Love Addiction
Using the healthy relationship approach I work with clients on healing addictions and their underlying causes. My approach includes comprehensive treatment modules used by The Meadows, Life Healing Center, and The Ranch treatment facilities. I am able to support individuals, couples and families in the treatment of and recovery from sex and love addiction. In addition to personal consultations, I offer a Love Addiction and Love Avoidance Coaching services.
Wondering if you suffer from Love Addiction? Check out my Love Addiction Assessment. Wondering if you could be struggling with sexual addiction? Check out the Sexual Addiction Assessment. You can also determine if your relationship exhibits signs of addictive love by taking my Relationship Assessment.
Common Questions about Love Addiction
What Is Love Addiction?
People develop addictions to shield themselves from intolerably painful feelings. An addiction always creates harmful, often ignored consequences. Only when the addiction becomes unmanageable will people do something about it. Love addicts spend much time, effort on a person to whom they are addicted. Love addicts value this person above themselves, and their focus on the beloved other often is obsessive. This behavior results in love addicts neglecting to care for themselves in a variety of ways, in essence abandoning important aspects of their lives and well-being to stay connected to the object of their affections.
Love addiction results from not getting all the necessary developmental information we needed at the times we needed it. I refer to this as Emotional Immaturity. When we suffer from emotional immaturity we struggle to interact with others in ways that are moderate and based in reality. Love Addicts, and Love Avoidants, lack the necessary psychosocial, and emotional information, and experiences, to live their lives in securely attached ways.
What is romance addiction?
Romance Addiction as a condition where the object of love has the power to provide a neurobiological fix. The object may be a person or a fantasy of someone we have never met. The high is obtained through thinking about the relationship you could have, getting the “fix” of euphoric feelings in your fantasy. The primary issue is related to a person’s ability to live in reality with what is true and what is being created.
Fantasizing about the love object or overall fantasy becomes the obsession in romance addiction and creates a state of limerence. In limerence a person will obsessively think and fantasize about a perfect union to create feelings of satiation and comfort. However, in reality the union does not exist. The roots of Romance addiction generally go back to early caregiver relationships where children may have created stories about an absentee parent who really loved them but could not show up for them for one reason or another. It is seen in everywhere in popular culture, and romance addiction is often encouraged by social norms to alleviate uncomfortable feelings of loss and abandonment. Romance addiction differs slightly from love addiction as a result of the strong tendency for high levels of melodrama and/or the absence of any relationship based in reality.
Are only partners addicted to each other?
Love addiction doesn’t necessarily pertain only to romantic or sexual relationships. It is possible for a person to relate as a love addict with their friends, children, sponsor, guru or religious figure, parent, or even with a movie star, whom they have never met.
A love addict’s core fantasy is the expectation that someone else can solve their problems, provide unconditional positive regard at all times, and take care of them. When this unrealistic need isn’t met, love addicts may find themselves feeling resentful, and may create conflict in their relationships with others.
Some love addicts find that when not involved in a love-addicted relationship, they are able to care for themselves quite adequately. However, when they become involved, the love addict quickly finds that their self-care capacity steadily declines.
What Causes Love and Romance Addiction?
People generally become love addicts due to a past history of abandonment from their primary caregivers. Adult love addicts usually recognized as children that their most precious needs for validation, love and connection with one or both parents were not met. This affects their self-esteem dramatically in adult life. It results in a conscious fear of abandonment and an underlying subconscious fear of intimacy. To a love addict, intensity in a relationship is often mistaken for intimacy.
What Can I do?
Love addicts experience severe withdrawal symptoms. Love addiction and food addiction are the hardest conditions to recover from, they have a high relapse rate and most individuals, who may seek treatment, often fall back into adapted relational patterns they established earlier in life. Many people, and arguable society as a whole, fail to recognize addictive love, and rather see it as “real” love, due to the high feeling intensity and neurochemical flooding created by the limerence stage of attraction. Working with a therapist can help guide the love addict through the process of talking about childhood experiences of abandonment, navigating through the feelings of pain, fear, anger and emptiness that may surface, and releasing old emotions that contribute to negative acting-out behaviors.
A solid relationship with a skilled therapist trained in love and sex addiction can help guide the love addict through this process.
As with any addiction, recovery from love addiction is a process of self-discovery. It requires taking specific steps: breaking through denial and acknowledging the addiction; owning the harmful consequences of the addiction; and intervening to stop the addictive cycle from occurring.
How Can Leslie Root COunseling Help?
I am a certified Love Addiction Healthy Relationship Clinical Practitioner trained by Brenda Schaeffer author of "Is It Love or Is It Addiction." In addition to Brenda’s training I am also trained in the PIT (post induction therapy) Model developed by Pia Melody. Using the healthy relationship approach I work with clients on healing addictions and their underlying causes. My approach includes comprehensive treatment modules used by The Meadows, Life Healing Center, and The Ranch treatment facilities. I am able to support individuals, couples and families in the treatment of and recovery from sex and love addiction. Get information on the Relationship Recovery Coaching Program Here to discuss how I can help in your healing process. Learn more about my approach to Love Addiction here.
Enneagram Relationship Recovery Coaching Program
Love Addiction and Love Avoidance enneagram informed coaching program
The enneagram combined with relationship (love addiction) recovery is one of the best ways to transform our relationships. Most of our models for relationship are very skewed and lacking the tools necessary for us to have the love we want. My work with clients over the years has taught me that we need a good foundation to have the love we want and move out of our addiction to love and codependent ways. This program takes us through the transformative power of the Enneagram Relationship Recovery model to identify healthy ways of relating and avoid unhealthy behaviors. This program is designed to support us with identifying the missing chunks of information that prevent us from having developed strategies for successful relationships. It will show you how to take these underdeveloped parts of yourself and essentially “Grow them up.” My decade plus work with couples and individuals who want love but can’t seem to get it has taught me that growing ourselves up and filling in the missing content creates the landscape needed for successful relationships.
Some Areas of Focus
• Creating and maintaining healthy boundaries
• Understanding what drives addiction
• Creating support and accountability
• Identifying healthy and unhealthy relationship patterns
• Working the 7 steps from addiction to healthy belonging
• Having support for letting go of unhealthy relationships
• Processing underlying causes of addictive patterns of love
Please contact me for more information about this service.