Are You A Love Addict? with Coach Shena from Black Girls Heal

Hey, girl. Welcome to the get yout Guy coaching podcast. My name is Anwar White, but you can just call me your own personal dating and relationship coach. Each week you'll hear actionable advice, tips, and strategies that you can implement in your own love life. I'm talking about healing your heart, dating effectively, and understanding men so that you can, you guessed it, get your guy. Are you ready to level up your love life? All right, let's go.

I never felt the way I do without anyone but you.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the getyourguy coaching podcast. I have a very special guest with me, and I was on her podcast not too long ago, but I am so glad that she has graced us with her presence. I want to introduce Sheena Coach. Sheena, you are a relationship and trauma and love addiction expert and a licensed counselor. Girl, thank you so much for being here. Can you talk a little bit about what you do? Let the girls know?

Yeah, of course. So, again, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. So what I do is my main platform is called Black Girls Heal. And I help women heal from the symptoms of love addiction, love avoidance, and love deprivation, and the trauma that causes it to make way for healthy love in their life, starting with the relationship with themselves, because your relationship with yourself is the one that carries you do everywhere. So through bgh, I have a podcast where I talk about these topics every week. We have coaching programs, my recovery school program where I help women work through these things online and my therapy practice. And what's funny about or what's interesting, I would say about the difference between those two types of working with folks with love addiction is I find that when people know what to do, they're able to make real change. Therapy is amazing. I love being a therapist, but it's a slower process. But especially when it comes to. We're going to get into it. When it comes to things like love addiction, love avoidance is so trauma based so that when you're triggered with someone like, you don't really have time between sessions, wait to react. And so I really love helping people on the podcast and in other programs learn skills and tools so that they don't return to unhealthy relationships or continue to repeat their trauma.

I love that you mentioned that because I think therapy is amazing. But sometimes, especially if you're like a smart individual, it can just kind of be an intellectual exercise. And it's easy to avoid the trauma by just kind of intellectualizing it versus really getting deep in there. But it does require so much exposure. So thanks for sharing that, girl. The girls are going to have to know about your story, because when you were telling me your story, girl, I was flabbergasted. I was gagged, girl. But I think it's just like so important because. Because I think that a lot of women have gone through something that you've gone through or have experienced something similar. So I would love for you to just share your kind of your story and how you kind of got into your work as well as really kind of being the foremost expert on love addiction.

Yeah. Thank you for that. So. So the way that I got to this place is, like I said, I'm a therapist by trade. And so there was one point in my career that I was working at a residential treatment center. And so people who have like dual diagnosis, which means bipolar, borderline, but they may have drug addictions as well. And so per my job, I did group coaching or group therapy at that time and individual therapy. And when people were in 12 step programs, we had to help them with their steps. So of course you have na aaa, but they also have something called love addictions. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Now, remember thinking this is bs, this love addiction doesn't exist. You know, it is, but okay, I'll do it because it's part of my job.

Why did, why did you think that originally? Because I'm pretty sure thinking the same exact thing.

Right, Right. You know, I never heard about love addiction before, and even there was even some controversy about whether or not sex addiction is a real thing. You know, now we talk about compulsive sexual behavior and things like that, but there's all this controversy and the idea, you know, I'm a hopeless romantic. And I just think, yes. So the idea that being addicted to love even is like a real diagnosis or real thing that could actually impact someone versus you just need to learn about relationships and learn how to do something different. It just was a big jump. And I was. I was never taught about love addiction in counseling and in clinical school. You know, it just didn't seem real. It seemed, um, kind of coddly, just to be honest, at this time. So. But I supported people through it. And while I was working at that job, my mom passed away. Now, up until this point, I was always someone who on the outside had everything together. I was very successful, well loved, well liked, had lots of friends, but my romantic relationships just couldn't ever click. And because I was so successful in all these other areas, I was like, well, and people talk about with relationships. People give good advice all the time. So I thought, this is just part of dating, part of growing up. It'll get better the more you learn. But it didn't get better. And if anything, I would have more and more relationships where I would abandon myself and sacrifice what I wanted because I was trying to give somebody a chance or give them benefit of the doubt or be fair, nobody's perfect, that kind of thing. And when my mom passed away.

