Are You Addicted to a Toxic Relationship?

Lisa Marie Bobby: Hi, this is Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, and you’re listening to the Love, Happiness and Success podcast. Have you ever been in a relationship that you knew fundamentally was not healthy for you, and you couldn’t seem to end it? Maybe you’re in one of those relationships right now. Today, we’re talking about why toxic relationships are so addictive, and the things that you can do to create emotional freedom and finally, break free. 

Friends, we have gathered here today to talk about the sad reality of getting addicted to a toxic relationship, how it happens, why it happens. To set the tone for the experience that you and I will be having together today is Frankie and the Witch Fingers, love this band. This is the song “In Your Head”. I’m sure you’re quickly understanding why the song is so relevant and appropriate for our conversation today. 

If you have not heard of Frankie and the Witch Fingers before, you need to have more of them in your life. So go to their Bandcamp page, FrankieandtheWitchFingers.bandcamp.com. You can check out their albums, merch and also tour dates at the time of this recording. They appear to be bouncing around on the West Coast, and hopefully, you can catch up with Frankie and the Witch Fingers. 

I hope that this musical selection helps us all get into the mood and kind of energetically enter the space of the experience of being addicted to a toxic relationship. We’re going to talk about why toxic relationships are actually much more addictive than regular healthy relationships. Also some of the strategies that you can use, the mindsets you can employ, the shifts that you can make that will help you just recover yourself and break free from the situation that you and I both know is not ideal for you. 

If you are currently not in a toxic relationship, but maybe have been in the past, my hope is that this episode will help you gain some perspective and understanding and clarity and hopefully empathy for yourself about like, what the heck happened, and how do I put myself back together again, and how do I not let that happen to me in the future. Also, you may be listening to this show, as a friend, as a family member, as a loved one of somebody who is in this experience right now. 

If that’s the case, I hope that you find some ideas in here that will be helpful for you to maintain your empathy and loyalty and compassion for them as you’re watching them go through this difficult thing. Also, please do share this episode with them, so that they can also just increase their understanding of what’s going on in these situations, why they’re so hard to get out of. But hopefully, we’ll also get some insight onto the things that will help them move forward. 

Thank you to all of you who have gotten in touch with me over the recent weeks and months to let me know that you are struggling in this situation or care about somebody who is struggling in this situation. Because hearing from you and getting your feedback and your ideas about the topics and the things that we should be discussing on the show is fundamentally important to my process, that is how we come up with topics and things that we’re discussing because we really want to make these shows valuable for you. 

So I do appreciate you getting in touch through our website growingself.com, through the comments on the blog, through social media, and everything. I have to tell you, as I was reading through some of your comments and questions, what always comes out to me when I hear your questions is just this like, sense of confusion, the helplessness. I mean, if I could distill every question down into one, it is why is this happening? 

I know this person is a horror show for all these 27 reasons. I know this isn’t good for me, but I can’t leave, I can’t get out of it or I keep going back or even if we do break up, I’m so like, obsessing with them and that all I can think about what is wrong with me. It’s that last part that I think I take the most issue with. I am here to tell you that there is nothing wrong with you specifically, because you’re having this life experience. 

This is really common, and there are reasons for it. So we’re going to be talking a lot about why that is and what to do but I also just want you to know that there is no reason to feel ashamed aimed, or like, most people don’t feel this way in this situation or that there’s something uniquely wrong with you because you’re having this experience. I hope that if nothing else, today’s episode will really help you feel just a lot more compassion for yourself. 

Because one of the things that toxic relationship will do with intention and skill is just smash your self esteem to bits. It will ruin your self confidence. Then once it has smashed your self esteem and ruined your confidence, it comes out with a steamroller and kind of drives over it about 97 more times, and then stumps up and down on it sets it on fire. I mean, it really does damage to the way we feel about ourselves because of being in the situation. 

Also, I think, because of the helplessness, the hopelessness, the lack of control, right? I think that at the end of the day, one of the most damaging experiences of a toxic relationship is not what your partner or your ex did to you, because that is damaging enough in itself, but the really damaging part is feeling like you couldn’t count on yourself to get out of the situation. You knew it was bad, and you let yourself be hurt over and over again. 

It’s the self betrayal that really messes people up. I just want to say that right off the bat, because if you’re listening to this podcast, either for your own growth, or if you’re listening to it on behalf of someone else, you should know that this is the experience, and that’s also one of the reasons why it’s so hard to leave. 

