Tag Archives: love addiction

What is Love Addiction?

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Melissa Killeen
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Melissa Killeen

When hearing the word “addiction,” most of us tend to think of alcoholism and substance abuse, as opposed to addictive behaviors like eating, spending, gambling, video gaming, sex and love. Nevertheless, people can and do become addicted to highly pleasurable, self-soothing behaviors just as they can become addicted to pleasurable, self-soothing substances – both have the same problematic results.

Individuals may turn to alcohol, prescription medications or illegal substances as a way to self-medicate or to numb out in order to avoid stress and/or emotional discomfort. These same individuals may also turn to an intensely pleasurable pattern of behavior as readily as turning to a substance. Let’s say it is like selecting to watch a X rated movie instead of drinking a glass of vodka.

Love addiction is a human behavior that is indeed a highly pleasurable, self-soothing behavior, a behavior through which some people have become addicted to the feeling of being in love. Love addicts can take on many different behaviors. Love addicts will spend much time and effort on a person to whom they are addicted. Love addicts value this person above themselves, and their focus on the beloved person can be described as obsessive.

This behavior results in love addicts neglecting to care for themselves. They instead, say, attend rock concerts of a beloved musician who does not know the love addict even exists, recreating an image of not who that loved person is, but perhaps a re-creation of a parent figure. Love addicts will select to stop seeing their friends in exchange for staying with the beloved person, only. Love addicts may lose weight, change their hair color or purchase a new wardrobe to suit the beloved. In essence, abandoning important aspects of their lives and well-being in order to stay connected to the object of their affection. Some love addicts find that when not involved in a love-addicted relationship they are able to care for themselves quite adequately, visit with friends and enjoy independence. However, when they become involved, the love addict quickly finds that their self-care capacity steadily declines. Love addiction is common, for men as well as women, however, most love addicts do not realize they are addicted to love.

The simple truth is that addictive behaviors trigger the same basic neurochemical response as drugs. Behavioral addictions create mood-related neurochemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, resulting in feelings of pleasure, anticipation and distraction. This intense neurochemical response to addictive behaviors provides temporary escape and relief. Over time, some individuals learn that the easiest way to avoid feelings of stress and emotional discomfort is to engage in a highly pleasurable and potentially addictive behavior. Eventually they start to use those behaviors not to feel better, but to feel less or to numb out. This is a sure sign of addiction. So the only significant difference between substance and behavioral addictions is that substance addicts ingest alcohol or drugs to create a neurochemical reaction, while behavioral addicts create their own dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and other mood-related neurochemicals to enjoy their own intensely pleasurable fantasy or activity – no substance necessary. Love addicts are addicted to dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin and can create these chemicals naturally in their body – with no need to leave home!

Could I be a love addict?

Adult love addicts usually recognize that when they were children, their most precious needs for validation, love and connection were not met by one or both of their parents. People can become love addicts due to a past history of abandonment from their primary caregivers or people close to them. To further confuse matters, a love addict may display love-addictive behavior toward a parent, their children, siblings, or friends, commonly referred to as enmeshment, which is not always related to romantic love or sexual interactions.

These addictive experiences result in low self-esteem, a conscious fear of abandonment and a subconscious fear of intimacy. To a love addict, intensity in a relationship is often mistaken for intimacy and love. Some symptoms of love addiction include love at first sight, excessive fantasizing about a romantic partner, and abnormal jealousy. Love addicts may find themselves living with a partner who is emotionally unavailable, abusive or dishonest. Many times a love addict will engage in sex with a potential partner, hoping that individual will love them.

Many sex addicts cannot see the role love addiction plays in their compulsive behavior. The fusion of sex addiction and love addiction is separated after years of therapeutic treatment for sex addiction, and the addict has begun to resolve the reasons for his or her compulsive sexual behaviors. This does not happen immediately, as it may take five to ten years to enter the maintenance stage of recovery from sex addiction. Many people give up on such a long duration of clinical support, and thus love and relationship addiction remains a hidden epidemic.

