Psychology Around the Net: August 10, 2019

Did somebody say chocolate?

This week’s Psychology Around the Net covers new research on dark chocolate and depression, how to find a balance between mindfulness and technology, why clinging to feel-good beliefs isn’t actually good, and more!

Is There a Link Between Dark Chocolate and Depression? According to the findings of a survey-based study recently published in Depression & Anxiety, people who eat dark chocolate appear less likely to exhibit clinically relevant depressive symptoms. Researchers from University College London in conjunction with University of Calgary and Alberta Health Services Canada took into account weight, height, marital status, education, ethnicity, income, levels of education, smoking, and other health conditions — a wide range of potentially confounding variables they say previous studies overlooked — as well as analyzed both dark chocolate and nondark chocolate. The researchers report: “[I]ndividuals who reported any dark chocolate consumption had 70% lower odds of reporting clinically relevant depressive symptoms than those who did not report any chocolate consumption.”

18 Important Reminders About Living Up to People’s Expectations: As Angel Chernoff writes, “A life spent ceaselessly trying to please people who are perhaps incapable of ever being pleased, or trying too hard to always be seen as doing ‘what’s expected of you,’ is a sure road to a regretful existence.” How true. Yet, it’s so easy to fall into an existence — even if it’s not yet regretful — of striving to live up to others’ expectations and it’s hard to break away from it. Keep these reminders handy when you find yourself slipping back into people-pleasing habits.

Mindfulness and Technology: Why You Need to Disconnect to Reconnect: Many of us are addicted to being busy because we’re uncomfortable with down time. Kaitlin Vogel realized she had fallen into a trap of hiding behind technology, so she set out to “disconnect to reconnect” and describes how she began her digital detox, what she learned about her thoughts (specifically, what they said about her) once she had to pay attention to them, and what she decided to do with her time not spent staring at a screen.

3 Common Feel-Good Beliefs That Are Actually Holding You Back: Do you believe that “The One” is out there for you, somewhere? That “everything is going to be fine”? That your “ship will come in someday”? Find out how we create these myths, why we cling to them, and how we can give them up.

1 in 300 Thrives on Very-Early-to-Bed, Very-Early-to-Rise Routine: Once thought quite rare, the so-called “advanced sleep phase” actually might affect closer to one in 300 adults according to a new study. When a person is an “advanced sleeper,” their body clock or circadian rhythm has earlier hours of operation, so to speak, than those of other people. Their body prematurely releases melatonin (the sleep hormone) and experience a body temperature shift. (However, the advanced sleep phase condition is not to be confused with the kind of early rising that naturally develops with normal aging or among people with depression.) Says the study’s senior author Louis Ptacek, MD: “While most people struggle with getting out of bed at 4 or 5 a.m., people with advanced sleep phase wake up naturally at this time, rested and ready to take on the day. These extreme early birds tend to function well in the daytime but may have trouble staying awake for social commitments in the evening.”

Why Is It Important That Parents Participate in their Child’s ABA Services? Parent participation and training during Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is beneficial to both the parents and the children, including children with autism spectrum disorder. Parent training can help parents manage behavioral issues, generalize the child’s skills to new settings, be part of improving their child’s life, and more.

Researchers found that CBD, or cannabidiol, did not react with either of two commercially available tests used to screen for marijuana use. However, another cannabis compound, cannabinol (CBN), did.

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Health effects of eating marijuana is subject of a new study, in which mice voluntarily ate a dough containing THC, the primary psychoactive component in marijuana. Researchers found the mice were less active, and their body temperatures were lower, after consuming the edible THC.

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After decades fighting Ebola, a beloved expert hangs up his boots

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Movie on the hidden toxins in our lives

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How to Recognize the Signs of Trauma Bonding

When you are trauma bonding it is easy to mistake abuse as love and not let go.

Emotional abuse is often mistaken for love by those who are trapped in a cycle of abuse in their relationship. Trauma is surprisingly easy to overlook when the abuse masquerades as someone “caring” for you.

Trauma bonding is a problem that many people trapped in abusive relationships don’t realize they’re experiencing because mental abuse often beats you down into ignoring various types of trauma as love.

When you’re holding out to be loved, you can easily become drawn to an abusive relationship and misread the signs as love instead of abuse. So, how do you know if you are truly in love or caught in a blinding fantasy due to trauma bonding?

Is it real love or abuse due to an emotional trauma bond?

Have you ever fell in love hard and fast, but then it all came crashing down with abusive behavior? Did you feel surprised that it was hard to break away from toxic love?

