Answer Addiction

Tag: love addict

  • Using Love as a Drug

    Using Love as a Drug

    I used drugs and alcohol to control my feelings and gave up on relationships early on since people are harder to control than substances. As I felt the other person pull away, my urge to control increased.

    Recently I was sitting in a meeting with a little over two years sober, feeling completely insane. For a few months, my moods vacillated between elation and utter sadness, complete faith and deadbeat nihilism, raging excitement and total fear. I was leaning into the program of AA more than ever. I was attending meetings every day, sticking to my spiritual practice, sponsoring two women, and regularly checking in with my sponsor. Even so, I wasn’t able to find any middle ground. The emotional chaos raging inside me was very reminiscent of active addiction. I felt so twisted I asked myself: Am I even sober?

    I googled the word “sober” and found a source that defined it as “being unaffected by alcoholism.” Fuck! I’M NEVER GOING TO BE SOBER, I thought. Over two years without any mind-altering substance in my body and serenity felt that far out of reach.

    You hear about people feeling messed up and hitting bottoms all the time in sobriety. But there’s a flip side to that: you can feel just as good in sobriety as you did in active addiction when the drugs and alcohol were actually working. At its best, it’s what the Big Book calls “being rocketed into a fourth dimension.” In my experience, the highs in sobriety get higher and so do the bottoms. Even so, feelings can come as quite a shock in early sobriety since they’re no longer being regulated or masked with drugs or alcohol.

    They say that for real alcoholics, the problems really begin once the drink is removed. My obsession to drink and do drugs was removed through working the 12 steps in AA (a few times) and the idea of picking up a drink or drug rarely, if ever, crossed my mind. This in itself is the ultimate miracle.

    But alcoholism is a beast that will show up in many forms. Once the obsession is lifted, the addict/alcoholic mind will quickly move on to other things: coffee, cigarettes, shopping, gambling, sex, eating disorders, social media, take your pick. In my case, it shifted towards arguably the greatest drug of all time: love.

    “Love” can mean different things to different people and our understanding of love has been shaped by what we saw growing up and our past experiences. As a point of reference, I use renowned spiritual teacher and physician David R. Hawkins’ Map of the Scale of Consciousness, which categorizes every level of consciousness a person can experience into levels of falsehood and levels of truth. Shame is the lowest energy field in falsehood where one feels hateful towards themselves and views a Higher Power as despising, and Enlightenment is the highest in truth where one feels completely attuned and at one with a Higher Power.

    Based on this structure, I propose that love is an energy field in an array of consciousness that we can fall in and out of at any moment. In Hawkins’ scale, Love is sandwiched right above Reason and below Joy. So here, we see that love is literally beyond reason. According to Hawkins, it is here that a person experiences feelings of reverence and revelation before transcending into Joy where one views themselves as complete. Perhaps this helps explain why our culture is so fixated and obsessed with the idea that another person can “complete” us.

    The process of revelation may come to an addict easily since, for many of us, any human connection at all in early sobriety is unprecedented and revolutionary. For years I used drugs and alcohol to connect with people around me. As I continued to develop a sense of belonging with others in sobriety, and saw it was possible that I could feel emotions of such a loving nature, I felt as if I had been “rocketed” into that fourth dimension the Big Book referred to.

    In his excellent book Unsubscribe: Opt Out of Delusion, Tune in to Truth, recovered addict and Dharma teacher Josh Korda explains that feelings of attraction and infatuation create a neural surge of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is related to our rewards state and motivation. The same neurotransmitter that floods your brain after two drinks, that thing that makes you go “Ahhhh.”

    As an addict, I was bound to chase that high. I was driven by an obsession of the mind and a phenomenon of craving. All I wanted was to feel that rush. Even a text message would send the dopamine levels up. It wasn’t long before this relationship dictated my every move, just like drugs and alcohol did. It was no different than when I chased one high to the next in active addiction, doing everything in my power to find relief and a sense of control. (For the sake of disclosure and to spare the theory of sex addiction, there was no sex involved.)

    Without realizing it, I’d become hooked. And with every high, there comes a crash.

