Addiction and Love: Astronaut Goes “Love Crazy”
By Nina Atwood
What do love and addiction have in common? Both involve powerful brain chemicals that drive behavior. Today’s story of astronaut Lisa Nowak’s crazed mission to kidnap a perceived rival is a case study of the destructive power of love addiction. Like the drug addict who holds up a convenience store employee for money to fuel his habit, the love addict will go to extremes to fuel the obsession with the “love object.”
Recent science shows that our brains are wired in a specific area for romantic love with the same chemicals that are involved in addiction (i.e., dopamine and norepinephrine receptors). At moderate levels, these chemicals are responsible for the delicious feelings of euphoria that we experience when falling in love: less appetite, high mood and activity levels, less need for sleep, and goal-oriented behavior. At extremes, these same chemicals can set off pathological obsessions and dangerous behavior. Apparently that’s what happened with Nowak.
In Nowak’s case, we’re left with questions: a.) why didn’t anyone see her problem before it got so far out of hand?, and b.) what preceded this dangerous obsession? Often there are events, or memories of earlier traumatic events, that trigger these obsessions. If no intervention takes place, and the person lacks sufficient self-awareness to realize that something is out of balance, the behavior can escalate into a bizarre ”acting out” of the obsession like this one.
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1 Comment
1. Drug Intervention Wisconsin | March 10th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Very nice.