March 17, 2026 • 30 mins
In Part 1, he named the addiction. In Part 2, he asks the deeper question: What’s the way out?
Clinical psychologist, body-based trauma expert, and author of Addicted to Drama, Dr. Scott Lyons returns with hosts Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters King, Marc Kielburger, and Craig Kielburger to explore how we break free from a culture fueled by urgency, outrage, overstimulation, and loneliness.
Joined again by his lifelong friend Nicole Asselin, Scott unpacks the difference between trauma bonding and drama bonding, the physiological cost of our attentional economy, and why shared stress can either heal us or hook us.
Together, they explore:
- The critical difference between trauma bonding and drama bonding
- How social media and the “attention economy” fuel stress addiction
- Why loneliness is more dangerous than we realize
- The body-based practices that help regulate overstimulation
- How service and shared purpose can interrupt the chaos cycle
Missed Part 1? You can listen here. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Subscribe for conversations that challenge, heal, and inspire.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It was like this idea of like going, where do
you contract in life? And what if you just said
e fit, you know, and it's not e fit like
I'm going to go destroy a car. It's like efit.
I'm not gonna let the way I think other people
think about me interrupt this moment of my liberation and
(00:20):
freedom of life.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
This is my legacy. Our conversation continues with doctor Scott Lyons,
clinical psychologist, body based trauma expert, and author of the
groundbreaking book Addicted to Drama If. Part one named the Addiction.
Part two asks a deeper question, what's the way out
from a culture fueled by urgency, outrage, and attention to
(00:42):
the loneliness epidemic hiding in plain sight? This chapter moves
from diagnosis to awakening to freedom. Let's dive in.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
You know, Scott, you've talked about the difference between trauma
bonding and drama bonding and describe it as real support.
Is isn't someone who joined you in the storm. It's
someone who helps you find your way out of it.
Can you unpack that for us?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yeah, I'm laughing because I'm seeing NICKI smile. Probably the
amount of times I'd try to rope her into my drama.
She could write her own book on it. Frankly, I
may not feel like Nicky's with me until she is
also activated and in the drama. And that's drama bonding.
And my niece told me I could tell the story.
(01:32):
I wasn't allowed to say it was my niece in
the book, but I have she signed a contract with
me that I'm allowed to talk about it. She just
turned seventeen yesterday.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Ye yep.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So I remember this was a couple of years ago.
She came home from school and she was upset about
a teacher in a math class or something like that.
And you know, like, I can play uncle, I can
play therapist, I can do the mix. It's kind of
just who I am at this point. And I was like,
I wasn't. I was like, she is activated, she is spiraling,
(02:13):
and I was like, hey, this is really hard. She's
like he's the worst. And if I were to join
in and cheerleader, I'm like, yeah, he's the worst. We
wouldn't have gotten to some level of regulation. And I
was like, I'm really sorry you had such a hard day,
and that's so unfair. I really get it. I'm not
raising my voice. I'm not changing my language too much
to join in. I'm keeping my own sense of self
(02:35):
and grounds. That's a level of stabilization or coregulation. Now
she left our conversation, I would say fifty percent more stabilized.
She goes away, she calls all her friends. They get
on a group zoom and I can hear them in
the other room trash talking this teacher and then just
(02:57):
throwing logs on my niece's fire, so to speak. And
she comes out and she's like, I'm quitting school. I'm
gonna sue them, I'm gonna do all this stuff. And
I was like, and my mom was there, and I
was like, Mom, what do I do? Like what do
we do? And she's like, just just ignorege, just let her,
let her burn the fire out, but don't join in.
(03:19):
And I was like, how do you know so much?
And I was like, oh, oh, you raised me. Oh
I feel so bad for you. But it was true.
I saw her eventually go out when she when there
were no more logs to put on her fire, but
they had they had created a bonfire in her room.
(03:40):
And that's that's drama bonding, right, and why I separated
drama bonding from trauma bonding is I think I was
seeing all of these social media posts about like trauma
bonding and I was like, No, what you don't understand
is that stress shared pain is a shared experience, right.
We are genetically designed to have empathetic responses from our
(04:04):
trauma to other people's trauma or our pain to their pain.
It creates a sense of closeness and proximity and if
you can just and and relationality helps heal the pain
and the trauma. So we if we're kind of like,
you know, putting a negative spin on something we are
(04:24):
designed to do, then then most people are going to
be like, oh, I'm not going to talk about my
trauma with you, because that's trauma bonding. And it's like,
there's actually a really healthy way to do that where
we get to have shared experiences and shared process without
throwing logs on each other's fires. When it starts becoming that,
it's drama bonding, and that's a really from a psychological perspective,
(04:48):
an extraordinarily important discernment.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
Nicole, You've seen Scott kind of weather these storms and
you know, kind of go in and out of so
much is there has there been any times that you
had to remind him of practicing what he preaches.
Speaker 6 (05:13):
Scott is always pushing the envelope. I mean, if you
know Scott, you know that it's like, oh, swim with
the sharks, why not sharks and piranhas. So there's always
with Scott, there's always like a one upsmanship or like
a double dare, a triple dog dare coming coming up
on you. So I don't know, uh, you know, in
(05:34):
general we do laugh a lot about being addicted to drama.
