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I've collected a list of my writings, some of them when I was angry. Many I believe to be wisdom, the rest are just things muddling my mind. Either way it should be interesting enough to cure your boredom for a while.
An article everyone should read about relationships
Love Addiction by Pia Mellody
A lot has been said about sex addiction, but not so much has been said about love addiction, so I’m going to speak about it. To me this love addiction was one of the worst things I tried to recover from. I probably fight that addiction more than any other addiction I’ve got and it about killed me to do it.
What sets this addiction up and what sets any addiction up is a disease called codependency. It is a state of dis-ease caused by child abuse that renders a person unable to experience appropriate levels of self-esteem, set functional boundaries with other people, own their own reality politically and their own reality as made up of what you look like, your body, your thinking, your feelings - which come out of what you think - and your behavior - what you do and don’t do. That is your reality. Difficulty taking care of your dependency issues around needing and wanting, and difficulty expressing your reality moderately.
What happens when kids are born into a family system that is less than nurturing, their physical body grows up, but inside they don’t develop the mechanisms that make a person an adult? We grow up and have these big bodies and we walk around acting like we know what we are doing. Some of us, who can be perfect and defended behind walls and think we are better than, can really look good.
A disease called codependency sets up love addiction and all addictions. That is because it is very, very stressful to be a little person inside a great big body. Fooling everybody all the time, but inside knowing that you are not fooling yourself. What happens to people is that they get into addictions to relieve the stress of being codependent. Being in an adult body dominated by a needy, pain filled, fear filled, anger filled shame or power filled child creates stress. The stress needs to be blocked - any addiction will do that. Love addiction just happens to be one of them that does it very well. But it is kind of a hidden addiction, because love addiction is standard in this culture. Especially for women. It is so prevalent that it is hard to recognize it as not normal behavior. But it is not.
There is a specific kind of abuse that sets up love addiction. The kind of child abuse that sets up love addiction is neglect and/or abandonment of the child by the major care giver. What happens to children that are raised in a family that is less than nurturing and which does neglect the child’s needs and wants or abandons the child in terms of their needing and wanting and everything else the child needs - what happens to those children is that they do not feel loved.
Loving is about holding someone in warm personal regard. Any kid is going to know when someone is neglecting them, not giving them time, attention and direction, physical nurturing, attending to all their other needs. Any kid is going to know that they are not loved, because if they were loved, they would be getting those things that they are not getting. Warm personal regard is about loving somebody. Holding them in warm personal regard and taking care of the child’s needs and wants makes the child feel loved. When they live in a family where they do not feel loved, do you think that is stressful?
What I have noticed about these people who are these board certified love addicts is that they got a little bit. They got a little bit of love from their major care givers that relieved the stress of not being loved or not being well cared for. And their brain never forgot it. They begin to realize that if they could just get that warm personal regard or that unconditional regard from somebody, it would relieve the stress of not being loved. So the brain took that in. And what I found in listening to the histories of love addicts is that they made a decision as a little person that when they got big enough to be in relationships with others they would find somebody who would finally make them feel loved and cared about. And that would solve the problem of not feeling loved. That is love addiction.
Love addiction is a state whereby a person assigns too much time, attention and value above him or herself to any person he or she is in a relationship with, coupled with unrealistic expectations for unconditional positive regard and to the exclusion of his or her own self care and self valuing.
When people finally get into a relationship with another person they make that person too important to them. They literally make that person their higher power. That is called assigning that person too much time, attention and value above yourself. That means the person that you are in a relationship with - that you are addicted to - is your higher power.
How comfortable are you in that relationship? Don’t you want to kill them one minute and worship them the next minute? Assigning somebody too much time, attention and value above yourself coupled with unrealistic expectations for unconditional positive regard - do you know what that means? That means that you think that this person is going to give you unconditional positive regard and that that is your right because you are in a relationship with them. That is absurd, irrational, immoderate, immature.
The bad news with this addiction is that it is never anybody’s business to do that for you. It is your own business. Once it has not been done by your major care givers, the only person who can ever do that for you is you. And to expect unconditional positive regard from someone that you are in a relationship with is not rational thinking. The only person that can do that for you is you. And you can love yourself, except when you are an untreated codependent. You almost have to get into codependency recovery before you know you have this addiction.
