Love Is a Capacity, Not Only a Feeling

Posted on by helpingsoul

What Eighteen Years of Clinical Work Have Taught Me About How the Capacity for Love Is Built, Blocked, and Restored

A substantial revision of a 2009 post on love. The original was a young writer’s reflection. This version draws on what clinical work has taught me about why the capacity for love develops easily for some and is significantly compromised for others, and what kind of work restores it.

Most writing on love treats it as a feeling. The intoxicating rush of new attraction. The steady warmth of long partnership. The fierce protectiveness toward a child. The bond with a friend who has known you through years. The reverence for whatever you understand as larger than yourself. All of these are real. All of them are part of what we mean by love.

What is less often written about is that love is also a capacity. The feelings we call love require a particular kind of internal architecture to be felt, received, and given fully. The architecture develops, or fails to develop, based on the conditions a person has lived through. Some people arrive in adulthood with the capacity for love largely intact. They can feel love when it arises in them, receive it when it is offered, give it without the felt sense that doing so will cost them something dangerous. Others arrive in adulthood with the capacity significantly compromised. They may experience strong feelings that resemble love — attraction, longing, attachment, even devotion — without being able to fully receive love when it is offered or give it without protection.

This article is for the second group, and for the clinicians and partners who love them. The capacity for love is not a fixed trait. It can be rebuilt, slowly, in adulthood, when it has been compromised by early conditions. The work is real. It is also possible. What follows is what I have come to understand about why the capacity for love is compromised in some people, what blocks it specifically, and what kind of work restores it.

What love actually requires of the nervous system

Before discussing what blocks the capacity for love, it helps to name what love asks of the body. This is more than feelings. It is the specific somatic conditions that allow love to occur.

Love requires the capacity to remain present in your own body during emotional contact with another person. When someone you love looks at you with care, your nervous system must be able to receive that look without flinching, dissociating, or deflecting. The eyes meeting the eyes. The face responding to the face. These small relational moments are not decorative. They are the substance of how love is communicated between bodies.

Love requires the capacity to feel emotion long enough for the emotion to be received and integrated. The warmth that arises when someone you love walks into the room must be allowed to be felt. If the system reflexively dampens warmth before it can fully register, love does not land. The feelings may exist briefly. They do not accumulate into the felt sense of being in love with someone.

Love requires the capacity to remain in connection during difficulty. When the other person is distressed, your nervous system must be able to stay near them rather than fleeing into protective distance. When you yourself are distressed, you must be able to reach for the other rather than withdrawing into self-sufficiency. The capacity to remain in relationship during the hard moments is what distinguishes love from preference. Preference is easy when conditions are good. Love is the willingness to stay in connection when conditions are difficult.

Love requires the capacity to receive what is offered. The compliment that lands rather than being deflected. The hug that lasts rather than being cut short. The act of care that is allowed to register rather than being countered with reciprocity. Many adults who have spent their lives giving but not receiving find that the capacity to receive is the part that needs the most work. The giving is familiar. The receiving feels foreign or even dangerous.

Love requires the capacity to give without expectation of immediate return. Not in some saintly self-sacrificing way. In the simple sense that love offered with the felt requirement of being returned in kind is something other than love. The system that has learned to track every act of care to make sure it is reciprocated cannot fully love. It is in a state of chronic accounting that love cannot survive.

What blocks the capacity

Several patterns can produce significant compromise in the capacity for love. The patterns often overlap. People rarely show only one. Recognizing the patterns is part of how the work begins.

Insecure attachment from childhood. The infant who was reliably met learns that reaching produces reception, that the other is available, that connection is safe. This learning becomes the somatic foundation for adult love. The infant who was not reliably met learns something different. The system that learned, in childhood, that reaching produces inconsistent or harmful response carries that learning into adulthood. The capacity for adult love is shaped by what the original attachment relationships taught the body to expect.

Trauma that has not been processed. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, severe neglect, witnessing of violence, sustained emotional cruelty, and other traumatic experiences produce specific compromises to the capacity for love. The body that has been hurt by intimacy learns to defend against intimacy. The capacity for love can remain, but it operates under the constant supervision of a protective system that interrupts love before it can fully arrive. EMDR, somatic experiencing, internal family systems, and other trauma-focused approaches address this directly when the underlying material can be processed.

