--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. So, you know that I believe in synchronicity, I believe in signs, I believe that you can open the portal to the universe, and I have the perfect example of how that happens. It happened to me just this morning.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm here in Los Angeles at SiriusXM Studios, and I come out of the bathroom before I was about to step into this room behind the mic and talk to you today. And holy cow, there was all this commotion as I was walking toward the elevators and boom, this entourage of people walk in. And the person that walked in is somebody that I recognized from a Bravo reality television show. And I didn't even know his name. I just know that he's on this show called *Flipping Out*, which is a show where he's flipping high-end houses and constantly flipping out at his staff and flipping out at clients. My kids love the show.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I thought, oh my God, of course I'm seeing this person right now because I'm about to go interview one of the world's leading experts on the topic of being addicted to drama. And here I am looking at somebody who is on television constantly being dramatic and flipping out. And I thought, if this is not a sign from the universe that I am in the right place at the right time, having the right conversation with the perfect expert, I don't know what could be more perfect.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I came down the elevator, I walked into the studio. And I am so thrilled because I know that today's conversation is going to change your life. I know that this is exactly what you need to hear because today you and I are digging into the fascinating science, research, and psychology of drama. Drama in your life, drama with other people, drama in your relationships, and more importantly, you're going to get the tools that you need to remove it. You're going to get the tools that you need to be able to diffuse it with people in your life that are dramatic or annoying or constantly about themselves.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Scott Lyons. Dr. Scott Lyons is a medical doctor. He has a PhD in clinical psychology, and he has also developed the somatic stress release, a holistic process of restoring biological resilience, which is taught in over 20 countries. He has a master's in clinical psychology, and he is a renowned body-based trauma expert. His book, *Addicted to Drama*, is filled with science and psychology and tools and strategies that will help you identify where there is unnecessary drama in your life. He's going to explain why we create drama and why we keep ourselves on edge and why we find ourselves picking fights, gossiping, and staying in these relationships where drama is present. I cannot wait to dig in. So without further ado, Dr. Scott Lyons, welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: I'm so excited to be here. I'm thrilled.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so I want to start with the most obvious question, which is, what do you mean when you say addicted to drama? What does that even mean?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's the unnecessary turmoil. It's the exaggeration. It's the performative aspect of the dysregulated use of energy, action, emotion in the dysfunctional way of adaptation.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, those were a lot of big words.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Those were a lot of big words. We can break them down.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But the most important word that I just heard was unnecessary. The unnecessary turmoil, the unnecessary exaggeration intensification. Love that because here's what I just got from that definition. I think this is super easy to spot in other people. It's the person who's like the bull in the China shop and everything's about them and they're very blustery. But you just included me in the definition when you said unnecessary turmoil. And I never considered myself to be a person who is addicted to drama, but I can see and admit that there are many areas and examples in my life where I create unnecessary turmoil for myself. And so for the person listening, can you just go even deeper? Could you walk us through some of the questions that you might ask somebody to help them realize, wow, I am addicted to drama in my life?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the questions you can ask is, do you use language like extremely, literally, always, very, really, never, that sort of extreme language? Do you feel anxious or bored when things are calm?
--:-- Mel Robbins: I know I'm raising my hand.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Used to.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Used to, yeah.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Same. Do you end up gossiping and stirring things up? Gossiping is so interesting because it makes us feel included but at a cost. And the thing to remember about gossiping is if people do it with you, they always do it about you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Exactly.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: You crave extreme situations and sensations. So that might be big feelings, it might be big actions like jumping out of an airplane and rollercoaster, or partying every night or lots of hookups.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah, absolutely.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: You pull people into your crisis. This is the victim form of drama. This is the victim, but it's also what we call drama bonding. So it's a way of feeling connection. So it's like, "Hey, Mel, oh my God, you're not going to believe who I saw in the lobby. He gave me this weird look." And all of a sudden you're saying, "Oh, tell me more." And then I'm pulling you in. I'm pulling you into my vortex. So you're an inclusive dramatic person. If you find yourself generalizing one bad situation and making it universal. So it's that like someone cut me off on the road today and what a terrible day it is. Or everybody that I've met is a loser. I'm not dating. What's up with men? I can't handle this anymore.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. Yes. Okay. Have you said those lines before?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: No.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, okay. I hear a lot of my friends say them though.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yes. Yeah. It's like, ooh. The catchphrase, "It's always something."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Always something. It's always something. You know, and I have other friends from like, "It's always something." And I go, "What's always something?" And then she'd just look at you and be like, "You, you always have something." That is true.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. You feel more alive under pressure. So like waiting to the deadline to get things done. You're preoccupied with fixing things. You play out a scenario or interaction over and over again in your head, even changing the storyline a little bit at each time and then possibly venting it to your friends as well. So if you find yourself retelling the same story more than twice, I would ask you, what about it haven't you processed yet? Why do you need to retell it? Because basically you're just spreading the drama. It's sort of like the person that talks about the breakup and then how the person has moved on and they've been doing it for months and months and months. And by talking about it and being dramatic about it and stirring it up, they keep it at the surface, but they don't drop into the deeper feelings of loneliness and inferiority and abandonment and fear.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And so replaying it keeps you out of being in contact with those vulnerable feelings.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What are some of the signs that you might feel internally? And it's important, again, to recognize how we view someone addicted to drama on the outside is different than how people feel on the inside.