If you don’t feel good about yourself, if your self esteem is in the gutter, if you are almost feeling emotionally dependent on this person, to make you feel better in these fleeting moments, when that actually does happen, it’s that much harder to get out of. It’s like a downward spiral. There’s a lot of systemic factors that are happening outside of you, inside of you, pushing you down, keeping in the situation. I just want to say that out loud. 

I hope all will make it, maybe not all, but a lot will make more sense by the time we get to the end of this episode together. But I just wanted to begin by saying that I get it and that I’m sorry that this is going on, and that you are not alone. I’ve worked with a lot of people who have been in this experience. I went through one myself. I wrote a book on the subject and learned a lot. I’m very grateful to have the opportunity today to share this information with you, because I feel like we’re not talking about this enough in our culture. 

In fact, when I first began my career, so I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. I am also a licensed psychologist. I am a board certified coach, and I founded a counseling and coaching practice called Growing Self Counseling and Coaching. In the beginning of my career, even though I myself had had that experience of feeling addicted to a toxic relationship that I wasn’t able to end or break free from and it was very damaging to me personally, this happened when I was a teenager, and it took a long time to recover. 

So even after having lived through that myself, still, as a licensed mental health professional, I was now being routinely confronted with people who were coming to me for help, and they like this is happening, what’s going on, what do I do. Honestly, as much as I wanted to, I did not feel equipped to be of assistance to them with what I learned in graduate school or even through clinical experience so far. 

So through a master’s program, through a doctoral program, there was zero in my education or training that prepared me to understand, yeah, what is this about, what the heck is going on. So I wound up having to do a lot of independent research, because I am a card carrying nerd. Before I was a counselor, I was actually a biology major. That was my undergraduate. 

I had the great fortune of stumbling across the work of a phenomenal researcher, Dr. Helen Fisher, who is an evolutionary biologist, and she, I’m sorry, evolutionary anthropologist, I think is her title. Nevertheless, she conducted some really interesting research where she put people who were having feelings of love, attachment, heartbreak, despair over a relationship through a functional MRI machine to take brain scans. 

She was able to identify the areas of the brain that are getting stimulated when people fall in love, and also the areas of the brain that are implicated when people are being essentially emotionally tortured from the inside out, either through a breakup or relationship loss or a toxic relationship. 

So through reading her research and really kind of understanding that and putting that together with things like attachment theory, and what I did know about relationships, and about the way human systems work, and about the way people work, right, the way we think, the way we feel, the way we behave, and what we need to do in order to be able to grow and move into healthy spaces, particularly in our relationships, that turned into a book called Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love. 

In that book, I’m really talking a lot about breakup recovery, like why we feel so bad when relationships end, what we can do on the path of recovery. I discuss a little bit in that book about the toxic relationship experience as being uniquely terrible, even compared to a regular breakup, but didn’t honestly have the opportunity to go into that as fully as I would have liked, and so just thrilled to be able to have a chance to do this with you on the podcast and for your benefit. 

So to dive in, and really go here, I mean, we all know, intellectually, that toxic relationships are bad news. There are different definitions of toxic relationships, but I think a quick and accurate definition is a relationship that makes you feel bad, where damaging things are happening to you. You are not getting your needs met. You are being hurt or disappointed over and over again, and where you know that there isn’t the opportunity for growth and improvement. 

All relationships have ups and downs. All people are not kind to their partners at certain points, right? I mean, so it’s possible to have some of these experiences in the context of a healthy relationship. But the difference with a toxic relationship is that it’s pretty consistently showing you that it’s not good for you, and it’s also not going to change. There isn’t a path forward, and you know that to be true, but you still cannot break free. 

There are as few life experiences that will make you as thoroughly miserable as being in the situation. The interesting thing is that toxic relationships, relationships that are disappointing, hurtful, and also keep you connected with that person are really hard to end. In my experience, those kinds of unhealthy relationships are actually often much harder to end than relationships that are fundamentally healthy, which surprises the heck out of a lot of people to hear. 

But if you’ve ever lived through this life experience, you will understand because there’s an experiential quality to these kinds of relationships, because they are unhealthy, that makes them very different than healthy, safe, calm, secure relationships. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you know what I mean. You’ve lived it. You may be fully aware that this person isn’t good for you, right? 

This isn’t going to end well, and still crave being around with them. Like you’ve never craved anything else in your life. You want to be with them. It’s like the only thing, right? It can genuinely feel like you don’t have the power to let go of this relationship. You can’t set boundaries, healthy boundaries, even though time and time again, you’re like, what am I doing, right? 