I would say, yes, I have chided Scott with the
title of his book quite often, but in general, uh,
in general, I think that you know, the nature of
our relationship is that, you know, I'm definitely not afraid
(05:55):
to draw draw the sword and get into the fencing
match with Scott about whatever crazy idea he has or
whatever proposal, or if he's you know, having a dramatic
situation or calls me with something wild that happened, you know,
I'm not afraid to push back.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
When you've known each someone for twenty five years, that
you're going to go through so many arcs of what
it is to be alive. And you know, I think
one of the things I can come back to all
the time with NICKI is that play and silliness is
still here in the world, Like even in the darkest days,
(06:36):
even in the most painful experiences, like there is some
levity that is possible. And it's not like we're overriding
the pain. It's just that it's just the levity is
also medicine.
Speaker 6 (06:53):
And I have a story about that levity. It doesn't
matter where he is, what's going on in his life,
what's happening in the world. You know, Scott can bring
the party and the levity that you were talking about
in the sense of play. I'll never forget. Also the
time that we were trapped in New York in that
rain storm and I had just moved to New York
and it was like we were just like the day
(07:16):
was ruined, you know, my whole look was ruined. And
you were like, let's just dance and sing in the
rain and then we're gonna strip down into our underwear
and we're gonna we're gonna parade into the apartment and
we're gonna have a dance party. And I was like,
(07:36):
are you sure we're going to do that? And so
it's like, Okay, this thing happened, but how can we
see it from another perspective?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Right?
Speaker 6 (07:45):
And so I think that's also another kaleidoscope lends to
bring to drama, because of course there's the light in
the dark of what drama is. And I think that,
you know, we spent a lot of time talking about,
you know, things about drama that are quite weighty and
quite negative. However, the drama, the little sprinkle of magic
can bring the right spice.
Speaker 5 (08:07):
Let us all go out in the rain naked and
have a dance and have a dance party. You're welcome, America.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
And the person I was seeing at that time, because
we really stripped off all of our clothes in this,
I don't doubt it, and then ran to my apartment building.
And Nichols also being but a bit modest, I didn't
have underwear on.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
See, like I'm saying, he always up.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
But I lived in in the you know, a townhouse
in New York, so no one was going to see
me run up the stairs. So there was no like
fear of like exposure to something. And but we ran
into my apartment where my partner, my then partner, was staying,
and I guess he found it quite strange. I mean
(08:54):
I even look back at that now, Nick, you know,
it was like, oh, what a lovely story. But I
think most people listening to this would be like that's
wild or that's crazy. When I went to undergrad, I
was in one of my degrees, was in acting, and
that one of our teachers had this saying said, I'm
not going to say the word, but ef it and
(09:14):
and it was like this this idea of like going,
where do you contract in life?
Speaker 6 (09:19):
Like?
Speaker 1 (09:19):
And and what if you just said e f it,
you know, and it's not ef it like I'm going
to go destroy a car. It's like ef it. I'm
not going to let the way I think other people
think about me interrupt this moment in my own liberation
and freedom of life. I'm writing about this story in
my my my current book then finishing up. And you know,
(09:43):
I was, I was. I was a dancer. Then I
was walking down the street in New York City the
first time I ever applied the effort rule. And I
looked down and I had a transparent, transparent laundry bask
bag and so and I noticed that like all my underwear,
my like my dance belt, all the like sort of
like intimacy, intimate underwears were showing, and I felt so
(10:08):
much shame, you know, as I was walking down the
streets of New York City, and I was like, fit,
what if I'm on a runway? And I walked to
the laundry at like I was on America's Next Top
Model instead, And I just felt so liberated, and I
was like, I don't care what people think about my underwear,
Like I'm a human being. And it was and so
like the rain moment was an effet moment, Scott.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
When you look at this philosophy of how you live
your life, yeah, and you look at how you help
coach people, like you created the embody Lab, like this
is the largest online training platform for body based you know,
trauma therapy. We live in a world where.
Speaker 7 (10:49):
Our listeners and viewers they're checking their phones, they're flooded
with information. And you wrote everything you're looking at, reading,
hearing you have a physiological reaction too, Yeah, and so
can you help us understand, like, if we are really
going to do the work, if we're going to really
go into our trauma journey, how do we make sure
we're not only doing this in the mind, but we're
(11:10):
doing this in the body.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So and you name the sort of the line that
everything we see, everything we do, everything we witness and
is something that then is mirrored in our physiology. Right,
we see a stick on the floor and we think
it's a snake. We feel that in our physiology. It's
not just a perception or mind shift, you know, or
(11:34):
a mind mirage. We actually have this physiological response preparing
us to run from danger, you know, truly understanding that
we are in an endemic of drama. All the circumstances
that make an individual likely to become addicted to drama
we are experiencing on a mass level.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Right.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So the fact that we are more lonely than we
ever have been as a culture, right, it is the
number one reason for death is loneliness. It is it
has greater physiological challenges and complications than smoking a pack
of cigarettes per day. Loneliness. Right, And it's not just
(12:21):
like loneliness comes out of nowhere. We're on our phones,
we're on computers, we're on screens all day. We don't
know how to even talk to each other like in
the good old days before all this, Right, we use
emojis instead of expressing with words, which has a significant
process Like it did, it reduces our emotional language skills, right,
(12:44):
and I love them emoji, so no, no, no shame there,
but it does. And so we've truncated so many of
our abilities to actually be in relationship and the impact
of that is significant, and we are so we are
more lonely as a culture. We need and so the
(13:05):
pain of that, what's called isolation pain, is so great
in our culture. What we think of is like what's
called auto regulating. We are numbing out the pain with
some other mechanism. Usually it's screen time, right, Sometimes it's drinking,
sometimes it's other things. But you know, all of these
are so easily accessible. And the other big thing is
(13:30):
our attention is being taken away from us and constantly
pulled into other ads and other you know, notifications on
our phone and what and so what we're in is
what we call a attentional economy. So whoever holds and
captures your attention is the victor of capitalism, right, And
(13:55):
the mechanism to capture and maintain your attention is to
induce a stress response. And so with capitalism is based
on what is actually an activation economy. Or a stress economy.
