Obsession, Fixation and Infatuation. When Our Thoughts Revolve Around One Person.

Thanks for joining. My name is Josh and this is Dharma Punk's New York. Let's see. Our in-person event is happening on August 4th, so that's not next Tuesday, but two Tuesdays from tonight, so if you're in New York or anywhere in the region, please consider stopping by. It's always great to see our friends in person and that's one of our grandstreet in downtown Williamsburg, Brooklyn, so hope to see you then. And then Kathy and I are doing our annual Labor Day retreat, Garrison Institute, which is very easy to get to just a very short Metro North ride from New York and you're there. So that will be from September 4th to the 7th, and we're calling it starting over, stepping out of the old stories, the old beliefs about who we are. Very Buddhist topic, but our retreats are very easy, time to hike and sit by the river and eat good food and lots of time to interact. And we're not a strict retreat. 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Of course, and you can ask us any questions about anything that we do beyond the teaching, the retreats or you can ask about counseling or anything you want. So, and now we're going to jump right into our talk. One of the many ways that our brains actively pursue activities that cause us suffering. Obsession, especially obsession with other human beings. Most of us have had the experience of becoming consumed by another person. Whether it comes in the form of romantic longing, someone we lost, someone we resent, it could be, you know, resentment. Or someone we're desperately trying to win back after a relationship has ended. But it's worth looking into what's actually happening when our minds get stuck in intense preoccupation. We're really going to try to uncover the brain's incentives for following an X romantic partner or an estranged sibling or an estranged child or an estranged relative on Instagram or Facebook or obsessing over a falling out with a friend or fixating on a boss we can seem to please, despite how much. The spare, the rumination and preoccupation causes, it doesn't feel good to have our thoughts colonized and fully occupied by another individual, especially when that individual isn't reliably available to us. Fixation creates a intense near inability to shift our focus, especially when the relationship is unresolved mood becomes a hostage to how the other person acts or behaves if we receive from them a warm tech. It produces a sense of relief, but if the silence is ongoing or the lack of availability is ongoing, then it produces, of course, anxiety, even sadness, longing. And so given that mood is what governs how we think and how we act, there's a whole nother talk on that, but it's known as mood congruence, our thoughts and actions tend to align based on our underlying mood. And it turns out that our underlying mood can be essentially hijacked by any kind of fixation when we focus our attention on someone that is not presently reliably in our life. So fixation reorganizes our life around one unresolved relationship rather than allowing us to address the actual circumstances that are right in front of us. So there are real available people in our life are true friendships that are would be more than happy to connect with us often go unattended, a lunch invite from someone that genuinely likes us and genuinely wants to connect will be overlooked because we're too busy checking our phone for text messages. The phone for text messages from the person who barely replies or hardly ever replies and our skills go undeveloped problems go unaddressed because the relationship has become the brain's soul priority. The brain essentially is stuck in a loop if I can only get this person's attention, get them back reunite or resolve the situation or if it's a resentment, get them out of my life, everything would be okay. Nothing else seems to matter when we're fixated. So it's hard to understand fixation because it almost invariably produces stress and suffering so why do we do it well to understand why we have to unpack a little bit more about how our brains work. So strap in this is going to be a little bit cognitive, but I'll try to break it down as easy as I can as we've talked about in myriad discussions previously our brains don't actually perceive the world around us or our bodies. So that's not what brains can actually do brains actually sit enclosed in skulls and they don't get lights or sounds or bodies sensations directly they simply get these electrical pulses that are eyes ears and bodies nerves essentially transform sites and sounds and body events into essentially electrical signals that pass through neurons into the brain into the thalamus and then the thalamus sends those signals to different regions of the neocortex to be analyzed and the brain in real time have enough information to not only produce an accurate representation of the world or a body, but it would also be far too slow. There are lots of evidence that if we did try to build our worlds accurately from what's actually happening it would be so slow and so metabolically expensive that we would die so our brains rely on a genius solution they build models of what it thinks is out there in the world what assumes are other people. The world builds models of our body because again all is