Defenses against affect. Some people develop, in childhood, a phobic relationship to feeling itself. The protective system intervenes preemptively to prevent any emotion from becoming fully felt. The dissociation, intellectualization, performing, or somatization that results blocks not only difficult feelings but also love. You cannot fully feel love if your system reflexively dampens feeling itself. The work of building affect tolerance, which I have written about elsewhere, is a precondition for the capacity for love to develop.

The parentified child or deity child pattern. The child who was assigned, explicitly or implicitly, the role of caretaker for a parent who could not be the caretaker often grows into an adult who cannot fully receive love. The internal architecture is organized around giving. Receiving has not been allowed to develop. The capacity to be loved, in this pattern, is compromised even when the capacity to love others may be intact. The work involves the slow restoration of the capacity to receive.

The internalized critic that interrupts love. Many adults carry an internal voice that responds to moments of being loved with shame, doubt, or the conviction that the love will be withdrawn if the loved person learns the truth about them. The voice was usually learned from a parent or caregiver who treated love as conditional, who criticized rather than supported, who communicated that the child was lovable only when performing acceptably. The adult version of this voice interrupts love in real time, often before the love can be felt. Working with this voice — naming it, understanding what it is protecting, eventually softening its automatic activation — is part of the work of restoring the capacity for love.

Performing identity. The adult who has lived in conditions that required constant performance — professional contexts where evaluation is continuous, families where being lovable required being impressive, relationships where love was conditional on output — often loses access to the part of themselves that could be loved without performing. Love that requires the beloved to keep producing in order to deserve being loved is not quite love. The performing identity has to learn to relax for love to be fully received.

What restores the capacity

The capacity for love can be rebuilt in adulthood. The work is slow. It is also genuinely possible. Several elements support the work.

Therapeutic work that is itself loving. The therapeutic relationship, when it works, is one of the most reliable conditions under which the capacity for love can be rebuilt. The therapist’s consistent presence, the reliability of being received without judgment, the willingness to stay in connection through difficulty, the genuine care that is professional and bounded but real — these provide the corrective experience that the original conditions did not. Many of the most meaningful changes in my clinical practice over the years have happened not because of any specific technique but because the client has experienced, over time, the felt sense of being loved by a therapist whose care for them was genuine and reliable. The therapeutic relationship becomes the laboratory in which the nervous system learns that love is possible.

Somatic work that builds the underlying capacity. Hand on heart practice. The slow rebuilding of interoception. The deliberate practice of remaining present in the body during emotional contact. The capacity to feel without dissociating, to receive without deflecting, to give without immediately needing return — all of these are developable through somatic practice. The body learns what it was not allowed to learn in childhood, in adulthood, with patience.

Trauma processing where unprocessed material is blocking the capacity. When specific traumatic experiences are interrupting current relationship, processing the underlying material through EMDR or other trauma-focused approaches often produces noticeable shifts in the capacity for love. The work is not about love directly. It is about clearing the protective system’s continuing alarm response to material that has not yet been integrated. As the alarm quiets, love becomes more available.

Parts work that addresses the internal architecture. The critic that interrupts love. The protector that defends against intimacy. The caretaker who cannot stop giving. The deity child who cannot receive. Each of these parts has its own history and its own protective function. Recognizing them, naming them, developing relationship with them rather than trying to eliminate them, allows the system as a whole to soften. The parts that have been blocking love do not have to be destroyed. They have to be heard, honored for what they have been protecting against, and slowly released from the protective duty they no longer need to perform.

Corrective relationships in adulthood. The friend who consistently shows up. The therapist whose care is reliable. The partner who remains present through difficulty. The community that welcomes you without conditions. Each of these relationships is a small repetition of being received. The repetitions accumulate. Over months and years of being consistently met, the system updates. The body that learned not to expect love begins to expect it. The capacity grows.

Time. The work of restoring the capacity for love is not quick. The protective system that has been running for decades does not soften in weeks. The body that learned, early, to defend against love does not relearn in months. The capacity grows over years of sustained work. Patience with the timeline is part of the practice. The work is real. The capacity is genuinely developable. And it requires the kind of patience that the protective system itself often makes difficult.

What love looks like when the capacity is functioning

People who have built or rebuilt the capacity for love describe specific qualities to their experience of it.

Love arrives without effort. The warmth toward the beloved is just there. It does not have to be summoned or produced. It is the steady underlying quality of the relationship rather than an intermittent state that has to be regenerated.

Giving does not deplete. When you do something for someone you love from a place of full capacity, you often notice that you feel more connected and alive afterward rather than less. This is the signature of love operating from genuine fullness rather than from depleted reserves.

