Post by Susan Peabody on May 13, 2024 15:19:55 GMT -8
The Hungry Heart
Susan Peabody
The heart is a lonely hunter.
Carson McCullers
Being obsessed with a person or a relationship, and calling that obsession love, is a phenomenon that is finally being recognized as a pervasive and serious problem. Obsessing is symptomatic of an addiction.
To clarify this point further, let me explain how the addiction process works. It all begins with what seems like an innocent attraction to someone, which quickly turns into an infatuation (idealizing someone you don't know very well). The potential love addict, who is insecure and hungry for love, takes this infatuation much too seriously and easily becomes blinded by the exhilarating effects of "love at first sight." (By "blinded" I mean incapable of being practical or unable to avoid potentially unhealthy situations.)
Once Cupid has hit his mark, the soon-to-be love addict quickly becomes excessively preoccupied with the loved one. Every other aspect of his or her life becomes less important than this new lover, and endless hours are spent fantasizing about how the relationship is going to develop.
Of course, to a certain extent we all go through this when we fall in love, but with the love addict there is no holding back or common sense. Responsible behavior flies out the window and everybody and everything takes a back seat to this new relationship. (For those who think this is normal behavior, think again. Even if romantic love is blossoming, it is not healthy to turn your life upside down and become a slave to your feelings.)
At about this point, love addicts will project onto the loved one all of their dreams for eternal happiness via the reinforcing effects of romantic love. Of course, someone who is emotionally secure realizes that one person cannot be totally responsible for another person's happiness, but love addicts (who are looking for someone to "fix" them) don't comprehend this idea, and they proceed to pin all of their hopes for happiness on this one person.
To one degree or another, we all fall victim to the illusion that someone else is responsible for our happiness, but love addicts cling to this idea as if it were a life or death situation. They are totally convinced that their happiness lies in the hands of someone else and life for them is just an endless search for the holder of their dreams.
Once the love addict has projected all of his or her dreams for happiness onto the new lover (unconsciously making the decision that only this person can make him or her happy), the dependency stage of the addiction is triggered and with it the love addict's deep-seated fear that the relationship will end and his or her dreams will be smashed. At this point, with so much at stake, a pattern of obsessive behavior emerges. This pattern is designed to ensure that the relationship survives. That is, the love addict will now start trying to control their partner as a self-defeating way of holding on. The particulars will vary with each relationship, but the goal is the same. Hold on at any cost-to this person, this relationship, this dream.
This is the stage at which the relationship usually begins to deteriorate. This is because while the love addict is putting forth so much energy to keep the relationship alive, his or her partner is usually reacting to this in a negative way. Depending on the individual and the situation, the love addict's partner will now begin to feel smothered, overburdened, intimidated, angry, and/or ungrateful.
In some cases, he or she will also feel free to become increasingly selfish, demanding, dishonest, neglectful or abusive, i.e., take advantage of the love addict. Of course, this puts more stress on the relationship and the love addict tries even harder to hold things together. This further erodes the relationship and a vicious cycle begins.
The hallmark of an addictive relationship is the fact that this deterioration does not mean the end of the union. Because love addicts are dependent (hooked) on their relationships to keep their dreams of happiness alive, they are far from ready to give up so easily. Instead, they work out an increasingly elaborate network of denial so they can pretend nothing is wrong. This is very sad. "Diminishing returns" would discourage other people, but a real love addict holds on even tighter. It's sort of like hanging onto a live wire. It hurts, but you can't let go.
Eventually, the stress of all this will take its toll, and the love addict's emotional and physical well-being will start to deteriorate along with the relationship. Stress related disorders become chronic and other obsessions (food, alcohol, drugs) become a tempting way to dull the pain. This is the final stage of the addiction and often the turning point. This is when the relationship usually explodes or falls apart.
Unfortunately, the end of one addictive relationship is not always the end of the love addict's battle with this emotional problem. For many sufferers, this way of relating to others is a pattern in their lives, and when one addictive relationship ends another just begins.