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So from the inside, you might say things, "I don't feel like I can direct my own reality. I don't have control." And my internal world has a lot of pain and wounding in it. And from the outside, someone might be like, "It feels like everything they're doing is being controlled, manipulated and measured." On the inside, it's intense. There's an intensity. There's a sensation that you're always kind of uneased and about to erupt and that everything is urgent. Like everything is an emergency. Because that's how we're viewing it from the inside. And from the outside, it feels like they're bulldozing, overpowering in like this frenetic energy that just can't be contained.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So is the reason why this topic, addicted to drama, is so critical is because without understanding where you or other people that you care about are addicted to this cycle of drama in their life, you will never experience peace and happiness.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah, it doesn't allow you to because peace, stillness, ease is unsafe.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What do you mean?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: For those of us who have some propensity or have some addiction to drama, which is quite a few of us, getting to that point of stillness, ease actually feels terrifying. It feels like death or we notice it in the reflex of our mind. So if you've ever gone to a meditation class or been in a bath or just walking through a garden, so you're in this peaceful place. The environment is right to find more ease and stillness. And yet there's this moment where you drop down and then something happens, like an alarm goes off. We call that a revving reflex. And you start thinking about the next day at work. You start thinking about that ex. You start getting on your phone, you start looking at people, your ex, whomever on the phone, you start doing things that interrupt that ease and that stillness.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Why? Why when we're sad do we go play even sadder music? Why are we rushing down the street when we have nowhere to go? Why?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Well, part of it's this addiction to drama, this constant sense of dis-ease and urgency that is within us. And that revving reflex helps us stay out of contact with the vulnerability of what hasn't been processed.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. I'm having a huge light bulb moment.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Oh, tell me about it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because, you know, Dr. Scott, when I think about being addicted to drama. I hear that phrase. And I think about external things, right? When I heard addicted to drama. And I hear that phrase. I think about someone who on the surface is flipping out or annoying as hell. Or narcissistic or controlling or whatever. That's not actually what you're talking about. That's one aspect of it. Here's what I'm getting. That an addiction to drama is a way to identify and label childhood trauma, the effect of growing up in a chaotic household, the effect of having sustained emotional abuse or sexual or physical abuse, or simply having this experience in your body where you feel on edge all the time.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I've heard a lot of people in my work and in the research that we do talk about the fact that, you know, I grew up with experiences where I felt like, when is the other shoe going to drop? When is dad going to come home drunk? When is there going to be another shooting on my block? When are we going to run out of money? When? And that your, you called it, what did you call it?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: A revving? A revving reflex.
--:-- Mel Robbins: A revving reflex. That another way to think about this sense in your life that you have to always be ready for the next thing. That is the revving reflex going all the time, it sounds like.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Absolutely. It's the anticipation, the readiness for the next bad thing, for the next trauma. We trace the drama to avoid our traumas.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. Let's unpack that because you're basically saying. Whether you're the annoying person in your friend group, in your family, where it's all about you all the time, you can't help it, you're even sick of your own stuff. Or you're the person who is sitting quietly in the corner. With no external evidence that there is drama. But you are so in your head and so either anxiety ridden or on edge or just bracing all the time that the drama is actually internal.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah, that internal revving.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Got it. Oh, wow. So that's the spectrum right there. I am getting so much out of this conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. And thank you for being here with us in this conversation. And thank you for what you're about to do, which is to listen to a word from our sponsors. Do not go anywhere because we are going to be right back.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I am so glad you're still here with us. We are talking to the awesome Dr. Scott Lyons and we're on a mission. Let's get rid of the drama in our lives. So, Dr. Scott, what made you want to call this drama? Because that feels a little bit more accessible. Like it's like in some way, if I were to call that revving or that on edge sensation in my body. And having been somebody that really struggled with anxiety for 45 years until I really understood that it was in my body, not in my head. Calling it drama feels way nicer and actually more accessible than calling it something like childhood sexual trauma stored in my nervous system. Like I like that. OK, it's just drama in my nervous system. Like, why did you start to study this? Why the word drama?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. I mean, drama is reclaiming. So we have these derogatory terms like drama queen. And when most people go, "They're such a drama queen" or "drama addict," it's usually in a very derogatory context.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's true.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And I wanted to reclaim it. And I wanted to say, okay, so we have this familiar term that all of us or most of us know. Someone walks in, they take the air out of the room. We know that person. We know that they have some like proclivity towards drama. Some addiction to it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or is this also the kind of person that they just can't get out of their own way?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yes. They get sober. Then they relapse. They keep dating the person that hurts them. Yes. Why? And it's like, yeah, we can look at attachment patterns, but it all leads back to the same physiological process.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Which is what?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Which is that it helps you distract. It gives you energy and it's a pain reliever. That is what drama does. And drama is anything that gives you a stress response, basically. That raises those cortisol levels, that makes you revved up. And part of it is, when I talk about the exaggeration and the intensification of something, like most people think of drama addicts as performative.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right, exactly. This is what I'm getting at, that you're actually talking about a much larger spectrum. Like, what does it look like for somebody who is not, quote, the drama queen or doesn't, quote, suck the air out of the room, but is suffering from an addiction to drama on the inside?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. Well, it all has the same physiological response. It all gives you that revved up stress response. Okay. So that's one of the important things is that whatever the behavior is, so whether we're overscheduling ourselves, whether we're gossiping, whether we're getting into another fight with someone in order to feel closer to them. Whatever it is that is the behavior, it all has the same physiological response. It gives us that boost of energy. It gives us pain relief. Stress is an anesthesia. Just like when you go running.