Counselling
LOVE ADDICTION
Love Addiction is the pattern of being drawn into toxic or painful relationships with emotionally unavailable partners. These relationships usually involve obsessive time, attention, and value given to the other person. They are often either brief, intense relationships or longer relationships that tend to have many extreme ups and downs.
Love addiction creates fixations and compulsions in love interests and can play itself out in unhealthy behaviors toward loved ones. Love addicts can people please, putting the needs of others before their own. Love addiction can lead to significant personal and professional issues, including divorce, affairs, and poor job performance. It causes emotional distress such as anxiety and depression. Additionally, it can lead to relationship conflicts, enmeshment, clinginess, and trouble focusing on daily tasks.
Intense emotional highs, like passion, and lows, like heartbreak, can strain relationships and lead to resentment. Love addiction often involves a loss of control, similar to other addictions, including sex or substance abuse.
People who struggle with love addiction may idolize their love interest and pursue relationships for the sake of the honeymoon phase or become very clingy and overly dependent on their partner. Love addiction can take on the following symptoms, but these signs are not limited to this list:
- Needing to be in love.
- Putting the romantic partner on a pedestal.
- Obsessing over romantic interest.
- Experiencing cravings, withdrawals, euphoria, and dependency on their partner.
- Needing to fall in love often.
- Seeking emotional comfort from a partner to the point of unrequited love.
- An inability to be alone.
- You confuse sex with love, and offer sex with the hope of receiving love
People facing love addiction have several ways of showing up in such unions. Susan Peabody, known for her writings on love addiction cites 4 main types of love addicts:
- Obsessed/obsessive love addicts
- Codependent love addicts
- Narcissistic love addicts
- Ambivalent love addicts
The obsessed love addicts struggle with detaching from partners—even if the relationship is no longer healthy, or the partner is emotionally distant. The codependent love addict uses their partner as their source of self-esteem and self-worth. They tend to please in relationships, hoping to get validation from their significant other. If the other partner is codependent, it may not be a problem early into the relationship, but resentment can build if the partner seeks a more emotionally independent partner.
Codependent love addicts can look for worth in their relationships and may give to the point of exhaustion, or connect with partners who have addictions, or are emotionally unavailable, wanting to “fix” their partner. Love addiction has more dependence on a partner in comparison to codependency. Love addicts expect partners to give them purpose, but are unable to receive love from their partner, creating a lose-lose scenario. Alternatively, narcissistic love addicts place themselves in a position of power in their relationships. They exploit the partner, using them for a source of attention, ego-boosting, servitude, and more. Additionally, they can severely mistreat their partner, by ignoring them and acting out in selfishness. Despite this, there is an attachment to their partner.
Lastly, the ambivalent (or avoidant) love addict avoids true intimacy. They can function as the one who holds on to past loves, engages in one-sided relationships (unrequited love), and sabotage their relationships. Furthermore, they are addicted to the illusion of relationships but may run away or be inconsistent about getting close in relationships. Any of these models of love addicts can use sex to maintain unhealthy attachments, lie, manipulate, play out past relationship dynamics, or even threaten themselves or their partner if they decide to leave.
Love addiction is deeply rooted in a constant need for attention, validation, nurturing, and connection. Comprehensive treatment is essential for recovery. Therapy involves first stopping compulsive behaviors detoxing the brain from fantasy, and then attending to underlying emotional wounds that have led you to cope in this way. You will learn how to experience authentic intimacy and stay connected to yourself in a relationship.
PORN/SEX ADDICTION
This group is designed to help men who have just begun their sexual addiction recovery & want to better understand what it takes to move beyond addictive bondage to healthy freedom.
WOMEN'S INTIMACY GROUP
What we have uncovered in our experience is Porn and Sex Addiction might look similar for men and women on the outside but presents itself very differently.
GROUP-FEMALE PARTNER BETRAYAL TRAUMA
This group is for WOMEN who find themselves trapped, overwhelmed, or unsure how to respond to the shock of an intimate partner’s INFIDELITY, addiction, or chronic deceit.
GROUP - MALE PARTNER BETRAYAL TRAUMA
This group is for MEN who find themselves trapped, overwhelmed, or unsure how to respond to the shock of an intimate partner’s INFIDELITY, addiction, or chronic deceit.
TRAUMA GROUP
Trauma can result from stressful exposure to any type of single event or repetitive situation that leaves us feeling stuck with painful feelings and negative beliefs.