getting are these mysterious electrical pulses so it essentially guesses what's causing these pulses and these models are used not only to construct what we actually experience when you are I enter a familiar room we don't actually see the room we see our model of that room in our model of that room was constructed. This room was constructed of countless little snippets of it. information, but mostly our brains guessing what was causing the sensations that we experienced. So we rely on these models to anticipate what's going to happen, to prepare our body, how to respond both in the outside world and in our body. And what is amazing is that this solution is what actually gives us a huge evolutionary advantage or it allows us to stay alive in a brilliant way because our brains all they have to do is maintain accurate enough models of the world that we don't bump into the furniture or make too many dangerous mistakes, but we don't have to each new situation take time to look around and see every nook and cranny of what's visually occurring, we don't have to analyze every sound, we don't have to recreate body states, we simply rely on older models and just use them and slightly correct them to match as much as needed so that these models we rely on, of our kitchen, our bedroom, other people are accurate enough, it's a very fast system, it allows the brain not to use up a lot of energy, it allows us to respond very quickly, sometimes though our brains experience what's called shocks where nothing fits the model and that is known in neuroscience as a predictive surprise when you walk outside and you expect it to be a bright sunny day but instead it's suddenly unexplicably very cold and windy or when suddenly there's an accident that you didn't know happened in your house or when there's a million different ways that reality can surprise us and what happens when we are surprised is that we can either accept that reality has changed and update our models of the world but that's metabolically very expensive it requires reconnecting countless millions of neural connections and the brain doesn't really like to do that too often so the brain generally chooses an easier path, it discounts the evidence, it discounts the fact that things have changed or it tries to change the world back to fit its model so you walk into your kitchen and your cat has spilled all this stuff instead of just leaving it there and building a new model of your kitchen having all this crap on the ground you clean it up so that your model of your kitchen looks like it always did this is an easier path for the brain than to build an entire new model of what's in your kitchen so the neurological basis of however denial is when the mind absolutely refuses to accept any of the new sensory data and sticks with an old model and doesn't even really change the world to fit back with the model it simply discounts the new information and lives actively in a fantasy based on what was once experienced in the past but is no longer happening very often when people lose a loved one that has been in their life for many many years rather than accept the loss or the divorce the brain keeps on imagining that the person is there denying that they've gone away or died and so they prefer to keep the model of still having their relationship as opposed to accepting the change and these are times when someone will if it's pining over an ex the denial causes us to search for any sign of reconciliation any sign that the person might be changing their mind if they broken up with us will replay every interaction for clues of what led to the breakup or we'll dismiss again very clear evidence that the relationship is over our brains will go to great extents to maintain their models of the world rather than especially if their models of the world felt really good felt really safe felt really what they wanted in uncertain situations when suddenly our brain is faced with huge sensory information from the world that says hey your model of the world your model of the people in your life is wrong our brains desperately want to conserve energy and do anything to return to certainty and very often that's by winning the person back or by obsessing and figuring out how or what might lead to a reconciliation or return after a painful breakup we can become so convinced that one more conversation if I only had one more conversation I could convey to them how I feel and they change their mind we seek closure or to say what we never got to say but really all we're seeking is a chance to restore the relationship ease the shock of rejection and return to a model of the world that felt much more comfortable than the model we live in in the aftermath of a loss of a friendship a loss of a relationship a loss of a family member whatever and so those conditions we no longer have accurate models and the world suddenly feels overwhelming and unsafe or too difficult to deal with so when we give too much when we rely too much on an old model and disregard the incoming sensory evidence that someone's no longer available or hasn't chosen us our brain is of course actively choosing a fantasy and it chooses the suffering because returning to accept to accept that the relationship is over to accept that the person is no longer available means also accepting uncertainty accepting that we don't have a