A woman I worked with was struggling with something her boyfriend said to her. After watching a show where a man was struggling with addiction to drugs, she had asked him what he was addicted to. He said he didn’t know what he was addicted to. She asked him what he thought SHE was addicted to and he immediately said love. He was right and she hated it as she thought it was a bad thing. She also assumed he was judging her for it. I know the feeling as I’ve been addicted to love since I was a little girl. Over the years, I’ve discovered that it’s the feeling of being in love, merging with someone where you can’t tell where you end and the other begins. It’s actually the feeling of being with the eternal energy of the universe that is present during moments of connecting with the divine love energy in deep meditation, while losing yourself in dancing, or having an orgasm. The brain turns off and you feel like you’re in the ocean of eternity.
While her original thought was that she was addicted to him, she was taken aback when he said love because to her it meant that he saw her as a love addicted crazy lady. This was her perception of herself with him even though he made no mention of her being a crazy lady. She thought he was going to say one of her favorite foods. In that moment she felt shame around being addicted to love and especially to him. She craved him like she craved no other man. She hated being the one needing him more than he needed her. She’d been told by her mother to stay away from a man she’s attracted to because all the ladies will want him and he’ll end up cheating on her.
This had her thinking that every partner she was attracted to would cheat on her, leading her to want to know where he was and who he was talking to at all times. She made up elaborate scenarios and gave them energy, thus upsetting her to no end, not to mention taking precious time from her work and sanity.
We found out during the session that this belief actually came from her mother having had her heart broken by a sexy firefighter she dated back in the day. My client had inherited her mother’s belief.
What if she doesn’t have to carry this belief anymore? What if she could release that belief? I asked energetically if she surrendered to being with this sexy man? The answer was no. We released that belief and gave it back to her mother as she had taken it on and believed it and it’s no longer serving her and was robbing her of feeling peaceful in this relationship. We also found an emotion of longing that needed to be released as she’d longed to be with someone she was attracted to for so long. Now that she had him, she was discombobulated in her energy from no longer needing to have the experience of longing.
In my trainings at Understandmen.com, I had learned about addictions being part of the human experience. We spoke about things that weren’t chemically dangerous. Maybe being addicted to love wasn’t as bad as my client thought it was; although the feelings that come from being addicted to love can feel like being chemically addicted. It brings our bodies into a constricted, panicky state when not having enough or for fear of losing him.
Hormones can wreak havoc in our lives if we’re not aware of what’s happening. The flood of endorphins released when merging with someone, even just by being in the person’s presence, can be a roller coaster when it’s gone for too long.
I suggested my client ask her man what he meant when he said she was addicted to love. She did and told me she was flabbergasted by his response. He said, “It’s a good thing. You’re always saying how much you love everything; the birds, the bunnies, baby chicks your friends and me. You love everything.”
I heard a woman say, “I would rather be addicted to love than all the other horrible things out there.” One of her addictions was the need for attention. I think that falls under being addicted to love. You need the attention from that person or persons so much that you can never get enough. It becomes a problem when we make our happiness based on getting that feeling fed through another person. What if something happens to that person, or they need some space? We set ourselves up for misery if we rely only on our partner to feed us connection. If we make time for the things that give us the feeling we’re wanting, without relying on our partner to fill that need, then we will have a much better time in the relationship we’re in. For my client, art gave her the feeling of merging she craved.
I once spoke with a man who said, “What I look for in a woman is that she has her own thing going on. She has her own life and friends. She can make herself happy without me having to do it. I don’t want to be her everything. That’s a lot of pressure.”