Love Addiction Is Real: How to Understand You Are in Its Grip.
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I am a love addict. I have always been one ever since I can remember.
Now the time has come I admit it to myself. I acknowledge the dysfunction within my outworn belief system and work within to allow my inner dark demons to show up as they are, so they can be healed, for they are nothing more than heavy energies that carry emotional wounds from my childhood or even past-life scenarios.
There was always a picture of a boy or a man in my mind that would falsely make me feel loved, or that I hoped and longed would complete me or make me feel worthy.
Love has always been the puzzle of my life.
I never admitted this to myself.
Or perhaps I could never be so much aware as I am now of my own old habits and thought patterns when it comes to love and relationships.
I bleed pain and ache when I am in a relationship.
My mind becomes muddy, messy, and I become so preoccupied with the new person who has just entered my life.
I become obsessed with thoughts about him, and a part of me feels like it wants to control all the outcome without giving me a chance to breathe into the present moment and whatever I am doing when the other is not there close to me.
I begin to obsess about all the ways he calls or texts and how he communicates with me. I begin to feel the emotional chains that attach me so strongly to the object of my affection.
This is how I lose myself. This is how I abandon myself. This is how the dysfunctional dynamics in a relationship begins for me. This is how I come to realize, through inner pain, that I have love addiction and he is either the love-avoidant or the emotionally unavailable man.
The more I cling to him, or rather to my image of him, the more things seem to break apart.
The more I cling to him and to my image of him, the more I lose myself and the more I forget myself in him.
And this is how the pain builds its nest within my chest and my heart bleeds.
This is how I disappear into someone that I may not even know all too well as yet. Because my heart is so weak and my mind filled with hopes of love, I completely ignore any possible red flags that show up as soon as the communication with a new man begins.
I completely ignore any possible flaws or not so positive traits of their personality that would show up more in the long run and thus ruin my dreams of love.
It is not easy to acknowledge these suppressed parts of myself I have kept in denial. I had placed them in the darkest corners of my psyche. Never really opened the closet to see what’s inside. Because it feels too insane to watch this dark movie that goes on inside my head, that terrifies me at times.
My thoughts become darker than usual, I begin to bend, my knees become very shaky and I risk falling on the ground.
I lose the sense of my self. I lose myself thinking 24/7 about the other, his happiness and what I can do to make the relationship work even when it does not seem to work.
I try hard and I call it love.
I try more and I call it sacrifice.
I give more than second chances and I call it love.
And it aches me. And again I call it love.
He gives me false hopes and I excuse his actions.
He says one thing and acts differently, but I tell myself to give him another chance and I call it love.
I stress myself out with obsessive compulsive thought patters in the hope they will help me come out of my inner hell, not realizing they are the hell themselves in which I’m holding on for fear of falling, of being rejected, abandoned and alone.
In my mind, I think it is better to hold on to a toxic relationship than to let go because that would add another failure in my romantic relationship repertoire.
Now I see clearly my thoughts pattern and habits when it comes to a relationship.
Now I see the circle of destruction that eats into my mental and emotional health slowly.
My head is exploding from thoughts running like mad horses wanting to get out of the cage I have put them in. I can’t let them go. It’s safer inside for them because I don’t know what would happen if I let them go.
Maybe my relationship would not last, maybe I would disappear, and I would find myself on the road again searching for a new romantic partner to come and meet my core needs, because as a child I suffered, for none of my needs of being loved, safe and secure were met.
It is a living hell. Being inside this river of obsessive thoughts about the other and getting lost in them.
I don’t listen to the intuition and the wisest part of my being.
I listen to this energy habit that goes on and on in the same repetitive circles of destruction.
And so I cease to exist and it hurts. It aches like no other pain.
My heart area hurts, my chest gets frozen, my hands become dry, my face pale, my blood changes color, my legs sore…!
I cannot sleep. I fantasize about him, or another new relationship if he does not meet my needs.
Again hoping a new relationship will make me whole, fix my wounds, or hold my hands like no other, because I am unable to love myself.
I don’t know how to love myself, on an emotional and deep level. I have tried and I have failed.