Dr. Susan Campbell, author of nine books on relationships and conflict resolution has written the Love Addiction Quiz. If you answer “yes” to more than two of these questions, you should take a serious look at learning more about love addiction and its treatment.

  1. Are you in a break up and then make up cycle with a romantic partner?
  2. Do you often think to yourself that this person is not good for you?
  3. Do any of your close friends tell you that this person is not good for you?
  4. After you two have been apart for a few days, do you get to a point where you feel empty or lost without this person?
  5. During the days immediately following a breakup with this person, do you experience difficulty sleeping, eating, or carrying out other self-care activities?
  6. Do you need emotional intensity in order to feel alive?
  7. Do you feel “high” when the two of you re-connect after a fight or a falling out?

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. The first step should be learning more about love addiction. Here are some excellent books on the topic:

The next step is to find a 12-step support group in your area. Susan Peabody, therapist, and author of Addiction to Love, started the 12-step program Love Addicts Anonymous. Additionally, another 12-step meeting for love addiction is Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA).

Like drug addicts, love addicts experience withdrawal symptoms. Sadness, depression, excessive sleepiness, or suicidal thoughts are part of this withdrawal process. Working with a therapist can be the most important step to help guide the love addict through the process of recovery. Guiding a person through childhood experiences of abandonment, navigating through the feelings of pain, fear, anger and emptiness requires a skilled therapist trained in love and sex addiction.

Next week, our blog post is about pornography addiction.

Resources used in this blog:

Robert Weiss LCSW, CSAT-S (12.2.14) Understanding Process (Behavioral) Addictions, Counselor Magazine for Addiction Professionalshttp://blog.counselormagazine.com/2014/12/understanding-process-behavioral-addictions/

Dr. Susan Campbell (3.13.13) A Few Telltale Signs of Love Addiction, Psych Central,http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/03/13/a-few-telltale-signs-of-love-addiction/

Alexandra Katehakis, MFT, CST, CSAT,(5.26.13) What is Love Addiction? Psych Central, http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/05/26/what-is-love-addiction/

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15 Common Signs of Love or Romance Addiction: Understanding Love and Romance Addiction, Part Two

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Michael
We welcome the return of our guest blogger, Robert Weiss, the Founding Director of The Sexual Recovery Institute and Director of Sexual Disorders Services at The Ranch Treatment Center and Promises Treatment Centers.

Recovering love addicts who have worked on themselves in therapy and 12-step programs like Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) can relate to the idea of having used a well-rehearsed repertoire of manipulation to find and hold on to sexual and romantic partners.

Jose, a 32-year-old IT administrator put it this way –

I was always hunting in one form or another to find the special attention and sense of importance that only the right girl might make me feel if I could get with her. I figured I could make it happen with someone if I just wore, said or did the right thing or was good enough in bed, etc. In recovery it was necessary for me to recognize all the manipulative strategies I used to employ to attract and seduce women. As I slowly began to cast these aside, with the support of 12 step members, friends and therapy I actually began to learn my own value and real human worth, which over time has helped to remove the powerful and empty fantasy life that I lived in for so long.

Unlike the kind of partnership and dependency that many of us seek to compliment our lives, the love and romance addict searches for someone outside of himself to provide the emotional stability he or she lacks within. Working hard to catch someone who can to fix them, rather than learning about and growing beyond their own emptiness, they can become fixated on troubled or emotionally unavailable partners, often providing others with the very love and security they themselves most desire. Ultimately as the love addict’s own emotional needs remain unmet, they may himself act out through verbal or physical abuse of a current partner or though excessive spending, sex addiction, affairs or drugs, experiences that will ultimately reinforce their underlying sense of shame, self hatred and loneliness.

For those seeking a long-term a relationship, healthy romantic intensity is the catalyst that brings about the bonding necessary to sustain love and attachment. The beginning stages of a potential love relationship are the most exhilarating because that emotional state helps us bond and attach. This is when how HE looks, walks, talks, eats and thinks is the subject of endless fantasy, excitement and late night phone calls.

