Love Addiction - Process

Process

Ideally, love and addiction do not have anything at all to do with one another. They are polar opposites. Nothing could be further removed from genuine love. A common process of falling into love addiction begins when a person begins to feel sympathy with another person after going through an initially innocent moment of attraction and automatically idealizes the other to the point of divinity. The individual is then blindly attached to the other person, becoming incapable of making a realistic analysis of the situation; they may project all kinds of illusions onto the other person, believing them to be the only one that can bring happiness. This process can be very quick. There are, however, those who never go past this stage of blind love, and remain 'addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up...parasitism, not love'.

Obsession can be considered the primary symptom of any addiction. In love addiction, the individual's insecurity gives rise to an obsessive attachment to the object of their affection. It typically manifests as an insatiable hunger that distorts the person's perception of reality and often results in various unhealthy behaviors and suffering. Those at high risk for love addiction include recovering alcoholics/addicts who use relationships as a form of substitution, and/or individuals who grow up in alcoholic/dysfunctional family systems.