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Do you run?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Used to.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Before bladder surgery and three children.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Or jumping into a cold pool. I mean those type of stress responses give us a flood of pain relief hormones. But you don't think about it that way because when you think about drama in your life it causes a lot of pain. Drama's not about making sense, it's about making sensation. And that sensation gives you a sense of feeling alive when most of your internal experience is feeling numb. So it gives you enough, the decibel of volume of sensation is high enough to rise above the threshold of numbness, to go, "I feel something." And that numbness comes from a trauma response that's protective, that survival response. Then we start to feel like we don't exist. We don't belong. And so we start to crave sensation. We start to reach for it. We start to manifest it. We start to find ourselves in scenarios or even create scenarios in our head that give us some type of experience, give a sensation to go, "Oh, at least I feel something, even if it's bad." And especially if that something gives me that heightened stress response, I feel energized because that's the first stage of a stress response is it releases energy into our body. And the second part is, is it releases a flood, a cascade of hormones that gives us some pain relief or disconnection from the underlying pain and trauma that we are hiding from, that we have to hide from as a means of survival.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or that we don't even know is there.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Or that we don't even know is there, but is plaguing us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Huh. This is so... How did you get into this? Why did you decide to research this? How did you discover that you had an addiction to drama?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. Well, I was always in the arts. And that was an indicator. I like performing in front of thousands of people. That moment where you feel like the rise of excitement and energy. I was like, "Oh my God, I feel alive." And I don't feel that in the rest of my life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Interesting.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And I was going through a divorce in my late 20s. And I was depressed. I was at the lowest point of my life. I had to move in with my parents. I just couldn't function. And I found that when I called my ex or got into fights with my sister or watched Bravo, whatever it was that created some type of tension, I felt alive again. And I started to reflect back on that and I was like, "Wait, so these moments of tension, of angst, of anxiety, of anger, that's when I feel alive? That's not the life I want to live." When I would watch the news and I would go call a friend and be like, "Did you see that?" And I'd feel alive. I'd feel part of something. I'd feel like we were an in-group and we had something to share and I felt belonging. And then the moment I hung up, I felt alone again. And I was like, "Oh, so that's... I don't want to live a life where the moments I actually feel relationship are either in fighting or in gossiping."
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's how a lot of people bond. I know. Is by complaining or gossiping about other people or complaining about their life or griping about what's wrong.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: We drama bond.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Drama bond.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: We throw logs on each other's fire and we feel like we're part of something. And I bring you into my tornado of chaos. And all of a sudden I feel a sense of connection because my internal world is matching the external world and you're in it. And that just isn't a sustainable form of the relationship.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is it true that you even faked your own suicide?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So tell me that story.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah, I was in high school and I was at my wits end. I was being bullied by teachers. I was told I was stupid by teachers that I would never pass high school. I was being shoved into lockers and I needed an out. I needed a way of surviving. And I didn't want to end my life, but I wanted people to feel the pain I was feeling so that they could somehow empathize finally with me and save me. I wanted to be saved. And so I set the scene. I wrote the note. I put the pills on the ground. I created the performance of my death. And what I came to understand later is what I called weaponized empathy. Even though there were people in my life who could relate to me, letting my guard down was too painful, was too scary. And so I couldn't actually recognize that there were people who could empathize with me. The only way I could understand empathy was if they were in the same pain I was in or something in close to it, proximity to it. It's like an eye for an eye. And so many of us do that. We see these fights with partners. Like if you don't, like you don't truly understand my pain. And so we bully them into being in the same sense of pain we are in. And so I did that as a young adult.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How old were you?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: I was 16 the first time.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wait, the first time?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. I didn't get what I needed. And part of why I didn't get what I needed is because I wasn't safe enough in my own body to receive people's love and care, validation. And we see that with those who are addicted to drama. We say like, "I'm here for you" and they don't hear it because hearing it would mean they have to let the drawbridge down of relationship. And that would also let the bad things in.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That makes a lot of sense. You know, my mom has often said to me, "Why would I go to therapy at my age? So I have to dig up all that stuff I don't want to deal with. What if I find out I don't like my life? What if I find out I don't like your father? What if I find out I don't like you? Like, I don't want to let that in." And so there's a huge part of this that I can see as you're telling this story, what I see in myself is that same busyness. That trying to outrun all the things that I did not want to have to face and realizing when I finally slowed down these past couple of years that I was actively blocking the love that people were trying to pour into me. Because I hadn't yet faced the stuff that needed healing. So Dr. Scott, let's take a quick pause.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Sure.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But we will be right back with more life-changing information from Dr. Scott Lyons. Stay with us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm so glad that you are still here listening and hanging out with me and Dr. Scott Lyons, because we are on a mission to help you identify and remove the unnecessary drama from your life. So, Dr. Scott, your first attempt was when you were 16. And then did they like, how did your parents respond? What did they try to do to intervene? Like, did they send you to therapy? Did you go inpatient? Like what happened?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah, I did inpatient.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And did it help? Did it not?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah, I loved it. It was a place of safety. And so they would let me out because I was doing so well. And I'd have to go back to that school where I was being bullied and harmed by faculty.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And were you out at this point in your life?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: No, no. So it wasn't even part of the conversation as to, I actually got more bullied because I had such severe learning disabilities than I did about my sexuality.