Receiving is possible. You can be cared for without immediately reciprocating. You can hold a compliment without deflecting. You can be the recipient of attention without managing it. The body has learned that receiving is allowed.

Difficulty does not collapse the connection. When you and your beloved are in disagreement or difficulty, the connection remains underneath the conflict. You can fight and stay in relationship. You can disappoint each other and still know that the relationship holds. The capacity to repair rather than to flee or destroy is built in.

Presence is available. You can be with the person you love without performing, without managing your appearance, without monitoring how you are being received. The capacity to simply be there with them, in your body, fully present, is one of the gifts that comes from doing this work.

Love feels like coming home. This is the phrase that many of my clients have used over the years, after years of work, when they finally arrive at the felt experience of being able to receive and give love from a capacity that is genuinely present. The home is in the body. The home is in the relationship. The home is in the capacity itself, which once felt foreign and now feels native.

A closing thought

If you have read this far and recognized yourself as someone whose capacity for love has been compromised by the conditions of your earlier life, the work is real and worth doing. You are not broken. You were not made in conditions that allowed the capacity to develop naturally. You have lived a life in which love has been complicated, difficult to receive, difficult to give, or different in some way from what you have read in the books and seen in the films.

The capacity can be rebuilt. Not perfectly, not all at once, not in a way that erases the original conditions. In a way that allows you to experience, over time, what love can be when the architecture is functioning. The patience the work requires is real. The reward is also real. And the experience of being able to fully love and be fully loved, in adulthood, after the work has done its slow rebuilding, is one of the genuinely sacred experiences available to a human being who has done the work to deserve it. You deserve it. You always did.

Love is not only a feeling. It is a capacity. And the capacity is yours to build.

Further reading: Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts. Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love. For clinical work in California or Florida that addresses the capacity for love specifically, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

What Actually Builds a Lasting Partnership

Posted on by helpingsoul

A Therapist’s Reflections on What the Research and Eighteen Years of Clinical Work Have Taught Me

A substantial revision of an earlier 2009 post on meeting and marriage. The original used a prescriptive timetable that real relationships rarely follow. This version draws on current research and clinical experience to describe what actually produces lasting partnership across many forms.

In 2009, I wrote a post that mapped what I thought of as the path from meeting someone to marrying them. The post laid out an eight-step timeline — meet, build friendship, set boundaries, develop respect, love revealed at nine months, marriage at one to two years. The framework reflected what I believed at the time about how the strongest relationships developed.

Sixteen years of clinical work later, I would not write that post the same way. Several things have changed.

The most important change is the recognition that relationships do not follow timetables. The couple who knew they were going to marry within three weeks of meeting can have as durable a partnership as the couple who took five years to decide. The couple who lived together for a decade before committing to marriage may have stronger fundamentals than the couple who married within months. The timing varies. The fundamentals do not.

The second change is the recognition that lasting partnership takes many forms. Marriage is one. Long-term cohabitation without legal marriage is another. Partnerships within queer relationships have their own histories and forms. Polyamorous and non-monogamous structures, when they work, work according to similar fundamentals as monogamous partnerships. The legal and cultural form of the relationship matters less than the underlying dynamics. The work of building something that lasts is recognizable across forms, even when the forms differ significantly.

This refreshed essay describes what I have come to understand about those underlying dynamics, drawing on current research and on the work I have done in my practice with couples across many configurations.

The conditions that produce lasting partnership

Several conditions, present together and developed over time, produce the kind of partnership that endures.

Friendship as foundation

This was true in the 2009 post and remains true. The strongest partnerships have a deep friendship underneath them. The capacity to enjoy each other’s ordinary company. The genuine interest in each other’s inner lives. The willingness to spend time together that is not about romance or sex but simply about being with this particular person.

John and Julie Gottman, who have studied couples in their laboratory at the University of Washington for decades, identify friendship as the foundational element of relationships that last. Their research consistently shows that couples who maintain what they call a sound relationship house — the underlying friendship and shared knowledge of each other — weather conflict and transition far better than couples whose connection is primarily passionate or primarily logistical. The friendship is not opposed to romance. It is what allows the romance to continue across decades.

Secure attachment within the relationship

Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy and has spent her career applying attachment theory to adult couples, identifies the felt sense of secure connection as the central work of lasting partnership. Each partner needs to know, in their body, that the other is reliably there — that emotional reach will be met, that need will not be dismissed, that distress can be brought to the other and will be received.