What is it going to mean being in recovery from being a love addict? You have to take care of yourself. If you haven’t recovered from codependency, you can’t take care of yourself. If you haven’t recovered from codependency, you can’t take care of yourself. In addition to that the love addict not only puts somebody on the throne and expects unconditional positive regard from them, the other thing they do is they start neglecting their own issues of self care and self nurturing.
I don’t know how many very high powered women I’ve known over the last few years that do very, very well as long as they are single, but get them in a relationship with one man, and in about three months they are sicker than a dog. Once they get connected to that person through dating, sex or marriage, they throw all their issues about self care and self nurturing out of the window and start hanging and whining on these people. And they get sicker and sicker and do less to take care of themselves.
I remember something weird with me because I knew I could take care of myself very well. And I felt wonderful as long as I didn’t have a man in my life. And I thought it was their problem, not me! I was this wonderful person. What happened was that I just kept picking these nerds. It was a terrible day when I discovered I was the problem.
Let me tell you some more bad news before I tell you how funny it can be. Guess what we know about how people pick people to be in a relationship with? We know you will pick somebody just like your major care givers. In fact, they are usually a combination of your parents’ worst traits that you get attracted to. We found out that people choose to be in relationships conscious attraction is to the worst traits your parents have. I think we get attracted to that on an unconscious level, so that we can resolve these old issues.
When you think about a love addict having parents that really neglected them or abandoned them, guess what you are going to pick to be in a relationship with when you are a love addict. Yes. You are going to pick somebody who is not there for you. Anybody who is not there for you, you will pick. Because you find them attractive, as they are walking away from you. I was never attracted to anybody who was facing me, telling me I’m wonderful. I looked them and said, if you say I’m wonderful, you’ve got to be a sick person. So I was never attracted to those people who were busy being nice. I only got attracted to those backs walking away. And then I’d get into high gear to get them to turn around and look at me. And they did occasionally, because I created quite a ruckus.
What happens to love addicts is that they are attracted to addicts. Any addict will do, because they are about walking away. Who is their higher power? Not you. Who is their higher power? Work, a bottle, another man, another woman - if they are a sex addict. It could be around their eating disorder, could be around any addiction. One of the sicker things in this is that most love addicts are in particular attracted to sex addicts. Because that is what brings you the most intensity. And that is the bad news. So love addicts are attracted to people walking away from them, and that is just any addict.
The love addict’s greatest fear is the fear of abandonment. The addict’s greatest fear is the fear of engulfment. Now isn’t that a combination? What is engulfment about anyway? It’s about this addict’s fear that somebody is going to control their reality. Somebody is going to tell them what they should look like, what they should think, what they should do or not do. What does the love addict need to do? Tell them all that. That is the perfect circumstance to set up what I call the addictive relationship.
Addictive relationships are relationships that mistake intensity for romance and love. You have somebody fearing abandonment chasing someone fearing engulfment, the one thing that is going to come out of that is intensity. The love addict fears abandonment and the addict is about going off into their addictions and they avoid intimacy because they find intimacy overwhelming. What happens as the addict starts walking away from the love addict, the love addict starts chasing them. That causes the addict to run faster. As the love addict is noticing the addict going off like that, they go into withdrawal because the addict is not in their life right now.
The withdrawal for the love addict is called fear to the point of panic and pain to the point of wanting to kill yourself. Withdrawal for the love addict is experienced as intense pain to the point where you want to kill yourself. So that spurs you on. After a while you will find it so unpleasant to try to get this person to be in your life that you give up, turn around and start walking in the other direction. Because the pain is just not worth it. You cannot stay wanting to kill yourself for very long, nor can you stand that level of panic that occurs for a chronic love addict. So you finally give up. You stop and say, hey, this isn’t worth it. You turn around and start walking away and guess what happens? They see you walking away and that triggers their fear of abandonment, because under their fear of engulfment is fear of abandonment. See how sick we all are!
