Status Updates From Facing Love Addiction: Givi...

They seek The Person who will relieve the stress of the original abandonment experience. As adults, almost any other person will do: a lover, a parent, a friend, their own children, a counselor, a minister. If the other party isn't powerful, it doesn't matter. The Love Addict will invest this person with enough imaginary power and unconditional love to make the Love Addict whole and deliriously happy.

Not only is it irrational to expect unconditional positive regard from another person, it seems preposterous to expect a person who is trying to avoid intimacy to take care of us.

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Not only do Love Addicts have inaccurate beliefs about who their partner is, they feel angry because of their repeated disappointment in the partner for not behaving according to their expectation (which is of a Higher Power). Love Addicts begin to retaliate with toxic fighting against what they interpret as a willful failure to love on the part of the other party.

Eventually, as Love Addicts try harder and harder to manipulate the other person to live up to the mental image they have created […] they experience repeated disappointments, because no one can satisfy these insatiable desires. When the pain gets bad enough, Love Addicts may even decide to end the relationship, only to find that they can live neither with nor without their partners.

I’m throwing this book away

These two fears—of abandonment and intimacy-bring up the agonizing and self-defeating dilemma of the Love Addict. Love Addicts consciously want intimacy but can't tolerate healthy close-ness, so they must unconsciously choose a partner who cannot be intimate in a healthy way.

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So in adulthood, while Love Addicts often think they are intimate and are seeking an intimate relationship, they are in fact frightened by offers of healthy intimacy because they don't know what to do. When they reach a certain level of closeness, they often panic and do something to create distance between themselves and their partners again.

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