Amber Hollingsworth (Put the Shovel Down channel) explains how to distinguish genuine love from love addiction. She frames addictive love as primarily a feeling/obsession (a thought process that drives behaviors) versus love as more about other-centered behavior. Core symptoms of love addiction described here include intense obsession (constant thinking), fantasy construction (being out of touch with reality), emotional dependence/withdrawal when not engaged, loss of other interests, and stalking-like behaviors. The video previews a series that will explore three phases of love addiction: with someone you are not dating, with someone you are dating, and after a breakup.
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Are you in love with a person or are you addicted to them? It's very important to figure out the difference between the two because addicted type love almost always ends in disaster. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the shovel down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your family and your life back on track. Get back out there and live the life that you want to live. You to know you are not powerless. You do not have to hit rock bottom. And there are many things you can do to help an addicted loved one. If you want to be back in control of your life, subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure you are always five steps ahead of addiction. And don't forget, hit the little bell if you want access to the bonus episodes. Sometimes it can be kind of difficult to figure out the difference in am I in love or addicted? And that causes a lot of confusion and mixed up feelings and sometimes really bad decision making on our part. So let's clearly define each, so that way you'll know which category your situation falls into. Now, one of the reasons why it's so difficult to figure out the difference in the two is because we tend to use the word love so broadly and to cover so many different things or types of love that it can be confusing. For example, there's romantic love. There's the way you love your best friend, there's the way you love your parents, and there's the way you love your child. And all of those are like totally different kinds of love. Wouldn't you agree? And the other reason why this can get messy and confusing and complicated is because of the way our culture represents love probably is really more like addiction and less like love. Which leads a lot of people who are actually in love to think that they're not in love or they're with the wrong person because they're not in an addicted state. And it leads a lot of people who are really in an addicted state to convince themselves that they are in love. But it's really two different things. One of the easiest, fastest, and most helpful ways to differentiate the two is to think about addiction or addictive love as a feeling and to think about actual love more as a behavior. When we're addicted to something, it's actually not that something that we're after. It's the way that that makes us feel inside. That's the thing that we're after. Whether you're addicted to A person, drugs, alcohol, gambling, whatever. You're really. It's not the thing, it's the feeling it gives you, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Or that things that are addictive are incapable of giving you that feeling consistently and long term. When you're addicted to something, you end up spending a lot of your time in kind of a desperate state. There's this desperation to hang on to whatever it is that you are addicted to. Addiction is really a lot more of a thought process. Now. There's behaviors that go along, but they're the result of this thought process that drives the behaviors. For example, if you are an alcoholic, the addiction is really the obsession about the alcohol. Now you'll see the behavior in that the person drinks alcohol. But not everyone who drinks alcohol is obsessed with alcohol. And just like someone can be like a normal drinker, like they drink alcohol. Sometimes they even drink a lot of alcohol, but they're not addicted to it. You can have that being in love feeling without that desperate, obsessive, it's taken over your whole life kind of thing. When that happens, you're really in the addicted state. So let's talk about what it looks like and feels like to be addicted to love. Now, you can be the kind of person that's sort of like addicted to love in general. And that means it happens to you all the time, over and over and over with different, different people. Or you can be the kind of person who's addicted to one specific person. Just like you can be the kind of person who's like, addicted to any kind of drug they ever put in their body. Or you can be the kind of person who's only addicted to one thing. But whether you're addicted to one person or you're just addicted to the idea and the feeling of love in general, these are the symptoms. The biggest, most important and number one symptom of addictive love is obsession. It's the amount of time, energy and space that you spend thinking about the person. Because there's something about the way that person makes you feel that you crave and you long for. And that creates an obsession, a constant need for. I'm sure you've heard that when people are addicted to something, sometimes they're feeling some kind of hole inside. Yes, same thing with love. It's like you have this gap inside and you feel like this is the only way to meet it, and you become obsessive about it. But here's a really important key factor. It's really not the person. It's this fantasy you build up in your mind about that person or about the relationships. What happens when you're in this addicted love state is you. You develop this whole fantasy world. You are not in reality. Just like when you're addicted to heroin. You're not in reality, just like when you're using alcohol. You're not in reality. When you are addicted to love and you are actively engaging in that addiction, you go into this fantasy state which is totally separate from reality. And then you become very reliant on that feeling, which creates a desperation, which then leads to a fear of losing that person because you feel like, I can't live without it. The same way as an alcoholic feels like they can't live without alcohol. You become reliant on it to, like, fix everything for you. You become reliant on it to meet all of your needs. You start losing interest in other things in your life. You might even give up hobbies, interest, activities because you're so obsessed with this person. So you're either spending all your time with them, or you're spending all your time thinking about them, or you're not engaging in this fantasy of the relationship with that person. You go into this immediate withdrawal type state, which leads you to pursue that feeling even more. Even the thought of not having that person in your life will put you in a withdrawal, crazed, desperate state, which will lead you to do desperate things. Now, the action associated with love addiction, I'm going to call it stalking. And stalking incorporates a lot of different behaviors, some of them in the way that you typically think about the word stalking, like following a person around. But this stalking type behavior can manifest in a lot of different ways, which we're going to cover in the next video. This is actually the first part of a series of videos because to really understand love addiction, kind of need to break it down into phases or categories. The three different phases or categories I'm going to break it down for. You are being addicted to a person that you are not in a relationship with. Then there's being addicted to a person that you are in a relationship with. And then there's being addicted to a person that you're broken up with or that you've lost. Now, sometimes you can go through all three of those phases with one person, and sometimes you just get stuck in one of the phases. So it's going to be important for you to watch the whole series to really understand where you're at, why you're there, and how to get out of it. Because ultimately it's going to end badly, just like any addiction does. You know that the way you feel about this person, this desperation that you feel deep down aside, you kind of know that there's something wrong with that. And it might be hard to admit out loud, but when you really dig down deep, you feel kind of ashamed about it. You don't necessarily feel ashamed because you feel that way, but you will feel ashamed of some of the behaviors that you're going to engage in because of the addiction. The same with any other addiction. You will do things when you are addicted to heroin that you wouldn't normally do, and you will feel guilty and shameful about it, just like you will do things when you're addicted to a person that you wouldn't normally do. And that leads you to feeling really terrible about yourself. When you have actual love for a person, it's really more about that other person versus when you're addicted to a person, it feels like it's about that other person, but it's not. It's about a feeling that you're chasing inside of you, and you falsely think that that person can give it to you. All right, now join me in part two of this series where we will explore how addicted love works when you are not in a relations with that person.
