Kathy's Story
Excerpt from Addiction to Love by Susan Peabody
Kathy experienced a lot of trauma in her childhood including neglect, abandonment, covert incest, the death of her brother, and peer rejection.
As Kathy looks back over her childhood, she remembers feeling sad, lonely, rejected, angry, and ashamed. She doesn't ever remember being happy. To ease her emotional pain, she started fantasizing. It was a great escape. She dreamed about romantic love, meeting the perfect man someday, having a family, and living happily ever after. This fantasizing was a great diversion, but Kathy overdid it. She couldn't concentrate on what her teachers were saying because she was always looking out the window and daydreaming about finding her Prince Charming. She read romantic novels instead of textbooks and cut school to see romantic movies like "Splendor in the Grass." Her mother commented once that Kathy seemed to be overly preoccupied with romance.
Kathy was about ten years old when she started falling in love. Her first crush was on a boy named Alan. Kathy projected all of her romantic fantasies onto Alan ─ hoping that he would be the one to make her dreams come true. Then she started fantasizing about him all the time. Alan was embarrassed and angry that Kathy liked him so much. He told her not to write his name on her school books. He threw rocks at her when she walked by his house. Kathy also watched Alan play baseball at the park. Sometimes, she was the only spectator, but she never missed a game. At school, during recess, Kathy would sneak into the cloakroom and put on Alan's jacket. She wanted to touch something that was his ─ she wanted to smell his presence. She also wrote in her diary about her love for Alan. Day after day, she described the bittersweet pain of unrequited love, hoping that someday Alan would love her too.
Of course, there were other infatuations over the years. The pattern was always the same. Attraction led to fantasies of loving and being loved and a preoccupation with someone. This would be followed by the notion that only this particular boy could make Kathy happy. Then Kathy felt as if she had no choice in the matter. All of this led to an obsession and living in the future via her fantasies. Kathy always imagined that if she kept her love alive these boys would someday fall in love with her and her patience would be rewarded. This distorted thinking fueled her obsession and extended her heartache. Eventually, Kathy would get emotionally and physically sick from yearning to be with someone she could not have. Then, when the pain became unbearable, the obsession faded and she found someone more promising to adore from a distance.
The projection of her romantic fantasies onto one boy after another was the progression of Kathy's addiction to love. With this progression came problems. By this, I mean that her childhood fantasizing certainly eased her emotional pain, but the projection of these fantasies onto a particular person only brought pain. This is true of all addictions. The exhilarating, mood-altering experience that starts out as a painkiller becomes a liability. However, like other addicts, Kathy found herself unable to stop. She was hooked. Like the alcoholic who can't stop after one drink, Kathy couldn't stop after she fell in love. She had to obsess. She had to have her dreams come true. It took a lot for her to give up on her fantasies and obsessions.
High school was not a happy time for Kathy. She prayed that someone would ask her out for a date. One time she did get a call from a boy. He asked her out and she agreed to go. She was so excited and nervous that she stayed up all night making a new dress. The next day at school some boys snickered at her as she walked by, and that night someone called to tell her that the phone call she had gotten the night before was just a joke. Kathy was so embarrassed, she wanted to die. She prayed that no one would hear about what had happened.
When Kathy was nineteen years old, she became desperate to have a relationship. She wanted to have a boyfriend and she was willing to do anything to get one, even if she had to take someone hostage. Her addiction to love was progressing.
Because of her low self-esteem, Kathy did not feel loveable enough to attract someone she really liked, and she was too impatient to wait for someone compatible to come along, so she got involved with the first person who showed any interest in her.
Kathy met Ray at a bus stop. He was twenty five years old, unemployed, and living with his mother. Kathy started spending a lot of time with Ray and within a few months she was pregnant. She decided to sign up for government assistance (welfare) and find a place where she and Ray could live together. From that point on, Kathy became Ray's caretaker. She paid the bills, bought Ray's clothes and gave him money for drugs.
Kathy liked caretaking. It was her way of trying to control the outcome of the relationship by buying love and making Ray dependent on her so he would not leave. Kathy also liked caretaking because it made her feel benevolent, even superior. This gave her a false sense of self-esteem.
Caretaking also made Kathy feel needed or indispensable. It gave her an identity. She saw herself as Mother Teresa taking care of a lost soul who needed her guidance. Since Ray was a drug addict she tried to clean him up. Because he was a Viet Nam veteran, she tried to counsel him and care for his emotional wounds. Because he was abused as a child, she accepted it when he abused her. Whatever Ray's problem was, Kathy tried to fix it. Of course, she didn't realize that she should not be doing for Ray what he should be doing for himself; that she should not be trying to combine charity with intimacy. However, Kathy was doing the best she could at the time. She really didn't know any better ─ she was a love addict.
What Kathy liked most about caretaking was that it killed a lot of time and was a great distraction from her emotional pain (anger, shame, loneliness, depression, fear, low self-esteem, etc.) Her problems faded when she concentrated on Ray's problems. She did not see herself as negative or controlling. She did not see caretaking as a way to avoid recognizing that she had problems of her own ─ that Ray was not the only one who needed fixing. For her it was just a lifestyle, one shared by most of her friends.
