Love Addicts Often Need Support

An anxious person’s response to the intensity and desperation of their narcissistic partner may be to step beyond codependency and fall into love addiction. Even though we know we need to walk away, we will not always be able to do that. An addiction is something we repetitively do to protect us from feeling old pain and fear. The neurochemicals that get released in the early phase of relationships feel extra potent because as children we did not receive enough of them, so our reaction when we feel them release is heightened. In the grip of love addiction, our focus narrows until nothing else matters. All we can think about is finding and keeping a partner who will satisfy our craving for love. This urgent need is what keeps us coming back for more, even when we logically know the relationship is not good for us. When we get to this point, we’re in danger of losing ourselves entirely in the search for love’s momentary soothing. We are a perfect match for the narcissist’s need for a constantly adoring person who will endlessly provide worshipful attention, no matter how damaging to us. What is going on within our system when we find ourselves captured by love addiction? First of all, not only is it normal to crave a relationship with a loving partner, it’s equally normal to devote a lot of time to him or her in the beginning. You’re in love and your partner is all you can think about. It becomes hard to focus on work, and this person is all you talk about to your friends.

Get It Right The First Time

You obsess over his or her social media feeds and want to spend all of your time with her or him, hanging on their every word. You even begin to start looking into summer versus fall weddings. In the very early stages of a new love, we are literally high on a cocktail of neurochemicals and hormones designed to help us form an attachment with this person. Simply put, we can’t get enough. Next up, norepinephrine floods our system with energy, with an effect like being on amphetamines. We can’t eat, we can’t sleep, and we mistake our racing heart for a sign of true love. This person becomes all we can think about, and we start coming up with ways we should change to fit in with what we perceive as her or his needs. It makes sense that it’s easy to become addicted to this feeling. Who wouldn’t want to feel like the luckiest person in the world every day? A natural transition is trying to happen as a couple moves from constant seeking to feeling a trusting, ongoing bond with each other. As a relationship moves into the realm of lasting attachment, oxytocin, the cuddle hormone that’s also released during orgasm, childbirth, and breastfeeding, helps us form the trust necessary for monogamous bonds. For those of us whose injuries leave us most vulnerable to love addiction, that initial high feels so good and so absolutely necessary that it can easily be mistaken for the answer to our prayers, even though we are handing over our power in exchange for all these potent and exciting feelings. The chemicals combine to give us the sensation of having met somebody who is madly in love with us and seems to know instinctively how to fulfill our emotional needs.

Give Up the Ghost

This sounds exactly like what happens between parents and a new baby who are forming a secure bond. Meanwhile, the restless energy of the norepinephrine puts us on high alert for the first signs that they may be pulling away. Coupled with a drop in serotonin, we have more difficulty settling and begin to obsess about his or her every move until we can’t think about anything else. The responses of a narcissistic partner only intensify this process with their ongoing behaviors to keep us feeding their wounds. Before we know it, a biological process designed to help us form a lasting attachment is actually stirring up our deepest fears of abandonment, seeded in our early relationships. Deep down inside, our wounded Little Me is being called up, while back in the relationship, we begin to modify our behavior to try to keep getting even the most momentary infusion of this love cocktail. Both the narcissist and the love addict are in the grip of childhood wounds so severe that they are not in control of their responses to each other. It is a blessing when the relationship breaks apart, as there is virtually no hope for healing such wounds within the relationship. Love addicts often need support in leaving, but then the door is open to taking steps toward healing. The main difference between people with an avoidant attachment style and pathological narcissists is that the former often have the ability to look at their behaviors and take responsibility for their part. Their wounds aren’t so deep that it makes it impossible to do that. Many avoidant people can also feel empathy and vulnerability.

Stuck Inside A Cloud

This was the situation with Lauren and Peter, who couldn’t find their way through their difficulties to lasting partnership. However, it is also true that many avoidant people will be able to get the help they need to heal these old wounds. I have seen people invested in this work come out the other side with a greater depth of caring, understanding, and empathy than many couples who started from a healthier place. This is very good news indeed. Perhaps we can picture our body as a home, one that has the potential to be a sanctuary for us. A place to be quiet, to feel at ease, to get deeply in touch with our wounds and our needs. But for anybody who has experienced trauma, including emotional neglect, being fully in our body often feels unsafe. As we have learned, our earliest experiences create different sensations and feelings in our bodies, which send messages to our brains.