Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

Is It Love or Is It Addiction? The Book That Changed the Way We Think About Romance and Intimacy

By Brenda Schaeffer

Published May 2009 (Paperback, Third Printing) Hazelden

In this space that used to be my dining room, I have this fabulous stack of new and nearly new books.  Today, I was compelled to read Is It Love or Is It Addiction?

I grew up in cruelty.  I was trained, in essence, to accept, even attract, relationships that feel the same as being raped and sexually molested by my stepfather.  That began when I was four and-a-half, because I stubbornly expressed my loyalty to my real dad.  I last saw my dad when my stepfather beat  him up and told him never to come back.  I was six.

So when my stepfather treated me sexually, he was being kind and loving, and this I came to equate with real love.  When he was verbally and emotionally abusive, I tried anything I could think of to bring peace, to make him love me.  I saw his real soul, knew his personal pain, and believed that if my mother loved him, there must be something to love.  My mom was alcoholic, schizophrenic and suicidal, so trust was shaky.  I was always looking out the window for my rescuer – my dad – but he never returned.  I hired a detective to learn — many years later — that he had died of heart problems when he was just 54.

The men I’ve gotten close to along the way have held that same energy I experienced as a child and teen.   My therapist reminded me today that Abuse is not Love, and that I am ready for a healthy relationship.  Still smarting from another painful choice – a male friend whose soul I know, but who punishes any woman who gets too close (his alcoholic mom died when he was six) — I finally picked up the book, Is It Love or Is It Addiction?

True love, Brenda Schaeffer writes, is life-giving.  It is an expansive, nourishing energy that knows no limits.  It does not injure, it heals.

Yet she says there is a fuzzy line between love and addiction.  Brain chemistry plays a major role leading to three types of “love” that can be experienced simultaneously — sexual arousal, romantic attraction, and emotional bonding.

When Schaeffer discusses addictive relationships, she explains they are formed often when parents appeal to their children while acting from their child self.  The kids feel important by helping the parent, but they also form misguided beliefs, like that the parent will fall apart without them.    When those kids grow up, they seek out others to meet their unmet needs, unconsciously believing that that will complete them.  But  they end up meeting people like their parents who “did not have the capacity or information to meet those needs in the first place.”  She writes that there is usually a direct correlation between addictive love and trauma.

Check out this formula “Trauma=betrayal=broken heart=loss of trust=fear=addictive love.”  When we’re triggered, parts of the brain bring past memories forward, and you’re flooded with the sense that that trauma is happening again. Here’s the good news.  Heal the trauma, heal the love addiction.

Schaeffer tells her clients’ stories to illustrate her points, and it is the storytelling that is so liberating.   She basically says our parents, being human, all failed us to some degree, and the result is that all our relationships have a bit of addiction.  The point is that we can heal — that the answers lie within, and so does the power.

That is such a relief!