    During the crashes, I found myself resorting to some lower-level behaviors I had not seen in a while. My behavior was extremely erratic, I couldn’t stay focused, and I was irritable unless my craving was satisfied. My addiction found its way into other areas of my life and unmanageability and insanity crept in once again.

    Once someone becomes addicted, they lose their free will and will do anything in their control to satisfy the craving. Referring back to Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, the addict falls into another state entirely: Desire. Often confused with Love, Desire is actually one of the states of falsehood, along with Guilt, Shame, Fear, and Hatred. Desire itself can never truly be satisfied, because it’s based in an illusion. One wants what they can’t have. It is here that nothing is good enough, everything fails to hit the mark, and any other place and time is better than the present moment. This conjures the state of restlessness, irritability, and discontentedness. This internalized state eventually turns so wretched that drugs and alcohol appear to be the solution again. My alcoholic mind took all its evil twists and turns so that once I exhausted all other alternatives, I “all of a sudden” had the thought, A line of coke and a shot would make all of this go away.

    That is the insanity of drug addiction and alcoholism.

    Naturally, there is an impermanence to all things and all states; a simple fact of life I could never easily accept and consistently fought against. Feelings ebb and flow, usually without any sense or rationale behind them. Relationships are not guaranteed. As an addict who is obsessed with control and wants to feel good all the time, these truths are not easy pills to swallow. I used drugs and alcohol to control my feelings and gave up on relationships early on since people are harder to control than substances. As I felt the other person pull away, my urge to control increased.

    I tried to take control of my feelings back. I had no desire to pick up a drink or drug at the time, but my addiction manifested in my anorexia, chain smoking, excessive running, drinking too much caffeine. Meanwhile, I still attempted to control the course of the relationship. Even my participation in AA was extremely alcoholic in that I was using the tools to fix the way I felt, rather than simply living with it. (Yes, it is possible to do the 12 steps like a drug.)

    It was suggested to me that I was perhaps a love addict, to which I countered: Am I love addict or am I simply an addict who now participates in relationships? I did attempt to dive back into the 12 steps yet again, but this time in the area of relationships, so I could just figure it out and then just not be that way anymore. It didn’t work.

    One thing I’ve learned in recovery is that this is all super normal, human stuff. People meet other people, develop feelings and feel the adrenaline and dopamine rush of a crush and the heady feelings in the beginning of a relationship. Everyone experiences rejection and break-ups. However, my experience as an addict is that I did not thoroughly develop in these areas because I was never truly there for them. My emotional growth was stunted when I began to use drugs and alcohol, and sobriety is a big catching up game in terms of emotional intelligence. It’s how I cope with these normal life experiences that matters and what I found was that I was still living alcoholically, even without drugs or alcohol in my system.

    Is all of this to say that addicts should shy away from connecting with others, initiating new relationships, and striving for new, unadulterated levels of intimacy? Am I doomed in every relationship because I’m an addict and alcoholic? Absolutely not.

    One of the greatest things about recovery is its wide invitation to exist on this plane with other people, to feel things the way humans should. These developments can take years to even out. In recovery, we get to challenge our false belief systems and stumble around with everyone else learning how to care about each other effectively. Relationships are where we see our character defects in action, where we experience life, where we ultimately grow in the process. The longer I stay sober, the greater my capacity to connect with others and to be honest becomes. And it all boils down to this: There is no way to grow spiritually in isolation.

    All I needed to remember was one of the simplest things I heard when I first got sober: The unmanageability would cease as soon as I relinquished control. Just as it did with drinking and doing drugs.

    I was back at step one and had to get honest. With truth and reality can come a lot of pain and suffering, but it’s not the truth that causes it. It’s the extent to which and for how long someone lives in a false reality that perpetuates suffering. Not only was I driven by the same obsession of the mind and phenomenon of craving that drove me in active addiction, I was also driven by the false belief that people, places, and things are on this planet for me to prove my worthiness and to validate my experience.

