Summary and Takeaways from Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love by Lisa Marie Bobby

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll give you my summary and takeaways from the book called Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love by Lisa Marie Bobby.

I'm now a mental health therapist in residence and I have been reading as many books as I can on every condition, every human issue, every disorder so that I can be as helpful as possible to my clients.  And I figured, if I'm going to read these books -- I should share my summaries with you, so here goes.

The book I read most recently is about Love Addicts, which the author, Lisa Marie Bobby, calls Exaholics.  The reason this book appeals to me is that after hearing account after account of the loss, grief, and anxiety that people go through after break-ups, it started to occur to me that love was pretty similar to an addiction -- and that breakups felt a lot like withdrawal.  This book is, by no means, the only one to make this claim, there are lots, but it did happen to be the one that my library had available and it may be the most recent since it was published in 2019. 

Okay -- before I get into the contents of this book, if you are going through a rough break-up, I would highly recommend reading or listening to this book as an act of self care. The author is sympathetic and nurturing and understanding and the whole thing will make you feel less crazy and less alone with your enormous feelings.  And that is where she starts. 

It's Normal

The whole first part of the book is about how normal it is to feel terrible after a significant relationship ends.  In fact, she sort of indicates that we as a society are way too quick to expect people to chin up and get over it afterwards.  The bottom line is that it is normal to feel grief and pain and anger (not necessarily in that order) and you may feel crazy, but that's normal too.  Even if you've determined that you've fallen in love with the wrong or a toxic person, that doesn't mean that you necessarily have low self esteem or are a terrible judge of character.  The influence of love is incredibly powerful -- some might say addictive.  The end of a relationship is like going cold turkey from a  addiction.  You crave an attachment that no longer exists.  Then she dives into what for me was the most fascinating part of the book --

Why is Love Addictive?

First she talks about the critical role of attachment or love in our survival as human beings.  Love is as important to our survival as a species as is food, water, or shelter.   Because we are so vulnerable when we are born, our survival drive for love and attachment is hard wired directly into our brains and our nervous systems.   And what is fascinating to me -- is that apparently, love is the *original* addiction.  The euphoria that we feel when we are first in love is created by a cocktail of neurotransmitters or brain chemicals.  Love increases the level of dopamine in our brains -- which creates euphoria and goal seeking.  And it decreases the levels of serotonin, which is responsible for satisfaction and contentment.  So, essentially, people in love feel euphoric, goal driven, anxious, agitated, compulsive, and impulsive.  Just like people who have snorted cocaine.   In fact, she makes the point that those neural pathways were designed originally to motivate us to attach to another person -- and they are highjacked by other chemical addictions like heroin, nicotine, and alcohol.  Love is the original addiction -- everything else is just borrowing those neural pathways and brain chemicals.  People tend to have different feelings towards those recovering from a broken relationship than from those recovering from a chemical dependency, but frankly the brain mechanisms are almost identical.

Love Stages

She does cite Helen Fisher's work on the stages of love which include Lust, Romantic Attraction, and Attachment.  The attachment stage is characterized by a decrease in dopamine and increase in serotonin so that you feel less euphoric, but more satisfied and calm.  Unfortunately, a rupture in the relationship even in later stages can throw your brain chemistry into an uproar and throw us back into feeling obsessive and impulsive.  When love is blocked or rejected, our feelings of passion are magnified which is why toxic relationships are sometimes the most addictive.  I found all of this stuff fascinating.  The next section discusses the two stages of love withdrawal

Protest and Despair

If you think about the stages of grief, protest covers the first 3: denial, anger, and bargaining.  This doesn't feel like sadness -- this feels almost like survival fear and provokes a fight back response.  The protest stage is akin to withdrawal from most addictions.  It's characterized by intense cravings, obsessions about your loved one, and compulsions that feel out of control.  This is when you know you shouldn't, but you text, you call, you show up where you shouldn't, you check social media, you mine the Internet and others for information.  None of this feels right, but it also doesn't feel like you can stop it.  And you know what?  Each of these actions actually gets you a fix.  Because all it takes is contact with your loved one.  And in fact, because the bonding process engages our imagination, human beings only need to conjure up a mental representation of their ex in order to get a fix.  So, checking their social media constantly is the equivalent of having an IV drip in your arm all day long.  The bottom line is -- these processes are inhabiting deep and ancient parts of our brain.  The idea that we can simply "talk ourselves out of it" is laughable.  The emotional brain always has the upper hand over the rational brain.

And of course, when it turns out that our loved one doesn't return our affection even after a lengthy protest period, we eventually fall into despair.  Emotional pain lights up the same parts of our brains that physical pain does on a fMRI scan.  Once you get to the point where you accept that it's over, you can finally start the

Healing Process

In the end, you want to get to a point where you can think and feel at the same time.  You need to calm your emotional brain down enough so that your rational brain can help you weigh the consequences of your actions and you can start acting from your values again.  The author gives three techniques to help you cope while you are recovering.  The first is

• Mindfulness - this involves staying in the here and now and being aware of your thoughts, but not needing to act on them and not judging them.  You can do this through meditation, journaling, talking to a therapist.  The next technique is
• Stop and Replace - When you start to think about your loved one, have another pleasant thought ready to replace it with.  Mantras also help with this.  I have mixed feelings about this idea, since I tend to think suppressing thoughts just makes them more powerful, but her final technique is
• Acceptance - which I *do* fully embrace.  Accept your thoughts, your feelings, your memories.  You don't have to act on them, believe them, or fuse with them, but you do need to accept that you are having them.

And one of my favorite part of this book is her

12 step program

for Exaholics.  It's obviously modeled on the Alcoholics Anonymous program, but it provides many of the scaffolding techniques of support and acceptance that have helped to lead so many people out of addiction and into the light.  And the great thing is that there is a website that offers a community, discussion boards, and blogs for support and communication with fellow travelers.  Humans heal best in relationship and in community, so she is providing a wonderful service to help those navigating this bumpy terrain. 

All in all, I learned some new ideas and I made some new connections as a result of reading this book and I wasn't even going through a breakup!  I think it would be incredibly validating and motivational if I was.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!