This can also be very isolating and damaging to other relationships that we have, because this is baffling from the outside, right? I mean, like when we are observing somebody that we love and care about going around this weird roller coaster, rodeo thing, I’m like, what are you doing? They know that the relationship isn’t good for you. They see your pain. They’re talking to you time and time again, when you’re like, oh my gosh, this awful thing happened and they’re like, “Huh, really? Who would have guessed?” 

It feels isolating, because after a while, people who care about you can start to pull away too, right? You sense that they’re getting impatient with you. They are saying things like, yeah, this isn’t good for you. You should leave. It’s like, nobody understands you. They don’t get it. They don’t understand what you’re going through. You know they’re right, and you’re like, yeah, if it was only that easy I could. 

But that it starts to change those relationships too. It changes their relationship with you, but then it starts to change your relationship with yourself, because you too are wondering why someone that you know is smart and capable and wonderful would put up with so much crappiness and angst and heartache. That’s what starts to damage your own self esteem. The self destructive streak that’s happening in you that doesn’t make any sense, that feels out of control, and damages your relationship with yourself. 

So lots of dire consequences in these situations, but it’s also just so important to know that toxic relationships are addictive, just like other addictive substances. Heroin is addictive, alcohol, other drugs, and they work a little bit differently than toxic relationships. But toxic relationships have a very forceful and powerful impact on the way that we feel on our brain chemistry, on our hormones, and on our attachment systems. 

So we all have these structures inside of ourselves that are there for the purpose of bonding to other humans. Fascinatingly, what Dr. Fisher also discovered in her work is that these brain structures that allow for human bonding and attachment are the very same ones that are implicated, that are taken over when we do become attached to substances. So the same parts of your brain that light up when you ingest cocaine are the same parts of your brain that light up when you’re falling in love with someone. 

It’s thought that the reason why addictive substances are so addictive is because they are artificially stimulating these very powerful parts of our systems that nature created for the purpose of bonding with other humans. Same with opiates, opiates are recruiting kind of, hijacking parts of our brains that are there for the purpose of forming attachment bonds to other people, which is different than the experience of falling in love. 

But then, there’s some really interesting new research coming out from psychologists and researchers in the field of addictions and recovery, which is pointing out that in many times the cure of substance abuse recovery is in fact, not just stopping using a substance, it’s developing very strong, insecure attachment bonds with other humans, because it’s like, you’re moving something positive into that place. 

So just some interesting food for thought about the nature of addiction itself, and I hope some understanding around why certain kinds of relationships are as addictive as they are, because they’re sort of ground zero. They are addictive in the way that nature intended for you to get addicted, which is to fall in love with people and develop attachment bonds. But toxic relationships are much more powerful in some ways than healthy relationships, because of the highs and the lows, the high highs, the low lows, the euphoria, the elation, the despair, the anxiety, the anger. 

There’s a reason that that pattern, that kind of up and down the intensity of it does a number on our brains, making it really hard to walk away from them. So I want you to understand why these are so addictive, what’s going on. As I was thinking about how to prepare this podcast and make it be as meaningful as possible for you, I thought that I would tell you a story about this. If you will indulge me and for a couple of reasons, like I want you to. 

I think that sometimes when we see things happening to other people, we’re able to get perspective and understanding that can be harder to come by when it’s us. Because this experience is so isolating, I think it can also be really helpful and healing to understand the path that other people have walked through too. This is one of the really powerful things of group therapy. 

I just thought that telling you a story about somebody else would be a better vehicle and more helpful for you, then just focusing on your experience, on our experience. So the setting of the story is my therapy office. So if you can imagine there’s a couch, there are end tables. There are chairs. There are tea cups. There’s me in my work clothes. When I go to the office, I wear appropriate attire. I’m currently wearing yoga pants, but I clean up real nice. So we’re in my counseling office, and I am having a session with Tom. 

Tom is not his real name, and many of these other details are de-identified, but we’re gonna call him Tom. It was a year before he died. I imagined this very clearly. I remember just sitting across. I was in my little therapy chair, and he’s on the couch, and he’s just obsessing over Sarah. He cannot stop thinking about her. He is in terrible pain. He wants to be with her. Everything is in his life, if he’s at work, or if he’s at home, or if he’s going here, going there thinking about future plans or past pet plans. 

