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  • What Is Love Addiction Really?

    Posted by Derek on February 1, 2022 at 2:38 pm

    Hi iRise community! My name is Derek Hart, one of the iRise instructors. This is my first post, as I wish to make contact with all of you. I will soon be more available to the community to help with all of our relationship struggles, including my own. I’m in it with you all. I have a few thousand articles, and I will be choosing some of the ones that have helped people over the years. My first one that I will post here is entitled “What Is Love Addiction Really?”

    If you have comments or wish to engage in conversation, I would love to do that here. I prefer clarity over agreement always, so feel free to give any perspective you’d like. I just ask that for this community, we’re gentle with each other. You might get into a debate with me, but if you don’t like a comment from another iRise viewer, please be gentle.

    Here is the article:

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    What Is Love Addiction Really?

    We all need to be touched, loved, understood, seen… gotten.

    The need is Universal.

    Humans deeply need each other.

    A baby that isn’t touched will lose a part of his/her soul.

    There are two components I want to break apart here, so you know the difference between them.

    Component One: the Frozen Needs that occur when your needs are not met as a child.

    Component Two: relating as adults, healing the Frozen Needs.

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    Frozen Needs

    I consider a need to be frozen when a significant abuse or neglect happened as a child.

    This need was frozen in time.

    If you cried as a child, and your mother didn’t have “enough” maturity to place your needs first AND understand how to tend to herself, her own needs… then she might have showed up for you, annoyed with you.

    Annoyance coming at you as an infant from an unhealed mother permanently builds pathways in your brain.

    You learn if you are worth being loved. Or. Not.

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    You Have Two Mothers

    In adulthood, when you are triggered by another adult, it hurts, and it’s terribly confusing.

    Sometimes we blame mom (or dad, just sticking with mom for brevity).

    It will help you OWN your own healing path if you know that the mom you are grieving is the one from childhood; actually about 90% of it is the first 2 years of your life.

    (As a side note, in professional psychology, the debate has shifted from 6 months of age all the way up to 6 years old as the most critical years. Currently, 6 months to 2 years is the popular opinion amongst psychologists. It doesn’t matter. It’s fucking young.)

    So when I’m hurting, I think of young mom: scared, confused, not ready to be a mom.

    Dealing with this directly, being hard on my mom as an adult, takes me away from owning the pain.

    Leave the poor lady alone.

    It’s the one from childhood that hurt you, the one that set up your frozen needs.

    From a different vantage point, healing the adult to adult mature relationship with your mother today can be a great path to maturity, if you’re ready to learn something about her, what her struggles were as Young Mom.

    I am in full agreement to spend a period of time blaming mom if you need to… young mom, old mom, all versions of mom.

    But make an attempt to really get Young Mom is no longer in physical form in the way you think.

    Young Mom is a neural net of pathways in your brain.

    Those pathways can heal.

    250,000 recovery books have made attempts to tell you how.

    Very few describe vulnerability with another mature adult… I will get to that in a bit.

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    The Trigger Is Inside You

    Mature adult love exists when giving/receiving is happening.

    Without a trigger, and with present, clear, caught-up communication, you can FEEL the giving/receiving.

    Triggers are faster than a speeding bullet.

    When you get triggered, hurt, that’s when you now have choices to make if you want to be conscious, and want people… to want to be close to you.

    My favorite person talks about a “Gotsta Know Now” trigger.

    If you hurt me, neglect me… it hurts, and I need to know… RIGHT NOW… how to fix it.

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    The Red Pill Or The Blue Pill

    In my needing my immediate answer, I am hurting.

    USUALLY, WELL, ALMOST ALWAYS, IF I HIT CONFUSION, I AM IN A FROZEN NEED.

    What I literally need is a time machine.

    I need my mom to come in and feed me while I was crying, in 1972.

    I can be mad at 2022 mom, or 2002 mom, but she can’t do anything.

    It’s mine.

    If I take the Red Pill, I will stay stuck in trying to get Back To The Past.

    I am in a frozen need.

    Every defense from childhood, every brilliant method I created to manipulate these flawed humans to love me… I will pull out every method I can to get my needs met.

    I am in emotional danger.

