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Is It Healthy Love or “Love”
Addiction?
Since we all have grown up in a society that
confuses healthy love with “love”
addiction, many of us find it difficult to know
whether our feelings are based on healthy intimacy
or addictive desire. Based on my work over the last
45 year’s as a psychotherapist specializing in
helping people develop and maintain healthy
relationships, I offer the following
comparison.
1. Healthy Love develops after we feel secure.
Addictive Love tries to create love even though we
feel frightened and insecure.
2. Healthy Love comes from feeling full. We
overflow with love. Addictive Love is always trying
to fill an inner void.
3. Healthy Love begins with self love. Addictive
Love always seeks love “out there” from
that “special someone.”
4. Healthy Love comes to us once we’ve
given up the search. Addictive Love is compulsively
sought after.
5. Healthy Love comes from inside. It wants to
give. Addictive Love comes from outside. It wants
to take.
6. Healthy Love grows slowly, like a tree.
Addictive Love grows fast, as if by magic, like
those children’s animals that expand instantly
when we add water.
7. Healthy Love thrives on time alone as well as
time with our partner. Addictive Love is frightened
of being alone and afraid of being close.
8. Healthy Love is unique. There is no
“ideal lover” that we seek. Addictive
Love is stereotyped. There is always a certain type
that attracts us.
9. Healthy Love is gentle and comfortable.
Addictive Love is tense and combative.
10. Healthy Love is based on a deep knowing of
ourselves and our lover. Addictive Love is based on
hiding from ourselves and falling in love with an
ideal “image” not a person.
11. Healthy Love encourages us to be ourselves,
to be honest from the beginning with who we are,
including our faults. Addictive Love encourages
secrets. We want to look good and put on an
attractive mask.
12. Healthy Love flows out. Addictive Love caves
in.
13. Healthy Love creates a deeper sense of
ourselves the longer we are together. Addictive
Love creates a loss of self the longer we are
together.
14. Healthy Love gets easier as time goes on.
Addictive Love requires more effort as time goes
on.
15. Healthy Love is like rowing across a gentle
lake. Addictive Love is like being swept away down
a raging river.
16. Healthy Love grows stronger as fear
decreases. Addictive Love expands as fear
increases.
17. Healthy Love is satisfied with what we have.
Addictive Love is always looking for more or
better.
18. Healthy Love encourages interests to expand
in the world. Addictive Love encourages outside
interests to contract.
19. Healthy Love is based on the belief that we
want to be together. Addictive Love is based on the
belief that we have to be together.
20. Healthy Love teaches that we can only make
ourselves happy. Addictive Love expects the other
person to make us happy and demands that we try to
make them happy.
21. Healthy Love creates life. Addictive Love
creates melodramas.
I value your thoughts and comments.
©2010 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
+ Suicide
* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of nine
books including Male
Menopause,
The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression. and
Mr.
Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable
Male Syndrome. His
upcoming book, Tapping Power: A Man’s Guide to
Eliminating Pain, Stress, Anger, Depression and
Other Ills Using the Revolutionary Tools of Energy
Psychology will be available next year. For over 38
years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback.
E-Mail.
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
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