As a caretaker and love addict, Kathy accepted a lot of neglect. She had a high tolerance for suffering because she was used to it, and because she thought this was the price she had to pay for having a man in her life. Ray took advantage of this. He only came home when he felt like it. He never helped to clean up. He didn't give Kathy any affection and their lovemaking was unstimulating. Kathy and Ray didn't even talk very much, unless Ray was telling her what to do. He also took all of her money, except what went to pay the bills. Sometimes Kathy would try to hide money for a rainy day. Then Ray would get into some kind of trouble with gambling or drugs and start yelling at Kathy to give him some money. If yelling didn't help, he would cry and tell Kathy he would be killed by the men he owed money to if she didn't help him. Kathy always gave in. She felt responsible for Ray
Of course, Kathy wanted more than she was getting out of the relationship. She was just not ready to demand it or to find someone who was willing to offer her the love and support she needed. So she just cried when her birthday went unnoticed. When Ray didn't come home she just kept busy waiting for him to return. She baked, sewed, cleaned house, and took care of their daughter ─ anything to keep herself occupied so she didn't have to feel the pain she was in.
Kathy also accepted a lot of dishonesty from Ray. She had no idea what it felt like to trust him. Usually he lied to her about other women. He said he was not having affairs and he usually was. Deep down Kathy knew what was going on, but she buried her head in the sand because she was afraid if she said something to Ray he might leave her.
In her relationship with Ray, Kathy also lacked personality boundaries. She had no values or interests of her own. She adopted his mannerisms and speech patterns. She dressed the way he liked her to dress, and she did the things he wanted her to do. She listened to the music he liked, and she even talked herself into supporting the things he believed in ─ even if they were contrary to her own belief system.
Despite her dependency on this relationship, Kathy tried several times to end it. She remembers after six months of being with Ray that she wanted to leave him. When she told him she was going to leave he got very sad. He said, "I guess you've gotten what you want and now you're ready to move on and leave me behind." Kathy felt guilty when Ray said this and she stayed with him to keep from hurting his feelings. She projected her fear of being abandoned onto him, and assumed that he could not survive if she left him.
Later in the relationship, Kathy thought about leaving Ray again, but she felt guilty about withdrawing her financial support. Kathy knew Ray had become dependent on her. Kathy was also afraid to leave the relationship because she knew it meant facing her fear of loneliness and giving up her identity as a caretaker. She knew it would mean going through a lot of emotional pain (withdrawal) so she just kept putting it off, hoping her misery would end someday.
Another time Kathy asked Ray to leave, but when he started packing his bags she panicked. The next thing she knew, Kathy was begging Ray to stay ─ like a child begging her mother not to leave her alone in the dark. During this scene, Kathy's fear of abandonment overwhelmed her, and she was ready to do anything to avoid feeling the panic that gripped her heart.
While it seemed as if Kathy would never leave Ray, eventually she did fall in love with someone else and decided to ask Ray for a divorce. Unfortunately, Ray was not ready to lose Kathy. When she told him she was going to leave he held a knife up to her throat and threatened to kill her. Then he beat her up and held her prisoner in the house. He kept saying to her, "I know you still love me, just admit it." After three days, Kathy agreed to stay with Ray and he immediately calmed down. Then she said, "Ray it's time to cook dinner and I need to go to the store and get some things." Ray agreed to let Kathy go and she quickly hurried out of the door. Once she was safe, Kathy went to a phone booth and called the police. Ray was told by the police to leave the house and he did.
The man Kathy left Ray for was not much better, and that relationship failed too. From this point on, Kathy became involved in a series of short term relationships similar to the one she had with Ray. All of these relationships failed because Kathy was too emotionally unstable to select an appropriate partner; and even if she did, she couldn't sustain a relationship because of her neediness, low self-esteem, and fear of abandonment. So, as the years passed, Kathy's hungry heart went unsatisfied and this made her even more desperate to find love.
As Kathy's addiction to love progressed, her health began to deteriorate. She developed a spastic colon and high blood pressure. She was chronically depressed and almost died in two car accidents. (Once she couldn't see the road because she was crying and the other time she was fantasizing instead of looking where she was going.)
Once, after a failed relationship, Kathy was in so much pain she cut her wrists. This was not a suicide attempt. She didn't cut deep enough to do any damage. She just wanted her body to go into shock and ease her emotional pain for awhile. She was crying out for help.
When Kathy was thirty four years old she fell in love with a man that she worked with. She could not seem to get his attention, so she decided after years of being overweight that she would shed her excess pounds, become more attractive and seduce this man. It just started out as a simple diet. However, when Kathy started to look great and the man did not respond, she kept on dieting anyway. Eventually she became ill and had to be hospitalized. She later told her doctor: "I thought that if I lost five more pounds he would notice me; then it was five more pounds and he would love me." Then later I was so depressed it became: "five more pounds and he'll come to my grave and wish he had loved me." (This is controlling from the grave.)
As a result of this latest obsession, Kathy not only got ill from her anorexia, she sank into a deep depression and shut down emotionally. Her once-clean house became a pig sty. She yelled at her daughter and left her to take care of herself. She also started drinking every day to drown her sorrows and began to secretly plan her suicide. Kathy felt that life was not worth living without someone special, and yet somehow genuine love and healthy relationships had eluded her. Kathy was ready to die for love.
