Love Addiction vs. Healthy Relationships

How to Break Free from Codependency & Toxic Relationship Dynamics

Codependence and Love Addiction

Codependence is often characterized as an unhealthy over-reliance on others, coupled with a disregard for one's own needs and boundaries. This tendency can manifest through behaviors such as caretaking, people-pleasing, and enabling someone else's dysfunction.

In addition to these behaviors, codependence can also be accompanied by symptoms such as low self-worth, low self-esteem, and cloudy communication. Those who struggle with codependence may relate to other people through control, denial, compliance, or avoidance.

Love addiction and love avoidance are common patterns associated with codependency in romantic relationships. However, these patterns can also occur in relationships with friends, family members, and authority figures.

Read more: Codependence is incredibly common. Discover more about codependence, self-worth, and boundaries.

Love addiction is not necessarily an addiction to love itself but rather an addiction to the concept of love. Individuals with love addiction may be drawn to the intensity, denial, control, and extreme excitement that come with love-addicted relationships.

Moreover, addiction to love is often fueled by unresolved traumas; love addicts tend to bond through trauma wounds and project their childhood abandonment or enmeshment traumas onto their partners. In many cases, individuals become lost in fantasies of being rescued, losing sight of the reality of their situation.

Healthy Relationships

When you're in a healthy, conscious, loving relationship, you'll feel calm, relaxed, stable, and supported. Healthy love is learned and cultivated over time, in a way that might seem slow and steady in contrast to the extreme highs and lows of love addiction. When you're in a healthy relationship with someone, you honor each other’s freedom and independence because your relationship is grounded in trust and self-worth. You give each other plenty of time and space alone to enrich and take care of yourselves. This dynamic encourages both people to be their best selves and embody a sense of wholeness instead of trying to use each other to fill a void. Together, you share a healthy dynamic of interdependence as opposed to codependence. In a healthy relationship, you keep promises to yourself and the other person. You trust each other, and your own instincts and boundaries. Communication is clear, compassionate, non-violent, and mutually respectful.

How to Identify Love Addiction

Love addiction occurs when you feel the need to complete your partner or rely on them to feel whole. This view of love comes from the emotional void felt from childhood trauma. Symptoms of love addiction often involve traumatic projection onto your partner, reflecting past parental or savior fantasies, and fast-moving, intense, and thrilling relationships based on sexual chemistry and physical attraction. These relationships might feel like love at first sight, but they lack lasting intimacy, and you may occasionally do impulsive or intrusive things, such as excessive fantasizing, online stalking, or too much texting.

Love-addicted relationships can lack boundaries, be passive-aggressive, or have murky communication. This behavior typically results from a lack of clarity and mutual respect in the relationship. Love addiction relationships can also involve lying, disloyalty, codependence, blame, shame, insults, deflection, manipulation, controlling behavior, and a lack of personal responsibility.

Such relationships result in full absorption or immersion, and you might longer lose sight of your life outside of the relationship. This involvement, i.e., ride-or-die behavior, can lead to dysfunction, manipulation, or toxic, abusive behavior. Subsequently, you may abandon hobbies, friends, values, and your sense of worth to stay connected to your partner. Spending time alone or apart from your partner may be triggering, resulting in intense feelings of fear, anxiety, paranoia, and suspicion.

A Guide to Healing and Growing Beyond Love Addiction

STEP 1: Commit to Reparenting Yourself

Addressing attachment wounds and childhood trauma is crucial to healing love addiction tendencies. In some situations where you have low self-worth, the root cause may be attachment trauma. This means that your bonding patterns were disrupted in your formative years due to inconsistent emotional support from caregivers, leading to feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. Unresolved trauma often manifests as avoidant or anxious behaviors in your relationships. In order to move forward, it is essential to reparent yourself and heal your childhood wounds instead of seeking a partner to fill the emotional void or play the role of a parent.

Read more: Many people have an anxious or avoidant attachment style. Learn more about the anxious or avoidant attachment style.

STEP 2: Self-Care to Cultivate Your Worth

Nurturing healthy self-worth is important to overcome love addiction, which stems from unresolved emotional trauma, feelings of unworthiness, shame, and emptiness. Consistently caring for yourself is vital to building a positive self-image and communicating effectively while maintaining healthy boundaries. The first step is recognizing and tending to your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs. Create a list of your needs in each category and plan ways to meet them daily. By prioritizing self-care and addressing your needs, you can foster a sense of inner strength and healthy self-worth rather than seeking validation externally.

STEP 3: Boundaries and Communication.

Setting healthy boundaries begins with first acknowledging and committing to the protection of your own needs and boundaries. At times, maintaining such boundaries may involve having open and honest conversations with others. It's important to remember that other people can't simply read your mind, nor are they responsible for meeting your needs. Instead, it's your responsibility to communicate and uphold your boundaries, even if others don't necessarily understand or agree with them. Ultimately, the goal is to honor your boundaries with self-respect and respect for others, rather than abandoning them in order to please others. While clear communication may feel uncomfortable or vulnerable initially, regular practice can turn this into an easier pursuit, all in service of fostering healthy love and relationships.

Read more: Explore non-violent communication and how to be assertive without being controlling or bossy.

STEP 4: Seek Professional Help.

Love addiction and avoidance exist on a spectrum. If you find yourself struggling with moderate to severe love addiction or unable to break free from a pattern of unhealthy relationships, seeking professional help is crucial. In a safe and therapeutic environment with a trusted professional, you can work through past traumas, build an improved sense of self-worth, establish healthy boundaries, and recognize red flags early on.

Recovering from Love Addiction

Recovering from love addiction may be a long-term journey, but as you process your childhood trauma and develop your self-worth, communication skills, and boundary-setting abilities, your tendencies towards codependency and love addiction will weaken. Over time, you can approach your relationships with a greater sense of empowerment, inner stability, independence, and strength, paving the way for healthy, interdependent connections instead of codependent dynamics.

To help identify unhealthy patterns and distinguish between love addiction and healthy relationships, please view the navigational guide below.