When you meet someone, who stimulates your brain chemistry and sends your biology into a euphoric celebration, there is little difference in what happens inside your body between this “falling in love” and getting high on crack cocaine.
This has been well-documented overtime, ever since humans have had the ability to document the intense power of love-longing in poetry, the arts, and philosophical thought. If you have a reverence for such art, including love songs on the radio, you understand that this reverence for the longing for love can be very powerful indeed.
People who are addicted to crack cocaine seek the high state of euphoria associated with using it to set their internal brain chemistry ablaze with a rush of an overwhelming feeling of pleasure, not unlike falling in love.
It is against the law to use crack cocaine, so there it takes a willingness to engage in illegal activity to have the experience at all. A definite deterrent if you have a fear of imprisonment. Also, it is well known that using crack cocaine over time can have serious ill effects on one’s mental health, physiological health, leads to seriously bad decision-making skills, and can ultimately lead to death. The statistics are well-known, prisons, hospitals, and cemeteries are full crack addicts.
Falling in love, on the other hand, is legal, and there are far more people in prisons, hospitals, and cemeteries due to love.
If you question the similarity, try this on for size:
Dr. Helen Fisher, who has had the pleasure of studying the neurological effects of love on the brain and the body discovered the identical brain chemistry overload of dopamine and norepinephrine of subjects deeply in love as those experiencing a high from using cocaine. (Lust, Attraction, Attachment: Biology and Evolution of the Three Primary Emotion Systems for Mating, Reproduction, and Parenting).
Just the same, only different.
Effecting your motivation and decision-making skills is clearly apparent. Whether you’re addicted to crack, or deeply in love, you will do the darndest things which would not make any sense to you if you weren’t under the influence.
When you’re high (on either love or crack) you have an incredible feeling of elation, everything appears to have increased clarity and your self-confidence surges as you feel almost invincible. You’d do almost anything to sustain this feeling.
On the other hand, if the effects of the drug in question (cocaine or love) starts to diminish, the addict looks for new ways to achieve the high they originally felt when first exposed to the original source (which may have varying degrees of success, but it is well known that the height of the original high will never be reached by increasing the dose, method, or frequency).
Still, we have a tendency to look elsewhere, as our resistance builds to the original drug.
There is nothing more devastating to the addict (whether addicted to love or crack) than suddenly not having access to the supply of their high. The withdrawal symptoms of losing one’s supply, having it cut off for any reason, has been routinely associated with the effects of withdrawal from heroin. Which can send the addict into an unimaginable tailspin leading to intense pain and suffering.
See you at the Soulmate Wizardry event.