I mean, it’s like, Sarah, it’s all there is, right? You should know about Tom, that he had actually left his wife and children for Sarah, some years previously. As is often the case with affairs, this relationship for Tom had sparked a passion just deep inside of him like nothing he’d ever known. Tom’s experience was not unusual in this, I mean, the context of an affair, the secrecy, the excitement, the adventure, the forbiddenness, the cloak and dagger kind of secrecy, all the things make affairs feel much more emotionally intense than regular relationships. 

Tom could have met Sarah on a dating app, and they could both have been single and gone on a date and liked each other. The relationship, I think, actually could evolved in a very different way if it had not begun as an affair. If you’re interested to hear more on this topic, I’ll refer you back to a podcast that I did around if you’re married with a crush on someone else, because we’ve also talked about affair recovery on other podcasts, how you can mend a relationship with your primary partner in the aftermath of an affair. 

But the experience of having an affair changes the way that the relationship itself feels to people who enter in the context of an affair will be having a much different experience with each other and with themselves if those same two people were to meet each other in different circumstances. So I think that that’s an important detail. But with Tom, he had been previously married for decades. 

They had kids, was probably kind of boring and humdrum, and boring but boring, I mean, calm, secure, you know each other well. My relationship is like right now, right? But when he met Sarah, all of a sudden, there’s all this newness. They’re having fun together. They’re laughing. The sexual connection was super intense. Sarah was a very sexual person. As destructive and crushing as the relationship had ultimately bend for him at the end, he was still very much addicted to the way that she made him feel. 

Those early days of the affair and of their relationship were like, I have heard it said that the first time that people use certain really powerful addictive drugs like opiates or stimulants, there’s this overwhelmingly euphoric experience that they refer to as chasing the dragon after the fact. Like a lot of their subsequent drug use is in some ways in efforts to feel as good as they did when they first started. 

There was very much that quality to Tom when he talked about it, it was really a lot around how amazing it was in the beginning, that was the hook that went through the gills, right? You should also know just more details about the relationship itself. I mean, I actually wound up meeting Sarah, briefly. At one point, this was like an on again, off again relationship. While certainly like any ethical therapist, if I am working with an individual client, I cannot shift gears and turn into that person’s couples therapist to now be serving the relationship as opposed to that individual. 

An experienced marriage and family therapist who knows what they are doing would never do that. If you are with a therapist who offers to do that, or think it’s okay to do that, just some big big sisterly and unsolicited advice here, would encourage you to get a second opinion or at least understand that you are not working with a marriage and family therapist who is well versed in best practices, so just as a little aside there. But so I did meet Sarah because, as is his right. 

I mean, with individual clients, they can bring anybody that they want into their work. At an on again, off again relationship, at one point, Tom felt that maybe if he and Sarah were able to talk through some things, he was able to have support and saying some of the things that he wanted to say, and the emotional safety that I think me and our relationship provided that that might have a different outcome. It didn’t, but I wasn’t there to do couples therapy. 

I was just here to help Tom talk about his feelings with Sarah. Sarah was very pretty. She was very charming. She was fun. She had a great smile. I did not get to know her. Well, I only met her that one time, but in hearing stories from Tom came to understand that she was mercurial. Big emotions, intense emotions, she would get really upset about different things. When she got upset, she would break up with him, and this happened fairly frequently, even towards the beginning of their relationship. 

She would get mad, and then she would cut things off. Tom wouldn’t have access to her for a couple of days, which is also a very common thing in toxic relationships and is also, I think, part of this addictive process, right? Because Tom is euphoric, and now, he is in despair. Now, he wants to be with Sarah more than anything, and he’s torturing himself if only I didn’t say that thing. 

Then maybe we can reconnect, and then he reconnects with Sarah and oh my gosh, I’m so happy and just like that big intense roller coaster, roller coaster. It was that feeling himself of euphoria, that despair. The only way to feel good again was to reconnect with Sarah. Because these emotional experiences were so intense, Tom was not able to do the kind of thinking around, maybe it’s unreasonable that Sarah is getting mad at me for these things. 

When I really think about it, I didn’t do anything wrong. Sarah is not a great communicator. If Sarah is upset about something, there are many other ways that she could let me know that. These are solvable problems. I care about the relationship. I’m willing to make changes. But Sarah and I are not talking about those things. She’s actually kind of behaving fairly abusively towards me by punishing me, yelling at me, breaking up with me. 

This is not an emotionally safe person for me. At that time, in that place, Tom was not able to think about it in that way, because he was so caught up in this emotional intensity, and he didn’t understand Sarah. It was like, that’s just the way she is, right? But even during the good times of their relationship, because in toxic relationships, it’s not all bad. We wouldn’t stick around for that. 