Then we are all in an ecosystem of constantly being
in that process of stressed and in a rat race
(14:18):
of trying to get attention no matter what the cost is,
in an ecosystem of loneliness. So it is the grounds
to which an addiction to drama is based on, and
we're constantly being fed images on a scale we have
not evolved to be able to metabolize. So there's a
(14:39):
study that showed after the Boston bombing that those who
were watched six hours or more, which is not much
because based that's on your phone, that's on a screen,
that's even talking about it, those who watched or were
exposed to six hours or more of content around the
(15:00):
Boston bombing had more severe symptoms of PTSD post traumatic
stress disorder than those who were there. Wow, I was there.
I saw the plane go in on nine to eleven.
I was downtown. I was outside walking to school.
Speaker 6 (15:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
I never have seen a single clip of it. I couldn't.
I didn't want to. My parents were glued to their
television for days and days as a means to stay
connected with me. When I bring up nine to eleven,
I see my mom's face swell up a tears and
then she turns white. Right, the severity of the information
(15:45):
and we are turn on your Instagram right now, go
ahead and look at in your feed. What is the imagery?
You are literally being fed and I mean fed into
your body. We must learn our pausing point of overstimulation.
We are overstimulated and under mobilized. When I talked before
(16:07):
about like why the body is so important, we need
a vehicle to move the level of activation and emotion through.
We are more static as a culture. We're spending how
many hours? Go ahead and check your phone log? How
many hours are you on your screen? How many hours
are you on the television. This is not to shame you,
It's just to say that we are not then as
(16:29):
a culture, are not mobilizing the amount of information we
are taking in, and we are drowning in overstimulation, and
that creates more inability to connect right, which creates more loneliness.
So we we are overstimulated and it has severe consequences
(16:51):
and there's not a lot of ways out until we
start to be able to register our own pause point.
But we can't because our at tension is constantly being
stolen in and usurped from us by this attentional activation economy.
So we're in this cycle of more and more and
more and boredom, right, is actually a symptom of not
(17:14):
being stimulated, because underneath the boredom, if you can hang
out at enough time, you will likely feel some level
of anxiety, because that's what's underneath the boredom and the
absence of stimulus. The symptom, like in any like an
the behavioral addiction, the absence of the drug, the absence
of the drama, the absence of the stimulus evokes a distress,
(17:41):
an anxiety, or what's known as a withdrawal symptom, and
so we go get more to get out of the
anxiety or the pain of the withdrawal.
Speaker 5 (17:51):
You can go, you can go. Old school parenting, we
learned quickly growing up at home not to say I'm bored,
because first of all, I love Therese. I never was bored.
But if you said that in our house, I'm bored, yeah,
my mom would guarantee you say, oh you're bored, I
will give you and she would like go clean out
(18:13):
the garage. And it wasn't like a suggestion list. It
became a to do list. You know, oh, okay, the
garage needs cleaning. Oh you know there's you know, go
reak the yard like there was never like then, Like
so there's this understanding almost that yeah, if you know,
if you're saying that, then you need some type of
physical stimulation and movement. And you know, you have a
(18:33):
seventeen year old niece and how this this it the
eternal question of social media young people. We're talking about
processing and proceeds. Like, so, what suggestion or advice do
you have for all of us that have children teens?
(18:57):
How do we what's the suggestion for them navigating?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
So I used to be really firm with my suggestions
and then my sister taught me more humility about being
a parent. And you know, so as a research scientist,
I can say one thing and then you kind of
have to come back and be a human being and
be like, well, what's actually possible? So I mean, like
(19:23):
we can go on for another hour just about like
the what you know, cell phone, what you know phones,
and that overstimulation does to the circadian rhythm, the sleep patterns,
the brain waves of someone before they go through puberty,
which is pretty severe, very severe where we see you know,
(19:43):
like three x four x depression since since teens have
gotten their hands on phones and other another anxiety, et cetera,
let alone the what's called the mimicking effect where they're
watching other kids in the dress on social media and
starting to mimic that because the other folks are getting likes.
(20:05):
It's wild out there, right, So you know, my suggestion
would be like, no social media until after puberty is
what the research says. That's not fully possible for so
many parents. And I want to just be really like
empathetic to that. So it's like, what is the bare
(20:29):
minimum we can work with? Is it like, how about
fifteen minutes a day? And how are we balancing that
out with a lot of play and synchronistic experiences like
where we're sharing meals together and there's no television plane
where we're taking walks together as like parents and kids
(20:50):
or kids and kids. So it's not reliant that they're
the majority of their day is not on either the
stimulation or metabolic the stimulation maybe breaking down all of
that information that's beautiful.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Yeah, scrolling won't change your life, but subscribing just might
tap that button and stay connected to conversations that kempt.
