Drama As An Attempt At Intimacy
By: Jeanine Austin, Ph.D.
We either know a drama queen, we are a drama queen, or goodness forbid, perhaps both! Some people run from high drama to high drama. They never really live the real drama of life: deep love, true passion and deep peace. They seem to get high from the intensity and frantic nature of “cheap drama”. Why do we/they do it?
Cheap drama can be an addiction like anything else. It makes us high and gives us something to focus our energies on. Cheap drama seems to give us purpose, and in the moment, it seems to make our life interesting. However, the price of living cheap drama is a great one. People get burned out on us, people get tired of hearing our, “Oh my goodness you are NEVER gonna believe this one” stories, others tire of our constant cries for help and our refusal to find solutions to our problems. People lose faith in us including our bosses, our co-workers, our beloved, our families… To them, to use the new expression, we are one hot mess!
We know we are living cheap drama when we are always at the effect of our lives. We are so busy “putting out fires” that we don’t have the time, energy or focus to create the life that we truly want. The first step in healing may be to recognize our patterns. We may want to detox from our lives the things that are aiding our cheap drama addiction, this might include: gossip, tabloid talk, substance use, caffeine and sugar addictions and our addiction to unloving relationships. We also may want to look at what we need to do to take care of ourselves.
Much of cheap drama, it seems to me, is an attempt at intimacy. We may have learned this way of relating from our family of origin or we may have discovered this high along the way. Much of our desperation for intimacy, I believe, is because we are not doing what we need to do to nurture ourselves. For instance, when we are tired, do we rest? When we are hungry do we eat healthfully? When we are sad, do we express it? When we need help, do we ask for it?
Many the Peace of Real Drama Dance in Your Lives!
Love,
Jeanine
©Copyright 2008 by Jeanine Austin. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish
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