So there were calmer periods, times when they weren’t fighting, but even then, I think, it was easier for him to get some more distance and perspective on who and what she was when they were going through simpler times. But even then, he would see the way she parented her children, which he told me he thought was pretty manipulative. According to him, she spent too much money. She was impulsive. 

He saw her creating kind of problems for herself, questioning some of her judgment. There was more to this story. His friends actively disliked her. His adult daughters hated her with a fire of a thousand suns. But because I think he was so caught up in these feelings, I mean, he stayed by her side and over the course of Tom and I’s relationship, this continued to evolve in some pretty interesting ways. She was convicted of shoplifting. 

There was an embezzlement situation, I mean. But he was very devoted to her. Really, I think the reality of who she was quite obscured, because of the intensity of his feelings, and he was really stuck in this place. So during all this time, during the breakups and the getting back together, I would, I thought sensibly, but I think, because my understanding of what was going on was still developing, my advice is like, okay, let’s be done, and here’s how to be done, here’s how to block her from her phone, so she can’t text you in a week asking you if you want to get together. 

You know how this is going to end. We had been around the cycle like 20 times. We need to end, and he would get so emotional. He was like, the idea of being capital D, done and preventing her ability to access and to think that this is over, over. I mean, he would cry when he thought about it, right? I mean, because he knew that if he cut her off, he wouldn’t get that inevitable, hi, what you doing text that would just flood him with this hope and euphoria, and maybe this time, it’ll be different, and being back together again for another few weeks, possibly months of bliss, because they had fun together.

Tom lived for that. I mean, they had peak experiences, right? They did fun things together. But at the end of the day, in a healthy relationship, there needs to be more substance. We can only spend so much time riding motorcycles, having sex together, going dancing at concerts. Sooner or later, somebody has to pay the tab, take out the trash, decide what to cook the kids, right? So it was actually in those moments that more like day to day life stuff that that’s when the real friction would start. 

Because as things evolved over the years, Tom would explain, like, hey, we need to do this, or no, I don’t think we should do that. But it was like that, because the relationship was so emotionally unsafe for him. If he stood up and talked about how he felt or wanted to create change, it would just totally flare up into this very angry situation and just incinerate the moment, like Sarah couldn’t tolerate it. 

She would punish him and kind of back in your place, Tom. When things got that kind of hot, Sarah would reject Tom. I think that’s how she maintained control in the relationship. She would break up with him. She would refuse his calls, and he would just be heartbroken again and on my couch talking about how great Sarah was. It really impacted him. He couldn’t eat. 

He couldn’t sleep. He was a former smoker, and remember, he started smoking cigarettes again at one point. I mean, it was awful. And even then, we would talk about the addictive nature of this relationship. And Tom could understand it like, intellectually, when I said things from what I understand, doing cocaine is a lot of fun, too. But because it feels good, sometimes doesn’t mean that it’s good for you. 

He could see the parallels because I could say, here are the consequences, here are the ways that cocaine might harm someone. And here’s the harm that’s being done to you through your experiences in this relationship. He was not a stupid man. I mean, he could totally see it intellectually. But he was really hooked. And like this biological, elemental, limbic brain kind of level. He felt euphoric, when they were together. He felt this craving for her when they were apart. 

And the fact that this relationship was the relational equivalent to eating ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then getting six year stomach. It didn’t matter, he wanted to feel it again. He wished for it. And so it is with all addictions. I mean, we talked a little bit about the nature of addiction when we first started. But I think an easy definition of any addiction, be it a substance, be it sex, be it gambling, spending too much money, any of the behaviors, whatever it is, is something that changes your mood in the way you want it to go. So it changes your mood in a positive direction, at least momentarily. 

When you do cocaine, you feel whatever it feels like to do cocaine. I have not had that life experience myself, but I understand it’s fun. But you know, I was addicted to cigarettes at one point in my life, which is embarrassing. But true, when I smoked a cigarette, I very predictably felt like “Haaahh” kind of experience. This dopamine kind of surge, this calm, I felt more relaxed, right? I could focus better. 

So whatever people are doing that they get addicted to, it has a component of it, where it changes the way you feel. And that by engaging in whatever it is. It is also stimulating the reward system in your brain. You have reward systems and gravitate towards connection, sugar, fat, comfort, stimulation, like again, going back to this evolutionary biology, those are part of survival drives that keep you alive. 

