MISERY ADDICTS “Just Say No!”
Call them drama queens, drama mama, people who like to stir things up, wishy-washie men…What be so ever.
But there is a clinical term for people like you or me when and if we over indulge in emotional time, pain, or suffering. They are addicted to chaos, MISERY.
How can someone be addicted to feeling bad? Don’t we normally seek out pleasure rather than pain?
It probably does appear to others that the person is addicted to feeling bad… but if you think about it, they probably don’t know anything else. It has been their source of survival, a way of living, for years, and therefore, they probably wouldn’t know how to act any other way.
Check this out – Sometimes sadness or misery becomes a habit. It’s easier to feel constant disappointment than be happy for a while and then have something knock the wind out of your sails.
DrBev Believes that many people found that the misery that they submerged themselves in and even created was because they were trying to manifest externally how they felt internally. They would create drama, choose bad boyfriends/girlfriends and friends, etc., so that they could have the anger and upset that they felt inside.
When Misery is Company: End Self-Sabotage and Become Content written by Anne Katherine MA, and several other groundbreaking books of popular psychology, “Misery addicts are addicted to avoidance, self-sabotage, and a system of survival that results in loss of joy, intimacy and potential.” Emotions R Us…All of us!
Anne Katherine says this is more complicated than other addictions. “With alcoholism, for example, you get abstinent first then change your lifestyle,” she said. “With misery addicts, the lifestyle is the problem.”
For people who are addicted to misery, happiness itself is threatening. These are people for whom Alfred Lord Tennyson’s generally accepted adage of 1850 (“Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”) is just not true.
I read this book and learned a lot about myself. I have been a self-sabotager. However, I don’t see myself as a drama queen, since I’m a fairly quiet person. I don’t see any connection between liking to stir things up and self-sabotage.
Unfortunately, half my family is like this. Everyone is against them, nothing they do is ever good enough for the world, blah blah blah. The majority of suffering that people go through is self-induced.
I no longer allow misery addicts in my life. When I’m shown a red flag, I simply walk away. No more chaos or drama in my life.
Viv
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