The Chemistry of Love
The main focus in my practice is mental health, my viewpoint on healing comes from trying to link the physical body with what the mind is doing. The reality is- there is no chicken before the egg but an existing relationship when understood, can open the doorway for many things.
The brain is a natural place to start when thinking about emotion. Many of us think it a logical/intentional decision to be attracted or drawn to another human being, but really it is a fundamental signal from the body much like hunger and thirst.
One of the most important influences on love, hate, compassion and pleasure is Dopamine. Dopamine is produced in the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) and is part of the motivation/reward system in our brains...it activates desire.
Dopamine, aka reward and pleasure can fire in response to something as simple as eating foods we like, it can fire in response to winning a road race, or getting that promotion at work. However pleasures and rewards are not always limited to positive things, they can come from doing illicit drugs, they can be reasons why people overeat, why people struggle with addiction, why people work too much, etc. This is a what I call our impulsive neurotransmitter. It makes you feel pleasure but does not discriminate on what the catalyst is. An impressive but scary role.
Another important player in brain chemistry is Serotonin. This makes us feel important. We have increased Serotonin when we get that 'ego boost', it fires when someone compliments us or when we feel important. This can be responsible for that need to seek out blind acceptance and play an important role in our self esteem.
Next we have Oxytocin which makes us trust, this is the bonding neurotransmitter. This is the one that completes the loop in our relationships, it is what makes our efforts requited. This is when we love someone and they love us back, it is when an unspoken decision is made to trust the other person and strengthen a bond.
In the topic of relationships these neurotransmitters pose some questions and can put things into perspective as to why we lean toward one relationship over another, why we are happy with some people and not others, why we choose the friends we choose, and even why we choose the profession we do. This also explains how we might synthesize our attachments based on what our experiences were at a young age and into who we become as we grow older.