The trauma that was underneath me, looking for relationships and people outside of myself to validate me, isolated. And it got worse. And so not only did I have grief, but now I was dating more people that were not. That were not good for me. And it was affecting me more and just more other sexual addiction type things. And so finally my therapist was like, I think you need help with this. Have you ever considered sex addicts or sex and love addicts Anonymous? And I was like, no, because he said sex addiction first. And I was like, no, I'm not an abuser. I'm not a perpetrator. I'm not going to go to this place. I mean, you know, people may. You know, the idea that you have was people with like trench coats on and they're like, look seedy and everything. It's like, I'm not gonna go to this meeting. Yeah. And then a few weeks later, there was another relationship that just was horrible. It was a narcissist. There was someone who was unhealthy, like very clearly unhealthy, that would stay connected to. And he said, well, what about sex and love acts Anonymous. And the love part made me be like, okay, I'll try it. So I go to this space and I don't know what to expect. And I sit into this room and everybody around me looks completely normal. There are lawyers in the room, stay at home, moms, there's teachers, there's students, but just an everyday woman. And I hear my story in every single one of them. I hear women who love too hard, that when I. When people talk about being a hopeless romantic, they sometimes people will champion, you know, when I love someone, I'm there, you know, like I'm loyal to a fault kind of thing. And like, it's like seen as a growth area. But also like, I like this about me. And it's okay to be loyal and faithful and compassionate, but when you do it at the sake of yourself, that's where the problem happens, right? And so I hear the story and I hear the trauma and I hear everything else. I'm like, oh, this is. This is what I've been dealing with. And so I get on my Googles and I look up Love Edition.

Yes, girl.

And I look into like a pamphlet they have, and I was like, oh, that's what this is.

Yeah.

Because when I was going through this. You know, when you struggle with love addiction, you're the person who keeps going back to relationships, even though you know they're bad for you and even though there's real consequences. You're the girl who continues to talk about the same partner and the same relationship over and over. And at first your friends are supportive, but then they're like, why do we keep doing this? And you feel crazy. Especially if you have all these amazing things going on in your life and you just wonder, why can't I be grateful? Why can't I move past this? Why can't I be healthier? And you wonder that there's seriously something wrong with you. And even that you're the only one. Especially if you have healthy friends who, yeah, people have a bad relationship here or there, but people who are securely attached are healthy. It's like few and far between when you struggle with love addiction or love avoidance is either one or the other. Either one stream or the other. Either you push people away and you can't let the good people in. Or with love addiction, you're really attached and available only for the unhealthy people. And then also when the breakups happen, they just take you to this crazy depth, like there's an actual withdrawal that happens. So the panic attacks, the inability to sleep, the anxiety, the depression, that's also embarrassing because your friends may go through breakups. Breakups suck for everyone. But for you, distance from this person you're trauma bonded with because it's connected to deeper childhood trauma is devastating. And it's really hard to have other people who don't have that type of trauma pattern understand that. And the same ways that you learn how to cope around relationships understand that. So to be in that space and be in that room just healed so much. And learning how to connect and talk about my feelings with other people who got it healed so much. That program was great. I'll just say one more thing. That program was great. But it connected back here because like my therapist said, he didn't really know how to help me. He knew that love addiction support groups and sex and love addiction support groups were a thing, but there wasn't any training on that. And so I saw that even when I would talk about with other clinicians that same response. I said that I had. I would have other women who would come to my practice because I shifted to focus only on love addiction. And I have all these women who would come and work with me and talk about being shamed by their previous therapists who are like, we already talked about this before. Why do you keep doing this? Who didn't quite understand that connection to why this is happening. So I decided to focus on that in my practice, and it was great. And I pivoted to talk about that on the podcast. And so that's what we hear today.

And I'm so glad that you're here. Girl, this is so interesting. Girl. I want to get into it. I want to get into all of it. So what is love addiction?

Yeah, love addiction is the persistent obsession of a person, a relationship, or the fantasy of who you want that person or relationship to be. And mistaking that intensity for love, mistaken that obsession for love. So, because I can't let them go because, you know, I miss them so much and we're a part of. They miss me because I'm thinking about them all the time. That must mean that this is supposed to be when really you've had people before in your past, you've been unavailable, who've abandoned you or whatever, and you have found someone who's repeating that same trauma pattern. And so that's why it feels familiar. That's why it feels like something that you can deal with. And what may be clear red flags to other people, you don't. Either you don't notice it, or you minimize it, and you don't think that it's that strong. And so this can show up as codependency. It can show up, like I said, people who call themselves hopeless romantics, but they lose themselves in the process. Serial monogamous. So not being able to have any point in time where you're actually single because of the fear, what comes up if I'm not with someone, if I'm not chosen, if I'm not seen, if someone doesn't love me back, what does that mean for me? Because you don't really have that love for yourself.

Talk to me a little bit about how this kind of love addiction might affect, like, black women specifically and the unique experience of a black girl or black woman growing up.

Yeah, I think so. If love addiction is based in trauma, we can look at just typical trauma that all human beings, for the most part, can experience. Family trauma, maybe bullying, stuff like that. When we add in the experience of being black and Black American, here in the States, we have the impact of intergenerational trauma, of chattel slavery, of oppression, of discrimination, and all the ways that that has formed different norms and relationship expectations for us as people. So because of history and a lot of things that have happened, unfortunately, there is a legacy of abandonment, of withdrawal, of people being there and not being there anymore. People who were doing everything they could just to survive. So they didn't have the space to actually build emotional.

