Lately I started to pay more attention to people. Starting with me, knowing what and who I am at my core, I try to pay attention to what affects others and what reactions are determined in other people by several social aspects, fact which can be easily understood from their personal stories and background.
This way, I came to find out more and understand what emotional addiction really means. I prefer to generalize it under the name of emotional addiction because, as we will see further, love is not the only thing that causes psychological addiction in us.
Although we are all somehow addicted to our loved ones and the people in our life, there is though, a fine line between healthy relationships and toxic situations that tend to go off track if we don’t pay enough attention to ourselves. But these things don’t just happen from one day to another, they are the result of unhealed emotional wounds from the past.
There are situations in our proximity which have their roots in spoken words or facts that generate inside a person or better said, unlock wounds that have been created in their early childhood and which for one reason or another remained unhealed.
This factors can vary from social rejection, improper family environments where we can add, physical or psychological abuse, lack of affection, lack of attention to effective abandonment.
All this aspects open wounds inside of us, and that is not a new thing to say. The bible and in some ways all religions and all the self-development books too, say that we must love others like we love ourselves therefore they underline that before learning to love others we must love who we are. There’s no doubt in that but recently I was watching an interview at Oprah’s Soul Sunday in which they explained in such a beautiful way that when you love yourself first, you take time and care for filling your soul with good and positive things and only then, when you reached a limit of fullness, from an emotional point of view, only then you start sharing, loving others, paying forward all the good things that fill your heart, mind and soul, only then you are capable of filling others with love.
It is true though, I can’t ignore a few aspects here that are a little bit hard to manage. Yes, first you must learn to love yourself so you can love others but this is like a sword - it has two sharp sides so you must be careful. Because in fact, society is the one that teaches us how to love
ourselves and others, accepting who we are and showing love towards our person in the first place. Starting with
our parents, play mates, school colleagues, work colleagues and so on we (should) learn how to love and accept who we are.
If love and acceptance doesn't come from the outside world, we grow with negative thoughts that build our inside
world and our character, knowing at a mental level that others think about us in a certain way and therefore we will act and react in consequence to those inner beliefs.
Going through life like this, at some point in our life, let’s say, as teenagers we hit a wall made of words like: you’re lazy, you’re sloppy, you’re good for nothing etc. moment in which, to say the truth, everything we have been told in one way or another when we were kids becomes
reality in the teenager/adult that we become.
This things mean in fact a huge empty space inside of us, created by the lack of attention and affection we must have felt in our childhood, because missing a child of this things that are normal and human in the end is like telling him indirectly: you do not count, you are not important, I have better things to do than listening, loving you or going out for a walk with you. And then at a close age to adulthood it becomes very hard to find out by yourself why no one seems to want you. But the answer is simple, because you haven’t learned to want yourself, to love and care for yourself. You never learned to accept and understand who you really are because no one gave you the chance to do it. Precisely because you never felt any curiosity from others to know and understand who you are. As a consequence that follows the fact that you never learned this things, you also never learned to trust yourself and who you are and what you can or may do.
But not everything is lost. This things can be recovered step by step, learning to offer yourself what others have denied you without maybe even knowing: attention, trust, comprehension, because there is nothing in this world on which, what or who you can rely on, more than your own
self.
On the other hand, I must say there is also another perspective to this kind of things, because, in the end, according to the title of this piece, we are referring to emotional addiction, therefore, all the things, mentioned above, have or tend to have one or more of the following consequences:
Arrived at an adult age you may encounter one of the following situations:
You may not manage to be/feel alone. Starting from the fact that no matter the social context you are in you feel that you don’t fit, you don’t manage to adapt, you can’t find
your place in the world and you always feel the need for company and not being left alone at home. This happens as a consequence of not trusting yourself enough to feel
capable enough of facing unpredictability and this lack of self-trust can affect several aspects of our life but this is another discussion.
You get attached to someone before things really matter. As far as I’m concerned this thing may happen because of one or both of the following reasons: either one of our
parents have been out of the equation, either even if they were present, they have been emotionally absent from our lives and they left in us an empty space which can be felt in
our future relationships, romantic or not. The biggest problem here is that when you depend emotionally on someone it’s possible that at the beginning you don’t even notice until life continues it’s way and the one for whom you have developed such an addiction is no longer close to you. Basically your source and daily doze of attention, affection and trust suddenly has been taken away and it won’t be any more at your disposal.
When this happens usually you may have the following symptoms:
. You may feel a lack of energy and power of will to actually do something every day.
If the attachment has been made toward a person of the opposite sex, probably to this is added also the fact that you feel you miss them and you have no air when they’re not around, until they call you or text you. But you don’t really miss them. You were like an empty jar waiting to be filled with all that was missing: energy, desire to live, attention, affection.
Now that they’re gone, there’s no one who can fill the jar anymore, and for a while you feel that nothing you do has a meaning because you built your universe around a single person, and people leave.
Even if you are not in that context anymore, your mind is still there, you still leave like that person is still part of your present. Way in which, memories remain alive months or even years because you always make verbal connections of present situations to past ones (a past that is still very present for you).
Another symptom to take in consideration is that: you would do everything to bring those memories back in the present.
The problem is that nothing lasts forever, and we need to learn to deal with that. Life never repeats itself - we are the ones that always fall in our own traps and incapability.
Octavian Paler, a Romanian writer, used to say that ‘’what we haven’t lived at the right time, we will never live again’’ - it’s a saying that I very much enjoy and appreciate and I often consider it's meaning to be very relevant.
This kind of symptoms, I consider to be available for what I like to call passive emotional addiction. I choose to call it passive because it can develop in the absence of an actual
romantic relationship. It can very well developed in apparently normal inter-human relationships.
The above mentioned symptoms are the main symptoms.
On a second perspective, but not less important are the feelings of shame or guilt we feel towards that person, which again can develop from a lack of self-trust and fear of rejection, from the fact that someplace deep inside you, you don’t feel good enough or worthy enough for someone to like you and love you for who you really are.
Love and Emotional Addiction is hard to cover in a few words and the only way someone can heal is through the development of their self-trust and by accepting who they are and what they are at their core. By learning that if we don’t care about ourselves no one will, and no one
will be able to fill that inside jar endlessly because once we feel someone has fixed us a little, they will leave because we all have our own path in life and if today we find ourselves on one track and meet someone, tomorrow we may change track and meet someone else and so on, all with the aim to learn from each other, for personal and spiritual growth.
If you place all your hopes in a single person, what will you have left when they leave?
This was an extract from my next book: Love addiction and other social drugs. I hope you enjoyed it and I am waiting for your feedback on my Facebook Page:
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I can’t wait to see your message!
Take care my friend,
Ralu The Writer
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