the work. I’ve been seeing my counsellor for 8 years, I left the ex. I’ve done all the things. Why this now? It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“I don’t know why, only you can define what your trauma is Chantelle. I can just see that you are reacting in a really big way which tells me it’s likely trauma and has nothing to do with MM. Which is the good news here, it’s not him.”

“I know you’ve done lots of talk therapy but maybe you need to try to get at it from a different direction. You should try kundalini yoga, see if you can move some of this trauma out of your body. I hear it’s good for survivors of abuse. I think it’s time to take things from the bottom up.”

Again, huh? I thought. I was beside myself. 

I knew what she was talking about though; Somatics.

Ironically, I had just finished listening to the book “The Body Keeps Score” by Bessel Van der Kolk MD and had become quite curious about how we store trauma in our bodies.

How we can then treat said trauma with movement and mindfulness (bottom up) instead of just talk therapy (top down).

I was in. 

That day I called my therapist and requested an emergency session. We went right into a somatic visualization practice and from there I started seeing her weekly. 

I took time off work, found a local kundalini yoga studio, and started going several times a week.

The panic attacks and crying didn’t stop. The only relief I felt from them came during those yoga classes. 

I slowly learned to come back home to my body.

I emailed My Maritimer to tell him the good news.

“It’s not you!!!”

I couldn’t wait to explain what I had uncovered. I went on to write that I was having a trauma response because of all the things I’d gone through and that my body was trying to get me back into something familiar.

That I thought it was him, but that it wasn’t and that I was deeply sorry. 

this is how my addiction was affecting me:

Trauma Responses

My Brain

I am used to working for love and affection. I release chemicals when a relationship that I’m in shows up as conditional/transactional in nature. Reward and punishment. Those light me up the most. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Rinse and repeat. 

And so, with MM, receiving constant unwavering love is deeply unsettling for me. I haven’t received this kind of love from men, this is so new to me that I can’t quite process it. 
So, I create drama where there isn’t any, I make him wrong for me and I tell my body to RUN when things get uncomfortable/boring/unfamiliar. 
My well-known and very much automatic internal voice that says, "I'm out!" is front and center.

Enter trauma response numero deuce, FLIGHT. 

My Body

The trauma from my past is stuck here.
It seems this breakup cracked the seal and I finally get to feel. 
My deep insides know that this love is exactly the love that I need. My body knows that I need to learn what it feels like to receive it and to stay. That I AM worthy. My soul knows. 

It is from this guttural place that my tears come from.

So, it is my soul, my heart, my guts and my body that cry and cry and cry. 

It's my trauma that is crying. 

It's the little girl in me that's crying.

My body can finally LET GO.

I shake and breath and shake and breath, my heart races and instead of freezing, I am finally processing. 

My body is releasing what was trapped under trauma response numero tres, FREEZE.

And so, My Maritimer and I got back together. 

Even though at the time I didn’t have this clarity, I was candid and honest with MM about what I was going through.

He was willing to stand next to me as I processed all these big feelings and emotions. He was willing to stay and to love me through it all. Just like he always had.

Messy swingy, shaky bits and all.

Enter the Moratorium.

I don’t know about you but when I think of a Moratorium, I picture a morgue in my head. Maybe it’s because I’m a nurse and have seen too many dead bodies in my lifetime, but regardless that’s what I see. 

So, when my Best said to me, “I am putting a yearlong Moratorium on your relationship.” 
I thought, huh, something has to die. 
And, I wasn’t that far off.

She went on to say, “this means, I am putting a prohibition on your ability to break up with MM for a whole year. You’re going to want to, and I won’t let you, because I’ll remind you of this Moratorium.”

“I’ll remind you that it’s not MM you’re breaking up with, it’s your addiction calling you back into your old patterns. You wanting to break up with him is an old trauma response that you need to unlearn, and this is the only way.”

I thought she was crazy. Like actually. She can't do that, can she?

But I couldn’t see what she saw and what she knew so clearly about addiction and recovery.
 
And thank god I listened.

At this point, I had to decide if I could do it. I still had a lot of uncertainty inside me. I was battling with what felt like a daily showering of every uncomfortable feeling one could experience. I had to face knowing that I had to feel this discomfort alone.

That MM couldn’t save me like I wanted him to. Even though there was still a big part of me that thought HE would be my solution (especially since I now knew he wasn’t the source of my pain). I believed, “we are back together, I’m fixed, he’ll make it all go away!”

But then I’d have a panic attack while sitting on his couch and all at once I realized he couldn’t.

I had to become friends with my anxiety. I had to sit, listen and realize that nothing else, other than me, could go through it. 

And so, I did.

that’s how it went for a long time. 3 months in total.  

After the acute onset of my breakdown, I slowly started to heal. The panic attacks waned, and I was able to fall asleep without crying. 

I was able to go out in public again and eventually my kids came back home, and I went back to work at the bedside in the ICU.

I kept going to kundalini yoga religiously. I could FEEL that it was healing me from the inside out. From the bottom up. 

I kept seeing my counsellor regularly and didn’t stop the internal inquiry.

But what happened to the Moratorium, you ask?

Well, It’s been 10 months since the Moratorium was instated by my Best.

And in that time, there have been several instances that it’s been used… still to this day. 

It looks like this, I call my Best in a *clear* panic and I say frankly,

“Yup MM isn’t the one. He’s not right for me and it’s best I just end it before more people get hurt.

Best, I’m really sure this time.”

My Best would then calmly reply,

"Nope, you are in a trauma response Chantelle, this is not MM, it's your brain."

Every time I didn’t believe her. Every time I felt I was ignoring my instincts and settling, not being fair to My Maritimer or making him right for me when in fact he wasn’t. 

Three days later I’d flip back to feeling secure and completely in love with MM while also being totally unaware and disassociated from my previous “we need to break up” self. 

They felt and still feel like two separate people.

I’m not kidding.

I can joke with My Maritimer about this now, we call it me ‘glitching’, because that’s literally what it feels like. 

Like I’m in the matrix, for crying out loud.

But thanks to the extreme insight and intelligence of my Best, the Moratorium has held strong, and it has served its purpose beautifully.

I'm happy to report that every time I 'glitch' out now, it lasts a little less long and the safe secure feeling takes over more quickly.  

My brain is getting used to a new way of being.

And so, I persevere.

What I’m learning is, much like a drug addict, after taking the “drug” away, the only way to recover and heal is to re-wire the brain with new pathways.

And this is HARD.

• Learning what it feels like to stay in a relationship that is constant and unwavering.
• Teaching my brain that mundane can be secure and beautiful and not boring at all. 

Thank god the brain is neuroplastic!

I now know that being in the discomfort is the only way to create change and that we can only do this work IN relationship and with community, while feeling safe. We are not meant to do this alone, no one can.

As you can see in my story, were it not for my people and all the practices that were intentionally put in place I would most definitely be out galivanting with some rich American somewhere convincing myself that this one is “the one” and I’d be sure that all those red flags were most definitely green.

Different pants, same guy.

I’d be high as a kite and fundamentally deeply unhappy.

Instead, I am in love and still with My Maritimer.

I am actively choosing to be all in for learning a new way to give and receive love and I refuse to give up.

Thanks Best. 

xo