Skip to main content

What Is Love Addiction ?

Love addiction in the psychology jargon is termed " a process" addiction. Like an addiction to drugs or alcohol there are certain criterias that must be met in order for it to be considered an addiction. If we look at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorder, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) it breaks it down into 11 categories which atleast 2-3 criterias should meet the criteria in order for it to be classificated as a substance addiction.  The ones that I would like to highlight are tolerance ( needing more and more of the substance to achieve a desired effect) and withdrawal ( physical symptoms one experiences as a result of dependency on the substance). This relates to the love addiction in that you develop a tolerance, where you need more and more of your point of contact to feel better. Also, you experience physical withdrawal symptoms when you are no longer around that point of contact. I believe it is important to note that despite how this problem may interfere with many areas of your life such as occupational, relational, social and etc, you continue to engage in the behaviors despite the consequences. Can you relate? Share your comments below!

Comments

  1. Jeffrey FleuridorApril 13, 2017 at 7:59 PM

    This was wonderfully written and you do a great job of explaining the process of addiction. The euphoria one feels when being with someone which you reference as contact leads to this concept of addiction. The process of being around a person for a period of time then even a day without them can have you suffering with symptoms of withdrawal.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JoJo GreyApril 13, 2017 at 9:04 PM

    Thank you Jeff. I think a lot of
    People are unable to understand the level of impairment that occurs from these type of process addiction because unlike drugs, you don't necessary recognize the severity as you would with drugs

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Healthy Versus Unhealthy Relationships

                                Love Makes Me Accept Crazy Things                         I have to give some back story on how this topic for my blog even came about. As I was sitting down messaging my clients, I had Jerry Springer broadcasting in the background. Normally, I don’t watch this, (I am serious); but for some reason ended up on this episode. Anyways, as I began watching this, the topic was regarding a man who was confessing to his girlfriend his faithfulness and how he would never cheat on her. She gave him an ultimatum that if he wanted to continue the relationship, then he would need to drop his female friends. Needless to say, he was cheating and this resulted in a full on fist-fight with other woman who he was having an affair with. Jerry asked him, do you love this woman? He stated “yes”, she ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reactivating The Pain

I do believe that sometimes people trigger old behaviors that we are trying to change about ourselves. Sometimes you may find yourself working towards recovery by changing old patterns, beliefs and behaviors; however, unfortunately someone new comes into your life and you find yourself repeating these same old behaviors that you have been working hard to change. Thats is the powerful effect of this addiction, if you are not aware of your triggers or high risk situations, you find yourself falling back into the unhealthy lifestyle and becoming readjusted to the chaos again. Sarah’s problem stemmed from abandonment and dysfunctional family relationships. She was uncomfortable being alone or loving herself and she sought validation through other men. Her past history included entertaining multiple men at once so that their would never be a gap in between someone providing this validation that she needed. It is funny, because she used to say to herself and joke with her friends th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are Unhealthy Relationships The Norm?

I was sitting in the office of my colleague and we started talking about relationships. She is an older lady and has been in the field for over 20+ years, so I always love to get her feedback and wisdom. While I was talking to her, it dawned on me that many people learned how to have an UN-healthy relationship; never really learned what a healthy relationship consisted of. When you look back at some of the relationships you’ve had, do you ever ask yourself what was I thinking? How did I ever tolerate or accept something like this? Its funny how when we remove ourself from a toxic or unhealthy relationship and have time ( Sometimes you have nothing but time after a relationship ends) to reflect on it, we find that what we had was never deserving of our energy or our time. See, the problem with having a pattern of unhealthy relationships, is we have nothing to judge what a healthy relationship is. In other words we have nothing to compare it too, because we have never seen or known on...
1 comment
Read more