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Gotcha.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Sometimes I'd be pushed into lockers because it was called fag or other names, but really it was like that dumb kid. And that was the era where they would like take us out of class and put you in the special track. And so you just knew. And so this continued on, this seeking attention and wanting to be seen, but not feeling seen. Seeking to be seen, not feeling seen and not able to accept being seen. And that's the conflict right there is because even though it's something we want, it feels too dangerous to get it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, so many of us to be seen means that we're also being seen in the things that we are trying to avoid, the things that are too painful to be in contact with.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And so one of the aspects of addiction to drama is to keep running away from that point of contact, which is ourselves. You know, when we have early traumas, we disconnect from ourself. We get a divorce from ourself. We call that dissociation. And it leaves a void. And when we start filling that void up with anything, we become dependent on it, whether it's alcohol, whether it's drugs, whether it's sex, whether it's stress. And when we fill that void, what it's also doing is it's helping us stay away from what's underneath that void, underneath that hole or at the pit of that hole, which is the root of so much suffering, which is our trauma.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How do you identify that it's drama that you're addicted to? Keeping in mind that this might be the first time that the person listening is considering, "Wow, I'm always waiting for the next shoe to drop. I'm always stirring something up. I do bitch with my partner or pick fights. Or I feel closer to them after a fight than I do in moments of ease." So wait, you're saying that we pick fights to feel closer with somebody?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's the places where we feel safer.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Why do we feel safer when we're fighting?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Well, one of the symptoms of an addiction to drama is there's always a sense of dis-ease. There's a sense of constant urgency. And from the outside, it looks like someone with an addiction to drama is like bulldozing. But on the inside, they feel out of sync. That their own sense of timing feels disproportionate to the timing of other people. And their energy, their attention, their emotion are disproportionate to other people. And I can go into the physiology.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Please, let's hear it.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: The best example I can give is I was renting an Airbnb and you know those carbon monoxide detectors when the battery's dead, it goes beep. Beep. And it doesn't stop. It's so annoying. So annoying. And somebody hid the carbon monoxide detector and I couldn't find it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In this Airbnb rental?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: In this Airbnb. And it was going like every 55 seconds I timed it. And then I started to notice, "Oh my gosh, I'm actually in an anticipation state." So I'm already getting ready for the next beep. I feel my body tensing. I feel my attention zooming in onto where it could be. And that's what trauma does. So often we think trauma is just stored in the body. But trauma is also about how we get ready for the next possible trauma.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Explain more about that.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So all of our senses, the way we smell, the way we hear, start to attune, like a TV channel, to the next possible danger.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Gotcha.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So we're looking for it. That is the filter of our life. Like it could be your boss. It could be friends. It could be all this stuff. So all of our senses are more attuned towards danger than safety. So that is what we find. So when those who are addicted to drama are like saying "It's always something," it's because that is the channel to which they see the world. That's the channel that's on the world that is dangerous. And so they constantly feel and are responding to that world of danger. They feel it in their whole nervous system. There's a sense of dis-ease. There's a dis-ease is also because they feel disconnected to themselves. There's so much suppression, repression, because they had to disconnect from the trauma that's stored in their body. And the symptom of that, that lets us know there's a disconnection, is dis-ease. We feel that sense of urgency because we're out of sync with the world as we know it. Our world, if we're addicted to drama, feels dangerous. The world that everyone else is in, who doesn't have that, looks easy. And so there's a sense of being in dissonance, out of sync with everyone.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So can I ask you another question? Because when you said that word, "It's always something." Are there other catchphrases that people that have this addiction to drama, like I'm thinking about the fact that one of my daughters always says, and I used to say this too, "I always feel like I'm on the outside looking in. I always feel like everybody else has it figured out, but I don't." Like, is that like a catchphrase that you might say to yourself?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: "No one ever gets me."
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: "No one's ever here for me. No one's got my back." And then someone next to you is like, "But I'm here with you." My friend picked me up from the airport maybe a year ago. And she brought all my favorite food and my favorite water. And I had just gone through a breakup. And I got in the car and she's like, "How are you?" And I was like, "Sad. I feel like no one loves me." And she's like, "I just brought you your favorite food. I picked you up from the airport." And I was like, "Oh gosh, you're right. Thank you for breaking me out of that." It's such an old script that I replay sometimes when I'm not feeling well or not feeling secure in myself. But the reality is I know there's love out there, but in my childhood, I couldn't be with it. It wasn't safe.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, you're just helping me have a little bit of empathy for a friend of mine who I will not name, but this particular friend has this extremely annoying habit of texting in a passive aggressive way. "When are we ever going to see you?" Or heaven forbid I am in the town that this person lives in. Inevitably, if this person sees that I am in town, instead of getting a, "Hey, I see you're in town. Do you have time? Let's hang out." It's, "Oh, thanks a lot for not saying that you were coming." And I'm like, "Fuck you. Like, why are you unloading this on me?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: And what you're making me see is that this person isn't a jerk. This person has an addiction to this drama and they feel a sense of not being important. There's a sense of not feeling important. There's a sense of not being seen, which is a chronic issue of the original trauma often. And I'm assuming they go from seeing something on the internet and creating a narrative or story and then having an emotional response to the story as opposed to what's actually happening.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so what you could sometimes say is, "I hear the story you're creating is that I'm not here for you." But if we can take a step back, I'd love to get together and connect. And this is the hard part about being someone around someone who's addicted to drama: often they're rolling down the hill of drama.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yes, that inertia you cannot stop.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't know about your friend, but if you were to say, "I'm here, let's get together," they're like, "No, it's too late."
