How to Overcome Love Addiction - Top 5 Core Issues to Address
How to Overcome Love Addiction - Top 5 Core Issues to Address
By Jim Hall MS, Love Addiction Specialist - Relationship Coach
This article describes what I believe are the five vital core issues on how to overcome love addiction in treatment for love addicts and anxiously attached individuals.
I've experienced an intense recovery process to break my addictive relationship patterns, and so I definitely can offer some vital feedback on this. People seeking answers to overcoming love addiction often ask a similar question: “How to get over love addiction and what are the key issues I need to work on to heal, become more secure, and change toxic relationship patterns?"
When we are new to love addiction recovery, we may mistakenly believe that recovery is limited to ‘getting over a bad breakup’, then simply moving on to find the right partner.
The reality is, unless we do the work dealing with specific problems that fuel love addiction and **toxic relationship patterns**, there will likely be little lasting growth. Finding the “right person” to love you will not work; your ‘radar’ will continue to attract unhealthy partners that are avoidant, selfish, or narcissistic.
In love addiction recovery, we learn to break the lie we as love addicts have bought into: that when the ‘perfect one,’ ‘Superman,’ or ‘Wonder Woman’ comes along, things will be fine. Do not fool yourself. No one will make you happy until you ‘get’ happy internally and gain the necessary awareness.
Furthermore, while surviving the withdrawal from a breakup or divorce of a bad relationship plays a critical role, it is just one piece of a bigger puzzle. We need to fix ourselves. But this doesn't mean you are broken. You are not broken.
The "fixing" has to do with detaching from carried false beliefs and distortions – rules we’ve lived with that have caused toxic relationship patterns resulting in pain, confusion, and loneliness. When we do this, we will realize and appreciate ourselves for who we are, and our romantic relationships can enhance instead of sabotaging our lives.
So what are these core issues that love addicts can deal with to assist in overcoming unhealthy patterns of becoming dependent on a person in romantic relationships?
What areas can you address to help you establish happy and satisfying love relationships and a secure sense of self?
Love addiction is caused primarily by what is underneath — that is, the underlying core symptoms.
I write a lot in my book The Love Addict in Love Addiction about these key core symptoms/characteristics that, from my experience, should be tackled to provide the best possibility of recovering effectively and successfully.
When we resolve most, if not all, of these primary issues, a future of experiencing a gratifying and fulfilling romantic relationship, unlike those from the past, becomes conceivable.
5 Core Issues I Believe Help Propel Love Addicts in Treatment and Recovery Over Love Addiction and Insecure Attachment Patterns:
1. Fear of Abandonment
Being abandoned is the love addict's greatest fear and is often triggered in close relationships, frequently keeping them stuck in miserable, unhappy relationships. Fear of abandonment often stems from childhood attachment trauma, growing up in less-than-nurturing family environments, contributing to anxious attachment.
2. Denial
Love addicts often enter relationships in denial — denial of their partner‘s reality, the relationship's true nature, and their own self. When this denial crumbles during a relationship or after a breakup, withdrawal symptoms will occur.
3. Impaired Self-Worth
Self-esteem issues also tend to come from attachment trauma and underlying toxic shame carried from childhood. Love addicts often have difficulty affirming their inherent value and worth, possess a distorted reality, and carry maladaptive beliefs about themselves, love, and intimacy.
Some signs and characteristics of self-esteem and insecurity issues might include:
- Perfectionism
- Placating
- Caretaking
- Rescuing
- Fear of intimacy
- Rejecting someone who wants to get close
- Enabling
- Martyr complex
- Victim mentality
4. Unrealistic Expectations
Love addicts often enter relationships with unrealistic expectations that no one can live up to, even their avoidant partner.
Because the love addict has difficulty meeting their own needs, they place unrealistic expectations on one person to meet all of their needs — to take care of them emotionally, physically, or financially, to fill their inner void, and to take away their fears, anxieties, and unbearable feelings of shame and low self-esteem. This consumes them.
They often (though not always) expect more from a relationship than any relationship can deliver. They fall for the Hollywood-inspired fantasy that even the most damaged person can love them no matter what. They will blame themselves when their partner fails to meet these expectations; they feel betrayed, frustrated, and angry; eventually, they wrongly conclude that the expectations aren’t being met because they’ve done something wrong, often taking on their partner's responsibilities.
5. Damaged Boundaries
Love addicts often enter relationships with little to no healthy boundaries. This can be displayed, for example, by tolerating intolerable behaviors from a lover; allowing a partner to control their feelings and actions; being too open in the initial stages of meeting someone; smothering their partner; making demands; or exhibiting extreme neediness.
Though one problem for love addicts resulting in unhealthy relationship patterns is the type of partners they choose and stay with, the real problem is NOT about any romantic partner. The problem lies in these core issues that have fueled toxic relationship patterns.
Most of us who have grown up in a dysfunctional family dynamic or have had traumatic or abusive experiences are also likely to foster this problem of loving obsessively.
We need to understand where our love-addicted issues came from and identify false beliefs about ourselves and relationships that continue to foster dysfunctional patterns. If we do not examine why we think, feel, and choose the things we have, recovery from love addiction is unlikely to succeed.
When we come to recognize and clearly identify them, we become more able to let them go through the treatment process and establish healthy behaviors. We become able to develop healthy boundaries, express them clearly, know how and when to share appropriately, be accountable, and express authentic love.
We need to learn how to embrace our feelings and emotions instead of ignoring, minimizing, or beating ourselves up for having feelings. When we can learn to honor and embrace our emotions and listen to the message that each emotion carries, we can begin to reverse our self-criticism and dependency on others.
With time, patience, and commitment to changing for the better, we can learn other behavioral options from which to choose instead of being locked into old, dysfunctional, familiar patterns.
Having an addiction to love is an insidious and cunning disorder. Despite this, there is hope.
Addressing these core issues with a skilled counselor, therapist, or qualified expert in love addiction makes breaking love addiction possible.
💬 Ready to overcome your love addiction? Work with Jim and break free! Explore 1-on-1 Coaching here.