model of what to do next that we have to build entirely new models of who's in our life how to deal with each day without that person how to live in short and this is why when we tell someone in a loving way that they should move on and let go their obsession over someone who's emotionally unavailable who's continuously let them down but if they do let go of that obsession it means they have to return to the complete unknown the lack of models the uncertainty of a brain and brains hate uncertainty they hate being without models that are feel accurate and they hate building models from scratch it's all very very vulnerable and metabolically expensive and there's of course a second reason why we fixate that I never even dart into until now which is that rumination obsession limerence fixation they all distract us from something far larger and less controllable while we ruminate about a relationship rehearsing what we should have said or how to undo what was done it provides the brain with something that feels somewhat solvable especially when there's a crisis that lies in the background that's overwhelming beyond our coping strategy so for example interlives their global stressors like economic instability career uncertainty people can suddenly reach a time of retirement where they don't know what to do with their life or they might lose a job and face severe instability financially. And these issues can feel so overwhelming and so beyond our control so vast and so outside of our sphere of influence that it feels preferable to simply fixate on one person the drama of a relationship that breaks up and gets back together and breaks up and gets back together. That kind of obsession feels preferable then what am I going to do with the rest of my life or how am I going to get a new job or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Even a relationship that caused pain will feel less overwhelming than the complete overwhelm of these huge looming issues in terms of how do I, what am I going to do with my life, how am I going to support myself, how am I going to et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So sometimes we simply choose to obsess over someone because it feels like a more manageable distraction from a real issue that causes so much stress that we'd rather think about anything else. In the Mahatana Sankaya Suta, it's a difficult one to pronounce but there's also the Salafan, Faguna, Suta, the Buddha notes that craving doesn't originate in a specific person or object. Craving is innate to brains and he says that they're innate to brains because our brains constantly by nature try to distract themselves from the pain, the inevitable pain of life, the old age, the sickness, the death, the not getting what we want, the losses, the lamentations, the grief. So the Buddha says the exact same thing that our brains choose craving, it really doesn't matter what the object is, who we're fixating on, we choose to fixate because it feels better than acknowledging the huge inevitable pains of life. Belonging was already there, it just needed to look for something to long for or to pine over. So there are, of course, certain people who are more liable to engage in limmerence, pining, rumination, obsession, fixation. It's easy to understand our brain builds its models of who to attach to and how relationships work based on the earliest data it receives, the early interactions with our caregivers and those early interactions with good old mom and dad or whoever raised us, guide our brain, teach our brain who it is we should attach to, whether it's safe to be vulnerable with another person, is love reliable or is it intermittent or is it too scary to follow? And there are certain children who have inconsistently available or inconsistently attentive parents, sometimes they were attentive and caring other times, they were completely emotionally unavailable, children who had unpredictable caregiving, not parents who were predictably unavailable or parents that were predictably attentive, but children who had parents that sometimes were soothing and other times were simply too involved with other issues or emotionally overwhelmed themselves. That specific type of childhood teaches the infant's brain that love is an unreliable thing that constantly requires vigilance and attention and connection has to be chased after rather than given up on. So in attachment theory, these beliefs known as internal working models are associated with anxious attachment. An ancient attachment alone is rarely the only cause of obsessive fixation. There's often secondary factors like secondary traumas, I mean, a devastating heartbreak in adult life, a sudden loss, severe social isolation and so forth act as system shocks that shatter our current models of safety. So when a new loss occurs, our brain doesn't experience the new loss, a new, it immediately goes back to those early models from similar losses stored in memory. They models that tell us how to respond when we are dumped or rejected or abandoned and those models determine how we feel and how we act. So the pain of today's rejection is amplified, attached to all the previous experiences of rejection and helplessness. That's why the pain of a new breakup can feel disproportionately painful, disproportionately hard to bear. It's because we're not just feeling