If You Want To Be A Winner In Love, Overcome Love Addiction! Part 1

winner in love overcome love addiction

Why do we have to overcome love addiction? First and foremost, if love addiction runs our life, it means that we are not. What’s really crucial is that we often act out unconsciously from the wounded and unloved place inside of our self which only creates more hurt, separation, disconnection, and suffering. It does not have to be that way. We have to stop outsourcing our pain. The moment we decide to take 100% responsibility we can turn from disconnection to love in an instant.

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If You Want To Be A Winner In Love, Overcome Love Addiction! Part 1

We will be talking about why is it so vital to overcome love addiction. First and foremost, if love addiction runs your life, it means that love addiction stands in the way of a lifetime of happiness. Let me tell you that once your life is no longer controlled by love addiction, the level of happiness will be so much higher. If I look at the quality of my life today compared to when I was still an addict, today I smile for no reason and I receive gift after gift from life. All of a sudden, the fantasies I had always created in my head now become reality naturally but without the compulsion and the obsession behind it. They show up in a very playful, innocent, and blissful form.

I’ll give you one example. I used to fantasize about how and where to have sex and surely it involved very romantic scenarios, but they never happened the way I wanted them to. Now that I am more relaxed about all of this, I experience things that are out of this world and I don’t even have to be needy to get them. Just a couple of weeks ago, I made love under the full moon on a blanket on green grass in the mountains of Umbria, which is one of the most beautiful parts in Italy where I had spent some time to prepare the launch of my show. It was magical. When I was still a love addict, I would have gone into obsession afterward, trying to make it happen again, waiting for his texts, calls and sooner or later I would repel the guy with my behavior.

Today, I am able to fully enjoy the moment, appreciate it, and be grateful for it on a deep level, but then I go back to my project, my life and focus on myself. It’s a totally different quality of life. There’s so much more emotional freedom, there’s so much more energy to create, to make things happen, to contribute instead of losing myself in someone else again. Apart from that, there are other important reasons why it is so vital to overcome love addiction and they not only concern us as an individual, but that concern the world, the people in our life, our surrounding and environment. By overcoming love addiction, we contribute to a much healthier world on so many levels. I’m going to introduce you to the three crucial reasons why we have to overcome love addiction. In this episode, we will dive into the first one in more detail. In the next episode, I’ll be elaborating on the other reasons.

If love addiction runs your life, it means that you are not. Click To Tweet

Reason number one why we have to overcome love addiction is to stop acting out unconsciously from the wounded, unloved place inside of ourselves that will only hurt others and create more separation, disconnection, and suffering. Let’s look at reason number one in detail. One of the worst consequences, if we do not deal with our feelings and our pain, is that we often act out destructively and unconsciously on the people around us instead of feeling what gets triggered in us. Act outs are an unconscious response to painful triggers. Acting out means the action or an act of expressing repressed or unconscious feelings in overt behavior. For example, when someone hurts us, instead of staying with the pain that it causes us, we express our repressed pain in overt behavior such as wanting to hurt the other person back.

Overcoming Love Addiction: If we do not deal with our feelings and pain, we often act out destructively and unconsciously on the people around us.

Instead of saying, “You hurt me when you say that,” and we cry about it, we blame the other person and maybe say mean things back or in the worst case, we become abusive. Think of a father that is stressed about his child that doesn’t stop crying. Instead of him taking care of what it triggers in him, he hits the child or screams at the child. He is unconsciously acting out his trigger and passing on his stress and pain to his child. Another example would be either partner in a relationship constantly nagging the other partner, acting out his or her hopelessness and frustration of not having his or her needs fulfilled. The nagging is the act out. Owning and feeling the feelings would be to vulnerably share and let the partner know about the pain we experience because at that moment we might feel deeply unloved.

If we don’t get what we want and long for, we often translate that into thinking that we are not loved or not worthy, and that is a very old imprint we have from childhood. Make sure to definitely read episode number nine to learn more about this. Let me also take an example from my life. When I was in a relationship with my ex, he would often reject me sexually. Instead of me feeling the hopelessness, the pain of feeling rejected and share that vulnerably with him, letting him see my pain, I would instead go into blaming him, bitching around and punishing him in subtle ways like for example belittle him. These are all ways of acting out. All of that led to a deep feeling of resentment towards him and I didn’t respect him anymore over time, and then he, of course, could feel my disrespect and therefore became even less willing to give me anything I wanted.