Romance itself, with or without sex, does encourage personal growth when we are open to learning. Then each new relationship can offer insight and self-awareness. Most people easily relate to that “rush” of first love and romance; the stuff of endless songs, greeting cards and fantasy. More than romantic intensity or great sex, true long-term intimacy is an experience of being known and accepted by someone over time. Loving relationships develop in part as those first exhilarating times together form a foundation of a deeper, long-term closeness. It is that deeper closeness which ultimately feeds our hearts and keeps us content; long after the rush of new romance has passed.

Love and Romantic addiction are not defined by gender or sexual orientation. The men and women who suffer from these challenges do however have underlying attachment, trauma and/or personality based issues that will require a period of healing to work beyond. It is strongly recommended that love and romance addicts both attend 12-step sex and love addiction meetings and therapy with a specialist trained in behavioral addictions. Hope and change are highly possible – but first the addict has to fully withdraw for some time from the active dating/sex/love game, while being guided by others toward self-reflection, grieving and improving social (non-romantic, non-sexual) peer relationships.

15 most common signs of love or romantic addiction:

1. Frequently mistaking intense sexual experiences or romantic infatuation for love

2. Constantly searching for romance and love

3. Using sex as a means to find or hold onto love

4. Falling in love with people met superficially or solely online

5. Problems maintaining intimate relationships once the initial newness and excitement has worn off

6. Consistent unhappiness, desire to hook-up or anxiety when alone

7. Consistently choosing abusive or emotionally unavailable partners

8. Giving emotionally, financially or otherwise to partners who require a great deal of care-taking but do not or can not reciprocate what they are given

9. When in a long-term relationship most often feeling detached, judgmental or unhappy, when out of a relationship, feeling desperate and alone

10. Making decisions about what to wear, how to look, what to say etc., based on how others might perceive you, rather than on self-awareness, comfort and creativity.

11. Using sex, money, seduction, drama or other schemes to “hook” or hold onto a partner

12. Missing out on important family, career, recreational or social experiences in order to find, create or maintain a romantic relationship

13. Giving up – by avoiding sex or relationships for long periods of time to “solve the problem”

14. Being unable to leave unhealthy or abusive relationships despite repeated promises to self or others

15. Returning to previously unmanageable or painful relationships despite promises to self or others not to do so

Editor’s Note: If you think you may be a Love and/or a Romance Addict consider visiting the following sites:

http://www.slaafws.org/

http://www.coda.org/

http://www.itsallaboutlove.com/quiz_3.htm

http://loveaddicts.org/kindsofloveaddicts.html

http://www.piamellody.com/

http://recoverytradepublications.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mastin-kipp/addicted-to-love-part-1_b_652919.html

This blog was written by: Robert Weiss, Founding Director of The Sexual Recovery Institute and Director of Sexual Disorders Services at The Ranch Treatment Center and Promises Treatment Centers. These centers serve individuals seeking sex, love, romance and codependency addiction. Follow Robert on Twitter @RobWeissMSW
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Understanding Love and Romance Addiction: Part One- By Robert Weiss,LCSW, CSAT-S

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Michael

Welcome guest blogger, Robert Weiss and this two part series on love and romance addiction. Robert is the Founding Director of The Sexual Recovery Institute and Director of Sexual Disorders Services at The Ranch Treatment Centerand Promises Treatment Centers. These centers serve individuals seeking sexual addiction treatment and porn addiction help. Follow Robert on Twitter @RobWeissMSW. Enjoy his blog:  Sex and Intimacy in the Digital Age at: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex

Understanding Love and Romance Addiction: Part One

When love and sex become a means to distract or escape from emotional pain, partner choice becomes skewed. Compatibility becomes based on “whether or not you will leave me,” “how intense our sex life is” or “how I can hook you into staying,” rather than mutual compatibility or whether we might truly become intimate and healthy peers, friends and companions.