the present loss, we're also returning to models that were based on previous rejections. So another question, before we get to solutions, is one of the most disorienting features about fixation is how specific it can be. We don't just, if we are prone to rumination, choose anyone randomly, there's generally a kind of pattern of person that we've fixed over. Freud, of course, called this and everyone I'm sure out there will know what I'm about to say, repetition, compulsion, the unconscious tendency to recreate an old relational dynamic as if trying to achieve, as if somehow we can master the wound and revise our childhood losses and all the losses in the past. Our brains gravitate towards familiar people, people modeled over our caregivers or modeled by important emotional figures in the past, not because it enjoys suffering, but because familiar familiarity, familiar alert, like God, I can't pronounce that word. Familiar people is far less metabolicly expensive. Again, brains prefer to rely on old models, so they choose people that fit or are similar to the people that created the models we live by. A familiar type of person, say someone is available or unavailable or overwhelming who reminds us of those earlier people in our life, activates all of our coping strategies and the brain already has models for those coping strategies. The brain already has models how to chase, love, how to placate, how to people please, how to over function. Our brains have models how to walk on eggshells, how to shrink ourselves down to avoid rejections, how to bite our tongues when our needs aren't met and so on and so forth. Someone who grew up placating a volatile parent will find themselves as an adult instinctively choosing alcoholics or people with mood disorders because they already have in place the models of how to act in such relationships and that person will seem oh so validating of their models. The genuinely healthy and available person who shows up to an anxious person will be unpredictable. They won't have models for someone who's available and kind and predictable so they'll get bored or they'll find it stressful and they'll gravitate back again and again to figures who are not emotionally available. Individuals who are emotionally and physically unreliable to someone with anxious attachment feels like home. They don't have to change their models. The intermittent warmth even produces dopamine spikes because it's an unexpected positive surprise. So the tragedy of fixation is that it creates a feedback loop. The brain picks someone that confirms its old models and old models that were never particularly healthy and it burns enormous and amounts of energy trying to force that new person to fit the model or to act in ways that they never could act in. So what's the way out? What helps? There's no single clean solution to obsession and fixation. But there are practices in both contemporary psychology and the Dharma that help our nervous system and our brains begin the slow process of revising the models and building new healthy models. The first thing we have to do is limit all contact with the person that we're ruminating over. There's no way around this. It gives our nervous system and our brains room to recalibrate, recalibrate. So muting a number, unfollowing an account. These are unglamorous but they're often very useful transitional steps to take rather than to keep the person available to us either through texting or email or on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. We simply want to for a long period limit all contact and of course what that will produce is the underlying loneliness grief, the destabilized sense of self and if that goes unaddressed we'll simply find someone new to fixate on. So it's very important to as we'll talk about it in a moment, surround yourself with other people who have experienced the same thing, the same rumination, the same fixation. It doesn't have to be they're experiencing it at the same time as you but simply find other people who can relate and understand so that we don't feel alone and that we have support during this process because if we go through letting go of an obsession or a fixation not only we're going to feel all the loneliness and grief it's distracted us from but we'll also be overwhelmed by all the other issues in life that have gone unattended suddenly will be aware of bills that haven't been paid or health things we haven't done or whatever so if we don't have support all it's going to be we're going to be flooded with so much anxiety or depression that we'll just wind up returning back to the person we're fixating on. It's also essential to starve the brain of unreliable people no matter how funny no matter how interesting no matter how fascinating or cool they are if someone we want to have as a close friend or romantic partner is not consistently available does not express a desire to be with us does not reliably respond that doesn't you know doesn't that puts effort in if they don't do these fundamental things to make themselves predictably available we cannot have them in our life as close friends or as romantic partners all they will do is reconfirm the damaged models from childhood that love is something that is stressful uncertain unreliable unpredictable and that is not a model we want to live with at all period end of