There are more calories and food with a lot of fat or sugar. So your brain has adapted to crave those, to prioritize that. And to give you a little zing of dopamine or reward when you eat those kinds of foods. Because 100,000 years ago, to eat something that was high in fat, or high in sugar content, gave you an evolutionary advantage and like living another day. So there’s a reason for that. And everything that we crave has that component. And part of that survival system is also very much around forming attachments. So there’s a lot of rewards for that as well. 

And certainly, you know, sexuality, euphoria, those kinds of peak experiences are very rewarding. But the other definition of an addiction is that, you’re changing your mood, it’s stimulating your reward system, and it is creating negative consequences for your life. And despite really being aware of and understanding those negative consequences, you can’t stop. 

So there are all kinds of things that we can do that change our mood in positive ways that stimulate our reward system, and do not create consequences for us. Maybe they create positive consequences for us, like green light, go do that. But if you’re experiencing negative consequences, and you’re like, “Oh, these are negative consequences, I should stop doing that” and then you try, and then you can’t. You know now, officially, that you have a problem. That’s cool. You know, we all can get into these situations and knowing that it’s a problem is the first step in making that be different. But it can sneak up on you.

I mean, the alcoholic drinks to change their mood, to celebrate, to console, to unwind, to feel free and loose, right? I mean, somebody with a gambling problem will pull that handle to feel the excitement, the hope, the thrill of victory. And their reward systems are “Ting! Ding!” every time they do. The lover desires to be with their irreplaceable other, for the joy of connection with our beloved for how good it feels. And all of these pleasures, powerfully stimulate this neurological reward center that is deep in all of our brains and just floods us with these feelings of euphoria. 

These are the structures that exist naturally, that artificial substances like cocaine or heroin stimulate. So they existed a long time before cocaine and heroin came around. You know, cocaine and heroin are just very efficient at making us feel big things quickly. So it is part of your brain. Evolutionarily speaking, it precedes the development of the other parts of our brain that are responsible for things like executive functioning, language, logical thought, right? 

Animals run on survival drives, gravitating towards certain things and getting rewarded for that and then doing it again, without being fully conscious of why. Right? And those are the parts of our brains that developed much longer than the parts of our brains that are like, maybe that’s not such a good idea, like, that’s new. And the thinking part of our brain is much less powerful than the older emotional parts of our brain and the survival traps that we’re talking about. 

It’s like shouting into a hurricane. I’ve heard it described very nicely as being like a writer who’s sitting on top of an elephant. The writer is your conscious brain, it is a little pipsqueak of a person who feels very self important to know with all these ideas and thinks logically. And, yes, we should do this. And sometimes not even aware that they are sitting on an elephant. That is about 200 times their size, immensely more powerful. And that if the elephant wants to go in a different direction, it will. And it will take that rider with them. That’s a lot of the human process. And we’re oftentimes not conscious that it’s occurring at all. But that’s the kind of really powerful stuff that’s going on with any addictive process, and especially with addictive relationships.

I just really want you to know that. I think understanding that is one of the things that starts to heal people’s self esteem. Because if you’ve been sitting here thinking, “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with Tom? Why does this happen?” but you know, it’s not your fault. I mean, there are a lot of very powerful things at work here that are much larger and older than anything that we’re thinking about or trying to do. 

And so, the physiological engine of addiction, it drives these compulsions for more, right? It overrides pain, fear, values even. This kind of survival drive can motivate pigeons to peck up for reward laden pellets until they drop from exhaustion. You know, it’s the same thing like shivering skeletal addicts exchanging the last remnant of their dignity to get the drug that they feel that they need. I mean, these are very powerful forces. And it is because we’re all descended from animals who were built to crave and seek pleasure. And that those systems are very much at work and all of us every day. 

To be addicted to love. I mean, we also talked a little bit about why this is. But you know, going back to the work of Dr. Helen Fisher, who really explored this and took a deeper look at where in people’s brains love is happening. Why are people having these experiences, in coming back with this hard evidence that romantic love and attachment is stimulating the same addictive neurological pathway the same reward centers as opiates as amphetamines. I mean, we crave love and connection and with very good reason. Because when you consider that from above all else from a high level evolutionary perspective. 

The survival of our species has required us to pair bond, to reproduce, to remain committed enough to successfully raise babies together, to stay connected to a tribe, to a collective, that is literally the only advantage that we have in the natural world. Our ability to think, our ability to envision but also that humans are a collective species, right?

Those are primary survival drives. And that’s why we have these structures in our brains that support the air quote addiction to intense feelings of love. And why does this make sense? 