Real love doesn’t always hit so hard, nor so fast. Real love is steady and grows slowly when you get to know the real person. Whereas, being attached through a trauma bond can feel magnetic and captivating, when you are feeling lost love for someone. But, this is not real love, its attachment through the wound.

What Is Trauma Bonding? The Scientific Reason So Many Women Stay Stuck in Emotionally Abusive Relationships

Trauma bonding refers to the attachment bond that is created through repeated abusive or traumatic childhood experiences with the caregiver, whereby this relationship pattern becomes internalized as a learned pattern of behavior for attachment.

If you experienced abuse from a caregiver who also loved you, then you learned to associate love with abuse. This became the template for how you learned to relate to others and form relationships. So, you expect that in order to feel loved you get abused. Abuse feels like love, and often many become attached to their abusers to feel loved in this way. This is how it works.

Imagine you were abused for being noncompliant as a child, so you are left feeling abandoned and unworthy. In order to attach to the abuser, you learned to meet their needs and make them happy and you received love and approval. This became your equation for love. So, you learned to please your abuser in order to receive the love you wanted.

If you were abused as child, you protected your relationship with the parent by preserving the notion of the ‘good parent’, pushing down feelings of anger or hurt towards your parent in order to feel loved or attached. You protected yourself by burying these feelings, and internalizing that there was something wrong with you for upsetting your parent. So, you came to believe that it was all your fault, you are bad, naughty and must make it up to them in order to feel loved and good enough. Well, this template is now how you see yourself in relationships with others.

You see yourself as ‘bad’ and deserving of punishment, so you must be ‘good’ to get the love you want. You end up attracting abusive partners, with the wish to be good enough for them, so you get the love and approval you’re looking for.

In essence, you are still longing for your abusive father or mother to give you the lost love you wanted, yet, you bury this fantasy, and replicate this pattern by attracting abusive partners, so you can get them to love you.

Often, when feeling not good enough, the desire for love can be the perfect bait that an abusive narcissist hooks into. When you’re meeting all their needs, you feel loved and good enough, which allows the abuse to be justified. When you blame yourself or think something is fundamentally wrong with you, you believe the abuser and allow yourself to be put down, because it is what you’ve already internalized about yourself. You repeat the pattern of putting up with abuse because it’s the internal bond that keeps you attached to the parental abuser, so you do not feel abandoned or not good enough.

When you justify the abuse or minimize it and blame yourself for it, you become unaware that you are being abused. Just as the child, you deny the abuse is happening in order to feel loved and wanted.

You may not see the real person as abusive but still hold onto the fantasy of being loved which you project onto that person.

Acknowledging the abuse creates the fear of abandonment from the lost love object and awakens the original pain, that becomes further defended against with denial and self-blame.

Letting go of this fantasy of being loved brings up feelings of abandonment, with associated feelings of not being good enough, causing you to reenact the same attachment pattern with the abusive parent. So, you cannot let go of the abuser and must be good to get them back.

So, the victim of abuse will go back to the abuser and justify it. This is the actual truth about why it is so hard to cut the ties and let go. It’s a deep wound, a trauma wound that binds them together.

So, how do you detect the signs of a trauma bond?

Signs of trauma bonding in an abusive relationship — what you say to yourself to justify the abuse:

• He didn’t mean to get angry, it was my fault.
• He puts up with me and still loves me.
• He had a terrible childhood, I feel sorry for him.
• I can help him to change with love and support.
• He deserves a fair go, he doesn’t mean to hurt me.

Notice how the abuser’s behavior is justified and the victim blames herself as if the abuse is her fault.

This is how the victim of trauma bonding minimise and denies the abuse in order to uphold the positive image of the perpetrator, while distorting the reality and being misguided by fantasy love, not real love.

How to stop trauma bonding:

• Always take your time to get to know someone, find out their past.
• Never jump straight in because it feels good.
• Look out for the red flags of abusive behaviour, such as feeling pressured or controlled.
• Ensure you can be respected for your boundaries (say no).
• Make sure what you see is what you really get, no hidden truths that come out later.
• Be careful that you are not being sold a charming person to reel you in and hook you.
• Be careful when all the ex-partners are crazy, nothing is their fault, or they’re the victim.
• Be aware if you feel they’re too good to be true or make you feel amazing.

Don’t confuse trauma bonding as real love; it will blind you.

True love is not abusive, nor do you distort the way they see yourself and your partner in order to fit the fantasy of being loved.

