Help for Love Addiction Counseling
Are you struggling to sustain love and intimacy? Do you experience emotional highs and lows rather than any sort of lasting intimacy? Do you find yourself getting “lost” in relational fantasy that you eventually discover untethered to the relational reality? Are your behaviors causing negative consequences in family, jobs and physical or emotional well being? Do you experience extreme relationship swings or imbalances?
Whether you feel lost, anxious, depressed, hopeless or angry about your love life, relationship recovery is possible. We will work together to identify what is going on and identify specific empowering steps to disrupt the cycle of toxic relationships and participate in a relationship process that is reciprocal with clear boundaries and a lasting, mature, grounded love connection.
Signs that you may need help for love addiction:
- Give more than you receive
- Panic that your partner is not demonstrating enough interest in you
- Feeling a sense of panic over the idea that your partner may leave you
- Chasing a level of intimacy that your partner will not commit to
- Failure to identify what you want out of the relationship
- Changing your beliefs and desires to fit the lifestyle of your partner
- Partner is engaging in other addictive behaviors and you feel like you’re left behind
- Giving up your boundaries so that your partner will not leave you
- Mistaking romantic intensity and newness for love
- Searching endlessly for a romantic relationship
- Feeling distressed and alone when not in a relationship and compulsively using sex and fantasy to fill the void
- Losing interest in a relationship once the newness wears off
- Choosing partners who are abusive or emotionally unavailable, and do not reciprocate
- Forfeiting pastimes, priorities, beliefs or friendships to please a romantic partner
- Using seduction or manipulation to hold on to a partner
- Using porn, anonymous sex or compulsive masturbation to avoid “needing” someone
- Repeatedly returning to unhealthy relationships despite promises not to do so
Signs that you may be dealing with love avoidance:
- Withholding affection or sex to stay in control
- You distract yourself from true intimacy with other people or behaviors.
- You feel angry or resentful or your partner’s neediness
- Opening up to your partner is a serious struggle
- You communicate with anger, criticism or passive-aggressive behavior
Recovery for love and relationship addiction can feel overwhelming and hopeless. Intimacy and stability present themselves, but patterns of attraction frequently bypass such opportunities in exchange for the highs and intensity of dating, falling in love, fixing the partner, and familiarity of chaotic relationships. People who experience this become easily dissatisfied with stable or peaceful intimacy. Conversely, being terrified of abandonment can feel overwhelming. Toxic relationships are held onto without genuine affection or warmth.
Transform pain and shame to resilience, joy, and healthy intimacy
Find and walk a path out of addiction and intimacy disorder. CRSR specializes in private and comprehensive sexual recovery. You are not alone. We can help.