Any kind of addiction even in the guise of the word Love is still an addiction.
Addiction happens when you rely on someone or something to the extent of putting everything you have just to feel something.
A rush, an emotion- you undergo it to feel something- to distract your mind into facing your actual problems in life and hinders you from resolving them.
Any form of addiction is bound to be harmful, to become addicted to something means to have something in excess.
Signs of A Love Addict:
1. A love addict will value another person above themselves even to the point of obsession.
2. A love addict will neglect their care for their own welfare, they could abandon important aspects of their lives. This could include their career, children, family and they could fail to improve certain aspects of their life especially their well being just to stay connected to the object of their affection.
3. A love addict will usually expect that someone else will solve their problems, that is it the duty of another person to provide them care and unconditional regard at all times.
A love addict expects another person to save them from feeling lonely, and when there needs are not met the love addict will feel resentful and would create conflict with their relationships with others.
4. Love addicts when not involved in the care of others, are usually able to take care of themselves well, but when they become involved they lose the ability to properly care for themselves.
What are the usual reasons why people become Love addicts?
People who have a history of love addiction have previously suffered abandonment from their parents or guardians.
During their childhood they were not given proper validation by parents and were not given a good loving connection with one or both parents.
This has greatly affected their self-esteem and they carried it on their adult life. A person easily addicted to love will usually hate the feeling of being abandoned- and they will also form a subconscious fear of real intimacy.
Most of the time a person easily addicted to love is just searching for the rush, the intensity and not really focused on finding the meaning of what real intimacy is.
How does one reach real intimacy?
Real intimacy is reached only through self-discovery and not the other way around. A lot of people commit the mistake of finding intimacy with another person without truly understanding who they are first.
Instead of taking the time to figure out ourselves first, we immediately jump into the messiness of diving into another person's life. Instead of facing ourselves first, we expect others to perform the discovering of ourselves.
We want the other person to know us, to understand us, but how can that be possible if we on our own do not know who we are.
The main line of a fight in a relationship are the words " You do not understand me".
Here lies the problem, we are expecting someone else to understand what we mean, what we say, what we feel--what we are doing when we on our own are not able to know what we really want in life.
When this happens there comes a huge communication gap. Instead of being able to reach full intimacy with another person we will get stuck complaining- instead of becoming more thoughtful and clear on what we want- we end up confusing one another.
We fail to see our own life, or real character, we are unable to understand the good parts of the other person as well as to extend our patience with their bad parts because we have not done that yet- we have not examined our own life yet.
How to reach Intimacy:
The first assignment of a person who want to reach real intimacy with another person- is to first understand or know themselves.
This means facing our own demons, it means penetrating our own mind, removing our masks, the pretensions we have, the deceptions we have created about ourselves and our own life.
To remove our disguise and to be truthful about who we are- what we really want to do in life--
Most of the time we have been subjected into liking something, into agreeing with something, a lot of people want to control our actions- our future.
The media tells us what to do, our parents tell us what to do, our friends dictate to us what we need to become--- and until we are able to step away and hear our own voice...the process of reaching an honest relationship with another person is not possible.
Because intimacy is about honesty--if we are not even honest about what we really want in life-- we cannot expect to get to the intimacy that we are hoping for.
If we are able to face our own anxieties, our own truths--it would be easier for us to open up and be available for another person- we would actually have the time and patience to get to know another person deeply and meaningfully without being constantly bombarded with our fears, insecurities and weaknesses.
Love Yourself
The best way to cure Love addiction is to Love Yourself.
Most of us are taught that we if we love ourselves- we are selfish. Most religions and traditions will tell us to love others, and to forget loving ourselves.
This is where failure begins, we tend to think that by giving too much effort, too much of ourselves to others to the point of forgetting ourselves that we begin to reach a good point in our life.
But acts that result to leaving our own life and soul impoverished by giving too much will only result into a lost soul.
A lot of traditions and culture teach us to avoid self love- people condemn it- they make us believe that if we listen to ourselves, that if we follow our heart that we are an egoist.
By loving oneself we become egotistic or a narcissist. But this is simply not true, because a man who has value for himself, a man who respects their own body and beliefs- a man who loves their own self are the only ones who can love others.
If a man loves himself- he will not be egotistic, because a person who has learned to respect their own mind would be able to cultivate themselves.
They would be able to find their path in life and they will learn to be happy even when they are on their own and will not find the need to drag others.
Their cup will be filled with hope, a person who is full of love for themselves will be able to give freely without asking something in return.
Only people who give everything that they have without leaving options for themselves become bitter with life.
Here are several lines taken from the teachings of Osho:
"But you have an idea of love; that idea is creating trouble – not love itself, but the idea. The idea is that, in love, lovers disappear into each other, dissolve into each other. Yes, there are moments of dissolution – but this is the beauty of life and all that is existential: that when lovers dissolve into each other, the same are the moments when they become very conscious, very alert. That dissolution is not a kind of drunkenness, that dissolution is not unconscious. It brings great consciousness, it releases great awareness. On the one hand they are dissolved – on the other hand for the first time they see their utter beauty in being alone. The other defines them, their aloneness; they define the other. And they are grateful to each other. It is because of the other that they have been able to see their own selves; the other has become a mirror in which they are reflected. Lovers are mirrors to each other. Love makes you aware of your original face.
When we are already aware of who we are- if we are at a point in our lives where we are able to relax our mind and we are able to put our attention to how we want life to be- and we have processed the steps into reaching that life--that is the only time we should be In a relationship.
We cannot expect to reach the intimacy that we want with another person if we have not even learned to be kind and intimate with ourselves.
Until we have reached a point where we are honest about who we are, our fears, until we recognize the things that terrify us and have worked towards finding a way into curing these sensitive areas without relying on someone else to do the work for us--we must postpone getting into deep.
We have to examine our thoughts, the quality of thoughts that enter- so that we can avoid living in self-denial- we could avoid abusing ourselves and we could avoid another person from abusing us.
First, we must have an honest scrutiny and self-examination- that is the only way we would be truly open to someone else-- we would be able to discern why we feel certain feelings- why we fear certain things and we would be able to avoid blaming someone else for what we feel.
We can start taking responsibility for our own life instead of expecting someone to do it for us. We can stop relying- we can overcome the expectations that are eating us up and we would be able to find room to give because we have taken the time to fill up our own love meter.- we can avoid clinging or getting addicted to a certain rush.
