Addicted To Love

This video rings true to me.

Therapist Jerry Wise says: Love addiction fizzles out and people are hurt when that love doesn’t turn out to be healthy, long-lasting, caring, passionate. It’s a big flash and then fizzles out like every other addiction.

An affair is a classic example of love and sex addiction.

The love addict experiences love on the addictive level. It feels compulsive (behavior) and involves obsession (thinking).

The love addict mistakes enmeshment for love. The love addicted relationship involves fear of abandonment, unhappiness with self, distraction from shame, guilt, low self-image. Love addiction involves high levels of emotional reactivity and pendulum swinging relationship cycles from enmeshed to detached to cut-off to too enmeshed. Love addiction involves unrealistic expectations for how your partner should meet your needs and make you feel happy.

Love addiction involves too much carryover of our family of origin issues in the relationship. For example, my father was never there for me, so that is now my spouse’s job.

Love addiction can occur within committed relationships.

Love addicts are preoccupied with loving and being loved. We feel terrified of being abandoned. We have no impulse control when it comes to love. We feel an overwhelming need to check up on someone. More than once, we’ve spied on someone we’ve loved. We expect our partner to make us feel lovable. We often fall in love too easily and too quickly. Once we’ve bonded with someone, we can’t seem to let go. Once we’re attracted, we’ll ignore all the warning signs. We take on more than our share of responsibility for the survival of the relationship. We’re overwhelmed with loneliness and feel inadequate when we’re not in a relationship. We get involved with wrong people to avoid being lonely. We’ll sacrifice ourselves to become who our partner wants, even abandoning ourselves and our values.

Love addictions stops us from having healthy, stable, loving, committed relationships. Unless we address this brokenness, our chances for happiness are low.

If someone makes me whole, then without them, I’m not whole, and that’s dangerous, because people are imperfect and can’t keep us whole all the time.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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