Building this kind of security is the work of years. It develops through small repeated experiences of being met. The partner who turns toward you when you reach out, even when they are tired. The partner who returns to repair after a conflict rather than letting the disconnection settle. The partner who notices when something is wrong before you have named it. These small moments accumulate into the felt sense of being securely held by the relationship itself.

For partners who arrived in the relationship with insecure attachment patterns from childhood, the work is more demanding. The nervous system that learned not to reach has to learn to reach. The nervous system that learned to defend against connection has to learn to receive it. The relationship itself, when it is functioning, becomes the corrective experience that updates the original conditioning. This is slow work. It is genuinely possible, particularly when both partners understand what they are doing.

Respect as daily practice

Respect is the felt experience of being treated as someone whose thoughts, feelings, and choices have weight. It is not the same as agreement. Two partners can disagree substantially and still treat each other with respect. They can fight hard about what matters to them and still convey, throughout the fight, that the other person remains worthy of consideration.

The Gottmans’ research identifies contempt — the felt sense of looking down on the partner, dismissing them as beneath you — as the single most reliable predictor of divorce in their studies. Contempt is the opposite of respect. When it enters a relationship and is not addressed, the relationship is on a trajectory toward dissolution that is statistically very difficult to reverse.

Maintaining respect requires daily attention. The small ways you speak about your partner when they are not in the room. The small ways you respond to them when they share something with you. The small ways you handle conflict when you are tired or activated. Respect is built or eroded in these small moments. It is rarely built or eroded in dramatic events.

The capacity for repair

All relationships experience rupture. The strongest relationships are not the ones in which rupture never occurs. They are the ones in which both partners have developed the capacity to repair after rupture has occurred.

Repair is its own learnable skill. It involves the willingness to recognize when something has gone wrong between you. The capacity to take responsibility for your part without becoming defensive. The willingness to make a genuine acknowledgment of harm caused, however unintentional. The patience to let the other person have their own response to the repair attempt without controlling how they receive it. The follow-through that demonstrates the repair is more than words.

Stan Tatkin, who developed the psychobiological approach to couples therapy, writes extensively about repair as one of the central practices of lasting partnership. His framing — that secure functioning couples treat each other’s regulation as their joint responsibility — points to something important. The repair is not just about the specific rupture. It is about the ongoing maintenance of the relationship’s underlying safety. Each successful repair tells both partners that this relationship can hold difficulty. Each failed repair, particularly accumulated, communicates the opposite.

Differentiation alongside connection

Esther Perel has written extensively about the tension in long-term partnership between connection and otherness. The relationship needs both. Partners who completely fuse — who lose their individual identities into the relationship — often lose desire for each other over time. Partners who remain too separate, who do not actually allow themselves to be known and to know the other, miss the depth that long partnership offers.

The work is holding both. Maintaining your own friendships, interests, and inner life that are separate from the relationship. Continuing to develop as an individual across the years rather than freezing into your role within the partnership. And also doing the work of genuine intimacy, allowing yourself to be known and to know the other deeply, building the shared history that only long partnership can produce.

Differentiation is not coldness. It is the capacity to be fully present in the relationship while remaining recognizably yourself. Partners who maintain this capacity often find that their desire for each other endures across decades, because the other remains genuinely other rather than dissolving into a version of the self.

Shared sense of meaning

Lasting partnerships typically develop a shared sense of what the relationship is for beyond the immediate enjoyment of being together. This may be raising children. It may be building a business or pursuing creative work together. It may be participating in religious or spiritual community. It may be navigating significant challenges — illness, loss, large life transitions — that the partnership has helped both partners through.

The shared meaning is not always articulated. Sometimes it lives in the unspoken understanding that this relationship has been the container for the life both partners have lived. The relationship is not just a source of pleasure or companionship. It is the structure within which a life has been built. That kind of meaning, accumulated over years, produces a depth that newer relationships cannot match no matter how passionate they are.

Commitment as ongoing choice

The 2009 post talked about hundred percent commitment as the defining feature of marriage. I would say something slightly different now. Commitment in lasting partnership is not a one-time decision made at the altar or at the moment of agreement to be exclusive. It is a daily choice that gets remade across the years.

Every long-term partnership goes through periods when one or both partners genuinely consider whether they want to continue. This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the partnership is real and consequential. The partners who continue across these moments do so because they have made the choice to continue. The choice is not always certain. It is often made in conditions of doubt. But it is made, and remade, and remade again across the years.