sentence a good practice is CBT's cognitive behavioral therapies evidence examination when our fixated mind generates an interpretation such as their tone and that email means they've changed their mind about me there they might be open to reconciliation we can express that evidence to someone else who is not preoccupied and asked them or we can write it down alongside other evidence that shows the person hasn't changed their mind so we're widening the the data stream our brain is sampling and forcing it to reconsider its attempts to return to the old damaged model Buddhist practice teaches us other tools is not just revising the fixation but transforming our relationship with desire or rumination or fixation itself in the Vedina Sati which is the mindfulness of our feelings provides a practical tool every experience before we even think or fully understand what's happening our brain predicts how to respond and guides us via feelings that's what Demacia showed with his somatic marker theory that is now widely adapted that all of our behaviors are steered and guided not by thoughts but by feelings and fixation originates at this level if another person at any point in the past produced a pleasant feeling even though they've consistently disappointed us our brain will very often entice us to ruminate to think about them to chase after them on Instagram or other social media just in the same way an alcoholic reaches for a bottle before they even make the decision to drink so in fixation the image of reuniting with the other person produces such an intense pleasant feeling tone in the body that our brains instinctively reach towards them and in other words we start thinking about them or we start following them again and one of the things that Vedina Sati or mindfulness of feelings does is it trains us to watch feelings arise allow them to be there without acting upon them and then allow the feeling to pass we simply note okay the thought of being with that person produces a pleasant feeling I'll watch that pleasant feeling arise then I'll watch it dissipate and so the more we can withstand the pressures that these feelings exert on us the more we can put aside fixation of craving and a couple of final ones really briefly one of my favorite I heard many monks when I was studying Buddhism back in the nineties an early ought to talk about the suma bhavana which is the contemplation of body parts but really when it's very they would often say is if there's someone that you're obsessing over bring to mind not the image that we imagine of them but bring to mind the various different constituent parts of their bodies they remember once it was literally I think Ajahn Brahm who talked about imagine their their their their kidneys their their liver their stomach their organs and we're not doing this as cruelty we're simply noting that this sort of whole package that we visualize is simply an illusion and that brings up the second practice that we contemplate in permanence the fact that everyone we all age everything is impermanent and the relationships the people we pine over were never going to be a stable thing they were always going to undergo change and so fixating is a kind of a brain that doesn't accept impermanence anyway the Buddha's teaching on Sangha returns us most to what our the fixating brain needs most which is real friendship real community real person interpersonal bonds being seen and valued by others is a really valid need. The only problem with a fixated brain is it goes about that need in the wrong way. It chooses one person who's unavailable to fixate on rather than going to places where attention and connection are reliably available. So the most important thing to do is to go to places like Alan on ACA, SLA, Buddhist centers that where people go who are trapped in fixation go. So that's tonight's talk. It was a long one. So we're now going to just meditate and let all of that go and settle. And now we're going to just sit back and relax and find a really comfortable seated posture. Or you could lie down if you want. And I'll encourage you to go off-screen because speaking for myself, I'm not inclined to meditate while other people can watch me. I only do it because I'm the one who teaches. But frankly, if I was just a member tuning in, I would, when I meditated, go turn off my screen. So get yourself really comfortable. Having a nice drink of Habiscus tea, which is my favorite thing to make this time of year. And I'm closing my eyes. And so see you, when you close your eyes, you can bring attention to some place in your body that feels comfortable or relaxing enough that while you pay attention to it, you don't get anxious or uncomfortable. Very often, when we soften our bellies, that can produce a pretty comfortable sensation or this space behind our eyes or maybe when we really lift and drop our shoulders, just the sensations there. Maybe it's the sensation of breathing. The key is to find a sensation that's reliably available, not fixate on something that's unavailable, like a person or a thing, but something that's already present in our life. And simply try to breathe in a way that feels relaxing to the body and peaceful to the mind. It's the basic constructions of the Buddha's primary meditation. The Anapanasati is to know when you're breathing in, know when you're breathing