So the addict sees the love addict walk away and they charge. And if they are a sex addict, guess what they do? They turn on the charm. It’s powerful. The love addict then gets seduced by all that charm. So you turn around and say AH! And there is about ten seconds of relief for both of you before you start charging after them and they start running again. That does create intensity, doesn’t it? We call this romance in this culture, and we are sick to call it romance. It is not about romance and love at all. It is about addiction.
Every time the love addict experiences the addict running away they go into withdrawal. This withdrawal is experienced as intense pain and intense fear that gets into panic, and it sets severe depression and helplessness that often times the love addict thinks about killing themselves. While they are in this state of withdrawal, because the addict is still out there, they have got to do something to relieve their pain and their fear. They then start obsessing.
One way to relieve feelings is to get up in your head. Obsession is about uncontrolled thinking. When the love addict goes into obsession what do you think they obsess about? How to get ‘em back! How to kill ‘em. Or kill the one they are involved with. Or you could even start to plan your own death. They start obsessing usually about how to kill themselves, how to kill somebody else, or they go into a major plan on about how to get them back. Any plan will do as long as it takes you up into your head and you obsess forever about it. Then you implement the plan. That is called compulsion. You obsess yourself into what you are going to do and then you do it. It is called obsession/compulsion. It is an addictive process. You just do it.
I’ll never forget when my sponsor said, Pia, stop thinking about him. You’re crazy, I said. I spend my whole day thinking about him. I don’t think about anything else!
So you go into this obsession and compulsion. That relieves the withdrawal from the addict you are trying to be in a relationship with. Usually most of us who don’t understand our trouble will usually get into more planning about how to get them back into our life. And we implement the plan and it usually works. You usually get them turned back towards you. The love addict gets relief momentarily and the addict gets overwhelmed by the neediness of the love addict.
One thing about the love addict is that they are codependent, so they don’t know how to take care of their own needs and wants very well. They don’t know how to take care of getting food, clothes and shelter - especially women. They don’t know how to get physical nurturing. They don’t know how to get emotional nurturing from somebody, which is about time, attention and direction. They don’t know how, in an adult like fashion, to take care of their sexual needs. They don’t know how to take care of their financial needs. They are dependent on other adults to do that for them. They are usually very, very needy. If they are not, it is only because they are single. And when they get into a relationship, suddenly this whole thing kicks in and they are very needy. That neediness that gets worse and worse the more and more they get addicted to somebody who is their higher power. It is extremely intense. So if nothing else is succeeding in driving the other person away, their intensity and increasing neediness does.
You can’t treat these people. You can’t treat a love addict as long as the person they are addicted to is facing them. The only time they are available for help is when that person is walking away. Then they get into such pain that they are willing to do anything the therapist tells them to do to get them out of the pain. You can track when the addict is in the love addict’s life, because when they are not, they are in your office.
What does recovery look like for the love addict? It is hard work. I got so addicted to a person in my life that I could not believe it. First thing I had to do is stop the compulsive behavior. My compulsive behavior was about creating intensity in the relationship, in any way I could. Screaming, having fits. Dropping bombs and responding to bombs.
Do you know about bombing your mate or responding to a bomb? The first thing my sponsor said to me was: you will stop bombing. That bothered me. Because I enjoyed it. It was part of creating the intensity. In creating the bomb I would start obsessing about something I knew he was doing. Whether he was doing it or not was irrelevant. I just decided in my sick way that he was doing that. Then I would think about it until I’d get myself hysterical. The minute he would come home, I would start into some crazy talking and he would start looking confused. But I was creating all kinds of intensity and all of a sudden a big fight was going on. And then I’d have him facing me and I’d get relief. So my sponsor said, stop doing that. You can obsess all you want, but close your mouth and breathe.
I said, I think I can do that, but I can’t stop the obsession.