This framing changes how we understand commitment. It is not the absence of doubt. It is the willingness to act in the direction of the partnership despite the doubt, and to bring whatever the doubt is about into the relationship rather than carrying it alone. The strongest partnerships have rooms in them for the difficult conversations about the partnership itself.

What I would tell a younger version of myself

If I could speak to the therapist who wrote the 2009 post, I would tell her several things.

The timeline does not matter. What matters is what happens within whatever timeline the relationship actually unfolds along.

Marriage is not the goal. The goal is a partnership that allows both people to live in a way that feels genuinely theirs, with someone who knows them and is known by them, across the long arc of a life.

Friendship matters more than passion. Passion comes and goes in long partnership. Friendship, properly tended, deepens.

Repair matters more than avoiding conflict. The couple who never fights is rarely the couple whose relationship lasts. The couple who fights and repairs is.

The work continues. There is no moment when you have arrived at a lasting partnership and can stop building it. The building is the partnership.

If you are in the early stages of a relationship

If you are in the early period of a relationship and trying to determine whether this person could be a lasting partner, here are the questions worth asking yourself. Not on a timetable. Whenever they become relevant.

Is there a genuine friendship underneath the chemistry? Do you actually enjoy this person’s company when you are not romantically engaged with them?

Can you imagine being known by this person at the depth that long partnership requires? Are they capable of receiving you, and are you capable of receiving them, beyond the surface?

How do they handle conflict and repair? Are they capable of taking responsibility for their part in difficulty? Can they offer genuine acknowledgment without becoming defensive?

Are their values and life goals genuinely compatible with yours, or are you assuming compatibility that has not actually been tested?

Do you feel respected by them in the small daily moments, and do you respect them similarly? Is there any contempt in either direction that has begun to enter the interaction?

Are there patterns from their family of origin or yours that you can see playing out in the relationship, and is there room to work with those patterns together?

Do you both have the capacity to maintain your individual lives within the partnership, or is one or both of you losing yourselves into the relationship?

These questions take time to answer honestly. The relationships that last typically allow the time for these questions to surface and be addressed. The relationships that move too quickly past these questions often arrive at the larger commitment with answers that have not been earned.

If you are in an established partnership

If you are in an established partnership and reading this article, the questions are different. The work is not whether to commit. The work is how to sustain what you have built.

The same elements apply. The friendship needs continued tending. The attachment security needs daily renewal. The respect needs to be protected from the small erosions that accumulate over years. The repair after conflict needs to remain a practice rather than something that has become rare. The differentiation needs to be preserved so that you do not lose yourself into the relationship. The shared meaning needs to be allowed to evolve as the lives you are living evolve. The commitment needs to be remade rather than assumed.

Couples therapy can be useful at many points in lasting partnership — not only when the relationship is in crisis. Working with a clinician who understands attachment, who can hold both partners’ nervous systems at once, who can address the somatic dimensions of long partnership rather than only the verbal ones, often produces real growth in relationships that are already functioning. The work is not about fixing what is broken. It is about deepening what is already real.

A closing thought

Lasting partnership is one of the most demanding things a human being can attempt. It is also one of the most rewarding. The partnership that endures across decades does not endure because it was easy or because both partners are uniquely well-suited to each other. It endures because both partners have done the daily work of building and rebuilding it across the years.

If you are in a relationship that is working, honor it. Tend to it. Notice what makes it real, and continue investing in what makes it real. The relationship is not a destination you arrive at. It is the daily practice of choosing to remain in it, to develop with it, to be changed by it across the years.

And if you are searching for a lasting partnership and have not yet found one, the search is real and worth doing. The conditions that produce lasting partnership are recognizable. With enough self-knowledge and enough willingness to do the work, the conditions can be met. The path is rarely linear. The destination, when it is reached, is worth the journey.

Further reading: John Gottman and Julie Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and What Makes Love Last. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight. Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity. For clinical work with couples in California or Florida, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida specializing in EMDR, sex therapy, and couples counseling. She trained in sex and couples therapy at AACAST at UCLA. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Now is the Time to Do

Posted on by helpingsoul

By Richard Branson
When posting recently about the importance of making lists and resolutions, there was an overwhelming response from people keen to reach their goals in 2013. It’s great to see such enthusiasm – and practical planning – for making positive changes from people all over the world.