out. Breathe in such a way that feels good to your body. Breathe in such a way that is peaceful calming to the mind. So, if you decide to focus on your breath as the anchor, the anchor is the object we focus on to prevent our mind from wandering much like an anchor. Keeps a shift, a shift from drifting too far from a single spot. So, we find a sensation in the body to anchor us to the present moment. And it's very important that that sensation or place in the body be comfortable. You don't want to anchor your ship in water that's too rough, too prone to destabilizing ships. You want to anchor your boat where the water is relatively calm and it's the same with our meditation. You want to find an anchor, which means if it's going to be the breath, the anchor is also where you focus on your body breathing. It could be in your belly, your chest, your throat and just breathe and just know when you're breathing in, know when you're breathing out and breathe in a way that just feels relaxing to the body and the mind. And any thoughts or memories or other concerns that float by, you just can acknowledge, but you want to always know whether you're breathing in or breathing out. And always know if the way you're breathing is conducive to ease. So you're not so much pushing away other thoughts or trying to suppress them. You're just keeping your breath in mind. And anything else that wants to share your tension can be there, but you're always anchored to the present moment. And if you don't like working with the breath, no worries. Just listen to sounds arising and passing. Don't visualize what causes the sounds. Just keep sounds in mind as again an anchor to keep our minds from wandering. So we'll sit and silence for a little while and while we do, when you get distracted, just don't criticize yourself by any means you've done nothing wrong. One of the best tools and meditation is how we respond when our minds wander, when we simply bring our attention back again and again to something in the present moment like our breath or sounds. We teach our brains how to escape fantasies and ruminations and obsessions and return back to the real to a more accurate appraisal of what's really happening. So we're giving our minds an escape route from suffering when we gently bring our attention back. you you [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] So hopefully your body by now feels pretty comfortable if you've been breathing in a way that relaxes the body in the mind. Either way, just pay attention for a moment to how your body feels, whether your stomach feels soft. The shoulders comfortably released so that they fall away from the ears, the jaw is not locked. The forehead doesn't feel scrunched or furrowed. The eyes are comfortably floating in the eye sockets. The breath is at a nice long relaxing pace. And all the other areas where the body stores tension, the buttocks, legs, hands, that they are all fairly relaxed. And then the invitation would be first to bring to mind someone that or something that we really would love to have in our life right now but isn't available or isn't in our life right now. And just know someone that or something that we've been pining for fixated on could be even a place we want to go. But just when you bring to mind something that you really want but isn't present right now for you. Just notice how the image at first brings a pleasant sensation or a feeling in the body that inclines us to think about it more. And this is what in Buddhism is called "Vadenav", an underlying feeling tone that guides all of our behaviors and actions. When there's something that feels good, we think about it, chase after it, fixate on it, when something feels bad, we avoid it, we push away. Let go of the person or thing that you visualize and just pay attention to that pleasant feeling and just watch how long it lasts on its own. It could be a place you really like to be right now but aren't. So when you let go of the image and you just feel that pleasant sensation. Just notice how it changes and dissipates and passes on its own. And this is really important to learn how to do when we're dealing with obsession, we're visualizing the person. And then we're letting go of the image and just watch how impermanent and quickly the good feelings it produces dissipate on their own. Now you might bring to mind someone or something that we're longing for but not only isn't in our life but also has proven to be almost impossible to tie down something or someone that. Again and again and again we've sought or tried to get close to for whatever reason it never works out. and then bring your attention to the feelings. associated with this thought, this image, we once again set aside the image of the person or place or thing that you're longing for and turn attention to the feelings lurking below, perhaps loneliness or grief or confusion or uncertainty. And if we stay there with our attention to these feelings, what we'll notice is that they too begin to pass. If we greet these feelings with kindness and compassion rather than with a desire to get rid of them, all loneliness and grief that fixation has been distracting us from often turns out to be far more tolerable than we imagined. So I'm going to close our meditation with those practices and so take your time and when it feels right for you, open your eyes.