I don't want to say. I'll say intelligence, because they had to keep the lights on or they had to make sure that their family was safe, you know, and stuff like that. So to have space to actually affirm someone and listen to the feelings or to even see a child as a human being that was worthy of being attended to, that didn't happen because we have all these other things, right? And then even when we think about the impact for those folks who have a lot of Christianity in the background, which I think is very common for a lot of black people to be culturally Christian, whether or not it's part of truly your faith or whether or not it was something that was given down, given to you, depending on what you were taught and how you were taught, you need to be happy all the time, or, you know, struggle is normal, but God's got you. You know, God blesses those who are.

Hurt the most or those who are feel abandoned. So the way that this shows up in our relationships is that trauma, abandonment, neglect is normalized. We have a lot of black women throughout history who have had to pick up the pieces and be the ones who were strong, be the ones who have been in charge, be the ones who had to kind of be a workhorse or be a mule in a way again, to keep everybody going. So what space does that have for you to be loved and to be adorned and to be taken care of and for you to be soft? So we have women who had to grow up in this way, not being able to attend to their daughters and not being able to.

Not necessarily having relationships with folks who love them back, love them the way that they deserve to be loved. So now we have daughters watching that happen and receiving that. So then they go and they treat their daughters the same way or they try to do better. But there's no real models to show that this is possible. You know, I even see now in our popular culture that the stories for black relationships that get the most press are the ones of trauma and tragedy. Yes, the ones on these reality shows where it's normalized the cheating and the fighting and, you know, is it 50, 50 or da da, da? Like, there's not. We don't promote or what. There's not a lot of promotion of healthy, secure relationships. So what I see in a lot of women is that there has to be an unlearning of this, and there has to be a firm planting in everything that I want, I deserve to have. I don't need to meet Joe Schmo, who can only give me 30% of what I want emotionally. But, you know, on paper, he's got six figures or he's this tall or whatever else. You know, I'll meet a lot of women who have the same type of pattern where they will be with someone who may be physically present, but emotionally they're not present, or they're not able to be faithful, or they don't really know how to attend to them or love them as a human being, that they don't like them as a person. And so when I think about generationally, if you haven't had that experience, you don't know what you're missing. And you have to. You have to learn that you deserve that.

I love that you went into this, and I want to kind of harp on the parental relationships because it's so important. You named a couple of things. One, that sometimes it can feel, growing up, that our parents love us, but they don't like us. And so that can. That can be normalized, right? We will, like, lean into these sorts of pattern, these bonding patterns that we create that become foundational. And it can be. It can feel very natural for us, even though intellectually we know better. Emotionally, it just feels like home, however unhealthy that that feels like. And then secondly, one of the things that I have kind of experience in the work that I've done is a lot of us have very critical and judgmental and even narcissistic mothers and emotionally absent or physically absent fathers, which no shade is a double whammy in a lot of different ways as it relates, I think, to love addiction, because there's always this chasing, right? There's always the ideal of the potential of what it can be or what it should be, because it was never what it was supposed to be. So I'm so glad that you're kind of speaking words to, I think, the experience of so many women of color, not just black women, I think women of color in general as well, because that experience is something that is, you know, familiar for a variety of different women. So thank you for that so much.

Last year when we were chatting, you were talking about different kind of archetypes as it relates to like love addicts, right. Would you mind kind of just sharing a little bit about like what kind of archetypes there are? Because honey, we might see ourselves in some of these.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm gonna say real quick. So that's one way that it can manifest when it comes to love addiction. The other side of that, when you have a mother that's highly critical, narcissistic or absent or, you know, withdrawn father, is the love avoidance peace. So both of those are coping mechanisms. So either I'm going to really try to appease people and get them to love me and neglect myself, or I'm going to say forget relationships, forget love altog and I'm not going to be open to it, right. Because I've learned that I can't depend on folks. And there's not a switch that magically turns on when you learn to be love avoided to where you're like, you know what? This healthy person in front of me, I'm going to trust them, I'm going to be vulnerable, I'm going to open up. So that's why you really have to look at all the ways that this manifests.

So hold on, hold on. So that, that's the love avoidance. Do you see in the work that you do, people that are especially black women, are they more love addicted or more love avoidant?

It's a mixture. I, I would say most people have both sides. It depends on who's in front of them. A lot of women who are really, and this is an art, one of my archetypes for love avoidance, who are very purpose driven, meaning that they are about their bag, they're about on their career, like really ambitious.

The way that they will kind of create this, this buffer is they're doing things that the reason why they're here to be on earth. But it kind of creates all this distance to where people can't really get attached to them. So they're very love avoidant in that, you know, only have certain amount of time and energy for certain people and they're very restricted and over controlled. But when they get into a romantic partnership with someone who may be unavailable all of a sudden, now they're more open to giving them a benefit of doubt. They may attach very quickly. It's kind of like you're either on one extreme or the other. So I've seen both. The question I get here's what I'll say. The question I get most from women is, can I be both? I really relate to this love addiction part because they can think of previous relationships, but then when they hear about that difficulty trusting and letting people in and being vulnerable, they really relate to that, too. And so really, both of these are intimacy disorders, because as.