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d ye r i h t

A voice f or hea lth a n d rec overy

www.together.us.com

New York Edition

July/August 2012

This is Your Brain in L ve

Inside

Science takes us deeper into the world of attraction, sex and romance – and it’s still a mystery Jeffrey C. Friedman

Be Your Own Person.........17 Does Booze Make You More Creative?....................3 God's Whispers................... 9 The Movie in Your Head..............................8

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The “Miracle” of Recovery........................ 18

But, lately, the waters of love have been washing onto the dry and ordered shores of neuroscience, a place where all emotions, even love, have their distinct and measurable neurobiological substrates. Thanks in part to a new generation of neuroimaging technology, science can now offer new insight into the limbic pathways that govern attraction, sex and romantic attachment. Few would have guessed that it would be white-coated researchers, rather than the world’s artists and poets, to whom love would relinquish its final secrets, revealing truths that may help us fully sound love’s hidden depths. The Oxford English Dictionary defines love as “an intense feeling of deep attraction or fondness for a person or a thing – a sexual passion or sexual relations.” It is a definition that is both accurate and dense, though a bit of resonance is felt when the dictionary also tells us that the word “love” shares common etymological roots with the words “desire” and “libido.”

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: If there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung

J

ung was right. No experience in life is more transformative than falling in love. Love has a remarkable ability to open our hearts and, if tenderly nurtured, bind them to the hearts of others. No single emotion has as much power to enrich lives, even heal nations. But then love is less a single emotion than a patchwork of many. Its boundaries are vast and deep and encompass an ever-evolving medley of the most diverse feelings. And love is a force so enigmatic that, for millennia, its investigation has been primarily the domain of philosophers, artists and poets. Over many centuries, those whose craft is to define the indefinable have labored to chart love’s unfathomable waters, from its balmy, placid promises, through the stinging chop of its sudden squalls and down into the sightless depths of its bitter sorrows.

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The Cure is Worse Than the Pain The abuse of prescription pain medicine is epidemic, especially among adolescents. Dr. Mel Pohl, medical director of the Las Vegas Recovery Center, and one of the nation’s leaders in studying prescription abuse, has successfully treated patients and his own chronic pain without dangerous meds. We need to rethink how we approach pain, he says. By Suzanne Riss Together: Pain is the primary reason we go to see a doctor. Is the real problem that the most common treatment is medication? Dr. Pohl: There’s an underlying cultural problem here: We don’t want to feel pain or anxiety. So we take a pill or we go on the Internet or we text or we gamble. As a society, we’re oriented away from the present moment, and we try to take away any unpleasant feelings. The reality is that the world is filled with unpleasantness. We can’t medicate it away. It’s impossible. We can temporarily numb the brain with a drug. But the drug wears off, and then we need to do it again. I think as a culture we need to learn how to deal with reality. And as a corollary, a lot of people are medicating emotional pain that they perceive as physical pain. They feel anxious, and their back starts

to hurt, so they take a Vicodin. They’re not making it up. Anxiety causes you to hurt more. Using pain medications to treat emotional pain is called “chemical coping,” and it’s a common phenomenon among people who get in trouble with these meds. Do most people become addicted to prescription pain meds by accident — they underestimate how addictive the meds are? What’s the typical scenario? There are three basic scenarios. The first involves people who will become addicted to anything that alters their mood, like drugs that hit the reward system of their brain. These are people who have an underlying addictive disorder, and they’re at risk for problems with any drug. They may have used marijuana, alcohol, sleeping pills, cocaine. Then they find an opiate at some point. If they develop a painful condition, they then get into trouble with that drug.

The second group has never had a problem with addiction. They drink socially. They might have experimented with marijuana or even cocaine recreationally. But when they’re exposed to opioids to treat pain, they become addicted. These folks take more than they’re prescribed and they chew or snort their oxycodone and Roxicet (Roxy’s), which is the newest popular drug being abused. Those are signs they’re out of control. They have become addicted although they never were before. The third group doesn’t

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