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: A thousand percent. You've hurt me. I don't know what I can do. Everyone hurts me. And they just keep pulling all these logs on to burn their fire higher.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. The drama fire.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And you can't stop it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, I was doing this to myself, too. So that's an example of somebody on the external. That's an external revver. Let me tell you the internal one. About five or six years ago, as I was really starting to feel lonely, my kids were getting older and I was no longer seeing a lot of friends because we're all super busy and I'm working all the time. And I started to tell myself a story that I have no friends. And I started to tell myself a story that all of my old friends were always getting together.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And they were getting together without me. And I kept repeating this story and it kept me isolated. It kept me feeling lonely. It kept me from reaching out to people.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It made me feel separate from everybody else. It actually made me miserable because I convinced myself that all of our old friends were having wonderful parties and enjoying life and everything was fantastic. And we were the losers that nobody liked or ever invited anywhere. And of course, now I know nobody was getting together with anybody. Everybody was busy as hell and starting to feel lonely.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it was a complete dramatic scene that I had created and was the main character in.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. That sounds so painful.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, I think based on the number of comments and topic requests that we get, I would be willing to put money on the fact that 90% of you listening can relate to that story.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. I think it's so common how we internally rev, we create these stories that reenact our childhood traumas, that keep us further away.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So for somebody who's never even considered this, could you give us an example that is relatable to how some kind of trauma that a lot of people may have experienced in their childhood might not even consider it to be trauma? Can you give us an example of how that can create an addiction to drama as an adult?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah, absolutely. So most of us have some sense in our life of not being seen and heard. That's a very familiar wound for many of us. And especially as young kids, what do we do? We don't have very many options. So we disconnect. We disconnect from the feeling. We focus on something else. It's a suppression, repression of it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think I have an example.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it's one I did to my kids.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Okay, tell me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So when our kids were in middle school, I was starting to travel a lot and my husband was the stay-at-home dad. One of the things that our daughters in particular say that we did terribly as parents is that my husband, because of how he was raised, would always say to them, "Try to get a ride home." Meanwhile, I'm off traveling. I have no idea this is happening. I did not grow up in a family where anybody ever said, "Try to get a ride home." I lived close enough to the school I could walk home if worse came to worse. But our kids could not walk home from where they were.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so Chris, because of his childhood where nobody picked him up, was constantly telling our middle school daughters, "See if you can't get a ride home." So they would be feeling at the end of a soccer match the panic that they're responsible for bumming a ride home with somebody.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Or abandoned.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or abandoned. All of it. And fast forward now, I realize that there is a lot of drama in our family around getting out of the house because it becomes this chaotic experience in our family.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because they have this unresolved issue of feeling abandoned. And then it's getting triggered when we as a family are trying to go somewhere and they're starting to feel like nobody's going to be there on time. We're not going to be there on time. This is a very familiar experience. Is this an example of it?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. It's a beautiful example of the disproportionate response to a very basic stimulus. It's like blowing out a candle with a fire hose. It doesn't make sense. It's like, "Oh, it's sprinkling outside. We better go into the bomb shelter."
--:-- Mel Robbins: "We're going to leave the house. Come on, we got to go. We're going to be late. Everyone's going to hate us." You are a thousand percent in our kitchen right now. The blowing out a candle with a fire hose.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Let's just pause on that phrase.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Sure.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because I think we all know a number of people in our lives that blow the candle out with a fire hose, that they get triggered and they completely tantrum.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Let's talk about what is it like and how can you, in a healthy way, be in a relationship with somebody who is addicted to drama. Because most of us know someone who is addicted to drama.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's important to recognize that a stress response, someone who's in a chronic stress response like happens in addiction and drama, is contagious. So let's say I was pretty nervous when I saw you today. I still am a little nervous.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You are?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, my God. Why?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: I don't know. You're great. You're great. Thank you. And it's intimidating.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, please.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And someone in this room or even you might start to pick it up on a level you wouldn't recognize.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So subconsciously, your physiology is responding to my physiology. That's evolutionarily designed. If I'm running into the house or into the studio because I just got chased by a snake, you don't even have to know what's chasing me. Your physiology is going to mirror mine in preparation to be responsive.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I would imagine this is even faster and more addictive in a family.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yes, because you register the cues quicker.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I was shopping with our daughter this weekend and it happened to us.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah?
--:-- Mel Robbins: She's stressed about life after college. So she's already baseline, you can tell, starting to rev herself up. To use the language of drama. We are out shopping and she comes out of this dressing room and she's got on a pair of motorcycle boots. She's like, "What do you think?" And I said, "Those look just like the ones that I bought you five years ago." And she goes, "Well, I don't have those anymore." And the energy shifts.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I immediately feel the drama. She then spins on her heels and stomps back into the thing. And then I feel myself rev up because I'm thinking, "Is she pissed at me because I'm not buying her a pair of boots?" And now I'm tense. It escalated from there. And I'm realizing that the dynamic you've described of somebody having that flood of emotion and then blowing out the candle with a fire hose and stomping into a dressing room, she's feeling something deep in the moment, which is painful: "I don't know what I'm doing with my life and I'm afraid I'm not going to figure it out." And these surface-level fights are her seeking that connection with me.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: She might not be able to be in contact with it. It's too painful.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's too painful.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So what do we do? We distract ourselves from that pain by creating more sensation.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So how do you deal with somebody who's constantly like this?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: For one, recognize what's happening in your own body. So the fact that you have that experience with your daughter, you started getting revved up from her revving.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So you got to find your anchor, find your ground, shake it off.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, my God. And then you don't want to know what I did?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: What'd you do?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, my God. I texted somebody while she was in the dressing room. I'm really just deep breathing and using the "Let Them" theory because Kendall is in a mood. And then all of a sudden, Kendall responds back because she was in the group chat and just said, "You know, I'm in this group chat with you and Lynn." And then I wrote back, "You are in a mood. What do you need?"
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And did that work?