Real love means you feel loved while expressing yourself, and you do not need to search for love to feel good about yourself. Real love is not conditional upon pleasing someone, but being true to yourself.

Why Trauma Bonding Stops You From Leaving Your Abusive Partner

Real love is not romanticized love, but how you deal with the ups and downs of living in reality and seeing each other for who you really are.

In true love, you feel good about yourself and attract those who treat you well. Obtaining self-love means letting go of the ties to the abusive parental object, in order to free yourself from the attachment patterns of seeking love and approval in order to feel good enough. Truly loving yourself means you engage in self-care and protect yourself from abuse, so you can be yourself and feel loved for the real person that you are.

This guest article was originally published at Life Care Wellness and appeared on YourTango.com: How To Recognize The Signs Of Trauma Bonding (So You Stop Confusing Emotional Abuse With ‘Love’).

How Mindfulness of Feelings Is Essential for Building Healthy Relationships

Our deepest longing is to love and be loved. But oftentimes we don’t know how to bring that precious love toward us. Our challenge is to discover what it takes to create healthy, satisfying connections.

Intimacy is the felt sense of connection with another person. In order to feel close to someone, we need to allow them to see who we are. We need to carry an intention to be seen. But before we can show who we are, we need to know who we are — from moment to moment. We need to pause, look inside, and get connected to how we’re feeling and what we’re wanting.

We can’t expect others to feel drawn toward us, if we’re not willing to take the risk to be vulnerable and reveal the ever-changing textures of our inner world. Yes, some people might be attracted to us based upon the image we project, such as being “successful,” or being interesting in some peculiar way, perhaps by having interesting hobbies, a nice home, or an attractive body. But as you might have already discovered, attractions based upon externals are short-lived at best. Such attractions are destined to curdle into distance and dissatisfaction when people inevitably discover who we really are — the secret fears, hurts, and challenges that we try to conceal. Or we might become rather boring, if we’re not moving toward a rich and alive intimacy based upon a deeper sharing of our innermost life.

Being Mindful of Our Feelings 

Sadly, we often don’t allow ourselves to slow down enough to look inside and discover what we’re really feeling inside. We might be afraid to allow ourselves to peer into our heart of hearts and notice feelings that might be uncomfortable or threatening. Yet if we want intimacy in our lives, we need to be aware of what’s going on inside us.

We need to dedicate ourselves to cultivating a quality of mindfulness — shining an awareness flashlight steadily inside to know when we’re having feeling such as sadness, hurt, shame, anger, fear, or delight — or when we need a hug or need to talk. We need to know when we feel hurt by a partner or friend’s comment so that we don’t allow a meaningful relationship to decay due to neglect, false pride, or a fear.

Sharing our feelings and needs is an essential way for us humans to know each other. If we keep our emotions and wants hidden, people aren’t given a chance to know us — and thereby feel closer to us. We can’t expect intimacy to bloom if we’re not willing to nurture the connection by allowing ourselves to be seen as the vulnerable human being that we are. 

This isn’t to suggest that we should not have good boundaries or that we recklessly express every feeling we notice, regardless of the consequences or a person’s willing to hear us. We need boundaries in the sense of staying connected to ourselves and sensing when it feels relatively safe and “right” to share our precious feelings with another person.

Keeping Ourselves Isolated

More ominously, we might keep ours feelings hidden from ourselves, fearful that they might overwhelm us. Staying hidden keeps us in a prison of self-isolation. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to identify and manage our emotions and display empathy toward others. If we want to find happiness in our relationships, we need to enter our world of feelings in an intelligent, mindful way — and then reveal those feelings to people we want to connect with.

In Buddhist Psychology, mindfulness of feelings is one of the 4 Foundations of Mindfulness, a path that leads toward a deeper awakening to who we are. If we want to live as a conscious, awake person, we need to find ways to access our felt experience. Approaches such as meditation and Focusing can provide a helpful structure for helping us go inside ourselves and be with our experience just as it is, rather than how we’d like it to be. 

If you want richer relationships, consider taking intelligent risks to share your authentic feelings with people you want to know better. And be a good, empathic listener when others share their feelings with you. Be there for yourself and listen closely to the tender feelings that you might normally ignore. Be gentle with your feelings. Then, even if they are not well received, you are there for yourself!

The only real power we have in life is to honor our authentic self and validate ourselves even if others do not like or accept us. But if we can find the necessary courage (to be addressed in a future article) to risk revealing our true self, we might find that others appreciate, respect, and like us even more.