Learned Helplessness
When we are exposed to shock and pain, the body releases
beta-endorphin to protect us. The beta-endorphin "numbs out" our
physical and emotional feelings, soothes us and keeps us safe.
Beta-endorphin is a powerful brain chemical. Morphine and heroin
evoke a beta-endorphin response, so you can well imagine why we
get attached to the feeling even if it comes in response to "bad"
things happening.
I believe that sugar-sensitive people have lower levels of
beta-endorphin. The brain compensates for this by opening up more
beta-endorphin receptor sites so we get a bigger response to its
effects.
Because of this heightened response, we are drawn to things that
evoke beta-endorphin-alcohol, opiate drugs such as morphine, heroin,
percodan, codeine, sugars, fats and white things. The things we
call "comfort foods" are usually the ones that are evoking a
beta-endorphin response in us.
Sugar-sensitive people are more attached to these foods than other
people are. We find more emotional comfort in these foods because
we are getting a bigger beta-endorphin "hit" from them. We not only
feel good at the moment, but our body "remembers" that
beta-endorphin means "safe." The feelings of comfort and emotional
safety become linked.
As many of you have been reading Potatoes Not Prozac, you have
really come to understand how powerful an effect beta-endorphin
has on our behavior and our eating. But the story is bigger than
you may have realized.
The comfort and numbing effects of beta-endorphin can become
cumulative over time. When emotional trauma or "numbing" occurs
repeatedly, the soothing quality of the beta-endorphin that is
evoked shifts into something really problematic. The numbing from
trauma (or from long-term, heavy use of sugars) becomes generalized
into what is called learned helplessness.
Those of you who suffered childhood abuse, molestation or incest,
or who have experienced any kind of adult trauma get a triple
whammy. Bad things happened and your brain literally kept you alive
by cushioning you from the mind-blowing reality of your pain. You
were flooded with the soothing protection of beta-endorphin.
The flood of brain chemicals numbed you in the face of things that
you had no control over.
You learned to be helpless in two ways. One, you literally were
helpless in the face of the bad things that kept happening and two,
the biochemical reaction which was saving your life did also
generalized into the biochemical pattern of learned helplessness.
You survived the bad things that happened over and over, but the
learned helplessness remains encoded in your body. The pattern
will be both unconscious and deeply affected by what you are
eating and what you are doing.
Our many discussions about foods and sugars have taught you the
impact of eating sweet foods. If you have comfort foods, you get
triggered and you want more. If you try to stop, you experience
withdrawal. And if you are using a lot of them, you feel overwhelmed
and hopeless. This is learned helplessness in action. It may be a
feeling that is very familiar to you.
However, you may not realize that there are other things besides
foods that can trigger these feelings and activate a global sense
of learned helplessness.
As an adult you may have intuitively found ways to recreate this
feeling of beta-endorphin "safety" not just with substances, but
with activities. The bad news is that the activities you may be
drawn to are harmful. That is, you may unconsciously recreate the
early trauma in order to get the beta-endorphin release that will
make you "safe" from your pain and reinforce your feelings of
helplessness.
You can unconsciously be drawn to abusive situations because the
abuse evokes the comfort of beta-endorphin. You may even create
bad situations like having your utilities turned off or your
credit taken away because inside the "bad" experience is coded
with the biochemical memory of of beta-endorphin comfort.
The more these bad things happen, the more helpless and inadequate
you feel. You simply feel "done to" and have no idea that you are
unconsciously participating in creating these situations as a way
to stay in a familiar and safe pattern. And the more helpless and
inadequate you feel, the more you want to eat ice cream and
chocolate. So the spiral goes down and down.
As you start taking care of the food, you assume that things will
get better. You cannot understand why you keep slipping into old
and perhaps abusive situations at the very time you are committed
to being so intentional about your healing.
Beta-endorphin withdrawal will drive you to get beta-endorphin -even
at the price of abuse. Learned helplessness will wind its sticky
little arms around you. And you will feel terrible shame because
now you think you "should" know better. You may not understand this
at all. You may assume it's a personal problem. You may either feel
victimized or totally inadequate. You may not have a clue about the
biochemistry of it, and may feel that the only way out is years of
therapy. Even then, therapy can take care of the "feelings" but not
the biochemistry.
The joy of the biochemistry is that you can change it fairly quickly.
You can start to see that learned helplessness is one of those sugar
feelings. It may be deeply encoded, it may be sticky, but the reality
is that you are in charge.
Learn about beta-endorphin and you can set yourself free with a
sense of purpose and power that you could never have imagined. You
have started to learn that there are many things that raise
beta-endorphins (BE's) other than abuse. Exercise, prayer,
meditation, sexual intimacy, playing with your pets, healthy
food and laughter, enjoying your grandchildren, holding babies,
and music. Lot's of options! But you gotta choose them to take them.
Learned helplessness usually means that your first line of action
is to retreat and isolate_the worst things you can do. Healing
requires one choice at a time, BE's the good ways. BE intentional
(be beta-endorphin-intentional) when you feel overwhelmed. Hold
the ice cream and CHOOSE from the list above of healthy
beta-endorphin-evoking activities.
Maier, SF et al, The opioid/nonopioid nature of stress-induced
analgesia and learned helplessness .J Exp Psychol Anim Behav
Process , 1983 Jan:9(1):80-90.
Miczek KA et al, Opioid-like analgesia in defeated mice .Science,
1982 Mar 19; 215(4539:1520-2.
Segato FN, Sucrose ingestion causes opioid analgesia .Braz J Med
Bio Res , 1997 Aug:30(8);981-4.
Tejedor-Real P, et al, Implication of endogenous opioid system
in the learned helpless model of depression .Pharmacol Biochem
Behav , 1995 Sep;52(1);145-5
(c) Kathleen DesMaisons 2006. All rights reserved.
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