I did stop the bombing, but then I noticed that I was getting bombed. Because what did we have? We had an addicted relationship. Somebody has to be dropping a bomb. I’ll call it creating negative intimacy. Any intimacy will do to make you feel like you have a relationship. All you do in addictive relationships is create negative intimacy, because that’s all you’ve seen. When I stopped dropping the bombs and was getting bombed, I couldn’t stop responding to it. And the sponsor said, close your mouth and breathe again. Harder work! So guess what happened? I got very boring. And very quiet. All of a sudden there was like no relationship. And then you go into panic, because you think I don’t really have a relationship here. Well, you don’t. Because all you’ve had up until this point is what I call negative intimacy.
Once I got that kind of under control and I was hardly bombing at all and I was not responding to all the other bombing, she said, now you’ve got to work on your obsession. You've not only got to close your mouth and breathe, but you also have to think about something else. That’s when things really got quiet. And I got more frightened. I would start into obsessional thinking and I would make myself think about something else.
Then she added one more thing to it: start asking for what you need. Have you ever tried that with someone who is hardly talking to you? Ask for what you need and ask for what you want and notice what you get. I said, I don’t want to do that, because I don't want to hear the NO. I don’t want to know how this is really working. So I was deepening myself into delusion. So I started asking for what I want, and then I couldn’t track it. I didn’t exactly know what was being said, because I shut my ears off as soon as I got the response. I was terrified I would get those No’s. I told my sponsor who said, you must ask for want and need, notice what you get and celebrate the NO. If you learn to celebrate the NO you will break your addiction.
So I tried. I cranked it up even higher and I started asking for what I wanted and what I needed and noticing what I was getting. When I got a NO I would say to myself, thank you. I wouldn’t say that to him. But I would say to myself, this is what you are getting Pia, and you can stand it. You can stand somebody saying no to you in the interest of their self care.
Guess what I found when I started doing that? I found out that he was doing lots of things around my needing and wanting that I had never noticed before, until she had me slow down, ask for what I need and want, notice what I get and celebrate the NO. All of a sudden I could track it that he was providing for a lot of my needs and wants, heretofore I had never observed. Because as a love addict and somebody who has been severely neglected and abandoned in my childhood, I was on hyper alert for any perceived abandonment. So the slightest NO was huge to me, and I was never noticing the yesses.
In the process my sponsor set up for me I began to notice what was really happening in this relationship. The biggest confrontation I ever got from the person I was addicted to was the night he told me that what I thought about this relationship was all fantasy. Love addicts, because they get into a relationship with addicts, create a fantasy about the relationship from the beginning.
We meet somebody. Because we are codependent we don’t know who we really are. But we figure out who they want us to be and present that to them. All the time they are doing that to us. Immediately we get off on the wrong foot, because we are not telling the other person who we really are. But a lot of us don’t know who we are in the first place, so it is real easy to tell somebody whatever we want them to think we are, which is always about what we think they want us to be.
This is an addict you are trying to do that with, don’t forget that. And they are about those many abandonments all the time, because they are addicts. Now, the love addict starts fantasizing about that not happening. They go into this enormous fantasy about who that other person is. When I got confronted about being in an addicted relationship and being a love addict I got that right in my face: that the relationship I thought was, really wasn’t. I accused him of saying that so that he could justify his behavior about abandoning me. But what he said to me was the truth. And that was the worst experience and pain I had ever been through. I had to open my eyes and go through the experience of finding out what I thought was there was not there. That I had created a perfect fantasy so that I could stay in the relationship in the first place.
Not only do you now find out that you are an addict and that they are an addict, the other thing you find out is that the relationship you thought was there is not there. When you start recovering from these addictive relationships, sobriety sets in and you take a look at that person and they take a good look at you and it is very easy to turn on your heel and walk away and say, screw this, I don’t want this.
However, if both of you are working at recovery and are willing to recover, you will find out that you have to make a big decision. Am I going to stay in this long enough to find out who I am and who they are? Am I going to stay in this long enough to recover and find out who we are and if we want a relationship with one another? If both are really willing to work on it together and stay in the relationship long enough to find out if they want the relationship, you can resolve the issue. You only have to do that once and you will forever assess who you are looking at in terms of getting in a relationship. You would never ever put yourself through that again.
