Ambivalent Love Addicts

Ambivalent Love Addicts (ALAs) are those love addicts who suffer from avoidant personality disorder. They don’t have a difficult time letting go, they have a hard time moving forward. They desperately crave for love, but at the same time they are terrified of intimacy. This combination is agonizing.

ALA’s are ambivalent for various reasons and to various degrees.Treatment is the same as that for the love addict—self-awareness, a support network, change, meditation, belief and faith in God.

ALAs also come in different forms, listed below.

Torch Bearers are ALAs who obsess about someone who is not available. This can be done without acting out (suffering in silence) or by pursuing the person they are in love with. Some Torch Bearers can be more addicted than others. This kind of addiction feeds on fantasies and illusions. It is also known as unrequited love.

Saboteurs are ALAs who damage relationships when they start to get serious or at whatever point their fear of intimacy crops up. This can be anytime—before the first date, after the first date, after sex, after the subject of commitment comes up—anytime.

Seductive Withholders are ALAs who always come go to their PoA when they want sex or companionship. When they become frightened, or feel unsafe, they begin withholding companionship, sex, affection—anything which makes them feel anxious. If they leave the relationship when they become frightened, they are just Saboteurs. If they keep repeating the pattern of being available/unavailable, they are seductive withholders.

Romance Addicts are ALAs who are addicted to several partners. Romance addicts are often confused with sex addicts. However, unlike sex addicts, who are trying to avoid bonding altogether, romance addicts bond with each of their partners—to varying degrees — even if the romantic liaisons are short-lived or happening simultaneously. By “romance” I mean sexual passion and pseudo-emotional intimacy. Kindly note that while romance addicts bond with each of their partners to a degree, their goal (besides getting high off of romance and drama) is to avoid commitment or bonding on a deeper level with one partner.

Some common signs and tendencies of Ambivalent Love Addicts:

• Ambivalent Love Addicts (ALA’s) crave love but they also fear it.
• They avoid intimacy altogether by obsessing about love through romantic fantasies about unavailable people.
• They only get involved and obsess about people who are emotionally unavailable.
• They become addicted through romantic affairs rather than committed relationships.
• They become addicted to people and then sabotage the relationships when their fear of intimacy comes up.
• They initiate relationships with more than one person at the same time in order to avoid moving to a deeper level with any one person and then become addicted to the whole group.
• They break up and make up over and over again in the same relationship and become addicted to this pattern.
• They sexualize relationships to such a degree that emotional intimacy is non-existent and then become addicted to the sex and the relationship.
• Regardless of how much addicted they are, they cannot commit to the future. They live in the moment.
• They can love, commit, obsess and even become addicted, but this will go hand in hand with avoidance tactics like a difficulty with affection and opening up emotionally. They are there and they are not there. They come close and then move away. They let other things outside of the relationships get in the way, i.e. hobbies, work, friends, lovers, addictions—anything. They just cannot open up to a deeper level of emotional intimacy and yet they are unable to let go of the relationship.

Types of Love Addicts

As I am myself trying to come out of love addiction I am reading a lot on this subject from various resources on Internet. I have found that on the basis of behavior and tendencies, love addicts and can be categorized into following types:

• Obsessed Love Addicts
• Codependent Love Addicts
• Relationship Addicts
• Narcissistic Love Addicts
• Ambivalent Love Addicts
• Torch Bearers
• Saboteurs
• Seductive Withholders
• Romance Addicts
• Combinations
• Narcissists and Codependents
• Switch-hitting

Description of these different types of love addicts is given below:

Obsessed Love Addicts: Obsessed Love Addicts (OLA’s) are the most common type of love addicts. They cannot let go of someone they love, even if their partner is:

• Unavailable emotionally or sexually
• Afraid to commit
• Unable to communicate
• Unloving
• Distant
• Abusive
• Controlling and dictatorial
• Ego-centric
• Selfish
• Addicted to something outside the relationship (hobbies, drugs, alcohol, sex, someone else, gambling, shopping etc.)

Codependent Love Addicts: Codependent Love Addicts (CLAs) are the most widely found and recognized. They fit a generally standard profile. Majority of them suffer from low self-esteem and have a certain predictable way of feeling, thinking and behaving. This means that from a their feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem, they try desperately to hold on to the people of their addiction to using codependent behavior. This includes enabling, rescuing, caretaking, passive-aggressive controlling, and even accepting neglect or abuse. In general, CLAs will do anything to please and “take care” of their partners in the hope that they will not leave—or that someday they will reciprocate.

The codependent love addict is a perfect example of a personality disorder combined with abnormal behavior. The codependency comes first (separation anxiety/attachment disorder) followed by addictive behavior (desperate attempts to stay in touch with the POA).