Planning is extremely important, for any adventure in or out of business. But even more crucial is the will to simply get out there and do something new. A couple of thoughts have caught my attention this week about creating original ideas.

Dr Muhammad Yunus, founder of the wonderful Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, said: “All human beings are born as entrepreneurs. But unfortunately, many of us never had the opportunity to unwrap that part of our life, so it remains hidden.”

He touches upon the potential within us all to bring new ideas to life. For those of us fortunate enough to have the chance to see their dreams come to life, it is foolish to waste our opportunities.

Another perceptive point comes from Seth Godin. On his blog, he wrote about the challenges of initiating any project. “Not enough people believe they are capable of productive initiative.

“I don’t think the shortage of artists has much to do with the innate ability to create or initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it.”

As Mr Godin suggests, it is absolutely possible for you to create, to take chances, to allow your ideas to flourish if you have enough self-confidence. While he is referring to artists, the same applies for the art of business.

Now is the time to do doesn’t just apply to starting businesses. it applies to relationships, to fitness, to all aspects of your life.

Nobody else is going to start your business for you. 2013 is the time to put your ideas into action. Now is the time to do.

Borderline Personality, Codependency, and Love Addiction

Posted on by helpingsoul

cycle of addiction

Borderline Personality tendencies, codependency, and love addiction are self-destructive behavioral patterns. Each personality seeks constant approval and love from others while abandoning themselves. Through people pleasing, compulsivity, and dependent patterns of behavior, a sense of self is lost. Relationship dynamics runs the extremes from idealization and domination to being controlled. The extremes create a false sense of safety, self-worth, and identity. This articles covers the characteristics of all three behavioral types and relates it to the cycle of addiction.

Everyone embraces some cycle of addiction, whether it be the way you towel off after a shower or mindlessly move through the grocery aisles. Regardless of the activity, the ritual involves unconscious thoughts, feelings and actions that repeats cyclically.

There are four parts to the cycle of addiction. The first stage is preoccupation, the second is the ritual, the third is acting out, and the fourth phase is feelings of guilt and shame.

Many dynamics of relationships exist but for the purpose of this article, codependency, borderline tendencies, and love addiction will be discussed with an emphasis of the cycle of addiction.

During the first stage, thoughts begin to preoccupy themselves with a lover. Persons consume the majority of their time and attention toward their imago. The imago is the image we place on our partner who mirrors our original caretakers. The psychological term for this is transference. The image feels right because it is familiar much like eating macaroni and cheese. Admiration for their partner is comfort food that feeds the attraction to excitement, chaos, and emotional intoxication.

The intense attraction is due to an unconscious drive to heal and resolve childhood wounds. This overwhelming state of infatuation is part of the first stage of addiction called preoccupation. During this phase, the love addict feels high (emotional intoxication) as parental fantasies to heal the abandonment, emptiness, and lack of self-worth are perceived to be met even if for a splitting moment. Thoughts and energy of their partner preoccupy all the love addict’s time. The majority of the day is conceiving ways to hold onto them and bring them closer so that they don’t abandon them.   Love addicts relinquish total control and power to their partner.   Any sense of spiritually becomes impaired as a grandiose persona transfers to their image.

Love addicts relation to family, friends, and personal care begin to change during the second phase of addiction. This stage is called ritual. Compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of their partner override any sense of independence.   Control completely transfers to other. Love addicts become dependent with learned helplessness and neediness. Trust and judgment projects on their partner and smashes their personal values and feelings. Love addicts give up control while abandoning themselves and becoming dependent on their lover to make personal decisions.   Over time love addicts’ careers, relationships, and personal care diminish.

Love addicts deny and refuse to open their eyes to the reality of their false, fantasy love. Similarly, codependents do not acknowledge their partner’s defensive wall, inability for real connection, and love themselves. Codependent relationships create enmeshment just as love addicts take on their partner’s morals and values and blur boundary lines. Relationships are viewed through unconsciously filtered fantasy. Relational dynamics continues between colossal cycles of intense passion and extreme anger. The sense of excitement in the emotional extremes is drunken in like an alcoholic drinks whiskey. The high of emotional intoxication deepens to obsessiveness that then is mistaken for authentic love.

The third period is acting out. Negative consequences of lost identity, irresponsible behavior, and diminishing life conditions are overlooked. Symptoms of loneliness, despair, and self-hatred continue in a downward spiral of intolerable circumstances. Self-worth bottoms and depression creeps in.