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Sexual rejection can trigger very deep pain. In my case, it gave me a feeling of utter worthlessness. At that time, I wasn’t able to feel my pain, so I knew no better than to act that pain out on him instead. If you let your partner see you in your pain, you owning that pain, taking full responsibility for that pain, your partner will respect you even more. They will also feel that they can trust you more and they’re much more willing to show themselves because they feel that it is actually safe to do so. Owning our feelings is one of the most challenging things and we have to learn it like every other skill in life. We will get to that in more details as we go along in the show.

Let’s take a last example with kids at school. Maria gossips about Sarah and bullies her. Sarah feels extremely rejected and hurt but she doesn’t know how to feel and has nowhere to go with these feelings. What happens often is that Sarah reacts in the exact same way. She might start gossiping and bullying someone else so she can feel that bit of relief from her pain. In other words, instead of feeling her pain, she passes it on to someone else and therewith creates more pain instead of understanding or connection. If we taught our kids and teenagers how to deeply feel and express their pain to a trusted adult, their nervous system would be able to relax, which would prevent them from acting out further because they learned to deal with and integrate their pain.

If we don't get what we want, we often translate that into thinking that we are not loved or worthy. Click To Tweet

In Sarah’s case, when feeling her pain she has around Maria bullying her, and fully express it in a safe surrounding, she gains the ability to choose how she wants to respond. Why are we acting out in the first place instead of feeling the feelings that are beyond a trigger? As I shared in episode number nine, it has to do with our body getting into a fight or flight response under certain stressful circumstances such as the threat of losing love, being rejected or abandoned. An involuntary automatic behavior kicks in where we don’t have much control over how we react to something because it happens automatically.

We also act out because of the size of our threshold. If we want to be able to respond with awareness instead of reacting unconsciously, we need a bigger threshold. Involuntary behavior and actions happen when our threshold is too small because there is no free space. Then any situation can result in strong triggers that automatically make us react out. Small thresholds are the result of too much residual and repressed or pent-up stress, anger, pain, frustration, and other difficult feelings. By feeling our feelings instead, they evaporate more and more and the threshold gets bigger because there is more space. It’s like a vessel. If the vessel is already full with anger, pain, frustration, sadness and so on, there’s very little room for anything on top of it, so automatically it spills over and it creates a mess. However, if we empty our vessel by releasing some of that pent-up emotional baggage, we have more space inside of us.

Overcoming Love Addiction: Triggers are the single most valuable thing for a positive transformation.

If we have more space, we can start holding space for someone else that is acting out on us, which is a wonderful gift. It truly ignites healing. We have to understand that triggers are the single most valuable thing for a positive transformation. Triggers bring us into the ideal feeling zone where we have access to our feelings right away. In the ideal feeling zone, magic happens. Unfortunately, some people see it as a negative thing when we still get triggered, as if it meant that we’re not yet spiritual enough. Triggers will always happen in life. I have triggers. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, quite the opposite, it paves the road to healing. The question is how we deal with them. Are we leveraging them because we know of the power of transformation and growth they can give us? Are we being unaware of it and we act them out all over the place? That is a huge difference.

I want to end this episode by giving you three tips on how to immediately stop acting out. Tip number one, become aware of your act outs. Reflect on the ways that you have acted out in the past. Is there a pattern that you can start seeing? What situations trigger you massively? What happened that you got triggered? Write it down and sit with it for a little bit. Tip number two, remove yourself when you get massively triggered before you react out. Sometimes it is best to remove yourself from the situation that triggers you, especially if the trigger is massive and it makes you react out. If it happens within your relationship, you could agree on a code word that either of you can make use of. If you feel that the fight doesn’t go anywhere and would only develop into both of you hurting each other more instead, take a time out for yourself. Tap into the feelings that got triggered in you and stay with them. Stop whatever you’re doing and stay with the feelings instead and allow the tears to flow. If you do want to talk to someone, choose someone you trust besides your partner. Once your nervous system starts to relax again and your partner’s ready as well, find some time to talk with each other about what happened.

We all make mistakes but we have to have the courage and integrity to apologize when we do. Click To Tweet

Tip number three, once you did react out, apologize. It will happen to all of us. There might be moments when you react out and you’re not able to be aware enough to see that you are triggered and you are reacting instead of responding with awareness. It’s okay, we all make mistakes but we have to have the courage and integrity to apologize when we make mistakes. Many times, we also act out by simply unloading our frustrations or anger onto our partner, not realizing that they are not a trash bin. In our next episode, we’ll talk about reason number two, why it is so valuable to overcome love addiction? You don’t want to miss it because you’ll learn about ways to create more connection, more love and more happiness in your life and the life of the people around you right away. I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode. Have a wonderful day.

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