    I will attack you back, lie, withhold the truth, not return your call, talk about you negatively to others, feel victimized… and worst of all, return your text message 5 hours later… basically I will ruin my mature adult relationship if I stay in this frozen need.

    I want my mommy.

    I want her to change in 1972.

    I will take it out on you in 2022, because you hurt my feelings.

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    The Blue Pill

    I personally love the blue pill, because I know how to do it, it works, and it’s the only thing that works.

    I have spent 30 years cultivating how to grieve, feel my feelings, and take the risk to tell you that I am doing just that.

    I have spent 30 years cultivating how to tell you what I did in childhood to protect myself.

    In my adult mature relationships, I can detect when I am triggered, and I don’t only have half the equation.

    The self-help books teach how to go inside and love yourself.

    It’s not enough.

    We need each other.

    And if you were harmed in childhood like I was, you need positive feedback even more.

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    Falling On My Sword

    Vulnerability means that I am putting myself in danger… temporarily.

    It is Component Two of the equation of how to grow up.

    Big people are scary.

    They use big words.

    It seems that if I admit something that I have done, I might be annihilated.

    Yes, when you are this honest, people will respond back, and it will hurt.

    That is part of your training, to detect that quickly, and eliminate them from your lives. Period.

    If you want a good life, and you want the vulnerable path, you must learn to not allow people to get close to you… if they are not on that path.

    You have your world of self-healing, but you also have millions and millions of souls on this planet that want closeness, that want depth.

    When the brain is measured on an MRI and a person sees depth, realness, a person crying in a move, the pleasure centers light up (in addition to the pain centers).

    We feel safe when we see another admit how flawed they are.

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    You Must Get A Microwave

    When you risk sharing what you ARE ABOUT TO DO to destroy your relationship, you create safety for the other.

    “I’m so embarrassed that I got so angry, and I was about to yell at you. I stopped myself. Would you hold me while I feel my anger?”

    When you risk sharing your CONFUSION AND NON-CLARITY ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS, you create safety for the other.

    “I want to be closer to you and I don’t know how. Do you want that?”

    When you risk sharing the EXACT THING THAT COMES TO YOUR MIND ABOUT WHAT YOU WISH YOU COULD SAY, you create safety for the other.

    “I go all day long wishing we wouldn’t argue. I feel more alone when you’re in my bed than when you’re not. I’m scared about that. Can we get some help?”

    The only way to thaw out a frozen need is one moment at a time, one vulnerability at a time, one risk at a time.

    I wish that I could help individuals heal super fast with one on one counseling with me.

    What clients learn from me is how to do the above.

    But nothing… nothing… nothing… will help you heal faster than a romantic partner that supports you… gently… in your continuous learning of how to move from a moment of a childhood Frozen Need… to vulnerability… a moment of sharing your coping mechanisms and your imperfections.

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    I love all of you that follow my posts.

    And I would not say all this without having to do this myself.

    Every single moment I have to do the same kind of risking, just as you do.

    Every single moment I risk, I think you are going to walk away and not love me anymore.

    So I go within, recognize that I have this Frozen Need, and I tell my beloved, “do you have a moment to listen to something I’m scared to say?”

    If she says that she does have a moment, I might need another qualifier… “This is a deep one for me, and I’m in my fear of you going away part.”

    She knows not to say anything to me for a minute, because I am simply crying and struggling to say my next sentence about what I’m scared to say.

    In all honesty, if I really slow down, I could stop there and sometimes not even say the next thing.

    Because for that moment, adult to adult, I had a person be gentle with me, while I described my coping mechanism and my wound.

    That is how to heal a Frozen Need.

    It is frozen, it’s really stuck in there, what happened in childhood.

    For me, my wounding was very difficult.

    I have come to peace that my whole life will be spent healing it.

    I don’t know another path other than this one.

    I love it.

    I get to be close to people, perhaps closer, more intense, deeper, than if I wasn’t hurt in the first place.

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    So what is Love Addiction?

    It is not understanding the above.

    It is acting out too much from the Frozen Need without vulnerability.

    It is having bad relationship after bad relationship and not understanding why.

    ashokgupta.tv@gmail.com replied 2 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
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