CASTIMONIA

Sexual Purity Support & Recovery Group

love addiction

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Is It Love or Love Addiction?

Healthy love is wonderful and makes life worthwhile. On the other hand, “love addiction” can cause pain, suffering, and even death. Knowing the difference between love and “love addiction” can be life-saving.

1. Healthy Love develops after we feel secure.
Addictive Love tries to create love even though we feel frightened and insecure.
2. Healthy Love comes from feeling full. We overflow with love.
Addictive Love is always trying to fill an inner void.
3. Healthy Love begins with self-love.
Addictive Love always seeks love “out there” from that “special someone.”
4 Healthy Love comes to us once we’ve given up the search.
Addictive Love is compulsively sought after.
5 Healthy Love comes from inside. It wants to give.
Addictive Love comes from outside. It wants to take.
6. Healthy Love grows slowly, like a tree.
Addictive Love grows fast, as if by magic, like those children’s animals that expand instantly when we add water.
7. Healthy Love thrives on time alone as well as time with our partner.
Addictive Love is frightened of being alone and afraid of being close.
8. Healthy Love is unique. There is no “ideal lover” that we seek.
Addictive Love is stereotyped. There is always a certain type that attracts us.
9. Healthy Love is gentle and comfortable.
Addictive Love is tense and combative.
10. Healthy Love is based on a deep knowing of ourselves and our lover.
Addictive Love is based on hiding from ourselves and falling in love with an ideal “image,” not a real person.

http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/cc-is-it-love-or-love-addiction/

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Love Addicts

Love Addicts compensated for lack of nurturing as children by immersing themselves in fantasy. Fantasies of being rescued or being the rescuer abound. Knights, dragons, romance novels – getting high from fantasy becomes habit. When a Love Addict plays with fantasy, they can get high in about 10 minutes, and stay there for 2-3 hours. Endorphins are released into their system, relieving emotional pain. Love Addicts begin relationships by trying too hard to please and connect. They are driven to find someone to tell them they are loveable and loved; to find someone who will rescue them from their inability to care for themselves; rescue them from their loneliness, emptiness, lack of self-love, inability to feel safe in the world without someone to protect them. They look for a relationship to make them feel whole. By Mary Ellen O’Leary, MA, LPCC
http://insidetherapy.com/codaloveaddict.html

“I liked it. I craved it. I wanted more and I took it. I took it like I needed it, like my life had a limit and if I didn’t get as much of it as I could I’d quit breathing the next instant.” – Kristen Ashley

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Needs for Validation, Love and Connection

People generally become love addicts due to a past history of abandonment from their primary caregivers. Adult love addicts usually recognized as children that their most precious needs for validation, love and connection with one or both parents were not met. This affects their self-esteem dramatically in adult life. It results in a conscious fear of abandonment and an underlying subconscious fear of intimacy. To a love addict, intensity in a relationship is often mistaken for intimacy. As with any addiction, recovery from love addiction is a process of self-discovery. It requires taking specific steps: breaking through denial and acknowledging the addiction; owning the harmful consequences of the addiction; and intervening to stop the addictive cycle from occurring. Ultimately, love addicts must enter a grieving process to address the underlying emotional pain that is at the core of the addiction. Love addicts experience withdrawal symptoms. Working with a therapist can help guide the love addict through the process of talking about childhood experiences of abandonment, navigating through the feelings of pain, fear, anger and emptiness that may surface, and releasing old emotions that contribute to negative acting-out behaviors. A solid relationship with a skilled therapist trained in love and sex addiction can help guide the love addict through this process. From “What is Love Addiction?” By Alexandra Katehakis, MFT, CST, CSAT
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/05/26/what-is-love-addiction/

“When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can still cling to.” – Don Juan

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Co-addicted Relationships Part II: Two Love Avoidants

Co-addicted Relationships Part II: Two Love Avoidants
A Love Avoidant and another Love Avoidant form a very low-intensity relationship. They agree to keep intensity low because each of them finds this comfortable; however, they each create intensity, obsession, and compulsion outside the relationship, which quite often does not include the other partner. For example it could be that one is a work addict in business and the other is intensely involved in church work or another form of volunteer activity. Or perhaps one is an alcoholic and the other a compulsive spender, or compulsive gardener, or compulsively redecorates and remodels their home. Or perhaps one of them avoids the spouse by being a Love Addict when relating to one of the children. Another possibility is that these two participate in some form of intensity outside their relationship, thinking they are having a relationship because they are together so much of the time. Actually they use the intensity outside to avoid intimacy within the relationship. For example, a couple can become involved together in compulsive gambling, tournament bridge, square dancing, sailboat racing, and so on. I’m not trying to say that gambling, bridge, dancing or boat racing are undesirable activities for a couple to share. But such activities may become an obstacle to their relationship when the partners create intensity with those activities to avoid intimacy. “From “Facing Love Addiction” by Pia Mellody – tomorrow Part III: “A Love Addict and a Love Avoidant”

“Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.” –  Barbara Cartland

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Co-addicted Relationships Part I: Two Love Addicts

Co-addicted Relationships Part I: Two Love Addicts
A Love Addict and another Love Addict form a very intense relationship. They enmesh with each other, get very dependent on each other, and often exclude other people from their partnership. Many times they even exclude their children, and these children feel very abandoned by the parents addiction to each other. The intensity, obsession, and compulsion is focused by each partner on the other partner and on the relationship itself. In some relationships between Love Addicts, one Love Addict’s intense drive toward enmeshment is more forceful than the others. These forceful attempts to remake the other part to fit his or her fantasy overwhelm this less forceful partner. The less forceful Love Addict, who similar attempts to remake the forceful partner to fit him or her own fantasy, fail, may feel in danger of being engulfed and drained and may therefore shift roles by adopting the characteristics of a Love Avoidant in the relationship. “From “Facing Love Addiction” by Pia Mellody – tomorrow Part II: “Two Love Avoidants”

“Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it’s a f ‘ed-up way, like a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it’s a trap.” – Tess Callahan