Seeking Behavior and Taking No’s

Part II, Chapter 12

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Chapter 12 – Seeking Behavior and Taking No’s

July 15, 2021

8:15am – Sightglass Coffee, Divisadero, San Francisco

How do I get this stress out of my body? It’s like I keep writing in here hoping I’ll find something. Seeking. Looking for dopamine in an “aha” moment of solution. Meenadchi texted me about a research rabbit hole she was going down looking at the connections between prolactin and dopamine, dopamine and schizophrenic psychosis. She was talking about questions re: intergenerational trauma and intergenerational deprivation of resources can lead to intense seeking behaviors and how that could end up preventing access to connection and healing. So…this could mean that seeking/searching behavior prevents connection. I was seeking proof, seeking judgments about me. I’m feeling the addictive nature of this thought pattern. I’m thinking about writing some of my memoir and it’s painful to think about not thinking about this right now. It’s got quite a grip on me.

But other people’s reactions are information about them, not character judgments of me.

July 16, 2021

Friday

7:17am

I’m in the car parked outside of Sightglass. They open at 7:30am. I think the “fix-it” savior thing is a dopamine seeking thing. Looking for the “answer” prevents connection.

Why am I no longer feeling safe in my body, my mind, and with D [someone else I’m dating in San Francisco]? What happened? Two things cause this anxious state. 1. When someone else is avoidant and 2. When I give too much vulnerability before I trust it to be cared for. So did I violate my own boundaries here? What is it that I need that I’m not getting? I don’t even know.

I remember one night when I was about four when I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed and sat at the top of the stairs. I might’ve called down quietly to see if my parents were awake in their bedroom. I remember sitting there alone with no particular emotional charge around needing anything, but knowing that I didn’t want to be in bed. I needed some kind of soothing. I had a hang nail on my big toe. I put it in my mouth and pulled with my teeth.

What a rush. Thinking back, it was a satisfaction similar to pulling the sticky stuff off the back of a new credit card, or putting a good ball point pen to a small stack of paper that has just the right amount of give and bounce. It felt like I’d fixed something, too. Checked off a box. Found the soothing I craved. [add a sentence here indicating that the picking became habitual, before you talk about trying to stop the habit in the next sentence?] Thus began a lifelong struggle of trying to stop picking and chewing at my fingers, my lip, my face—anywhere that I could. It could be called a stim, a bit of OCD, or even self-harm. It’s terribly hard to control.

I’ve identified this picking as part of a seeking behavior in which I look for something wrong that I can fix. I attempt to fix it by fixating, by digging, by ignoring my own sensory boundaries that are telling me I’m in pain. I pick until I bleed, literally or figuratively. I pick emotionally, too, at things I’ve said or didn’t say; at my gut and my health, looking for what I’ve done wrong to cause such problems; at my business, searching for the reasons why people aren’t signing up for my classes. I pick at my romantic relationships until my anxiety makes the other person avoidant and they pull away. I now see that my seeking behavior is attracting people who want to be fixed by love or a partner. The people I attract tend to have fallen prey to rom-com tropes of finding the one, and when I inevitably have a need or a stressor or I don’t fix them, they conclude I must not be their one. It’s avoidant attachment basics.

I had shared my song “I Said No” with this guy I was seeing in San Francisco. He responded by texting me a joke: “What if it ended, ‘I said yes’?” It really rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like a red flag and we talked about it, but he kept bringing it up, joking about it in a self-deprecating way. He told me to text him things throughout the day about what was going on in my life. I did, and when he wouldn’t answer for days at a time, it made me anxious. When I brought this up, shortly after writing this last journal entry, he told me, “I remember telling you to send me stuff, but I don’t think I said that I’d respond.” I laughed, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t. We stopped seeing each other shortly after.

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