Taking pleasure in the proximity to the person you love having this irrational devotion, to this irreplaceable other that overrides pain, overrides fear, overrides logical thought even, is necessary. If we view the power of love and attachment in the context of survival. And this makes a lot of sense, when we talk about what it does in survival terms. I mean, if you could go into a visualization of an exhausted half frozen guy who is now struggling to carry/drag a limp deer home through thigh high snow, right? And he’s been doing this for miles. Because there is a woman and their children waiting in the dirt hut or whatever it is, for him and he knows that if he doesn’t make it back with that deer, they’re all going to die. 

And that’s the bond. That is the only thing that is keeping that woman and those children alive at that moment. Without those bonds that are connecting them to each other, like, what else would motivate him to keep going through so much danger and so much pain. You know the things that parents do in service of their children do not make any logical sense. It would be much easier to not do any of that. But because we love them, we do the very hard things, we are making choices that are prioritizing their needs, and their well being sometimes over ours. 

Throwing them over the wall so that they can go on, feels more important than the day to day pleasure for a lot of parents. And so without this ability to attach, to develop this devotion, this attachment, this craving for one specific person, people don’t stick together. And those bonds endure, and they defy logic, they defy reason. And they don’t turn off. Because we decide they’re not a good idea anymore. 

Or even because our relationship is over. You know, that’s what a lot of what’s going on when people are really struggling in the aftermath of a relationship loss and feeling heartbroken. If, you know, the relationship has ended, but their attachment bond hasn’t. Right? So this is just to kind of set up and help you understand what’s going on with toxic relationships. 

And so when you think about this falling in love process, this pair bonding process, these things are healthy and good. If humans didn’t do this, we would all be in trouble. I mean, civilization would fall apart. We wouldn’t have made it this far as a species if we didn’t have this. So you know, this is true love, right? This is attachment. It sustains marriages, families, children, adults, these enduring partnerships that are just the foundation of our society.

These things exist to push us towards true love and help us create true love, which some may argue, I think I would. The most powerful and the most positive, the most important meaningful and noble of all human experiences. So these things are fundamentally good. But if you fall in love with or “get addicted” to the wrong person, someone who rejects you, who is not nice to you, who is not an emotionally safe person, or even someone who isn’t fundamentally compatible with you in terms of their personality values, judgments. It is very possible, easy even, to become attached to someone who is not going to be a good long term life partner for you. 

And in the context of a toxic relationship, many times, people who are not emotionally safe are very charming. Even to the point where like, for psychiatric conditions, like antisocial personality disorder, which is associated with sociopathy. One of the defining features of that is glib and superficial charm. People with narcissistic personality disorder can be quite charming. And so, just because you’re feeling attracted to someone who is fun and witty and bantery and fun to hang out with, you know, that can sometimes actually be a warning sign rather than a green light. 

Anyway, I don’t want to go too deeply into this. I’ve discussed this in other podcasts. But I really do want to drive home the point that it can be very, very easy to be attracted to, and then eventually attached to someone who isn’t going to be a good partner for you. And so that when you’re easing into relationships, or getting to know people, it’s so important that in addition to thinking about how you feel, and are you attracted to them, we’re also thinking about, is this a good person? Is this person a good friend? Would this person be a good partner for me? 

And also very aware that the experience of early stage romantic love, that infatuation experience is nature designed it to be in some ways. It softens the edges of all things. It makes it very difficult sometimes to see people for who and what they really are. It’s like wearing these soft glasses where everything is kind of fuzzy and rose colored. It’s very easy to idealize people and make excuses only to later find out that that was misguided. 

So I just mentioned all of this so that you have empathy for yourself and don’t beat yourself up and judge yourself for having this experience. I mean, we’re only human, and there’s a lot of biology at work in these situations that we’re all vulnerable to. So thank you for going on my little nerd tour with me. But I wanted you to understand the background. 

And I will also tell you how Tom’s story ended. And I do so in the hopes that it is genuinely helpful for you. Because Tom, Tom got hooked through the gills. And of all the “love addicts” I have ever worked with, his preoccupation and inability to detach from Sarah was very profound and ultimately, the most tragic. We worked together for a long time. Circled that cycle together, you know, rejection, obsession, craving, reunion, honeymoon, frustration, rejection, and each time through our work together, in the threads kind of binding him to her stretched thinner and thinner. He was gaining awareness of what was really going on. 

