Part of what came out of yesterday's realizations about curiosity vs goal based dopamine release;
dopamine or not, I think it'd be emotionally useful for me to see MORE things as goals even if their significance gets completely wiped out immediately in a larger hostile world. Example; yesterday I drove south, did an in person interview, drove back and in the middle of my job hunt found out I didn't get the job.
If I can phrase this as having accomplished a necessary step in this process I hate, one that wouldn't have had ANY chance of working out if I hadn't sunk effort into it, that makes it feel a lot better than just having it be part of an ongoing lifetime of never being good enough.
Part of what came out of yesterday's realizations about curiosity vs goal based dopamine release;
@Leucrotta that's a good way to think about it and matches what a therapist pointed out about me and romantic relationships
I can't say I've perfectly learned the lesson
Part of what came out of yesterday's realizations about curiosity vs goal based dopamine release;
@Leucrotta wait a sec that also explains rejection sensitivity in ADHD so much
if the little steps you're doing fail to stick in your mind as little steps of progress, it becomes all about your confidence if people like you
Part of what came out of yesterday's realizations about curiosity vs goal based dopamine release;
@chimerror @Leucrotta I can definitely see that association. It doesn't seem unrelated to self-confidence. Like, when we aren't crediting ourselves for what worth lay in our efforts, we are only absorbing and internalizing the negatives in a way that prohibits us from getting that confidence -from- ourselves?
re: Part of what came out of yesterday's realizations about curiosity vs goal based dopamine release;
@Oneironott @chimerror I was thinking about this some more and in my case I deffo think it circles around;
Being told that I'm unimportant, that I'm terrible, unwanted, unsafe, was going to generate a need for dopamine hits to keep going.
While simultaneously teaching me that if I were gonna feel good, it wasn't going to be from these tasks the adults and peers considered so important - after all I was doing what they wanted and even apparently succeeding sometimes and it meant nothing.
And I sure wasn't gonna get dopamine from social encounters while being isolated off at home right?
So now I'm seeing the double-whammy; I'd been trained that I wasn't going to be rewarded for doing tasks, *and* that curiosity not completion was going to feel rewarding. And similarly it can't have helped with socializing to have learned an ADHD approach to friendships on top of CPTSD jumpiness.