    The old ideas and beliefs that drive us in our relationships were constructed by years and years of living in falsehood. Now, in active recovery, we chip away at those old ideas and free ourselves from those false beliefs.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How I Conquered My Relationship Insecurity

    How I Conquered My Relationship Insecurity

    I didn’t engage in behaviors like calling or texting multiple times—if anything, I did the opposite, out of fear of being perceived as needy—but the thoughts alone, their irrationality and all-consuming anxiety, caused me a lot of pain.

    Fear of abandonment, jealousy, and general insecurity in romantic relationships leads many in the dating scene to be labeled the dreaded “needy.” It’s a pejorative that’s especially used to describe women, an insult that dismisses someone as being “crazy” for simply needing reassurance and consistent contact. Of course, men can suffer from the “needy” label too, but they often fall into the “unavailable” camp—aloof, distant, indifferent, and detached, which can quickly earn them the title “asshole.” Sadly, most folks don’t know the roots of these behaviors, so we’re left throwing insults at fellow daters rather than understanding that these traits date back to childhood.

    For years I thought I didn’t fall into the “needy” camp. Many of my past relationships were with men who bordered on needy themselves, so I never needed to feel insecure—if anything, they were the insecure ones, always vying for my time and attention. There was little reason to fear abandonment. It wasn’t until this past year that I discovered that if I’m invested in someone who is a bit more independent, my anxiety and fear of rejection can become nearly intolerable.

    Enter the man who is now my partner, Matthew*. The day after our first date, he sent me a very sweet text complimenting both my personality and appearance while adding that he would love to see me again, and soon. Just a few days later, we had our second date, and a few days after that, our third, and by that time I realized I could really fall for him.

    After our fourth date, I was officially hooked, and that’s when the anxiety hit. Now I was invested, and that meant that if a few days passed and I didn’t hear from him, I assumed he was over it. And I was so terrified of seeming needy that I rarely initiated a text. When I did, it would sometimes take hours for him to respond; that’s just his nature, being a very busy person, but when he didn’t respond right away, I’d once again assume he was over it. Despite all the fear, I’d always hear from him, often with a “Sorry, hun, wish I could have gotten back to you sooner!” text.

    At the time, I thought I was going slightly crazy. Part of me knew I was just being paranoid, and part of me kept buying into the irrational thoughts telling me that he was going to drop me. I knew that ghosters—people who vanish from seemingly stable dating scenarios for no reason whatsoever—were everywhere. But Matthew hadn’t given me any reason to think he might leave; all of his words and actions displayed evidence that he wasn’t going anywhere. Still, I worried and worried—every day waiting for the other shoe to drop—for Matthew to show some sign of disinterest.

    I comforted myself with thoughts like “Once we’re exclusive, this anxiety will go away.” Well, we became exclusive, and the anxiety did not go away. Even after he said “I love you,” I was still fixated on the fear that he would leave. No, I didn’t engage in “crazy” behaviors like calling or texting multiple times—if anything, I did the opposite, out of fear of being perceived as needy—but the thoughts alone, their irrationality and all-consuming anxiety, caused me a lot of pain.

    The pain prompted me to do some research on relationship insecurity—I had to know what the hell was wrong with me. That’s when I learned about attachment styles and the important role they play in romantic relationships. My fear of abandonment is a classic sign of an anxious attachment.

    British psychologist John Bowlby began exploring what he termed attachment theory in the 1960’s, and he conducted further research alongside psychologist Mary Ainsworth throughout the second half of the 20th century. According to Bowlby, the ways in which primary caregivers relate to infants and children greatly influence how they relate to others in their adult lives. Contemporary psychologists have expanded on Bowlby’s theory, many writing about the huge impact our attachment styles have on our romantic relationships and even how we perform at work. There’s also a study underway to determine what role, if any, attachment styles play in opioid addiction.

    Attachment theory posits that adults with secure attachment styles—around 50 percent of the population—had parents who were attentive, nurturing, calm, and, most importantly, consistent in this behavior. Those with anxious attachment styles usually had caregivers who were inconsistent, sometimes attentive, loving, and nurturing, and at other times distracted, distant, cold, or unresponsive to the child’s needs. Anxious attachments can also result from having overly-anxious or intrusive caregivers (this is probably how I wound up with an anxious attachment, as my mother often became too worried that something bad might happen to me.) Children who grew up with mostly aloof and detached parents typically wind up with an avoidant attachment style, those who crave intimacy but push it away out of fear.