Relationship Addicts: There are two types of Relationship Addicts (RA’s).

Type one are RAs who are no longer in love with their partners but they cannot let them go. Generally, they are so unhappy that the relationship is usually affecting their health, spirit and emotional well being. Even if their partner batters them, and they are in danger, they just cannot let go. They are afraid of being alone. They are afraid of change. They do not want to hurt or abandon their partners. This can be described as “I hate you don’t leave me.”

Type two are RAs who are addicted to a relationship with a friend, sibling, parent, child, relative, or anyone with whom they have never had romantic feelings.

Narcissistic Love Addicts: Narcissistic Love Addicts (NLAs) use dominance, seduction and withholding to control their partners. Unlike the codependents, who can accept a lot of discomfort, narcissists won’t put up with anything which interferes with their happiness.

NLAs are self-absorbed and their low self-esteem is masked by their grandiosity. In addition, rather than seeming to obsess about the relationship, NLAs usually seem to be aloof and unconcerned. They do not appear to be addicted at all. Rarely do you even know that NLAs are hooked until you try to leave them. Then they will no longer be aloof and uncaring. They will panic and use anything they can to hold on to the relationship—including violence. Many experts have rejected the idea that narcissists can be love addicts. This may be because they rarely seek treatment. However, if you have ever seen how some narcissists react to perceived or real abandonment, you will realize that they are indeed “hooked.”

Ambivalent Love Addicts: ALAs suffer from avoidant personality disorder. They don’t have a difficult time letting go, they have a hard time moving forward. They desperately crave for love, but at the same time they are terrified of intimacy. This combination is agonizing. Read More...

Combinations: A love addict person may have more than one type of love addiction. Many of these types overlap and combine with other behavioral problems. For example, one may be a codependent, alcoholic love addict. Or a love/relationship addict. The important thing is to identify your own personal profile so you know what you are dealing with.

Take an example, Graham was a love addict, relationship addict, romance addict and sex addict. He was married but did not want to divorce his wife of eighteen years even though he was not in love with her (relationship addiction). His hobby was masturbating to pornography when his wife was not home (sex addiction). He had affairs with many other women simultaneously without his wife finding out. He really cared about each of these women (romance addict). One day he met Katie and fell in love with her. It did not take long before he was obsessed with her. She did not want to be with him because he was married, so he began stalking and harassing her (love addict). Graham finally got into recovery, divorced his wife, gave up the pornography and affairs and married the woman he was obsessed with. In starting days his jealousy was out of control, but after a few years of therapy and self awareness he began to trust his new wife. Because she was mature, well-grounded and had high self esteem, the relationship began to normalize. Today, all of Graham’s addictions are in remission.

Narcissists and Codependents: It is not uncommon for love addicts to end up in relationships with other love addicts. The most usually seen kind of love-addicted couple is, as you might have guessed, the codependent and the narcissist. In the start of the relationship, narcissists are often seductive. After they have hooked their codependent partners, however, they change. Here is an example of a narcissist-codependent relationship.

Switch-hitting: Many love addicts switch-hit due to the reason that they have more than one underlying personality disorder. For example, a relationship addict may play the role of a codependent for years, then finally get out of the relationship and fall in love with someone who is not available. Suddenly, our relationship addict is an obsessed love addict or a torchbearer. Even narcissists switch-hit, believe it or not. For years they can be in one relationship after another, playing the role of the dominant, uncaring partner. However, if they ever fall hard, they can easily convert into a torchbearer or obsessed love addict. If they fall in love with another narcissist then they have no choice but to become the codependent love addict in the relationship because the narcissist will not stand for anything else. Even ambivalent love addicts will start obsessing instead of running away when they are addicted.

Love addicts switch-hit because of separation anxiety. If another kind of behavior is required to placate a partner and to hold on the him or her, the love addict will adopt that behavior. Is it an act? Sometimes . . . but if the love addict has weak personality boundaries, they may really become the other person while under the influence of the addiction. The point here is not to identify all the types of switch-hitting going on, or even to explain it, but to point it out and learn from it.

The Importance of this all
The Importance of All This: If all this seems complicated, it is. And, to be true, the only reason it is important is because it makes a difference when it comes to treatment and recovery. Codependent love addicts, for example, need a boost in self-esteem and self-acceptance. They must learn to think better about their own lives. Narcissistic love addicts, on the other hand, use grandiosity to bolster their low self-esteem and need to come down to earth. They need to learn some humility and how to become unselfish. Ambivalent Love Addicts need to find a healthy relationship and stay engaged in it even when their fear threatens to overwhelm them. Most of all, understanding as much as you can about love addiction will form the basis of your Recovery Program or give you a head start if you opt for psychotherapy.