--:-- Mel Robbins: We stayed in the drama cycle for the rest of the day. And then the next morning, I texted her and said, "I'm out here for two days. I really want to have today go well. What do you need from me?" And she said, "Well, why don't we talk?" And then we get in the car. In the safety of the car, there's something about talking to somebody when you're side by side versus looking them in the eye, she just burst into tears. And she's like, "You think I have it all figured out? I don't. I'm afraid I'm not going to make it. I don't know what to do. I don't even know why I'm out here. I don't know how to get into it." And it all came pouring out. And then I just apologized. And I said, "I'm really sorry. You're right. I look at you and see an accomplished, put together, confident young woman who is doing the work. I don't ask you if you're okay, because I assume you are, and I'm sorry."
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Wow.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It was a deep level of fear and pain that a lot of us experience when we're going through a major life change, which she is. Those first years out of college or out of high school or out of a relationship or out of a marriage are scary as you're finding your way. And I forget that. So I can see that in that example that I just lived in the last 48 hours, the drama escalated because she didn't know how to talk about the painful thing, which is "I'm lonely out here and I feel lost and I don't know if I'm going to make it in this big world as a singer-songwriter." And that's a lot. So instead we started fighting about the motorcycle boots, and that led us to this existential, beautiful conversation.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's such a prime example of how this little thing over here that's blown so out of proportion, that's so disproportionate to what's actually underneath the hood. And if we can get underneath the hood, the drama often settles and metabolizes because we can get to the real issue.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How do we do that, Dr. Scott? No, seriously, because I think I see this everywhere. I see the fact that when my parents came to visit me in Vermont, it's the first time they've visited us since we moved there three years ago. It was a beautiful visit, but as soon as my parents were leaving, my mom started to go, "Well, I guess we'll do Thanksgiving in Florida." When the plan had been for all of us and extended family to come. And she started just saying it and saying it and saying it. And the old me would have gotten pissed off. I would have felt controlled. I would have been angry about the campaigning to change a plan.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yep.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I would have felt offended when she said, "Well, you and your brother can get together. The fact that I'm going to Florida doesn't mean that you can't do what you're doing. All I've ever said is I want our family to do Thanksgiving together." She created a bind in that moment. So here's the thing, though. When I really unhooked myself and I went under the hood, here's what I thought: "When was the last time that we were all together? When was the last time we actually did all travel to them?" And it was quite a while ago. So when I didn't get into the drama cycle and I just took a deep breath and I was like, "Well, what's actually going on under here?"
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: That's exactly the question that needs to be asked, Mel. So if you're dealing with the friend that texts you, "I see you're in town. Oh, now it's too late. We're not getting together." Or the fight about shopping or the... Part of it is we can use functional reframes. So we go, "What do we imagine the story underneath their story? The feelings underneath their story? What are the unspoken needs that are actually present?" And that takes a fair amount of empathy, but it's a skill set for ourselves too. It's so we don't get involved in their drama cycle. That's part of a boundary. Recognizing what's happening in your own body, settling yourself. Do not attempt to take them off the rolling hill. That is never going to work. It's like, "Hey, what's going on with you?" That just is a log on their fire.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So do you just quietly put your hand on your heart and take a breath and literally go, "Let them"?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah. Let them spiral. Let them blow the candle out with the fire hose. Sometimes you have to let them run their cycle so that you can then enter in. And usually the cycle ends with a collapse in the drama cycle.
--:-- Mel Robbins: A lot of times what I saw from the listeners that wrote in is that there's the eruption, and then there's the silent treatment, because the person doesn't know or doesn't want to or isn't emotionally mature enough to repair the situation. So what do you do when you get the eruption and then the ice silent treatment or the pretending like nothing ever even happened? How do you handle that?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Go talk to a friend, a therapist, to validate your experience. Don't rely on their sense of reality to match yours. The more you try to put that pressure on yourself or them to have that mutual reality, the more challenging you will find it to be in your own sense of peace. The Venn diagram of where the overlap of realities happen is small in those moments. Because they are pulling in the past and the future as opposed to the present.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What's helped me a lot is understanding that when somebody does that, they are having an experience in their bodies where they're experiencing some wave of emotion that they literally can't tolerate it.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yep.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So they puke it out at you.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yep. The relationships become the depository for the emotions.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So is the reason why this is an addiction is because emotional outbursts or creating this revved-up state in your body or keeping yourself in a loop where you're like, "Nobody gets me, nobody gets me, nobody loves me, nobody takes care of me." How is it classified as an addiction, Dr. Scott?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So addiction typically has at least five characteristics to it, including you build up a tolerance level to it. You have withdrawal symptoms. You don't care about the social consequences of the action or the behavior. It occupies a lot of your energy and attention. And all of these things really fit into an addiction to drama. An example of tolerance is you need more to feel more. You need more to get drunk. And the same is true with stress. We start to need more stress or more of anything in that regard to feel more.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I thought I was super capable of dealing with stress. I just built up a tolerance level for it, which meant that I needed more overscheduling. I needed to be in more grad programs at the same time. I needed more intense relationships to get that high, to get that hit that then gives me a sensation of feeling alive. It gives me a sense of energy, gives me that pain relief. I needed more to feel more.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So that's tolerance. Withdrawal symptoms show up as things like anxiety and boredom. It's part of the collapse. It's like, "Oh, I'm so bored." And we start getting that itch of, "I got to do something, got to go get a tattoo or I don't know what it is." But I feel like that itch gets met if I get into a little friction with a friend or I go watch the news or go doom scrolling. Something feels stimulating, takes me out of that boredom and more importantly, out of the anxiety. Because at the base or the bottom of the anxiety is all the things I am trying to avoid. All the feelings that have been tucked down or haven't had the space, time, permission, support to process.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What's interesting about what you're saying is if you're bored, you could pick up a book of Mary Oliver poems, as I often do. Pick up a book of fabulous fiction. But if what you stimulate boredom with is doom scrolling or turning on some crime junkie thing... I remember when we had the extraordinary Dr. Tama Bryant on the podcast and she said something that really struck a nerve and has gone crazy viral. It's this idea of, you know, if you have trauma in your background, you really want to examine why you watch these crime shows or these horror shows or these violent entertainment shows at night. And she was saying that that is because it's familiar to you.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: I would go a little further. It's familiar, so we're in the reenactment pattern.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But what does that do for you? What does it do for you?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It goes back to the three things. It gives you pain relief, it gives you distraction, and it gives you energy.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How does it give you pain relief? I still don't understand that.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So we have two main natural pain relievers in our body. We get it from connection, from heart, and we get it from stress.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How is stress a pain reliever? Because I hear the word stress and I'm like, "That's pain."