Speaker 5 (21:16):
I have a question because the four of us, Martin, myself,
Craig and his brother Mark, we actually have an initiative
called Realize the Dream. Oh my goodness, we have so
many wonderful partners like All State that are really going
into communities and helping us have one hundred million hours
(21:39):
of service by Martin Luther King Junior's one hundredth birthday. Amazing,
But it is born out of the fact that we
were seeing, as it relates to, because we started this
initiative three years ago, how disconnected we are with each
other and with ourselves. Mark Father's last book is entitled
(22:01):
where do we go from here? Chaos or Community? And
I don't know anyone who is living today that has
not felt, certainly within the last six years that they
were impacted by chaos in some way. And we see
that service as a way of rebuilding community, building the
groundwork then for the beloved community and connection. Can you
(22:26):
just talk a little bit of how do you think
that connection In some ways, connection and service are a
pathway for healing.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, they are significantly, And I want to discern, like
when we talk about connection, there's qualities of connection and
a lot of our sense of connection currently is asynchronistically
meaning online we're not in proximity to each other, we're
(22:59):
not doing activity where maybe texting or leaving voice notes
or code doom scrolling next to each other or whatever
that is. And so we you know, when we talk
about connection in community, it is about shared purpose, meaning
and activity, an activity that often has some type of
(23:20):
mobile mobility to it, whether it's talking or moving or
food sharing, things like this that are really what our
physiology is wired to understand as true connection. And service
is such a beautiful vehicle for actually deepening connectivity. And
(23:43):
then as you deepen connectivity, you then have more of
a shared meaning as a group and are able to
further invest in the service that you have and you
can feel it more. That's that's the interesting research on
it too, is that we can sort of fake it
till we make it, and we will make it as
(24:03):
a group. Like as you invest your time, focused energy,
and then the collective experience of going in and doing
service work, you might feel like, Okay, I'm just doing it.
I'm just kind of doing it because I have to
fill these hours up right, or because someone my pastor
told me to or my Rabbi told me to, or
someone else suggested that, or Scott said, you know, said
(24:28):
the science of doing service work makes youre better, it
creates more well being, which it does, but that's not embodied.
But there is something really interesting that as we lean
into it, and as we lean into it and it
creates this group rhythm of action, we start to feel
(24:48):
it more and we start to feel a sense of
greater purpose and meaning because of that, and that does
start to interrupt the needing to find crisis and chaos
and stress and other things to mitigate the lack of
loneliness that is so pervasive in so many of us,
(25:11):
which is often the root of the pain that we
are trying to numb with addictions.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Nicole, What's something Scott has taught you that you now
carry into your own work or relationships.
Speaker 6 (25:23):
Something that has really affected me kind of in trying
times is the ability to find a slice of humor
and find a slice of like, oh, how could you
do it your way? I have seen Scott rise from
the ashes time and time again and reinvent and change
and seeing all those transformations and seeing the success and
(25:46):
just seeing unwavering determination for whatever goal. Scott is trying
to achieve has really sort of you know, given me
the freedom to not only make changes in my life,
but also make changes and make decisions with a little
bit more sort of slam dunk if you will, with
(26:09):
like do it your way. It's okay. You can be louder,
you can be wilder, you can be sassier, you can
take a risk. Why not.
Speaker 5 (26:22):
What has been so beautiful to watch is every time
when you're talking, literally Scott is looking at you with
such love and adoration, like it's like just genuine, genuine love.
So it's it was really beautiful to see that when
you're talking his love for you.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
I think, you know, as I've gotten older, I've really
really appreciate the memory keepers of our lives, of my life,
and it's like it's not easy for you know, as
parents disappear or as away, or siblings drift or whatever,
(27:03):
you know, like there's a lot I don't remember about
my life and had that shared experience with someone else,
to have spent so much time together, like and I
call these people the memory keepers. In the moments where
I am I don't know who I am anymore. And
(27:24):
I hope we all get to experience at least a
couple of those. It's really nice to be like, have
it a checkpoint with someone, like someone that says, well,
Scotty you you know, yeah, maybe this relationship didn't work out,
but you know, ten years ago you would have never
been able to say no to someone and stand up
for yourself. Or remember how the first time we met
(27:46):
and you couldn't carry a song, like carry a note
to save your life. And then somehow you like basically
did Broadway, and you know, like, look how far you
know that, Look how far you've come, or or at
the time or the same way, it's like or you
could come a little further, and you know, I really
(28:08):
it's it's And I also realized, I don't think I've
ever been in an environment with Nicki where I've I've
simultaneously gotten to talk about my like playful life, but
also in my professional life. There's a there's a level
of like my professional life that is like, you know,
talking about my research, like NICKI and I have talked
about my book, but it's it's like my answers for
(28:32):
like a podcast are a little bit more refined and
more filtered, despite what NICKI might say and so it's
like it's this really also this very interesting experience to
like welcome her into another aspect of my life.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
I love you knowing the two of you speak, and Scott,
you bicked the most beautiful plus one guest to bring up.
And I love because the friendship embodies the very message
of your professional work. You know, you have been together
through the trauma, bonding, the addictions, the challenges, and you've
been together through the positive, uplifting drama, the dancing in
(29:09):
the rain, the stripping down literally and figurably to come
together through friendships and to embody. And I love because
as we've gone through your life journey, you know, the
two of you have been this beautiful echo showing that
pain can lead to purpose, that rock bottom is at
the end, it's often the beginning that you know, Nicole,
you've reminded us all what real friendship looks like, to
(29:30):
stand by friends through hard time, through storms, but to
always be there with love. And Scott, your incredible work
has touched and uplifted so many individuals, holding us sometimes
hard mirror but always asking them to reach deep down
inside it to be their best selves. And so thank
you to both of you as we say on this journey.