Love Addiction

I think I am a Love Addict. I can say this from my experience and researching a lot on this topic from different resources, websites and discussion forums. And I am glad to find out that I am not alone who is suffering from such a strange disease. This is a common phenomenon and thousands of people across the globe are suffering from it.

What is Love Addiction?
Love addiction happens when you become addicted to some person you think your are in love with. You become completely dependent on this person and give complete control to him/her. You can do anything to please this person even if that means you are neglecting your own life, family and welfare.

Love addiction is very much similar to cigarette, alcohol and drug addiction where you know the addiction is toxic for you and harming you but irrespective of that you want to be with that thing/person of your addiction.

When you are love addicted you think round the clock about the person of your addiction (PoA). You will need them to talk to you…to keep sending you messages and to keep sending mails and giving replies. In other words the love addicted needs the person of his addiction to keep him/her occupied with his/her thoughts, to take care and provide moral support.

They become totally dependent on their PoA and loose their self respect, ego and self esteem. Even if a love addicts person of addiction is ignoring, insulting and abusing, cheating or manipulating they would like to continue this relationship just for the sake of it.

This can result in very dangerous consequences and problems for both persons. When the love addicted seeks complete attention of his PoA, the other person may start avoiding this person which can result in more problems.

When the relationship ends it may cause withdrawal symptoms like any other addiction. The love addict will do anything to get in touch with their person of addiction, will do anything to restart the relationship, will even beg and cry in front of their PoA to help and bail them out of this situation. They may even experience destructive tendencies like hurting themselves or their person of addiction.

Types of Love Addicts:

• Obsessed Love Addicts
• Codependent Love Addicts
• Relationship Addicts
• Narcissistic Love Addicts
• Ambivalent Love Addicts
• Torch Bearers
• Saboteurs
• Seductive Withholders
• Romance Addicts
• Combinations
• Narcissists and Codependents
• Switch-hitting – Read More

Are you a Love Addict?

Love Addiction Process
Frankly speaking, love and addiction do not have anything at all to do with one another. They are poles apart. Nothing could be further removed from genuine love. A typical process of falling into love addiction starts when a person begins to feel sympathy or attraction with another person after going through an initially innocent moment of attraction and start idealizing the other person to the point of divinity.

The individual then becomes blindly attached to the other person, even feeling incapable of making a realistic analysis of the situation; they may project all sorts of illusions onto the other person, believing them to be the only one who can bring happiness. This process can be very fast. There are, however, people who never go past this stage of blind love, and remain ‘addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up…which can be best described as parasitism, not love’.

Obsession can be called as the primary symptom of any addiction. In love addiction, an individual’s insecurity and low self esteem gives rise to an obsessive attachment to the object of their affection. It generally manifests as an insatiable hunger which distorts the person’s perception of reality and often results in multiple unhealthy behaviors and suffering.

Those people are at high risk for love addiction include recovering alcoholics/addicts who use relationships as a form of substitution, and/or individuals who grow up in alcoholic/dysfunctional families.

The Addictive Love Relationship
Like other addictions (drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, work, and the list goes on), the dependency to their PoA (their object- drug of choice) allows love addicts to feel alive- a sense of purpose- and to attain a sense of meaning and self-worth in the world: they are driven by ‘a fantasy hope that the drug of choice – a person – will complete them’.

‘Most love addicts start out trying to meet some known or unknown emotional need, then become dependent on the intoxicating feelings’ of being in love itself. Unfortunately, as in the case of drug addicts, “love addicts”, too, may become incapable of getting the desired satisfaction, which in turn increases their addiction’.

They often feel a burning, passionate love which gives and gives, destroying their sense of humanity when they lose the person they’ve given to, sometimes causing them to feel and act out in a vengeful way. The love addict suffers from a lack of bonding as they did in childhood, including an inability to give and receive affection, self-destructive behavior, problems with control, and lack of healthy long term relationships.

Withdrawal Symptoms
With addiction come inevitable negative consequences. The consequences of addictive love are most revealed as the love addict experiences withdrawal symptoms when a relationship ends, or when it is perceived as falling apart. When a break up happens, an addictive lover longs for the attachment and apparent loving feelings of the lost relationship, as much as a heroin user craves heroin when the drug is no longer available. This want may result in extreme debilitating pain, obsession, and otherwise avoidable destructive and/or self-destructive behaviors.