In time the resiliency of the person who loves addictively will decrease and their physical and emotional ailments will become life-threatening. They may even die. As Robin Norwood puts it, "...I want to reiterate that loving too much can kill you." It is this phenomenon of "dying for love" which particularly validates Halpern's and Peele's assertion that obsessing about a person in the name of love is symptomatic of an addiction. Anyone who holds onto something at the risk of their own life is addicted.
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At this point the reader may be asking why some people are so needy and insecure that they get caught up in the devastating effects of an addictive relationship. Where does this insatiable hunger for love come from? Most experts agree that it is a by-product of childhood deprivation, but opinions differ as to which type of deprivation does the most damage.
Howard Halpern declares that the roots of addiction to love can be traced to what he calls an overwhelming "attachment hunger." Halpern explains that "attachment hunger" is our natural need to attach or bond to someone-a need which stems from our unconscious desire to recreate the euphoric feelings of peace and omnipotence that we experienced as infants when we were totally dependent on our mothers.
While most people have a normal or typical "attachment hunger" which causes little pain and blossoms into a normal desire to become intimate with another human being, some have an overwhelming "attachment hunger" which has the power to distort reality and lead to obsessive behavior in relationships.
Halpern goes on to say that whether or not a person has an overwhelming "attachment hunger" depends on how that person's dependency bond with their mother was broken. If the feelings of safety and euphoria were interrupted in a healthy way, the child felt secure in their independence and not as if they had been cut adrift from their life-giving source.
If the dependency bond was broken prematurely, insensitively, or sadistically, the child did not have time to adjust and he or she was left with an overwhelming "attachment hunger." As a result, when these children become adults they feel an especially strong need to bond to someone. They unconsciously equate being in a relationship with survival-they think they will die of loneliness if they are not involved with someone.
If this feeling is strong enough, this person will do anything to hold onto someone they have become attached to. They will obsess and they will become addicted.
While a traumatic rift in the dependency bond certainly explains why some people so easily turn an attachment (or love) into an addiction, it does not take into consideration the more ravaging effects of growing up in a dysfunctional home.
According to Robin Norwood, this is where the seeds of addictive loving are sown. She explains that in a dysfunctional home (a family environment which is not conducive to the mental and physical well-being of the family members), children are neglected or abused over a long period of time and deprived of the kind of attention, strokes, and role-modeling they need to become healthy, well-adjusted adults capable of loving normally. She makes it clear that children who grow up under these conditions are operating with a handicap and tend to "love too much" or become addicted to love.
Of course, Norwood and Halpern are both right: "Attachment hunger" and growing up in a dysfunctional home do explain the connection between childhood deprivation and loving addictively. However, I would like to add one more thought to their insights.
Many love addicts can also trace their neediness and feelings of inadequacy back to those painful years when they were "wall flowers," or on the outside looking in; and like an overwhelming "attachment hunger" and growing up in a dysfunctional home, peer rejection and feeling left out can deprive children of the nurturing benefits of acceptance and the natural growth of self-esteem which could help them become healthy, well-adjusted adults able to seek and find love in a normal way.
With most love addicts peer rejection is linked to parental deprivation. That is, children growing up in a dysfunctional home might experience peer rejection because other children react negatively to their emotional problems (very often children who are unloved at home are emotionally unstable, and therefore unsociable, fearful, antagonistic, pushy, too anxious to please, etc.).
However, in some cases peer rejection is not linked to problems at home. That is, even if a child does receive parental love in a "normal" home environment they may still experience peer rejection because they are shy, self-conscious, disfigured, plain, too bright, overweight, come from a low-income home, have difficulty relating to others or just don't fit in where they happen to be growing up. Of course, in either case the impact of peer rejection is relatively the same. It tends to make a child insecure and hungry for acceptance.
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Few children can escape the after-effects of an unhealthy interruption of the dependency bond, the lack of proper parental nurturing, or inadequate interactions with their peers. Instead they grow up lacking in self-esteem and hungry for love. This, in turn, predisposes them to become love addicts or to become easily obsessed with someone who holds for them the promise of "living happily ever after" by way of "true love" ─ even when they find out that a kiss never really awakens Sleeping Beauty or turns a frog into a prince.
Excerpt from Addiction to Love