For living your legacies and for sharing them with all
(29:53):
of us today. Thank you so much, thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
You so much.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Thank you for joining us. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a moment.
It was like this idea of like going, where do
you contract in life? And what if you just said
e fit, you know, and it's not e fit like
I'm going to go destroy a car. It's like efit.
I'm not gonna let the way I think other people
think about me interrupt this moment of my liberation and
(00:20):
freedom of life.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
This is my legacy. Our conversation continues with doctor Scott Lyons,
clinical psychologist, body based trauma expert, and author of the
groundbreaking book Addicted to Drama If. Part one named the Addiction.
Part two asks a deeper question, what's the way out
from a culture fueled by urgency, outrage, and attention to
(00:42):
the loneliness epidemic hiding in plain sight? This chapter moves
from diagnosis to awakening to freedom. Let's dive in.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
You know, Scott, you've talked about the difference between trauma
bonding and drama bonding and describe it as real support.
Is isn't someone who joined you in the storm. It's
someone who helps you find your way out of it.
Can you unpack that for us?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yeah, I'm laughing because I'm seeing NICKI smile. Probably the
amount of times I'd try to rope her into my drama.
She could write her own book on it. Frankly, I
may not feel like Nicky's with me until she is
also activated and in the drama. And that's drama bonding.
And my niece told me I could tell the story.
(01:32):
I wasn't allowed to say it was my niece in
the book, but I have she signed a contract with
me that I'm allowed to talk about it. She just
turned seventeen yesterday.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
Ye yep.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So I remember this was a couple of years ago.
She came home from school and she was upset about
a teacher in a math class or something like that.
And you know, like, I can play uncle, I can
play therapist, I can do the mix. It's kind of
just who I am at this point. And I was like,
I wasn't. I was like, she is activated, she is spiraling,
(02:13):
and I was like, hey, this is really hard. She's
like he's the worst. And if I were to join
in and cheerleader, I'm like, yeah, he's the worst. We
wouldn't have gotten to some level of regulation. And I
was like, I'm really sorry you had such a hard day,
and that's so unfair. I really get it. I'm not
raising my voice. I'm not changing my language too much
to join in. I'm keeping my own sense of self
(02:35):
and grounds. That's a level of stabilization or coregulation. Now
she left our conversation, I would say fifty percent more stabilized.
She goes away, she calls all her friends. They get
on a group zoom and I can hear them in
the other room trash talking this teacher and then just
(02:57):
throwing logs on my niece's fire, so to speak. And
she comes out and she's like, I'm quitting school. I'm
gonna sue them, I'm gonna do all this stuff. And
I was like, and my mom was there, and I
was like, Mom, what do I do? Like what do
we do? And she's like, just just ignorege, just let her,
let her burn the fire out, but don't join in.
(03:19):
And I was like, how do you know so much?
And I was like, oh, oh, you raised me. Oh
I feel so bad for you. But it was true.
I saw her eventually go out when she when there
were no more logs to put on her fire, but
they had they had created a bonfire in her room.
(03:40):
And that's that's drama bonding, right, and why I separated
drama bonding from trauma bonding is I think I was
seeing all of these social media posts about like trauma
bonding and I was like, No, what you don't understand
is that stress shared pain is a shared experience, right.
We are genetically designed to have empathetic responses from our
(04:04):
trauma to other people's trauma or our pain to their pain.
It creates a sense of closeness and proximity and if
you can just and and relationality helps heal the pain
and the trauma. So we if we're kind of like,
you know, putting a negative spin on something we are
(04:24):
designed to do, then then most people are going to
be like, oh, I'm not going to talk about my
trauma with you, because that's trauma bonding. And it's like,
there's actually a really healthy way to do that where
we get to have shared experiences and shared process without
throwing logs on each other's fires. When it starts becoming that,
it's drama bonding, and that's a really from a psychological perspective,
(04:48):
an extraordinarily important discernment.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
Nicole, You've seen Scott kind of weather these storms and
you know, kind of go in and out of so
much is there has there been any times that you
had to remind him of practicing what he preaches.
Speaker 6 (05:13):
Scott is always pushing the envelope. I mean, if you
know Scott, you know that it's like, oh, swim with
the sharks, why not sharks and piranhas. So there's always
with Scott, there's always like a one upsmanship or like
a double dare, a triple dog dare coming coming up
on you. So I don't know, uh, you know, in
(05:34):
general we do laugh a lot about being addicted to drama.
I would say, yes, I have chided Scott with the
title of his book quite often, but in general, uh,
in general, I think that you know, the nature of
our relationship is that, you know, I'm definitely not afraid
(05:55):
to draw draw the sword and get into the fencing
match with Scott about whatever crazy idea he has or
whatever proposal, or if he's you know, having a dramatic
situation or calls me with something wild that happened, you know,
I'm not afraid to push back.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
When you've known each someone for twenty five years, that
you're going to go through so many arcs of what
it is to be alive. And you know, I think
one of the things I can come back to all
the time with NICKI is that play and silliness is
still here in the world, Like even in the darkest days,
(06:36):
even in the most painful experiences, like there is some
levity that is possible. And it's not like we're overriding
the pain. It's just that it's just the levity is
also medicine.
