Love Addiction
- Do you become consumed and obsessive in relationships?
- Do you equate love and relationships with self-esteem?
- Do you spend excessive amounts of time trying to get your partner to understand you or to change your partner's behavior?
- When you feel wounded by your partner, do you engage in sexual or flirtatious behaviors with others, outside of the relationship?
- If you identify with some of these behaviors, you may be a love addict.
Love addiction, sometimes referred to as relationship addiction, is a form of intimacy disorder. It is a painful, compulsive and addictive disorder that negatively impacts not only the addict but the object of their obsession. Love addicts compulsively seek relationships or romance despite negative social, emotional, financial, or physical consequences. Love addicts use love, or the pursuit of love, as a way of distracting themselves from uncomfortable feelings or emotions. Love addicts, as a pattern, seek out unavailable partners.
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Love Addiction & Love Avoidance with Michelle Chalfant and Karen Gelstein
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The early days of a love addict’s relationships are euphoric and happy. The addicted person feels as though they have met their true love and are destined to be with them. The fantasy creates a surge of endorphins, producing a “high” from love. However, as the relationship progresses, the idealized romantic dream collapses, which can cause love addicts to become emotionally needy and cling to their partners. It is not uncommon for love addicts to neglect themselves “in service to the relationship,” which typically leads to resentment and anger, rather than healthy intimacy. For some love addicts, even an abusive relationship is preferable to being alone since loneliness can trigger intense feelings of abandonment, creating feelings of hopelessness, panic, and depression.
To heal love addiction, we must sit in the emotions of not reaching out and stop the fantasies we make up in the mind that are untrue.
What are the Roots of love Addiction?
Love addiction can often be linked to unmet needs in early in childhood. When a child’s emotional needs are neglected, they feel unwanted and unloved, which disrupts early attachment experiences. The child unconsciously internalizes a belief that they are unworthy of being loved. This leads a love addict to search for ways to fill the emptiness left by their parents’ neglect, creating a constant need for attention, validation, and nurturing. These unmet needs are then imposed onto adult romantic relationships, casting a heavy, unrealistic burden on the partner. This dynamic creates a toxic and painful dynamic within the relationship.
Therapy for love addiction
Seeking therapy for love addiction can lead to a deeper awareness of the underlying causes of the obsessive needs that create codependent patterns. The ability to identify these patterns in adult relationships and to develop skills that alleviate the pursuit of unrealistically idealized love, replacing it with healthier coping strategies, can lead to improved self-esteem, healthier intimate connections and a deeper connection with oneself. Therapy offers a roadmap for this journey, providing the tools and support necessary to navigate the complexities of love addiction and embark on a path towards genuine, fulfilling love—the kind that begins within.
Love Avoidance
- Do you find yourself hesitant about commitments and emotional attachments?
- Are you craving more personal space, feeling smothered by your partner's attention?
- Perhaps you experience quick, intense attachments, idealizing your partner initially but then feeling anxious and fearful as soon as your partner wants to have a closer emotional connection.
- Or maybe you find yourself overwhelmed by your partner's needs, turning to things outside the relationship to create distance such as work, alcohol, pornography, or infidelity.
- If any of these scenarios resonate with you, you might identify with being Love Avoidant.
It’s important to recognize that these feelings and behaviors are common and can be addressed in a productive way. Seeking help and understanding more about your relationship style can lead to profound personal growth and healthier relationships. You are not alone in this journey, and with the right support, you can learn to navigate intimacy in ways that honor your needs and those of your partners.
Love avoidants can harbor an underlying fear of loss and rejection. The worry of being overwhelmed by someone else’s needs can overshadow the possibility of experiencing true intimacy and the joy that loving relationships can bring. It’s important to understand that love avoidance doesn’t mean avoiding love itself; rather, it refers to a challenging way of managing close, intimate relationships, often stemming from early relationship trauma such as physical neglect, emotional abandonment, or other forms of abuse.
When someone tries to get too close, avoidants may feel engulfed—a profound sense of losing one’s identity, experienced as being absorbed, smothered, stifled, or even suffocated. This feeling of engulfment is tied to fears of being used, controlled, or taken advantage of, alongside deep-seated fears of loss, deprivation, and abandonment. When love avoidants are faced with a partner’s neediness, it triggers intense anxiety and a fear of losing their independence. In response to these feelings, avoidants may become overly controlling and critical when supporting their romantic partner, and then withdraw when their partner seeks support or comfort.
Recognizing these patterns is a critical step towards healing. With understanding and supportive interventions, those who identify as love avoidant can work towards learning how to build healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
When we are able to stay even a moment in the uncomfortable energy, we gradually learn not to fear it.
Foundations of Love Avoidance
Love avoidance is often rooted in negative childhood experiences related to early attachment. Instead of forming healthy bonds with primary caregivers, children who are neglected, abused, or enmeshed may learn to view intimacy as conditional, abusive, or overwhelming. Consequently, they perceive attachment as burdensome. These children learn that getting too close means getting hurt and used, leading them to fear and flee from close emotional connections. Terrified of experiencing the same emotional trauma again, love avoidants take significant measures to emotionally detach themselves from others.
Avenues to healing
By seeking therapy, you can learn to recognize how your early relationships and attachment experiences have impacted you, making it difficult to trust people and form emotional bonds with loved ones in your adult life. Therapy involves reducing the intense shame, as well as skill-building for identifying and managing anxiety and the desire to avoid intimacy. If you are open to change, you can learn to become more vulnerable, receptive, and responsive in a healthy relational way, allowing you to enjoy the benefits of trusting and enriching intimate relationships.
The Dance of Intimacy
Transforming the Love Avoidant / Love Addiction Dynamic
Individuals who avoid intimacy often find themselves drawn to emotionally unavailable partners, who may be love or sex addicts. Both parties in this dynamic have intimacy-related issues stemming from early trauma, which resurface when the emotional threat of intimacy arises later in life. Initially, the relationship may work, with the love addict showering attention and affection on the love avoidant, leading them to feel accepted and cared for. While love addicts require constant emotional reassurance and attention as proof of love, love avoidants may feel that their love is proven simply by supporting their partner on an economic and physical level. However, this dance often results in painful relational dynamics and intensity that are contrary to healthy intimacy.