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's in preparation for what we do as part of a stress response. You're going to get into a fight. You already need the pain relief, the cascade of hormones that gives you the pain relief in preparation to deal with and adapt to the circumstances. Also, in love, it releases the hormones that then blocks the pain. It essentially gives us a distraction technique.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Gotcha. So you're basically feet up on the couch, you're watching some sort of dramatic violent kind of thing, you're calling it entertainment. And the stress is rising, but because you're distracted and the stress is flooding your body, it relieves you of that boredom and of the restlessness that you felt, which made you not want to sit with a book of poems or historical fiction. What is it that we're not attending to in ourselves when we're attending to something on the outside that is stressful? I want to further break this down because I think it's really important what you just taught us.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Okay.
--:-- Mel Robbins: If I were still in a space of my life where I was frustrated with my inability to control my emotions, that used to be me. Outbursts, nasty tone of voice, unloading on my family when I had a stressful day at work, venting, all of it. If you had told me to just take in my self-awareness, I would have thought for a second, "Okay, I'm taking in that I am not in control of my emotions and I'm taking in that I want to change this and that's a good thing." And a millisecond later, I would go, "Dr. Scott, that's not enough. What do I need to do?"
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Mel, are you revving yourself up out of the contact with yourself?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh my goodness.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And so even the reaction that, "Well, that's not going to work," is you revving up those old negative pathways.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. Holy shit.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's you staying out of relationship with yourself at any cost, including blaming me or creating a narrative, whatever other form of revving you use to stay out of relationship with what feels vulnerable.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How long do I have to just sit with it before I'm doing something else? That's seriously the question.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: We build up a tolerance. We titrate it. So maybe it's a second. Maybe it's literally one second, and then we build it up to five seconds, 10 seconds. It doesn't have to all be at once.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What's a good way to ask for help?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: So we build awareness, we build acceptance, and in that acceptance or that validation is also a bit of starting to open up to be seen. Because underlying the explosion is something that isn't being seen. So, "I don't feel like anyone's got my back in the family. I don't feel like anyone helps me clean. So I feel all alone." And that reminds me of my past when I didn't get picked up from soccer practice. And so we're starting to build enough space between the reflexive response, because it goes like that in the blink of an eye when we get into the drama cycle. So we start to recognize, "Can I build enough space between when I start to rev and when I go into that total catharsis where I blow up like a volcano?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then you're in a shame cycle and then you're apologizing.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And then you're in a shame cycle.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I lived that for so long. And one of the things that helped me a lot, and it's a very hard way to ask for help, but I at one point sat with my family and just said, "I don't want to be like this. And I need your help. I need you to tell me when my tone of voice is demeaning. I need you to tell me when I am venting because it's gotten to be such a lever that I pull reflexively." And what was interesting is that the more they would be like, "Mom, watch your tone," the more I would then have to practice feeling the engine rev up. But here's what happened that was really interesting: it forced me, when I no longer could get away with unloading my stress and drama on my family, it forced me to focus on the reality that I was profoundly overwhelmed at work and had not prioritized building an exceptional team. And I felt very alone and I felt unseen and I felt like nobody got it. And the drama was keeping me trapped in a broken system in my own business and in communicating with my family.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: I think what ultimately happens when you have the courage to look at where you're revving yourself up or where you're in this cycle of picking fights or exploding on people and then you know it's not working, I think that there's the potential that this unravels something incredibly beautiful and deep that you didn't even realize was the issue in the first place.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love what you're teaching us. I want to read you a question from one of our listeners, Shauna. "My oldest is 30 and constantly blames me for things. And then when I get upset with her, she likes to label me and call me an abuser because she can't get her own way, whether it be for a ride somewhere or a new cell phone. And we have tried the 'No, you're not getting it' to just giving in and giving her what she wants. Her father and I are very passive people. We do not like confrontation. What do you suggest for changing this dynamic with our daughter?"