Speaker 6 (06:53):
And I have a story about that levity. It doesn't
matter where he is, what's going on in his life,
what's happening in the world. You know, Scott can bring
the party and the levity that you were talking about
in the sense of play. I'll never forget. Also the
time that we were trapped in New York in that
rain storm and I had just moved to New York
and it was like we were just like the day
(07:16):
was ruined, you know, my whole look was ruined. And
you were like, let's just dance and sing in the
rain and then we're gonna strip down into our underwear
and we're gonna we're gonna parade into the apartment and
we're gonna have a dance party. And I was like,
(07:36):
are you sure we're going to do that? And so
it's like, Okay, this thing happened, but how can we
see it from another perspective?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Right?
Speaker 6 (07:45):
And so I think that's also another kaleidoscope lends to
bring to drama, because of course there's the light in
the dark of what drama is. And I think that,
you know, we spent a lot of time talking about,
you know, things about drama that are quite weighty and
quite negative. However, the drama, the little sprinkle of magic
can bring the right spice.
Speaker 5 (08:07):
Let us all go out in the rain naked and
have a dance and have a dance party. You're welcome, America.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
And the person I was seeing at that time, because
we really stripped off all of our clothes in this,
I don't doubt it, and then ran to my apartment building.
And Nichols also being but a bit modest, I didn't
have underwear on.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
See, like I'm saying, he always up.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
But I lived in in the you know, a townhouse
in New York, so no one was going to see
me run up the stairs. So there was no like
fear of like exposure to something. And but we ran
into my apartment where my partner, my then partner, was staying,
and I guess he found it quite strange. I mean
(08:54):
I even look back at that now, Nick, you know,
it was like, oh, what a lovely story. But I
think most people listening to this would be like that's
wild or that's crazy. When I went to undergrad, I
was in one of my degrees, was in acting, and
that one of our teachers had this saying said, I'm
not going to say the word, but ef it and
(09:14):
and it was like this this idea of like going,
where do you contract in life?
Speaker 6 (09:19):
Like?
Speaker 1 (09:19):
And and what if you just said e f it,
you know, and it's not ef it like I'm going
to go destroy a car. It's like ef it. I'm
not going to let the way I think other people
think about me interrupt this moment in my own liberation
and freedom of life. I'm writing about this story in
my my my current book then finishing up. And you know,
(09:43):
I was, I was. I was a dancer. Then I
was walking down the street in New York City the
first time I ever applied the effort rule. And I
looked down and I had a transparent, transparent laundry bask
bag and so and I noticed that like all my underwear,
my like my dance belt, all the like sort of
like intimacy, intimate underwears were showing, and I felt so
(10:08):
much shame, you know, as I was walking down the
streets of New York City, and I was like, fit,
what if I'm on a runway? And I walked to
the laundry at like I was on America's Next Top
Model instead, And I just felt so liberated, and I
was like, I don't care what people think about my underwear,
Like I'm a human being. And it was and so
like the rain moment was an effet moment, Scott.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
When you look at this philosophy of how you live
your life, yeah, and you look at how you help
coach people, like you created the embody Lab, like this
is the largest online training platform for body based you know,
trauma therapy. We live in a world where.
Speaker 7 (10:49):
Our listeners and viewers they're checking their phones, they're flooded
with information. And you wrote everything you're looking at, reading,
hearing you have a physiological reaction too, Yeah, and so
can you help us understand, like, if we are really
going to do the work, if we're going to really
go into our trauma journey, how do we make sure
we're not only doing this in the mind, but we're
(11:10):
doing this in the body.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So and you name the sort of the line that
everything we see, everything we do, everything we witness and
is something that then is mirrored in our physiology. Right,
we see a stick on the floor and we think
it's a snake. We feel that in our physiology. It's
not just a perception or mind shift, you know, or
(11:34):
a mind mirage. We actually have this physiological response preparing
us to run from danger, you know, truly understanding that
we are in an endemic of drama. All the circumstances
that make an individual likely to become addicted to drama
we are experiencing on a mass level.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Right.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So the fact that we are more lonely than we
ever have been as a culture, right, it is the
number one reason for death is loneliness. It is it
has greater physiological challenges and complications than smoking a pack
of cigarettes per day. Loneliness. Right, And it's not just
(12:21):
like loneliness comes out of nowhere. We're on our phones,
we're on computers, we're on screens all day. We don't
know how to even talk to each other like in
the good old days before all this, Right, we use
emojis instead of expressing with words, which has a significant
process Like it did, it reduces our emotional language skills, right,
(12:44):
and I love them emoji, so no, no, no shame there,
but it does. And so we've truncated so many of
our abilities to actually be in relationship and the impact
of that is significant, and we are so we are
more lonely as a culture. We need and so the
(13:05):
pain of that, what's called isolation pain, is so great
in our culture. What we think of is like what's
called auto regulating. We are numbing out the pain with
some other mechanism. Usually it's screen time, right, Sometimes it's drinking,
sometimes it's other things. But you know, all of these
are so easily accessible. And the other big thing is
(13:30):
our attention is being taken away from us and constantly
pulled into other ads and other you know, notifications on
our phone and what and so what we're in is
what we call a attentional economy. So whoever holds and
captures your attention is the victor of capitalism, right, And
(13:55):
the mechanism to capture and maintain your attention is to
induce a stress response. And so with capitalism is based
on what is actually an activation economy. Or a stress economy.
