Love Addiction: Is My Relationship Healthy?
Is it real love? Do you feel like half a person without sex or a relationship? Are you afraid of abandonment? Do you feel you might die without your partner? Love addiction and sex addiction is much more common than people usually think. This mental health video describes the cycle of love addiction that is common in this type of relationship and compares healthy love to unhealthy love.
Step 1: The other half:
Then what happens is, as an adult, when somebody turns 18. They come out and they have this hole in their soul. They feel like a half of a person. And what they want is to find their one true soul mate, and to get that other half.
Step 2: Halving a half:
Now, the difficulty, of course, is that if we've got half a person here, trying to get a half, from this half of a person here. This person is going to get diminished. And the half is actually going to turn in to a quarter.
Step 3: A fourth of a person:
This person, of course wants the exact same thing, and if they get it, the person is going to be diminished. And what happens is, a fourth of a person results.
Step 4: The difficulty of soul mates
The difficulty with these kind of relationships is, first of all, it's looked at as normal, what they're looking for, of course is their one true soul mate. And our culture says "That's right, you do get one true soul mate". Now really think of the reality of that. Out of 220 billion people, I'm going to be able to find my one true soul mate and then everything is going to be perfect. We're going to merge gloriously and we're going to be one.
Step 5: It's possessive love:
That isn't love. That's self-love. That's possessive love. It's immature love, it's romantic love. And that's what our culture pushes. If you look at the movies. If you look at the music. What you hear is ''You are my everything. I'll die without you. You are my better half." We don't even get to be our own ''better half''. But the other person somehow is better than we are. It's absolutely crazy, and it is self-defeating. That is why our divorce rate is up to at least 50 percent. Because the individuation and maturity isn't there, to really get a good relationship, and know how to develop it.
Step 6: Independance and reliance:
So back to our two people who have come together, and have merged gloriously. and for the first time in their lives feel whole. What they're asking for of course, is for a full, independent woman of the new millennium to feel strong and to be a partner. But at the same time, what the guy wants is, when they feel sick, they want ''Mommy'' to rub his forehead. And what the woman is going to want, is a strong independent male to share her life with. But she'd also like to be taken care of, too.
Step 7: Vague incest:
And the difficulty is that once that tends to blur, so that you are asking for a full independent lover and partner, and asking to be parented, to have those old childhood needs that didn't get met, finally met. You're creating incest. And eventually you feel it, on a very, very vague level. It's not something that people really know about consciously, but you often see couples calling each other ''Mommy'' or ''Daddy''. Which is scary as hell.
Step 8: Distance is created:
And what happens is, they'll get together, well somebody is going to blink. And usually, but not always, because these are mirror opposites, they're essentially the same thing, still fear of intimacy, but usually, somebody is going to distance. They're going to move away either physically or emotionally. And usually that person has been the one who has been most enmeshed in their childhood. They've been too smothered. And they essentially look at either inappropriate attempts to get close, or appropriate attempts to get close as enmeshment, and they gradually move away. So they begin to read the paper more. Or they stay at work longer. Or they don't focus on the other person and really see them in that ''I vow'' way.
Step 9: Pursuers catch 22
And what happens for the pursuer is that they tend to go right back in to abandonment feelings. And that means that in some ways, for greater or lesser, they go back to exactly one and a half years old. And they re-experience that abandonment again, as if a minute is an hour. And they often have even physical symptoms of withdrawal from the person. They feel like they just are desperate to get that person back. And so naturally, they pursue. And the minute they pursue, our distancer is going to feel enmeshed again, and they're going to back out.