But for Tom, the true clarity really came too late. Still makes me so sad to think about it, but it was when we were working together. He again, you know, having symptoms and complaining about different things, like health wise. Like, “You actually go to the doctor.” But the time he finally went to the doctor, he discovered that he had late stage pancreatic cancer. Which is a dismal sense of survival. And shortly after that, we heard from Sarah who was like, “I just can’t stand to see you like this”. And he never saw her again. 

She abandoned him to face the procedures, the chemo surgery, all the things alone. And only then did Tom really understand the truth of his addiction for the hollow reality that it really was. He understood then that he was pursuing these fleeting feelings. He had left his marriage and his family to dance in this mirage of excitement. But at the end, it all crumbled to dust in his hands when he reached out for real support. 

Like, he just woke up, and he came to his senses, only to find out that he was alone. I mean, really alone, without true love, without attachment, without commitment, from Sarah, at least. So he went home. Because thankfully for him, the true love of his ex wife and his children had endured through the years of his obsessive intoxication. 

Their true love, which, in my definition, is the unbreakable bond of a merciful family. People who care about your needs, and rights and feelings. Those things are just as important to them as their own are, right? His family was still this nourishing, stable connection of support, that was still there for him at the end of his life, they’d need to come back. And so in his final days, Tom was finally healed of this addiction. He found forgiveness, and redemption. 

He had a lot of forgiving to do with himself. But he came to understand and appreciate what true love really is, which is this just quiet, unselfish service to the well being of another that endures long after the sparkles of romantic love fade, right? And true love is not always fun or exciting, and it’s not terribly addictive. But it is there at 3am, to mop up vomit and to shelter you when you have nowhere else to go. It is the kind of love that has the courage to walk beside you into death, and maybe even meet you again on the other side. 

And in my opinion, true love is never an addiction. Because it’s not actually a feeling at all. Love is not a feeling, it is a choice. It is a value system, it is character, it is doing the right thing. And we can all decide to do that. So I hope that hearing Tom’s story and getting a picture of the choices of the different kinds of paths in front of you and the outcomes so you know that sooner or later we are all going to face. I don’t mention any of this to be scary or a downer, but really to help you think about, what you’re doing? And what is motivating you? And to empower you to be thinking about how you would like to live to be. What you would like to choose. 

And that it is absolutely possible for anyone dealing with any kind of addiction. To understand what these feelings really are, the craving feelings. And learn how to manage them differently. You do not have to be a slave to these impulses. You can decide to do something different in those moments. And I’m not gonna say it’s easy, and that it doesn’t require support. But at the end of the day, understanding what those compulsive and crazy feelings are. You know, they’re not healthy, they’re not good for you, they are certainly not love. And making a choice to start loving yourself, which means doing the right thing for yourself, for your life, for the people that care about you. Whether or not it is fun or pleasurable, that is love. And you deserve to experience that in your life. And it does start with you. 

So I hope that this conversation was helpful for you. And I hope you are experiencing the love that I have for you in this moment. And a genuine desire to help nudge you in the right direction. And so, if it’s helpful for you, because I do care. And I’ve created a lot. I’ve written a book, I have done all kinds of podcasts, written articles that are all available for you. Because this is a hard situation and I want to help you. 

You can access all kinds of things on my website growingself.com. There is a section in our blog and podcasts, we go growingself.com/blog-podcast, and you’ll want to go to the “Heartbreak Recovery” content collection. And there’s a Spotify playlist of other podcasts that I’ve done on related topics about healing after heartbreak, but also like toxic relationship addiction because they are related. As well as a number of written articles, links to the Exaholics book if you’re interested in checking it out.

And of course for many people, it is helpful to have a judgment-free, non biased person, a counselor or a coach who really understands the biological nature of what is going on with some of these toxic relationships or difficult breakups. And so if you would certainly like to talk with me or somebody on my team about what’s going on with you, you’re welcome to do that. You can schedule a free consultation.

But who also knows the story of Tom? We’d have been together for a long time. And at the end of the day, it wasn’t necessarily therapy, it wasn’t coaching, it certainly wasn’t anything that I said. It was Tom gaining a new understanding of what was really happening. And again, just like waking up from this dream. And so I certainly wish that I had been able to help him at an earlier stage so that he had more time with the people who really loved him. And I didn’t, and I still regret that to this day but I hope that you know, hearing this and taking advantage, some of the resources will potentially even make the ending different for you. 

Okay. Thanks for spending this time with me today. And I will be back in touch next week with another episode. In the meantime, here’s another Frankie and the Witch Fingers and I’ll talk to you soon.