What the *BLEEP* Do We Know??

Since I don't watch TV and never have the money to go to movies anyway, I never even heard of this movie. The first I pretty much heard of it was when it broke up the relationship of one of my best friends. She said: I watched this movie, and I just sat there stunned. I went home, and I just kept thinking. The next day, I realized... I don't need to put up with this. I am trying to make myself ok with something that just isn't, and I don't need to do that. I'm not *going* to do that.

Powerful words indeed. To say I was piqued was an understatement. I borrowed the movie from her new Ex, and watched it today. I watched the special features, the interviews with the actors and crew and director/writer. Then, I watched it again because I simply couldn't believe what I'd seen, and hoped some of the technical stuff would sink in a little better the second time.
I am absolutely blown away by this movie. I've long felt the truth in the statement: Your focus determines your reality. I've been able to see patterns in my life where I can tell that things are better or worse because of the way I look at a situation. I've been able to step out of bad places, and with effort, change my point of view to get out of the mental rut I was in.

This movie, however, took it a few steps further. For one thing, I was fascinated by the biological description of how emotions act on the cells, and this idea of cellular addiction to emotions. I hadn't known that the peptides that deliver emotional information to the cells used the same receptors heroin does. (I'd known there were opiate receptors, but I hadn't realized they docked peptides as well as pain killing hormones the body produces.) The implication, spelled out in plain english in the movie: If we can be addicted to heroin, we can be addicted to an emotion, any emotion.

I knew what he was talking about. I went through a period of emotional addiction, an emotion loosely bundled in the anger/frustration/victimization family of emotions. It's a long proud family tradition, that mix. My family, in fact, has a long proud history of addiction in general. The explanation of biological addiction to emotion clicked a key in my head, something I've instinctively known all my life but didn't have the biology to back it up until today. There were several dramatizations in this scene to back up the nature of how broad emotional addiction can be. The warning: be careful, you think like that and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy leaps to mind. The way it was basically described is this:

If you react in a certain way consistantly, you are rewiring your neural net to reflect that consistancy. If I heard right, the person implied that as our "identity". I say that tentetively, because it's a totally new idea for me, and I'm still feeling it out. He slipped it in there so fast, and then moved on, I found it hard to believe that a little word like that could have such an impact on me, and not be explained further. If what he's saying is true, then our identity, the very nature of how we view ourselves, is based on the choices we make about how to react to the things that happen in our lives as the body rewires itself to reflect those choices on a biological, cellular level.

"Nerve cells that fire together, wire together. Do something on a daily basis, and your neural net develop long term relationships between neurons, get angry, frustrated, suffer, give reason for vicitimization you're rewiring the neural net on a daily basis, called an identity" That's pretty approximate quote, based on my notes.

So, if addiction is something you can't stop, then emotional addiction is when you can't control your emotions. If you can't control your emotions, you're addicted to them. And, if you're addicted to something, then we will bring ourselves to situation that meet the biochemical needs of our body. Translated: If we are convinced that something will happen to us, or that we're going to react in a certain way, we find ways to make that true. As with most emotional stuff, perception is reality. The trick with this movie, is that physical reality and the nature of matter becomes just as uncertain through the wonderful world of quantum physics.

I began to understand what I'd always felt inside, which is that the reality around us is in flux all the time. We choose how we want to be in the world. Sometimes, we make bad choices based on (perhaps?) an addiction to a negative emotional outcome. That's why growth is so fucking hard. Growth is hard because you are literally breaking the chemical connections between neurons that have grown together, stuck together in your brain in a physical, tangible way. Making different choices is hard, because it means making new connections, new pathways true, but more importantly, you have to break the old ones down. That's no fun, because you're going against the neural flow, path of least resistance and all that crap.

I mentioned before that I went through a period of emotional addiction. Man, it was wonderful. In a time when I felt completely unable to affect change in my life, to fix things that were broken on a level I couldn't even completely comprehend, slipping into my biochemical heritage was like returning to the womb. My family, to say the least, is tempermentally volitile. I'm not really naturally inclined towards that, or at least that's what I like to tell myself. They have a tendency to explode first, think later. Mostly, you just deal with that pattern. That was not a pattern I was interested in for myself, however, and I've spent most of my concious life making sure that's not the tempermental path I fall into. I learned, however, that it's there waiting for me. It's so very very easy to be that kind of person, to let yourself lose that control. It can give you a feeling of power when you feel that you have non otherwise, it can make you feel that you can get things done when you feel that your opinion doesn't count, that no one is listening. Feeling lost, almost as an experiment, (I'd always sort of wondered what I was missing, why that was so attractive to so many people to act like that) I entered into that mental place, just to see if it made me feel better.

It didn't. In fact, the reactivity that you have to commit to just consumes a huge amount of your time, energy and resources without giving anything helpful in return. Now, I see that biologically that's also true. When we barrage our cells with a certain chemical mix, emotions, drug, stress hormones, etc etc, then they adapt. When they divide (and here's where I felt a *crack* in my brain) they make sure there are more receptors to accept that stimulation in the new cell. We learn in Cyber Chase that a computer has a finite capacity. If you're using up the capacity for one thing, something else slows down. There are only a certain number of possible receptors on a cell. If you take up more receptors to handle a barrage of emotional/chemical input, then there are fewer receptors for taking in nutrients, exhanging water and even handling waste. Fascinating.

They concluded this area of thought by saying: Does it really matter what you eat when you're older, if your cells are unable to even absorb the nutrients you put in the body after 20 years of emotional abuse?

Wow. Put a fork in me, I'm done. My back was already broken on the emotional reactivity front from a simple time/energy/resources standpoint. I just didn't want to commit that energy to it, for the ephemeral feeling of pleasure satisfying those urges gave me. My natural tendency is towards a low key emotional existance, where I experience my pleasure and pain with acceptance and then it's usually gone. I'd always sort of felt a vague unease about that. I thought maybe I just wasn't passionate, that I wasn't capable of strong emotion, that I lacked the depth to care enough to get really really pissed off. Now, I see the advantages of that personality type. Maybe I get myself in stupid situations over and over because I tend to be forgiving, but holding a grudge is just too damn hard. And, I see, it's hard on my body!

My dip into emotional reactivity has brought balance to my life. I know I'm capable of strong emotion, and it's there to draw on as needed. I also know that in general I'd rather just let things go. I'm content with that balance. It feels like an integrated and centered place to be.

For many years, I've managed my infrequent headaches with a visualization exercize. When I was young, very early teens, I remember hearing that if you can imaging a headache is a giant muscle in your skull, squeezing your brain, then you can imagine relaxing that muscle, releasing the grip it has. I know there aren't any serious muscles in the brain or around it, I did pay that much attention in health class, but I do make my headaches go away by picturing the muscle relaxing, leaving my brain alone.

Now, I feel like I have a whole new set of visualization tools given to me from this movie. I realize the idea of habits causing physical connection, of emotions and how they link into cells, of the long term effects of emotional barrage, and the concept that I can control what emotions I feel, and thus control what kind of, and the intensity of the abuse I'm going to put my body through on a cellular level. That appeals a great deal to me. I guess it's the creator in me, the defender of the underdog, that can't allow my actions to cause harm to something else if I can avoid it. Now I'm a tender of my cells, the keeper of my body's future ability to function at full capacity, the determiner of what reality I choose to function within, and the former of my world. Why make that world crappy and petty and drama filled? There is so much out there that brings joy and health and beauty. You have to experience emotions, that's how we work. But if I can maintain control over what emotions and what intensity, then I may as well work on the ones that bring happiness and contentment in my life.