It can be difficult to understand how the gifts of love and romance can evolve into painfully destructive and compulsive patterns. Yet for the love addicted, romance, sexuality and emotional closeness are experiences more often beset with painful emotional highs and lows than graced by genuine intimacy. Living in a chaotic, desperate internal world of need and emotional despair, romance addicts –these men and women, straight and gay – fear both of being alone and rejected or trapped and stuck in an unhappy relationship.

He or she lives in fear of never finding the one or worse, afraid that when they finally do meet, they themselves will be found unworthy of love. No matter how clever, how smart, how physically attractive or successful, the love addict feels incomplete and haunted by a desire for a fantasy partnership that if fulfilled, would make them complete. In order to achieve their goal relationship addicts will seduction, control, guilt and manipulation to attract and hold onto a romantic or sexual partner, even when unsure whether it is a good match.

Janis, a 27-year-old film student had this to say about her desperate search for love –

Eventually I began to hide my dates. I didn’t want friends to know that I met someone new because so many past times I had said, “he’s the one” and had it not work out that I thought they would laugh at me if I brought yet another guy to the table.

In my desperation I tried dating clubs, speed dating, Internet dating and church dances. Just like the dating books say-I asked everyone I knew to introduce me to someone they could see me dating. And then there were the hobby and recreation groups I joined, ones I didn’t even like, desperately hoping to find him making ceramics, hiking, welding or playing tennis.

When I found someone who felt right I would either have sex right away hoping that would bond us more deeply or avoid sex until we knew each other better thinking that would keep them around. For a while I thought maybe I wasn’t cute or smart enough, later I just blamed the men I dated for being too screwed up. Ultimately it seemed no matter how hard I tried or where I put the blame, I ended up alone.

Over time, my life became more and more about looking for the right guy and less and less about enjoying myself and doing things to make me happy.

Caught up in a constant search for someone to love, the addict’s endless intrigue, flirtations, sexual liaisons and affairs often leave a path of destruction and negative consequences in their wake. Ironically many love addicts have likely already had more than one opportunity for the love and commitment they claim to desire, but in their desperation and narcissism will mistake the intensity of “falling in love” or the drama of problem relationships, for love itself.

Even when dating someone who is safe, stable and appropriate, love addicts can become dissatisfied and anxious.  Appearing bored or unhappy but underneath fearful of an emotional trap, he or she may shove aside a perfectly acceptable mate and/or or start cheating while in perfectly good relationship – looking for yet another new intensity or “love” experience. Therein lies the addictive component of their problem. Struggling to have the relationship that everyone else seems to have and he or she does not, love addicts attempt to resolve these painful circumstances by engaging in even more searching dating and sex.

Addictive relationships are characterized by unhealthy dependency, guilt and abuse. At times despairing of her cycle of unhappy affairs, broken relationships and liaisons, the romance addict may try a “swearing off” period, not unlike the anorexic stage of an eating disorder. She may for a while decide that “not being in the game at all” will solve the problem, only to later find the same issues reappearing whenever reattempting intimacy.

Her denial of the problem can be seen her externalization of the problem, blaming boyfriend after boyfriend for being problematic rather than looking at herself. Like the alcoholic who offers up stressful jobs or financial problems as justification for his excessive drinking, the love addicts’ cycle of dramatic and empty relationships keeps them ever distracted from really taking stock of themselves (or potential partners), making it impossible to gain the insight required for change.

The next part of this blog will be published on Saturday, February 11, 2012

Robert Weiss is Founding Director of The Sexual Recovery Institute and Director of Sexual Disorders Services at The Ranch Treatment Centerand Promises Treatment Centers. These centers serve individuals seeking sexual addiction treatment and porn addiction help. Follow Robert on Twitter @RobWeissMSW. Enjoy his blog:  Sex and Intimacy in the Digital Age at: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex

 

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