I have tried again and I have failed again.
I have lost myself and found myself. I have lost myself again in a new lover and I have found myself after losing him.
And the circle goes on and on and on, and I am so fucking tired because no one taught me how to love myself when I was a child. No one taught me that I mattered as a child, that my feelings mattered, that my emotions were valid. No one saw the real me. Not even my parents.
I never felt seen by anybody in my childhood. I felt utterly alone. I felt alienated and I disliked myself for feeling so different from other kids.
I tried to please my father so I could get a hug or a kiss from him. I tried hard, but I never succeeded, so I was an angry child almost all the time. The only times I felt at ease were when I was playing outside.
Then growing up I tried so hard to get excellent grades at school and I failed. So I pushed myself harder and my grades became excellent when I entered high school. I studied in two different universities and got two diplomas.
I became a well-known reporter, but the emptiness inside was still following me like a ghost. Nothing of what I did or achieved fulfilled me. It actually made me even more empty.
I could never cover my inner pain and heartache.
So I started to obsessively search for love and for a man. Man after man after man.
And with every man I dated or got intimate with, I was repeating the same patterns of behavior based on my belief system. And those relationships failed. They were bound to. There were no pillars of strength to keep them together. They were empty, toxic, dysfunctional or superficial. They brought up all my inner issues.
I chose those dysfunctional relationships so I could see my own patterns of thinking. I chose those men as facets of my inner darkness that I could not recognize otherwise. Because of them I could see what I was getting into and why I was putting myself down constantly by having lovers who never loved themselves and did not know how to love me, just like I couldn’t either.
It was like two blind people trying to get the same love from each other that they could not offer their own selves.
The fear of not being good enough, the fear of being rejected, or being abandoned and alone terrified me always. Because underneath these fears lay another deeper layer of a deeper fear, that of having no worth, being completely worthless, which could mean ceasing to even exist.
My childhood wounds are still screaming from the depths of my inner ocean, moving like raged waves wanting to reach the shore to be released and gone.
My father was always an emotionally unavailable man whose heart was really hard to penetrate to make him see me as a child.
I always felt a sense of being rejected, neglected and not truly loved by him.
I was a deep child. I took to my heart every behavior of his not knowing what it was about.
And the result came later on in my adult life.
All the men I have loved or been pursuing so far are a sum of my father’s personality and remind me of him in many ways. And all these men have been unavailable to me, emotionally, mentally and even sexually.
So I starved.
I starved myself while loving them.
With all this muddy water I have often put myself in, I still feel thankful for the pain I have been going through, because it has opened my eyes and helped me see my own patterns and belief system, how it all stems from my early years and how I was made to feel about myself.
It is time I dig deeper into my unconsciousness and reveal to myself the hidden aches of my inner child, reassuring her that I am here to love her and meet all her needs, that as an adult I am here to see her, to listen to her, to truly care for her, and take her by the hand and caress her blond long hair that used to get messed up with the wind when she was little.
It is time I break the circle of repetition and repetitive patterns of attracting the same kind of men and relationships.
Because in my heart of hearts I know I deserve to live a most amazing life, and deep in my core I know I came here to heal all these wounds, to be whole within me and to experience an amazing, enriching and passionate love like I have never before.
I know it takes time, but I will take all the time I need to heal myself at my every layer.
Pain has its own way of working, and our souls have their own agendas of how to wake us up so nothing is lost. No wound can damage us forever, we can grow from each wound and plant the seeds of happiness in the soil of heartache.
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Ilda Dashi is a former journalist, always a dreamer and forever a nature-lover. She is a poet and writer who has authored her first book, It is You searching for You, a collection of raw poems about a life gone by and the search for a new one. Her life’s journey so far has had many unexpected turns and hardships, but she is determined to navigate through it, at times with her stubbornness and at times through silence and acceptance of what reality brings in front of her. She believes in magic, and feels that we are all made of stardust. We only have to remember this and live in alignment with it. She is both soft and wild in her nature, and always eager to enjoy life in the smallest and most mundane moments. She believes we are all a work of art in progress. You could contact Ilda via Facebook.
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