Source: http://www.recovery-man.com/loveaddict.htm
- Lack of nurturing and attention when young
- Feeling isolated, detached from parents and family
- Compartmentalization of relationships from other areas of life
- Outer facade of “having it all together” to hide internal disintegration
- Mistake intensity for intimacy (drama driven relationships)
- Hidden Pain
- Seek to avoid rejection and abandonment at any cost
- Afraid to trust anyone in a relationship
- Inner rage over lack of nurturing, early abandonment
- Depressed
- Highly manipulative and controlling of others
- Perceive attraction, attachment, and sex as basic human needs, on a par with food and water
- Sense of worthlessness without a relationship or partner
- Feelings that a relationship makes one whole, or more of a man or woman
- Escalating tolerance for high-risk behavior
- Intense need to control self, others, circumstances
- Presence of other addictive or compulsive problems
- Insatiable appetite in area of difficulty (sex, love or attachment / need.)
- Using others, sex & relationships to alter mood or relieve emotional pain
- Continual questioning of values and lifestyle
- Driven, desperate, frantic personality
- Confusion of sexual attraction with love (“Love” at first sight.)
- Tendency to trade sexual activity for “love” or attachment
- Existence of a secret “double life”
- Refusal to acknowledge existence of problem
- Defining out-of-control behavior as normal
- Defining “wants” as “needs”
- Tendency to leave one relationship for another. (Inability to be without a relationship.)
- Attempts to replace lost relationships with a new one immediately
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couldnt be more right. i didnt knew i was love addicted. thanks.
Glad I found your blog! I’m a love addict too. I have also found I have ‘avoidant tendencies’ too. I’ve never read this list before. I knew some of the basics, but nothing this in depth. Thanks for having this blog AND for having the courage to write about it!!
Thanks for these info. I visited your blog some months back. I use these articles for understanding me and gaining control over myself.
I am at the begining edge of discovery of my demons and how to rid myself of them. I am a 48 yr man and have a family and lovely wife.
. My marriage of 20 yrs is in trouble. I have blamed my wife and her family for my unhappiness.
My behavior follows similar traits of a man who is codependent and love dependent. I am just that.
My wife is an incest survivor and I have had to deal with rationed watery love. As I saw it, love making was a natural act between husband and wife. She pulled away, again and again. I kept trying to please her. She does hold some of the responsibilities of helping the problem perpetuate. But I did the most damage.
I did so many tasks from the all the cooking, laundry, shopping and home repairs to decorating the house at holiday times to win her affections. It never worked. I am seeing professional help for this as I too fear abandonment.
I need to repair and live a fuller life. We are both in marriage consuling and it is painful and ugly. But it takes getting hit in the face with a wet towel to wake up and see the wrongs one has created. It hurt, I argued it was not me? It has only been 2 sessions but it has opened my mind and heart to a new begining.
After serious thought and reflection I decided to seek out answers. Your story saddens me that you went through so much pain and in the end lost someone dear to you. Thank you for posting all of the struggles. You may have just saved a man from losing his wife, marriage, and direction in life. I will look at myself not others to solve this monster I have created.
Scott
Also, in some cases, there is fear of intimacy, from both partners. It has the root still in our childhoods, when it wasn`t `safe` to be ourselfs around the first people we learned to love, our parents/ caregivers.
I, as a proud `addict`I may say, I tend to have unhealthy attachments to everything, I tend to make an addiction out of everything.. keep going into extremes. If it`s not food, alcohol, then it`s gotta be a relationship. Or, a habit, like jogging. I keep running away from something I guess, that happened to me when I was too little to have control over it. It hits home to borderline personality as well, for me.
But hey, life is not perfect, we`re not perfect..we`re all wounded souls to an extent or another, only some of us, with huge, bigger scars and uglier memories than others. That`s how life was for some of us, but I like to think it this way, after all that, I`m still breathing, right?.. I`m damaged, but nobody can `save` me from my internal wounds, not even a perfect partner. I`m learning to comfort my inner children, and take responsibility without taking the blame. And last but not least, learn what forgivness is..
All in all, congrats for the blog!
greengirl, we have alot in common on many fronts. some of us have gone through so much more and are still recovering. I like how you are a proud addict. Embrace your issues, right. I agree that as codependents, love addicts, avoidance addicts, borderlines even, have an addiction to avoid the self and get addicted to another or get addicted to avoiding another. It’s still addiction. All addictions cause us to neglect ourselves. Hope you’re still around. Not sure how much activity is on this blog. Mine is at recoverytapping.blogspot.com and I’m Recovery Tapping on facebook.
You asked what else can you do or learn? Tapping is the answer I would give you. EFT or Tapping is like EMDR or like emotional acupuncture with no needles and just tapping and eye movements we can process so many intense emotional loops that are still stuck and keep coming up. I’ve been devoting the last 3-4 years of writing and researching on this. I have a masters in psych and I research personality disorders and recovering from them as parents or partners. I work in mental health and been in recovery a long time. I love alanon the most and it took the longest to get too. But I was teaching a love addiction class to addict mothers in a group home years ago and still have those in my book collection. Any abuse or neglect leaves scars and tapping is a great tool to help them heal. I’ve moved on so much, so much more forward that I would have been by now. I’ve been trained in tapping techniques since 2002. So you can see why I’m so passionate about it and in finding people I can talk to about it. Hope to hear from anyone here.
JP Bailey, MA
recoverytapping.com
recoverytapping.blogspot.com (good recovery blogs)
Take care everyone!