Then we are all in an ecosystem of constantly being
in that process of stressed and in a rat race
(14:18):
of trying to get attention no matter what the cost is,
in an ecosystem of loneliness. So it is the grounds
to which an addiction to drama is based on, and
we're constantly being fed images on a scale we have
not evolved to be able to metabolize. So there's a
(14:39):
study that showed after the Boston bombing that those who
were watched six hours or more, which is not much
because based that's on your phone, that's on a screen,
that's even talking about it, those who watched or were
exposed to six hours or more of content around the
(15:00):
Boston bombing had more severe symptoms of PTSD post traumatic
stress disorder than those who were there. Wow, I was there.
I saw the plane go in on nine to eleven.
I was downtown. I was outside walking to school.
Speaker 6 (15:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
I never have seen a single clip of it. I couldn't.
I didn't want to. My parents were glued to their
television for days and days as a means to stay
connected with me. When I bring up nine to eleven,
I see my mom's face swell up a tears and
then she turns white. Right, the severity of the information
(15:45):
and we are turn on your Instagram right now, go
ahead and look at in your feed. What is the imagery?
You are literally being fed and I mean fed into
your body. We must learn our pausing point of overstimulation.
We are overstimulated and under mobilized. When I talked before
(16:07):
about like why the body is so important, we need
a vehicle to move the level of activation and emotion through.
We are more static as a culture. We're spending how
many hours? Go ahead and check your phone log? How
many hours are you on your screen? How many hours
are you on the television. This is not to shame you,
It's just to say that we are not then as
(16:29):
a culture, are not mobilizing the amount of information we
are taking in, and we are drowning in overstimulation, and
that creates more inability to connect right, which creates more loneliness.
So we we are overstimulated and it has severe consequences
(16:51):
and there's not a lot of ways out until we
start to be able to register our own pause point.
But we can't because our at tension is constantly being
stolen in and usurped from us by this attentional activation economy.
So we're in this cycle of more and more and
more and boredom, right, is actually a symptom of not
(17:14):
being stimulated, because underneath the boredom, if you can hang
out at enough time, you will likely feel some level
of anxiety, because that's what's underneath the boredom and the
absence of stimulus. The symptom, like in any like an
the behavioral addiction, the absence of the drug, the absence
of the drama, the absence of the stimulus evokes a distress,
(17:41):
an anxiety, or what's known as a withdrawal symptom, and
so we go get more to get out of the
anxiety or the pain of the withdrawal.
Speaker 5 (17:51):
You can go, you can go. Old school parenting, we
learned quickly growing up at home not to say I'm bored,
because first of all, I love Therese. I never was bored.
But if you said that in our house, I'm bored, yeah,
my mom would guarantee you say, oh you're bored, I
will give you and she would like go clean out
(18:13):
the garage. And it wasn't like a suggestion list. It
became a to do list. You know, oh, okay, the
garage needs cleaning. Oh you know there's you know, go
reak the yard like there was never like then, Like
so there's this understanding almost that yeah, if you know,
if you're saying that, then you need some type of
physical stimulation and movement. And you know, you have a
(18:33):
seventeen year old niece and how this this it the
eternal question of social media young people. We're talking about
processing and proceeds. Like, so, what suggestion or advice do
you have for all of us that have children teens?
(18:57):
How do we what's the suggestion for them navigating?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
So I used to be really firm with my suggestions
and then my sister taught me more humility about being
a parent. And you know, so as a research scientist,
I can say one thing and then you kind of
have to come back and be a human being and
be like, well, what's actually possible? So I mean, like
(19:23):
we can go on for another hour just about like
the what you know, cell phone, what you know phones,
and that overstimulation does to the circadian rhythm, the sleep patterns,
the brain waves of someone before they go through puberty,
which is pretty severe, very severe where we see you know,
(19:43):
like three x four x depression since since teens have
gotten their hands on phones and other another anxiety, et cetera,
let alone the what's called the mimicking effect where they're
watching other kids in the dress on social media and
starting to mimic that because the other folks are getting likes.
(20:05):
It's wild out there, right, So you know, my suggestion
would be like, no social media until after puberty is
what the research says. That's not fully possible for so
many parents. And I want to just be really like
empathetic to that. So it's like, what is the bare
(20:29):
minimum we can work with? Is it like, how about
fifteen minutes a day? And how are we balancing that
out with a lot of play and synchronistic experiences like
where we're sharing meals together and there's no television plane
where we're taking walks together as like parents and kids
(20:50):
or kids and kids. So it's not reliant that they're
the majority of their day is not on either the
stimulation or metabolic the stimulation maybe breaking down all of
that information that's beautiful.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Yeah, scrolling won't change your life, but subscribing just might
tap that button and stay connected to conversations that kempt.
