Counselling & Psychotherapy

Relationship Counselling London, Marriage Counselling London, Relationship Problems, Marriage Problems, Love Addiction, Codependency
Love Needs, Love Addiction, Caretaking & Co-Dependency

Elusive Love?

We can have expectations that we should meet someone, settle down or have children by certain time. We may become desperate or despondent and struggle to be open, and people around us pick this up. We can be forever searching for our soulmate or dream of our perfect partner. Some of us believe that love only exist outside of us – as we become dependent on someone else responsible to meet our love needs. What we want to get from others may exceed what we contribute. In our pursuit for love, some of us can end up being overly needy (what some people call neediness) or desperate. Others may put such a strong emphasis on how they or their partner look, undervaluing their own or their partner’s internal qualities (see also Our Body).

In order to get love, some of us may end up regressing to a much younger age or trying to overly please our new partner at a cost to who we are. We can be guarded, and these responses can have a repelling effect on others - fear of intimacy, or being hurt can hold us back. Beliefs, dating back from childhood, in how we should act in order to be loved may no longer work. A challenge for some may be to become a soulmate to ourself, accepting our own imperfections. Counselling & psychotherapy can help explore these real human dilemmas.

Some may mistake infatuation for love. High on the giddiness of those early encounters, we may struggle to develop the relationship further. When the romance & love dies down, we may believe that the love we had has been lost forever. Then the ordinariness of living or sense of boredom may arise.

Some of us may only be interested in unavailable men or women, ensuring that a full loving relationship is not possible. We may become envious or jealous of people in a permanent relationships. Destructive romantic relationships may be familiar.

The counselling & psychotherapy will explore these concerns with you, alongside your memories, beliefs & feelings from when younger, which despite your adulthood may continue to shape & limit your experiences.

Unmet Love Needs & Neediness

Learning how to love may be a challenge for some. A challenge may also be about having the courage to express or receive love without losing our strengths, our individuality & difference or feeling disempowered. Some of us as parents may seek to get our love needs met through our children, rather than our partner.

Some of us may be ashamed of our neediness for love, believing we are supposed to be self sufficient. Yet sharing love is a basic need. We are all interdependent, thrive on sharing love & have this basic human need that can only be met by someone else. We may have difficulty in telling the difference between being needy & expressing our needs. We may struggle to take responsibility for having love & compassion for ourseIves – sharing our love, and therefore become needy of others, pulling on them for approval or attention, often experienced as emptiness inside and getting upset when others don't give us what we want. From this empty place our intention is different, often picked up by our partner (see Self-Abandonment). We expect others to give us what we are not giving to us. Our hope is that the other person will fill us up, so we experience wothiness & safety.

When the love we need appears to desert us, we can feel abandoned, rejected, out of control, separate & unloved (see also Our Sensitivities - Pushing Each Other's Buttons). We may struggle to find our own faith & love. This can activate our early experiences in Iife as we struggle to get in touch with our own resources. (For details see Impact Of Our Past)

Struggling to take responsibility for our own needs, we can sometimes feel bad about the way we act and feel unhappy with how we are as we treat others, and indeed ourseIf, in hurtful or damaging ways. For some this may be connected to feeling wounded or needy, being initially attracted to someone at a similar level of wounds or needs. Each of us can then get caught in hoping that the other – our partner, fills us up & makes us feeI good (e.g. take away our emptiness, aloneness, anxiety or insecurity). Yet they never quite can, and we may be caught in a familiar scenario of believing that the grass is greener or moving on to another partner, without exploring that feeIing full & good inside comes from caring for ourseIves. (See also Self-Esteem, Confidence, Criticism & Assertiveness)

We all have a need to be loved, especially as a child. As adults, our life journey may have less emphasis on being loved, and be more about loving & supporting to ourseIf & others for the highest good. In the counselling & psychotherapy you may want to explore the cycle of giving & receiving love in your relationship. Our challenge may be to share love, rather than expect it.

It is a cliche that if we can't love & trust who we are, we are unable to love & trust others. Yet sometimes we may find it difficult to do so. If we struggle to nurture ourseIves, we can become demanding & needy of our partner, wanting to control their choices or limit their joy, as if they are responsible for meeting our needs, taking away our unwanted feelings or making us feeI better about our own hurt & pain. We may want to explore our own envy & jealousy. We can try to make our partner liable for our unmet needs from our past & our behaviour, as if they are causing our own distress or inner loneliness.

Some of us may believe we are unlovable. Others may want to explore why our sense of happiness is overly dependent on the relationship with our partner. We may struggle to express our needs, get them met or take responsibility for them. Some of us may also want to take the responsibility for our partner's pain & hurt (see Caretaking – Codependency (Co-Dependency)).

