As my clients
begin the litany of what is WRONG with their mate and how they LOVE
that person, I say STOP! And I hand them this article. Do not
dismiss it as something warm and fuzzy to read to your child (you may
not even have a child). This writing explains Love Addiction to the
wrong people. In summation, it is about a woman who did not get her
needs met by her family when she was a child. Now and then there was
an occasional reward…and she kept anxiously waiting for more. I tell
my clients THIS IS NOT LOVE, it’s “ANXIETY”. And while it might make
for GREAT SEX, real love is often boring. Please pay attention to the
explanation in the 8th paragraph of the power on reinforcement. This
is how we get set up to believe “The big-maybe-this-time” is Love.
“The chemistry is more correctly suspense” (anxiety). “The excitement
of Love (is) connected to the constant possibility of its withdrawal.”
“uncertainty is a terrible high. Don’t mistake it for love.”
Sue V. Copelan is a counselor in Northwest Georgia
Read This To
Your Daughter: It’s Storytelling Time in the Land of She Who Often
Loved Too Much ~ By Penelope S. Schott
Lears, June 1990
There’s a certain young man out there I’d like to strangle. He’s
briefly back on the scene for another round. And she’s cooperating, to
her present and future grief. Can my daughter learn at 22 what I only
figured out a twice her age? Can yours?
It goes deep. I
was 14 when I heard Edith Piaf sing about a beautiful man who loved
her for one night. He was in the French Foreign Legion, blond and
silent. Il etait minc’, il etait beau, Il sentait bon le sable chaud.
(He was slender, he was handsome, he smelled of the hot sand.)
I could smell
that warm, dry skin. His almost physical presence created in me a
flutter, a longing I couldn’t yet label. Soon I would call it sexual
desire.
But I already
knew about desire. As a child I spent each winter longing most
passionately for summer, when I would be dispatched to my
grandparents. For years I lulled myself to sleep by imagining the
journey, the arrival, my grandparents posed in front of the fireplace
like cement lions.
I never dreamed
past the arrival, the moment where all good things were still
possible. This year I would be good enough to be loved. Again each
misdemeanor – table manners or tone of voice – was duly noted.
And yet – and
this is the remarkable part – year after year I lusted for summer.
This time I would deserve to be loved. The summers accumulated and I
eventually grew up and left home. My grandparents died.
Now it was my
parents from whom I craved approval, or perhaps it had always been my
parents and my grandparents were only their agents. No matter where I
moved or how much I avoided my parents, whenever I was with them I
felt bad – evaluated, found wanting.
A pack of
failures for each success. Still, before each visit, however painful
the last, a part of me thrilled with anticipation – my heart beating a
little faster, the blood pounding in my wrists.
I never
understood this apparent contradiction until I read about the
addictive power of intermittent reinforcement. When rats press a lever
and never get food pellets, they stop pressing; when they always get
food, the press when hungry and stop when full; but if mostly they
don’t get food and once in a rare while they do, they keep pressing
and pressing.
The big
maybe-this-time. For 40 years I kept pressing the lever.
Not just with my
parents. I spent most of my 30’s with a man I was crazy for. I
tolerated his casual affairs and unkindness and hoarded the times he
seemed to care about me.
Each moment of
acceptance flooded me with joy.
I remember lying
in bed with him and thinking, “Now I have him now. If the world ended
now, I would say it had been a good place.” When we parted I grieved
beyond measure.
While I was
still grieving I met a good man. I could see that his love would be
solid, uncontingent, so I wanted to want him. The problem was that
although we had become lovers and good friends, he didn’t inspire that
gut-wrenching ache.
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