Addicted to Love

Love addiction is focused on love as the solution to inner pain, loneliness and emptiness. In love addiction, the relationship or the need for romance is all consuming. Nothing else in life has equal importance.

The Love addict has very intense emotions including anger, fear, hate and 'love' for the other person, and it is this extreme positive or negative intensity that differentiates love addiction from habits where we often also develop a craving for the object of desire.

An addiction usually affects and includes the body, emotions and the mind.

On the physical level, our brain indeed creates a chemical, PEA that creates the thrill and excitement that we experience when we fall in love. When this person drops out of our life the body produces withdrawal symptoms such as shakiness, cramps or loss of appetite.

We all may have experienced such symptoms at the loss of a loved one. In case of love addiction, there is also a desperate need to regain this person or relationship back, accompanied by an increasing sense of guilt or shame about one's 'weakness' to let go of this person.

On an emotional-mental level, being in love makes most people feel good. In case of love addiction, it creates a feeling of being 'on top of the world', feeling drunken by love, being euphoric beyond any sense of reality about the steps necessary to turn the attraction into a workable relationship.

When these feelings fade away, the love addict will do anything to regain this love even at the price to submerge their own personality into the loved one by fully identifying with their interests and needs.

In love addiction, the addict is often obsessed with finding the 'prince or 'princess' that will be THE ONE FOREVER and solve all the problems. Life without that love seems to be meaningless.

The desperate need for finding that person or regaining a lost love can destroy all other parts of life, create chaos, tension and anxieties and threat life itself when chronic grief turns into suicidal thoughts.

Because love addiction gets supported through the ideal of romantic love in movies and songs, it's actually quite difficult to crack the self-delusion that is part of love addiction. All addictions have an element of denial but in case of love addiction it is more severe. Love addicts often don't see the connection between their pain and suffering and the illusionary quality of what they seek as love.

The first step would be to recognise the love addiction as such and then to take the necessary steps to fulfil all those needs that have been delegated to THE ONE. This may require finding out what you can do to be good to yourself, to love yourself and to appreciate the good things in your life.

Another important step is to accept that you may be single for a long time.

Start to develop a wide variety of interests and activities, meet people and make new friends. This will make your company more pleasant, give you practice in developing social skills, and increase your chances of finding a compatible partner to cope with everyday life.

With a good network of friends and acquaintances and exploring new and interesting ways to share your life with them, the emptiness and painful longing will fade away.

As love addiction is so deeply rooted, you may need extra help in understanding the dynamics of love addiction and in shifting the energetic patterns that hold the addiction in place so that you can develop healthy relationship patterns and communication skills.

I offer a free course in how to develop healthy relationships, a distance course on love where I shift those energetic patterns through a broad range of healing modalities such as movement, breathing, colour or sound and a book and the ebook Beyond suffering where you will find a comprehensive description of the different stages of love with its own qualities and challenges to give you a broader view of the context of love addiction. You will also find a hands-on manual in this book on how to strengthen a positive Self and move beyond this illusion of love

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