Others may be searching for a love, that is so great & ideal, but impossible for a human being to give, leading to a suffering of Iife's limitations. This longing may be connected to yearning for a deeper connection in Iife & beyond. (See also Expectations & Disappointments In Relationships)

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Love Addiction In Relationships

Some of us may be hooked on the infatuation phase of romantic love, longing for someone, who we can never entirely have, and mistake this for real love. The arousal, game playing & drama (e.g. exhilarating highs, despondent lows, the pursuing, and being pursued) of this intense stage can be intoxifying, turn our stomach over, distort our thinking & behaviour. If we are stuck at this adoration stage, and can't move on, it is often deeply unsatisfying. Some of us prefer obsessive love, rather than risking real, long term love, and authentic intimacy. They may believe that once the infatuation stage diminishes, the love is lost, that love is exclusively a feeIing, and not also a choice & decision.

Consumed by our need for love, some of us may struggle to see our idealised partner (the object of our dreams) as an imperfect, fallible human being, just as we are. When they are not the person we thought they were ("there is no chemistry anymore"), our perfect, safe bubble may burst, and we may struggle to accept our partner exactly as they are. Our rational mind may be captured by our fantasy mind, so when our "perfect match" lets us down, we feel devastated. It can be as we are addicted to love. Emotionally dependent, we may fear or believe that the relationship is over, yet it may simply be a grieving for a stage of a relationship. It may have just begun... Counselling & psychotherapy offers support through this difficult experience of love addiction, crave for attention & the "fix" we get from it. We may also explore being OK & in control without the often desperate need for someone else and healthy ways to live with your passion.

Emotional Dependency In Relationships

Fearing rejection, some of us may struggle with our own inner worth, and simply being OK. We can make our partner responsible for filling us up with love or approval we need. Yet in seeking approval from our partner we may become disempowered. Our need for attention may be in order to fill up our emptiness, hoping or believing our partner can do this for us. Some people experience this as clinginess. We may believe that:

• Our own feeIings can't be trusted, needing others to validate them
• We Are empty inside if we are not in a relationship, or even if we are, when we don't get the attention we need.
• We can't enjoy things or have fun, unless we are with someone who knows how to do this
• We don't get the response we want (to prove they care about us) from our partner or we have to wait too long for it
• We aren't lovable or worthy without our partner's approval
• Our partner completes our missing half
• We need so much attention in order to be OK
• We love our partner, yet are actually dependent on them, fearing abandonment

We may:

• Be convinced that positive feeIings only come from someone else loving us
• Want our security & safety to come from someone else
• Take uncaring behaviour towards us personally
• Get angry, when others do what they want to do, instead of what we want them to do
• Become overly needy, clingy
• Be continuously preoccupied by what our partner is thinking or doing
• Often get jealous
• Struggle to enjoy our own company
• Get tense or anxious around others
• Blame others for our unwanted or difficult feeIings

All of us need a dependable source of love, yet to expect another to be that dependable source can create codependency (co-dependency), as if love can only come from outside of us, and not within, e.g. "I can look to my partner to fulfil my needs, when I can do it myself". Counselling & psychotherapy can explore this with you alongside ways you can be empowered, take responsibility for your own feeIings (e.g. loneliness, grief, sadness or sorrow, helplessness, heartache or heartbreak), no longer abandoning yourself, becoming emotionally freer.

Caretaking - Codependency (Co-Dependency)

When we take a role of a caretaker, or "a saviour", there can initially be a "good fit" between a person who needs to be looked after, and the person who is very willing to do the looking after. In this co-dependent (codependent) set-up, the actions of the other person we are "looking after" make it easy for our own problems to continue – that they have the problem, and we have not.

We may have learnt to almost totally sacrifice, or ignore most of our own needs. Some of us can become like martyrs. We can take on the role of trying to save them, which can create enmeshment – what some people call compulsive helping. We may take the responsibility for their own happiness. If our partner is going through their own difficulties, we may struggle to accept it is the way our partner treats themselves, and their own self-beliefs which cause their pain - not the choices we make. We may struggle to connect with our partner if they are disconnected from themselves as a result of abandoning themselves. Yet we may have given ourselves up by giving to get love as our agenda. Our challenge may be to care about our partner's needs & feeIings, yet allow them to take responsibility for their own Iife without being co-dependent (codependent). (For details see Unmet Love Needs & Neediness)

When we give with an intention of wanting something back, we can often end up unseen, drained, disappointed or angry. Viewing our partner as the problem, it can be hard for us to consider that we too may have a difficulty – especially with certain, uncomfortable feeIings in us. It can be a challenge for us to take responsibility & care for our own joy & pain, be compassionate about our partner's, yet not take personal responsibility for them. Saying no to this cycle of behaviour may also be a challenge. As can living from our own identity and not that of our partner, in touch with our own feelings rather than theirs.

If we are unable to care for ourseIf we can become selfishly over-dependent or over-demanding of our partner, to give us the love we don’t give ourseIves. As we take care & responsibility for our own needs & feeIings (not making others responsible for giving us love that we deny to ourself), we can be in control rather than trying to control others (see also Our Sensitivities - Pushing Each Other's Buttons). It is a cliché, yet true, that when we are loving to ourseIf and value who we are, we are also able to love others.

Having our own healthy boundaries can support us, so we can choose to tolerate what we want to tolerate.

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