Depending on the level of one’s love addiction, negative consequences during withdrawal can result in extreme debilitating pain, obsession, and otherwise avoidable destructive and/or self-destructive tendencies including violence (to others or self), in addition to increased feelings of shame, depression, impaired emotional growth, chronic emptiness, loneliness, loss of intimacy and enjoyment in life

Recovery / Moving On
Since love addiction is fueled by fantasy, self-awareness and modifying your thoughts is the best way to get over your person of addiction. To break the cycle, love addicts can use the following steps to help forget the past and focus on the future.

• Assess yourself for love addiction tendencies honestly. Some signs include obsessive thoughts about another person which interfere with your life and feelings of worthlessness or depression when not in a relationship.
• Understand healthy love exists and how to identify it.
• Prepare yourself and be ready to face the pain letting go produces.
• Identify and address the underlying causes and psychological beliefs which support the compulsive/obsessive behavior. Ask yourself questions like, “What do I believe about relationships, love, and myself? Why might I fear closeness? Do I believe people will disappoint me or I will disappoint them?”
• Never forget the past; utilize it. Acknowledge that you will move beyond any painful experiences and focus on future relationship success.
• Find a support group such as Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous or a therapist trained in love addiction to bail you out through this transition.
• And most important of all…keep faith in your abilities, Belief that God is always there to help you, meditation and positive thinking.

Useful Resources

Wikipedia

Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous

Love Addicts Anonymous

Love Addiction Forum

Characteristics of Love And Sex Addiction

Are you a Love Addict?

Here is a set of 40 Questions to help you determine if you are a Love Addict?
If you can answer yes to more than a few of the following questions, you are probably suffering from love addiction. Remember that love addiction may come in several forms, so even if you don’t answer yes to all of the questions you may still be a love addict.

1. You are very needy when it comes to relationships.
2. You fall in love very easily and too quickly.
3. When you fall in love, you can’t stop fantasizing—even to do important things. You can’t help yourself.
4. Sometimes, when you are lonely and looking for companionship, you lower your standards and settle for someone lesser than you want or deserve.
5. When you are in a relationship, you tend to smother your partner.
6. More than once, you have gotten involved with someone who is unable to commit—in the hope that he or she will change.
7. Once you have bonded with someone, you can’t let go.
8. When you are attracted to someone, you will ignore all the warnings signs advise of your well wkshers that this person is not good for you.
9. Initial attraction is more important to you than anything else when it comes to falling in love and choosing a partner. Falling in love over time does not appeal to you and is not an option.
10. When you are in love, you trust people who are not trustworthy. The rest of the time you have a hard time trusting people.
11. When a relationship ends, you feel your life is over and more than once you have suicidal thoughts because of a failed relationship.
12. You take on more than your share of responsibility for the survival of a relationship.
13. Love and relationships are the only things which interest you.
14. In some of your relationships you were the only one in love.
15. You are overwhelmed with loneliness when you are not in love or in a relationship.
16. You cannot stand being alone. You do not like your own company.
17. More than once, you have gotten involved with the wrong person to avoid being lonely.
18. You are terrified of never finding someone to love.
19. You feel inadequate if you are not in a relationship.
20. You cannot say no when you are in love or if your partner threatens to leave you.
21. You try very hard to be who your partner wants you to be. You will do anything to please him or her—even abandon yourself (sacrifice what you want, need and value).
22. When you are in love, you only see what you want to see. You distort reality to quell anxiety and feed your fantasies.
23. You have a high tolerance for suffering in relationships. You are willing to suffer neglect, depression, loneliness, dishonesty—even abuse—to avoid the pain of separation anxiety (what you feel when you are not with someone you have bonded with).
24. More than once, you have carried a torch for someone and it was agonizing.
25. You love romance. You have had more than one romantic interest at a time even when it involved dishonesty.
26. You have stayed in an abusive relationship.
27. Fantasies about someone you love, even if he or she is unavailable, are more important to you than meeting someone who is available.
28. You are terrified of being abandoned. Even the slightest rejection feels like abandonment and it makes you feel horrible.
29. You chase after people who have rejected you and try desperately to change their minds.
30. When you are in love, you are overly possessive and jealous.
31. More than once, you have neglected family or friends because of your relationship.
32. You have no impulse control when you are in love.
33. You feel an overwhelming need to check up on someone you are in love with.
34. More than once, you have spied on someone you are in love with.
35. You pursue someone you are in love with even if he or she is with another person.
36. If you are part of a love triangle (three people), you believe all is fair in love and war. You do not walk away.
37. Love is the most important thing in the world to you.
38. Even if you are not in a relationship, you still fantasize about love all the time— either someone you once loved or the perfect person who is going to come into your life someday.
39. As far back as you can remember, you have been preoccupied with love and romantic fantasies.
40. You feel powerless when you fall in love—as if you are in some kind of trance or under a spell. You lose your ability to make wise choices.