You just broke up with your boyfriend / girlfriend and you can’t eat, sleep, panic, disoriented, you can’t focus on work and you feel like you’re going to die. You may feel nauseous, headaches, depressed, unable to function at home or work, have cravings for the person, have suicidal thoughts, feel shaky, forgetful, or a host of other symptoms that make you feel horrible.
Welcome to the withdrawal of the relationship. Yes, the symptoms you are feeling are the same symptoms that a drug or alcohol or any other addicted person feels when their “substance” is removed from their lives.
How can this be so? And why is it so intense?
I have written several articles on the effects of dopamine on the brain. Dopamine is the “feel good” transmitter our brain produces in response to something that triggers it. The trigger can be positive: exercising, falling in love, being surprised with some wonderful gift from a loved one; And it can also be triggered by something negative: spousal abuse, an unexpected response or event, drug / alcohol abuse.
The bottom line is this: Our brains like dopamine and they don’t care what we have to do to deliver it as long as they get their “fix.”
When we find ourselves out of a relationship with someone, it doesn’t really matter to the brain whether it was a healthy or a destructive situation. As long as the brain was meeting its dopamine needs, it felt good. But once that supply is gone from our lives, the brain gets cranky and starts flooding us with all kinds of physical and psychological symptoms. Sometimes these symptoms are so severe that we will voluntarily go back to whatever it is we left, including horrible and painful relationships, just to hit that dopamine level and thereby calm and quell the terrible withdrawal. This is one of the reasons why some people cannot leave a bad relationship. It’s also why we feel like we’re dying when what we think was a good relationship leaves us. It’s like being on a treadmill running at 5 miles per hour for a long period of time and then all of a sudden the treadmill shuts off. We keep moving, even though the treadmill no longer makes us work. Instead of euphoric dopamine production, we crash and burn in a dysphoric state.
The brain knows that there are many ways to get our dopamine “kicks”. But as creatures of habit, we will seek the same thing over and over again until it destroys us; Or, instead, we can change addictions and leave the drama-filled relationship and do other things to satisfy our dopamine needs. With each bout of addiction comes the need to up the ante because the brain will need more and more as it gets used to the ever-increasing levels of dopamine. The pattern becomes a disease of the brain that constantly speaks to us and tells us to feed it more and more. This explains why people literally feel like they are in abstinence when they leave a relationship. The brain is asking for a solution.
Anyone who has been through drug or alcohol rehab knows that it takes time to go through withdrawal. Time has an elegant and eloquent way of calming us if we let it. If you or someone you know is going through a relationship retreat, share this information with them. Be as supportive as you can and if you are going through it yourself, don’t isolate yourself. Isolation will magnify symptoms and prolong recovery. Stay active and busy with something positive. Start walking, jogging, volunteering to work with animals, working out at the gym, or taking a class so that the dopamine levels in your brain can be positively activated. And do this every day whether you want to or not. If you wait for your feelings to catch up with you, you will never make it! Get yourself a notebook and journal about your feelings every day, then put the notebook away and be proactive in doing something positive for yourself. Allow yourself just 5 minutes twice a day to cry about it, and then get on with your life between crying spells. Seriously, schedule and end your crying spells. Then go ahead. Learn from the relationship and make a solid plan for what you will do, will not do, will allow, will not allow the next time you are in a relationship. Know that in time, you will remember your abstinence period and it will be over … forever.
