Pain Body Politic

A field report from the couch

Remember in the last blog post when I said everything was fine and life was so serene it bordered on boring? I spoke too soon. Without even thinking about it, I moved that newcomer with the beard stubble and a hospital bracelet into the spare room. (Okay, not literally. But close.) The very thing I swore in that blog that I would never do again. And now I’m paying for it.

I should listen to myself more.

I’m in that phase of withdrawal where it feels like you’ve got a low-grade flu. You perhaps know the phase, when you finally get it through your skull that your romantic interest is unrequited and suddenly an invisible fist has punched you in the stomach. You have chills and maybe a fever and it really does feel like the flu. You can’t sleep, but you can’t wake up either. You don’t have the strength to get up off the couch and you can’t just lie down and watch TV or read, because your mind keeps wandering off into conversations with people who aren’t in the room at the time. Your Word Blitz score tanks (okay, maybe that’s just me.) Food tastes like cardboard. Spotify thinks you’re in junior high school.

That’s not the flu. That’s not even a broken heart. That’s withdrawal from oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin and all those other wonderful neurotransmitters that make a crush sheer bliss. And when they recede, it crushes you.

Withdrawal from love addiction is brutally physical and I’m in the middle of it. Haven’t been in this position — not quite the fetal position, but close — in years and years. And it pisses me off, not only because it’s wildly uncomfortable, but because I know better. Newcomers with hospital bracelets (not necessarily literally) are always dead ends. Always. Dead. Ends. Like I said in the book LOVE ADDICT, you can rescue that poor sweet animal from the trap, but chances are it will bite your face off.

I know what’s going on. As every cop in every cop buddy movie moans right before he gets shot: “I’m too old for this shit.” But, as they remind us in every 12-step room, self-knowledge avails me nothing. I can’t think my way out of it any more than I could think my way out of the actual flu. I just have to let it pass. And it sucks.

TIME DISSOLVE:

It’s 6 days later and guess what? The storm has broken. I’m up off the couch. My stomach doesn’t ache. I’m not getting fevers and chills. I’m listening to ‘80s dance music again. Yes, I still cycle conversations in my head, but that’s also the OCD. So what changed? What did I do, other than waiting for it to pass? I did the same thing you do when you’re jonesing for heroin or alcohol. First and foremost, I didn’t pick up. I may not be withdrawing from a substance, but there’s still a lot to not pick up when your drug of choice is a person. Don’t pick up the phone, not to call or to text or to read old texts. Don’t “accidentally” wander into places where Beard Stubble might be. Don’t casually ask mutual friends for an information fix. Don’t. Pick. Up. Hard, yes. Impossible, no.

Okay, I put down the drink/drug/motorcycle outlaw. (Again, not literally.) Then on to the rest of the program of recovery. I went to meetings. I called my sponsor. I wrote inventory. I prayed. And I meditated like a motherfucker.

What happened was, in writing inventory I was reminded of men I felt the same way about over the years. There was the tall blond guitarist and the short dark scientist; the distinguished writer and the juvenile delinquent; the trust fund baby and the starving student… the only thing they had in common was that I felt this way about them, and it broke me. It was like the addiction itself was an alien parasite that latched onto and connected us, independent of who we actually were.

I was reminded of Eckhart Tolle and his concept of the Pain Body, an energy/entity that feeds on our emotional pain. We were all reading Tolle back when I got sober. I thought it was all kind of woo-woo and I’m not a woo-woo person. But something here resonated. That newcomer with the hospital bracelet? Overflowing with pain. And pain calls to pain. At its core, this is more about my mother’s suicide than it is about Beard Stubble’s charming smile.

Here’s how ChatGPT put it, in its disturbingly conversational way:

“Ah—yes, the “pain body” comes from Eckhart Tolle (mainly The Power of Now and A New Earth). He describes it as a kind of accumulated emotional residue—old hurt, anger, grief, fear—that gets stored in you and reactivates when something triggers it. It feels almost like another entity living in you, feeding on negative emotion.

“You can’t exactly cut it out like a tumor, but you can weaken and dissolve it. The core practice is awareness without identification. The pain body survives by pulling you into identification—making you think you are the anger, you are the grief. When you witness it instead (“there is anger arising in me”), you deprive it of fuel. With repeated practice, it weakens, like a fire starved of oxygen.”

I had ChatGPT write me a meditation script for relief from the pain body, and I found some ready-made guided meditations online as well (I like the free meditation app Insight Timer - it has a ton.) And it’s working. Not perfectly: I do get cravings, like anyone in withdrawal does. As someone in a meeting reminded me: addiction is a progressive disease, and it progresses whether you’re using or not. Just ask any alcoholic who drank after 25 years of sobriety.

Oh, wait. You can’t ask them. They’re dead.