Addicted to love: What is love addiction and when should it be treated? PMC

I’ve admitted to her I have problem and I’ve checked myself into in house rehab program for 28 days next week, I’ve gone to a GA meeting every day in the mean time. The only reason people know he’s an addict and we have problems is because I’m trying to get him to stop. Maybe if I just kept quiet they way women who’s husbands have mistresses just keep quiet n carry on..maybe things would be ok..I think some days. But I couldn’t carry on with so much betrayal when he would steal or cheat or go MIA. When I speak about it to anyone… everyone’s response is “leave him”, “he’ll never change! I love him n I’m so dependent on him to do stuff for me n us as a family and I sound pathetic saying all this which just fuels my now depression over what I’ve been through. I didn’t realise the depths of it until after marriage..the lying, manipulation, stealing from me and cheating emotionally with other women.

Since the ancient times, philosophers and scientists have known loneliness as one of the most complex psychological phenomena. This may seem easier said than done, especially when it feels like you’ve tried everything in your power to treat the disease in your loved one.

Why Social Support is Crucial

Stage an intervention with family, friends, and a professional interventionist or therapist. Seeking emotional comfort from a partner to the point of unrequited love. I feel addicted up to my eyeballs and he is all I can think about. I know I can pull through this and I am willing and ready to try. Opening up to my partner might be risky as I sincerely do not know how he will take this so I am gonna pull through this on my own. Today is the 5th day I deleted him on my social media I haven’t contacted him and this has not been easy but I am willing to regain my freedom ( I sincerely hope I can. I didn’t know how I got to this point !!). This took a great effort on my side and I hope I can keep this up.

It helped me learn to trust the flow of life, knowing that there would be good things and bad things, and no matter what happened I would make it through. I believed for years that my ex would be in my life for the rest of my life.

How to Communicate With Someone Who Has an Addiction

Those feelings and reactions can be part of paving the way to recovery. You are an important part of your loved one’s long-term recovery. Research shows when people believe that their family supports them in their recovery, they have a better chance of staying sober. The further you descend into addiction, the less connected you feel to other human beings.

Be someone who is hopeful and excited about the future. Remember, your experiences have made you strong and capable of creating endless possibilities for yourself and the https://ecosoberhouse.com/ future. About a month after the relationship I realized I was so focused on the negative aspects of the breakup that I wasn’t seeing the potential path in front of me.

Exploring Love Addiction

Facing this first obstacle is a necessary step to getting clean. The only way you will be able to recover is if you continue forward despite how impossible the end goal may seem at the moment.

• When these same individuals binge on sugary food, they can experience a level of neurological reward that surpasses a dose of a drug such as cocaine (Lenoir et al. 2007).
• Here are seven of the most terrifying, but common, behaviors of an addict.
• Be someone who is hopeful and excited about the future.
• You can’t fix them, and it’s important for everyone that you stop trying.

This is such a hard question, and will take an open, brave heart to explore it. Addicts use addictive behaviours to stop from feeling pain. Understandably, the people who love them often use enabling behaviours to also stop from feeling pain. Helping the person can be a way to ease your own pain and can feel like a way to extend love to someone you’re desperate to reach. It can also be a way to compensate for the bad feelings you might feel towards the person for the pain they cause you. This is all really normal, but it’s important to explore how you might be unwittingly contributing to the problem.

Intimate Relationships & Marriage

When you are in love and have invested your time in someone, when you start to contemplate a different life, your emotions will be like a cruel game of tug of war. In 2008 he suffered a fall which resulted in a traumatic brain injury .

Do you mostly only feel positive emotions when in love or with a significant other? That could suggest an unhealthy behavior pattern, Simonian says. But if pervasive thoughts about a particular person, or the idea of love in general, start to negatively affect your job, schoolwork, sleep, or loving an addict any other areas of your life, that may pose some cause for concern. But this so-called “addiction” to love merely refers to a set of behaviors, according to licensed clinical psychologist and psychologist Anthony DeMaria, PhD. When they’re sober, you see the person you fell in love with.

Choose to practice the healthier ways of loving your addicted person. We don’t get to choose which feelings have the on/off switch. When we shut down their big messy feelings, we risk shutting down all their feelings, or at least in front of us. I have hope he can control it, but I also worry a lot about how he’s going to endure the constant, severe pain without meds. There’s snippets of him being so loving etc makes me forget the bad then there’s days all I do is remember the bad and I’m just angry. Being older and with kids I don’t know who would want me now.

Some treatments may work for some time and then need to be changed. Human nature sometimes forces us to shift the blame because it’s easier to understand a problem if we know its source. But the cause of addictions isn’t so black and white, so there’s never really just one thing to blame. Most importantly, the person with the addiction is not at fault for the disease. Here are some tips to help you through this difficult process. It is normal to idolize romantic partners by putting them on a pedestal. In the case of love addiction, however, the love addict may obsessively put their partner on a pedestal to their detriment.