Might As Well Face It: Telltale Signs Of Love Addiction
By Dr. Susan Campbell. Posted on .
If you answered yes to more than two of these questions, I suggest you take a serious look at yourself. If you need emotional intensity, for example, I ask you to look at what you might be avoiding with this pattern: Are you avoiding feeling ordinary? Do you have a need to feel special as a compensation for deeper feelings of insecurity?
Can you locate the source of your insecurity? What do you fear, specifically? Do you fear being alone, being rejected, being insignificant? If you can feel even a bit of this fear here and now, do any memories come up — possibly of a time someone important to you rejected you? If you can actually feel a bit of this fear intentionally and with compassionate awareness, this is a first step to healing this fear. Learning to feel painful feelings with compassion toward yourself allows you to dip into these feelings while you are in control — as opposed to needing these feelings to get triggered unconsciously by a lover.
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If you tend to feel empty or lost without your lover or if you are obsessed with worries about the relationship, you probably have a deep-seated fear of abandonment or of being alone. If this is your issue, I recommend allowing yourself to experience the "alone" feelings triggered by the relationship but in very small doses.
And do this with intention, with the conscious aim of touching into your pain from a wiser, more loving place in yourself — a place that knows it's okay to experience emotional pain, a place that realizes a certain amount of "fear of loss" is normal when you love someone.
Most dysfunctional relationship patterns arise out of the need to stay unconscious about our normal fears and about the normal emotional discomfort we feel when differences arise. When we just can't stand any emotional discomfort, like when we have to have our own way in a relationship, that's when we get into inappropriate relationships that force us to feel our hidden fears and insecurities — even to the point of dramatizing these.
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You can have it all in love: both hot sex and healthy love. You do not have to choose between being passionately in love and being a cooperative team. But to achieve this, you need to realize that if your current relationship is unhealthy, you need to take an honest look at how you tend to avoid what I call, "the normal discomforts of relationship." Dealing with differences is uncomfortable, yes. But to avoid dealing with your differences in a relationship can only create needless suffering or what we might call, "the unnecessary dramas of relationship."