When I went into recovery the only way I learned to celebrate the NO was to get extremely active in my own self care, so that the NO didn’t mean I wasn’t going to get it, it meant I would have to ask somebody else or work extra hard to get it done myself. That took the compulsion out of trying to make him be there for me when he didn’t want to be. This active self care was hard. It meant I had to start physically taking care of myself and it meant I had to do the one thing I didn’t want to do: I had to go to a financial planner and sit and talk about money. I started to address recreational needs, friends’ needs, all kinds of things I had to get for myself, so I could stand the NO to me and the yes to somebody else.
So I recovered from my love addiction and my codependency at the same time. I don’t see the codependency as an addiction. It is a disease called immaturity, because you never had anybody to help you grow up.
You are not necessarily addicted to somebody that you are in a sexual relationship with. You can be love addicted to your own child. That is a bummer for them, because you hang on them and drain them in your neediness. Somebody doing this is somebody who enables the child to be sick, for example. You can be love addicted to your own parent, trying to make them be there for you when they are not going to be there for you. You can be love addicted to your therapist and to your best friend. Anybody will do, as long as you keep that chase going back and forth.
So love addiction recovery requires you actively engaging in your own codependency recovery and especially focusing on taking care of your needs and wants, and truly interrupting this addictive process, confronting the pain and the fear.
I stayed in the pain and the fear, which was hard. But it made me confront the obsession and compulsion and start taking care of myself. If you are a love addict you are dealing with your own life in terms of suicide. And sometimes you reverse it and go out there and talk about killing them. Homicide and suicide - that does create intensity, doesn’t it?
There are love addicts who specialize in relationships with sex addicts. That is their gig. Sex addicts are very, very charming. They are powerful, charming, seductive people. And they create the most intense relationships you can imagine. Trouble is that we mistake those relationships for love. So it is very common to see a love addict who is an addict in other ways, too - choosing to be in relationships with sex addicts, because that is the most intense, exciting one of all. And the intensity removes you from reality. That is part of the fantasy you create around the person that you are in a relationship with, and the nature of the relationship in the first place.
Most people don’t know how to sponsor a love addict. You’ve got to find someone who has sobriety from love addiction. If you can find a sex addict who has recovered from their sex addiction, they will usually also have some sobriety from love addiction. You need somebody who will recognize the circumstances and pace you through: close your mouth and breathe. Don’t set off any bombs. Close your mouth and breathe and don’t respond to any bombs. Ask for what you need and want, close your mouth and breathe. Ask for what you want and need, notice what you get and celebrate the NO. That’ll do it.
You have to start seeing it funny. That is the good news. Once you start seeing how it works, instead of being so grief stricken, you can start laughing about I. In seeing the insanity of it all you will get relief.
There is only one way to get sober. It doesn’t matter what addiction you are dealing with. There is only one way to grow up and out of your codependency and that is to do the foot work. You have to make the decision that you are going to get well and proceed to follow the directions and your awareness. If you are willing to do that you can get out of this mess. And it takes a sponsor who will kick you in the butt. It is hard work. It is not for babies. And it is not for somebody who is not willing to find out who they really are.
In addictive relationships you have the controller and the pleaser. The controller is the addict the pleaser is the love addict. The controller is the one who says: sit down and shut up. The pleaser is really a manipulator who gets people to sit down and shut up without telling them, which drives the addict insane. It drives the addict crazy. It also helps to create intensity, which is what everybody is after, because nobody wants to face the reality of who you are and who they are. And nobody wants to act like an adult.
Any of these addictions is about facing reality. Addictions are there to remove reality, because as a codependent you are too immature to face reality. Because if you faced it you would have to do something about it and you don’t know what to do, because you are too big of a baby.
The only way out of this one is to sit down, shut up, take directions and grow up. And stop blaming the other person for how miserable you are. You have to stop the big bony finger and have to stop blaming everybody else for how awful you feel. I had a black belt in blaming my partner. If he would just shape up and do what I tell him to do I’d be happy. Now that is delusion, because you are the only one who can make you happy, and nobody is going to love you as you try to tell them what to do so you can be happy. Besides, that is controlling and the addict’s reality and they hate that because they fear engulfment and intimacy.
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