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's imperative that you put a boundary up. And how do you do that? It's saying, "What are you actually willing to say yes and no to and how much of that?" So it's like, "Abuser is not a word we allow in the family." That can be a boundary. It's like, "Hey, when you call me that, it shuts me down. It doesn't get me closer to you. It doesn't get me closer to what your needs are. And what I care about most is this relationship." What I hear in this dynamic is a child using their parent like a blankie. Life is hard, so I'm going to call and vomit on you and demand a new cell phone because I think a new cell phone is the way to solve all my other problems in life. And if you're still making your parents buy your cell phone plan at the age of 30, you've got bigger problems than needing a new cell phone. There is a dynamic where the dramatic person is in control of the relationship and the drama is what makes everybody jump. And so it just dials up and up and up. And when we say "avoids confrontation, avoids conflict," that's a flag to me where I go, "Ooh, we got to peek under what's on the hood there."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Here's the other thing. If you are in a situation with somebody who's dramatic, you're always in conflict. Because not saying what you feel and not calling people out on their shit causes a ton of agita and engine revving for the person who's passive.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Absolutely. If you are the person who is enabling someone addicted to drama, guess what? So are you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, my God. Say that again.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: I would get into the space between my parents and referee their fights. Being in that position creates safety for me, but I found that I was a referee in my entire life. I did it as a profession, doing couples work, working with people, and I realized that I am getting a physiological revving response by being the martyr.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think actually for you, if you're listening to this and you're the passive one, or you don't want confrontation, or you think it's just easier to let it slide, Dr. Scott is here to tell you that getting kind of trampled by somebody else's drama is your own issue with drama.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yes. When you recognize you have choice and agency, when you have power again to say no or walk away, then you can actually be in relationship with someone who's addicted to drama. When you are being trampled on, when you have no choices, even for yourself, then you are part of it. And I'm not trying to victim blame. That's not what's happening here. But to recognize our own contribution to our suffering is imperative.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It reminds me of what Dr. Russell Kennedy said when we interviewed him, which is his research and belief is that all anxiety stems from your unmet need to be loved when you were little. It's the little you saying, "I need help right now." I always think of anxiety as the telephone ringing, as the sound of the ring of the telephone. So when I feel anxiety, I go, "Okay, I can either participate in the anxiety and worry about worrying, or I can pick up the phone and see what's present in my body."
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: That's a beautiful image. And so healing addiction to drama is not about being zen.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is it about? That is some bullshit.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: It's truly about being able to be, "Okay, I can accurately use the right amount of energy, emotion, attention to ride and surf the challenges. I can be in flow. I can be involved. I can belong to myself. I can belong to community. I can be a part of this world and feel in sync and adapt, functionally adapt."
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think what you're talking about is a game changer and it makes it accessible for somebody because you can spot drama a mile away. You can feel the revving up in your own body and it is very hard to cycle down the drama in someone else. But if you want to, the best way to do it is to create more peace in yourself. Because if somebody else is getting all dramatic or triggered or they're blowing out the candles with a fire hose filled with sewage, if you can stay in your centered place of peace because you have trained yourself to not join in with somebody else's stress and drama, which you are capable of doing, it is a superpower.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: And when you talk about finding or feeling peace, I would go the next step and ask you, "What can you do with that peace?" You can function in so many environments. You can be around someone who's addicted to drama and be untethered to them.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Amazing. So, Dr. Scott, can you give us just a couple very simple things that someone can do today to start to break the addiction to drama or remove unnecessary turmoil from their life?
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Coin a phrase: create a safety word with your family, with those you trust and you love, of them signaling back to you like, "Hey, you're starting to rev up." I like "rev up." I think "rev up" sounds good. That feels right. Start to recognize what are the things that rev you up. I'd say take a media fast. Part of recognizing the job of the media is to get and gain your attention and to capture it. And they use the devices of drama to do it. They use awe, angst, and anger as the three main devices to capture you and to get you to share what they are sharing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't even watch news because I figure if there's something very significant going on, everybody will be talking about it.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Do you remember the Boston Marathon bombing? They found that those who watched the news about it showed more significant signs of PTSD than those who were there at present at the bombing.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Because of the massive repetition over and over again showing and the added language that they threw on top of that. So take a media break is a big one. Choose your words wisely. Recognize that the words you use have impact, not only on other people, but yourself. So if I'm using the word like, "Ah, Mel, when you said that, I just feel like you're a total abuser," can I step back and choose my words more wisely that feel aligned, not to the dramatic, to the intensification of things, but to what is true? It's like, "Ooh, when you said that I felt kind of pained." So stepping back, choose your words wisely. Forgive yourself is a big one. If you're listening to this and you're like, "Oh shit. This is me. Or this is everyone else I know. And maybe, maybe it's me. Who knows?"
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Forgive yourself. This, this is not your fault. There are certain conditions that created this, this survival mechanism, this way of needing drama to avoid the underlying trauma. Forgive yourself for the actions you've done and take responsibility for them at the same time for the change that you can make as part of your own healing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Great. Well, Dr. Scott Lyons, thank you. Thank you, thank you for being here with us and for giving us not only this really interesting insight but also specific things that we can do to end the unnecessary turmoil that we create for ourselves when we become addicted to drama.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Thank you, Mel, for being such a beautiful support and so vulnerable. The time to share your own life experiences to make this so much more accessible to people.
--:-- Mel Robbins: My pleasure. I got a lot of drama. Or I did. Oh my gosh, I got more out of that than I thought I would. And I also found it so helpful to use the framework that we were just learning in real time to really unpack what happened with my daughter Kendall this weekend. And I hope you found it helpful too, because you deserve to protect your peace. You deserve to get rid of all of this drama that is not serving you. And when you do that, you will create a better life. And one more thing, I want to make sure I remind you that I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to do just that. Alrighty, I'll talk to you in a few days.
--:-- [Sound of rolling tape or a cut]
--:-- Mel Robbins: We're rolling, right? Did you fold this? Yeah. Oh my God. Look at you. Okay, here we go. So if you say the word stress and then notice what happens to your breath. I don't want to say that. Because I literally felt kind of calm. And then you said, say the word stress. And I'm like, if I say the word stress.
--:-- Dr. Scott Lyons: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think like stress. Oh my God. You have a lot of degrees. I think we got it. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Scott Lyons.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