    Unfortunately, people with anxious attachment styles often gravitate to those with avoidant attachment styles, and vice versa, and this causes all sorts of heartache. Those who have secure attachment patterns are often already paired up—they’re the folks who are content in long-term relationships and forging lasting intimate bonds. This explains why spending lots of time on dating apps can sometimes lead to crushed hopes over and over again. If all the healthy folks are already in relationships, what’s left are a lot of people who may have some emotional baggage that begs sorting through.

    If you’ve ever attended a SLAA meeting, you’ve probably heard of the “love addict” and the “love avoidant.” In many ways, the love addict mirrors someone with an anxious attachment style—the deep need for connection and intimacy is a quality inherent in both personality types. Naturally, the “love avoidant” described in SLAA mirrors the avoidant attachment style.

    According to SLAA philosophy, the antidote to love addiction or love avoidance is the 12 steps, steps that require faith in a power greater than oneself, the admitting of character defects, and turning over one’s will to God as we understand Him. Though I’m not anti-SLAA per se, I do find it interesting that the terms “love addict” and “love avoidant” actually have roots in psychological theory, so the cause of the insecurity may have less to do with character defects and more to do with the way we were parented.

    Though an insecure attachment style may sound like a curse for anyone who’s looking for long-term love, there’s good news: anyone can change their insecure attachment style to a secure one through psychodynamic therapy, being in a healthy relationship with a securely-attached partner, and also by becoming a parent.

    It took a combo of consistent psychodynamic therapy and my relationship with Matthew, who has a secure attachment style, to help ease all of my anxieties. They haven’t gone away completely, but I have seen demonstrable improvement since I started working on them. I realized how far I’d come when he took a second business trip for a few days. The first time this happened, I grew anxious when I didn’t hear from him; this time when he went out of town, I didn’t fret once during his entire week away. Sure, I missed him, especially since we’re now living together, but I wasn’t ruminating on the idea that he would never return, and I actually ended up having a great week just hanging out with my friends.

    For someone with an anxious attachment style, behavior like calling or texting the object of their affection repeatedly throughout the day, or prying into their personal business, can emerge. Not surprisingly, all these attempts at reassurance turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy—they push the other person away. If the partner is avoidant, he or she can get angry, dismissing the anxious person’s needs. If the partner is securely attached, they are more likely to be reassuring, but not if the behavior is continually hostile, accusatory, or pathological. In the event that this behavior surfaces, odds are the securely-attached partner will withdraw.

    Though I didn’t engage in destructive behaviors with Matthew, my anxiety did reach a point where I had to share this struggle with him. There was no way around it—if I didn’t open up about my insecurities, which were causing me so much psychological pain, then I feared a wedge would stand between us, creating distance. What’s the point of being in a relationship if you can’t unload all your fears on your partner?

    I felt humiliated voicing my insecurity to him for the first time, which happened right as I started therapy, about six months into our relationship. Admitting to him that I was often preoccupied with the status of our relationship rather than prancing around Los Angeles “doing me” with a big fulfilled smile across my face, loving life and living big, which, apparently, is what single people are supposed to do at all times in order to be happy and to find a partner, terrified me. I figured fessing up would scare him and push him away.

    But Matthew was very reassuring. He told me: “Your needs are your needs, and there’s nothing wrong with them.” He did explicitly state that it’s up to me to find emotional balance when I get anxious, but he’ll meet me halfway as best he can if I need a little extra reassurance. On my end, I’ve had to learn to tolerate my anxiety, to sit with it and surrender my need for control. Since Matthew’s an introvert, he tends to withdraw when overwhelmed, which can come across as distant. This can certainly make me anxious, but I have had to learn to surrender my fears of being rejected and abandoned. At this stage, when I do get anxious, I have to resort to a kind of Buddhist mentality—nothing is permanent, I have no control over Matthew or over the longevity of our relationship, and everything will be okay even if things do end.

    It’s remarkable progress that I doubt I would have made without facing my insecure attachment head-on.

    View the original article at thefix.com