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Can You Be Addicted To Love?
We can feel love, which is lovely and can make our lives better. But when love turns into a passion, it can turn into love addiction, which is bad. Love addiction is a behaviour problem that can happen to anyone. It’s better to try to have a healthy, balanced relationship where both people love each other. You’re not the only one who thinks love can make you crazy. It’s never as easy as waiting for the love drug to wear off when it comes to love in real life.
What is being addicted to love?
To be exact, there is no clear description of love addiction because it is not a real illness but rather an idea. It’s not like you can put love to the test in a lab and see how it makes someone feel. But you can see how relationships change our lives, both mentally and physically, as some study has shown. A review from 2023 said that love addiction, which is also known as relationship addiction or obsessive love disease, is a strong and uncontrollable need for love, attention, and affection from other people.
Having unhealthy or extreme feelings for certain people or always looking for a love partner are two signs of this. In fact, people who are addicted to love might not always act in ways that are typical of addicts. It may also happen along with a mood disorder, an OCD, or even a disease that makes it hard to control your impulses.
Love addiction can be caused by a number of things, such as:
- Neglect or abuse as a child
- Low self-esteem
- Fear of being left alone
- Dependence on each other
- Unresolved feelings of pain
- Genes and traits
Signs: The signs of love addiction are different for everyone, but here are some typical ones:
- Thoughts about the love thing all the time
- Not taking care of relationships and tasks
- Being worried or sad when you’re not with the love object
- Doing dangerous things to keep the relationship going
- Not being able to control your feelings and actions
- Trouble stopping a relationship, even if it’s bad for you
How being addicted to love affects your health
It can be hard to tell when the love in your life is hurting you more than helping you when it comes to heart issues. The signs of love addiction can overlap with those of other mental illnesses, and they can also make problems worse. Some mental health problems that can come up because of love addiction are:
- Feeling down
- Having anxiety
- Having trouble sleeping
- Lack of self-esteem
- Dependence on each other
- Problems with eating
- BPD stands for borderline personality disorder
Treatment/Therapy
Love addiction can be treated in a number of ways, such as through treatment, support groups, and self-help methods. Here are some information about how to treat love addiction:
- Addiction Interventions: Help the addict get care right away by being loving, honest, and setting limits for the family.
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT): This type of treatment helps people recognize and change harmful ways of thinking and acting.
- Group therapy: Support groups can give people a safe place to talk about their problems and get help from other people.
- Self-help methods, such as meditation, mindfulness, and writing in a journal, can help people handle their feelings and thoughts.
- Transactional analysis is a type of psychoanalysis that can be used to help people who are addicted to love. It includes figuring out and changing bad ways of talking and acting.
- Regarding ethics, treating love addiction can bring up a lot of difficult issues, such as issues with transference and counter-transference, privacy, boundaries, and questions about having two relationships at the same time.
If you or someone you know is having trouble with a love addiction, you need to get professional help right away. People can beat love addiction and live a healthy, peaceful life with the right help.