As the spiral continues downward, bottom hits with feelings of guilt and shame making up the fourth stage. Love addicts feel stuck as if they cannot cope on their own. Codependents feel they need their partner to survive just as a dependent child. Guilt, shame, internalized anger and resentment grow until the pain is too great, and the hurt is too much to bear. Finally, a glimmer of hope emerges, and awareness unfolds. Denial slowly lifts as light shines down on their partner’s defenses, emotional unavailability, controlling, and manipulating behavior. Further consciousness arises in financial and career sacrifices if they still have a job. Understanding of their isolation surfaces the notions of little contact if any with family and friends. It’s a rude awakening to the mess.

Shame and guilt stage causes love addicts to feel like failures, remain hopeless and lose sight of their discovery. Consequently, they fall deeper into depression. Denial sets in again to lighten the pain, and the cycle begins again.

Borderline personalities obsess again about their partner thinking they will save them from their misery. Codependents shift independence to dependence and as they stay in the relationship; prolonging the cycle of addiction.

Commonly borderline personalities, codependents, and love addicts develop from an alcoholic family or dysfunctional family who are narcissistic, unable to allow another to have an independent self, and cut-off emotionally. The personality types yearn for real connections and intimate relationships yet don’t know how and continue to play cat and mouse.

Childhood hurt and rage from parental abandonment, neglect, and emotional abuse leads to internalizing thoughts of being bad. The child splits the image of his desire internalizing it as bad and places a good internal object-image onto their caretakers.

If a child’s needs of nurture, mirroring of feelings and thoughts, and care lack, the child continues to split parts of themselves; internalizing they are bad, and their parents are good. This pattern is a defensive survival technique so that the child can tolerate the abuse in an environment where he is dependent.   As adults, a bad internalized image persists as a worthless and inadequate identity thus the perceived need to latch on to others for an identity. The wounded adult attracts partner’s who replicate their parents and place the externalized fantasy image of real parts onto their partner ultimately giving them all power and control.

Awareness of the similarity of borderline personalities, codependents, and love addicts can shed light and understanding of internal emotional drivers of behavior. New knowledge brings more choices and the more power and control for healthy, respectful, and loving thoughts, feelings, and actions. Understanding how one’s personal cycle of addiction originated can then begin to find ways to break the cycle and healing can begin. The goal is to feel whole (independent) while having the capacity to give and receive love.

Beliefs, Values and Good Intentions

Posted on by helpingsoul

With few exceptions, all of us have beliefs, values, and a relatively similar sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. They are what make us different from other living things on the planet…they are what make us human.

But while having principles may be natural for us, actually practicing them isn’t. Acting according to these beliefs, values, and good intentions…doing what’s right “walking the talk” is one of the biggest challenges each of us face every day. It’s true for just about every aspect of our lives – from family and faith, to sports and politics, to our jobs and our communities.

Unquestionably, talking about beliefs is easy – there’s not much effort or pain involved at all. Behaving those values, however, is quite another story.

Discussing good citizenship is a lot easier than going out in an election-day rainstorm to vote. Stating the importance of honesty is just plain easier than overcoming the temptation to keep the change the store clerk overpays us. Touting good service is one thing, staying late to make sure a customer is taken care of is quite another. And, waxing eloquent about how parents should be actively involved in their children’s education is a piece of cake compared to turning off our most favorite TV program so we can check our children’s homework.

Here are two facts “you can take to the bank:”

  1. We all have moments when our behaviors are out of sync with the beliefs we hold deep down inside, and
  2. The vast majority of those out-of-sync behaviors are Unintentional.

Think about it. How many times have you jumped out of bed in the morning and declared, “My mission in life today is to NOT walk my talk. I’m not gonna rest until I’m out of sync somehow, some way!”? We’ll go way out on a limb and guess that your answer is NEVER! It just doesn’t happen that way.

Are there some misguided, hypocritical people out there who knowingly – even intentionally – do wrong? Unfortunately, yes. They’re the ones who make the headlines. The good news, however, is that they’re also the extreme exceptions. The rest of us tend to approach each new day loaded with noble goals and good intentions.

But too often, we get bombarded with demands, crises, pressures, changes, issues, and unexpected situations that make merely “holding our own” sometimes the best that we can hope for. As a result, it can become way too easy to fly through our lives on automatic pilot – without really thinking about what we do and whether or not we’re actually behaving our beliefs.