Speaker 5 (21:16):
I have a question because the four of us, Martin, myself,
Craig and his brother Mark, we actually have an initiative
called Realize the Dream. Oh my goodness, we have so
many wonderful partners like All State that are really going
into communities and helping us have one hundred million hours
(21:39):
of service by Martin Luther King Junior's one hundredth birthday. Amazing,
But it is born out of the fact that we
were seeing, as it relates to, because we started this
initiative three years ago, how disconnected we are with each
other and with ourselves. Mark Father's last book is entitled
(22:01):
where do we go from here? Chaos or Community? And
I don't know anyone who is living today that has
not felt, certainly within the last six years that they
were impacted by chaos in some way. And we see
that service as a way of rebuilding community, building the
groundwork then for the beloved community and connection. Can you
(22:26):
just talk a little bit of how do you think
that connection In some ways, connection and service are a
pathway for healing.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, they are significantly, And I want to discern, like
when we talk about connection, there's qualities of connection and
a lot of our sense of connection currently is asynchronistically
meaning online we're not in proximity to each other, we're
(22:59):
not doing activity where maybe texting or leaving voice notes
or code doom scrolling next to each other or whatever
that is. And so we you know, when we talk
about connection in community, it is about shared purpose, meaning
and activity, an activity that often has some type of
(23:20):
mobile mobility to it, whether it's talking or moving or
food sharing, things like this that are really what our
physiology is wired to understand as true connection. And service
is such a beautiful vehicle for actually deepening connectivity. And
(23:43):
then as you deepen connectivity, you then have more of
a shared meaning as a group and are able to
further invest in the service that you have and you
can feel it more. That's that's the interesting research on
it too, is that we can sort of fake it
till we make it, and we will make it as
(24:03):
a group. Like as you invest your time, focused energy,
and then the collective experience of going in and doing
service work, you might feel like, Okay, I'm just doing it.
I'm just kind of doing it because I have to
fill these hours up right, or because someone my pastor
told me to or my Rabbi told me to, or
someone else suggested that, or Scott said, you know, said
(24:28):
the science of doing service work makes youre better, it
creates more well being, which it does, but that's not embodied.
But there is something really interesting that as we lean
into it, and as we lean into it and it
creates this group rhythm of action, we start to feel
(24:48):
it more and we start to feel a sense of
greater purpose and meaning because of that, and that does
start to interrupt the needing to find crisis and chaos
and stress and other things to mitigate the lack of
loneliness that is so pervasive in so many of us,
(25:11):
which is often the root of the pain that we
are trying to numb with addictions.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Nicole, What's something Scott has taught you that you now
carry into your own work or relationships.
Speaker 6 (25:23):
Something that has really affected me kind of in trying
times is the ability to find a slice of humor
and find a slice of like, oh, how could you
do it your way? I have seen Scott rise from
the ashes time and time again and reinvent and change
and seeing all those transformations and seeing the success and
(25:46):
just seeing unwavering determination for whatever goal. Scott is trying
to achieve has really sort of you know, given me
the freedom to not only make changes in my life,
but also make changes and make decisions with a little
bit more sort of slam dunk if you will, with
(26:09):
like do it your way. It's okay. You can be louder,
you can be wilder, you can be sassier, you can
take a risk. Why not.
Speaker 5 (26:22):
What has been so beautiful to watch is every time
when you're talking, literally Scott is looking at you with
such love and adoration, like it's like just genuine, genuine love.
So it's it was really beautiful to see that when
you're talking his love for you.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
I think, you know, as I've gotten older, I've really
really appreciate the memory keepers of our lives, of my life,
and it's like it's not easy for you know, as
parents disappear or as away, or siblings drift or whatever,
(27:03):
you know, like there's a lot I don't remember about
my life and had that shared experience with someone else,
to have spent so much time together, like and I
call these people the memory keepers. In the moments where
I am I don't know who I am anymore. And
(27:24):
I hope we all get to experience at least a
couple of those. It's really nice to be like, have
it a checkpoint with someone, like someone that says, well,
Scotty you you know, yeah, maybe this relationship didn't work out,
but you know, ten years ago you would have never
been able to say no to someone and stand up
for yourself. Or remember how the first time we met
(27:46):
and you couldn't carry a song, like carry a note
to save your life. And then somehow you like basically
did Broadway, and you know, like, look how far you
know that, Look how far you've come, or or at
the time or the same way, it's like or you
could come a little further, and you know, I really
(28:08):
it's it's And I also realized, I don't think I've
ever been in an environment with Nicki where I've I've
simultaneously gotten to talk about my like playful life, but
also in my professional life. There's a there's a level
of like my professional life that is like, you know,
talking about my research, like NICKI and I have talked
about my book, but it's it's like my answers for
(28:32):
like a podcast are a little bit more refined and
more filtered, despite what NICKI might say and so it's
like it's this really also this very interesting experience to
like welcome her into another aspect of my life.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
I love you knowing the two of you speak, and Scott,
you bicked the most beautiful plus one guest to bring up.
And I love because the friendship embodies the very message
of your professional work. You know, you have been together
through the trauma, bonding, the addictions, the challenges, and you've
been together through the positive, uplifting drama, the dancing in
(29:09):
the rain, the stripping down literally and figurably to come
together through friendships and to embody. And I love because
as we've gone through your life journey, you know, the
two of you have been this beautiful echo showing that
pain can lead to purpose, that rock bottom is at
the end, it's often the beginning that you know, Nicole,
you've reminded us all what real friendship looks like, to
(29:30):
stand by friends through hard time, through storms, but to
always be there with love. And Scott, your incredible work
has touched and uplifted so many individuals, holding us sometimes
hard mirror but always asking them to reach deep down
inside it to be their best selves. And so thank
you to both of you as we say on this journey.
For living your legacies and for sharing them with all
(29:53):
of us today. Thank you so much, thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
You so much.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Thank you for joining us. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a moment.
Hosts And Creators
Craig Kielburger
Marc Kielburger
Martin Luther King III
Arndrea Waters King
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