ADDICTIVE ATTRACTION

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The whole paradox of addictive attraction to an object is that, despite its crushing influence, it is always perceived by some part of the psyche as a good object that allows an addicted person to get rid of psychological conflict and pain for a while. By analogy with a young child who is aroused and needs a mother to protect herself from being overwhelmed with emotion, the adult seeks an addictive object. All that can bring consolation, a person seeks in the external world at an ever-increasing frequency.

In a person who functions using addictive mental pain relief methods, there is a deficit in the parent's internal representation as a caring introject with which he could identify in states of tension or conflict.

Having offered my client, who had been using alcoholic means of consolation for a long time, to find associations for the word "mother", I saw absolute helplessness, followed by a refusal to participate in this, in the words of the client himself, "experiment."

Another client in a similar situation immediately blurted out "shit". For a woman, a "shitty" mother is a mother who cannot be relied upon, to enter into this "substance" means to feel insecure. Normally, the very word "mom" is associated with a sense of reliability, comfort and safety.

Early traumatic experiences over time lead to the fact that the child (and later the adult) is left without adequate internal resources that allow him to cope with situations when he is overwhelmed with emotions. Observing love addiction in my clients, I have many times come across the fact that another person plays an insignificant role in their subjective inner world, being more an object of need than an object of desire. Actually, this parameter is for me the determining factor in the differentiation of a true love experience (which is very often descriptively difficult to distinguish from addiction) from an addictive experience.

Persons who are prone to the formation of love addiction experienced significant emotional deprivation in childhood, associated with the absence of emotionally positively saturated contacts with their parents. Such persons grew up in emotionally cold families, did not receive proper positive attention and acceptance from loved ones. Some children interpret the emotional distance of their parents as quite fair, evaluate themselves as bad and worthless people who are not worthy of attention, care, participation and love. Compensation for the lack of love was carried out with the help of withdrawal into the world of fantasies and illusions, dreams of a happy future in which feelings not received from parents would be fully satisfied by another person. Meeting with "such" a person provokes the strongest love and obsession with him. Anxiety, shame, low self-esteem, which the addict experiences as a result of the internal conflict between the desire for love and the conviction that he is not worthy of it, turn his life into a living hell.