Is Your Love Addiction Killing Your Sex Life?

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Is Your Love Addiction Killing Your Sex Life?

This is volume three called, Is Your Love Addiction Killing Your Sex Life? If you feel that you never get enough sex or lovemaking in your relationship or if you feel that your partner is rejecting you sexually and does not touch you, kiss you, caress you and hold you enough, then this is an episode for you. You will also learn what to do to invite more connection and intimacy into your life. Many women shared with me that they find themselves oftentimes in a position of longing. A longing to be wanted more, to be seen more, to be validated more and in a way, to be loved more. Sexual intimacy for many of us is proof that we are wanted and loved for sure.

Through sex, we often feel ourselves again, and surely it is an important part of a relationship unless we consciously decide otherwise. I want to tell you why I chose this topic. This is very personal to me. I have repeatedly attracted and experienced relationships where the guys would eventually reject me sexually. They would not sexually show up the way I wanted them to. They would not make love to me enough. They would not be intimate enough for me, and I always felt that I don’t get what my heart truly longs for. Sometimes I would even be in relationships where sex was almost inexistent. Whenever I would lay in bed with a guy, I would feel that longing coming up, that urge that I need to be filled up by his cock. In other words, I didn’t want to feel that emptiness anymore. It was automatic and involuntary in a way that I felt like I had no control over it. I wanted to be present and to be there, but I couldn’t because my mind went into obsessive thinking. As soon as I got closer to a guy in or out of a relationship, all I could focus on was the thoughts of, “Is he going to touch me? Is he going to want me? Is he going to take my clothes off? Are we going to make love? Am I going to get it and will I be wanted?”

Sexual intimacy for many of us proves that we are wanted and loved for sure. Click To Tweet

The chances of me actually getting any of that were very low. How is it that I experienced sexual rejection for most of my life? Why did I never get what I wanted? Why did I have to face that unfulfilled longing over and over and over again? See this was a pattern. To me, a pattern always indicates that there is something that I am not seeing, something that is in my corner, something that I am unaware of. What helped me most is to look at it from the perspective of taking 100% responsibility for whatever shows up in my life and in my reality. This continuous self-responsibility and self-inquiry as well as doing the work for many years have enabled me to fully understand why this was my reality. The place where I was coming from was a place of neediness, a place of desperation, a place of insecurity. I made my guys responsible for something they were not willing to give. The guys felt repelled by that frequency of neediness and desperation. The reality that showed up for me was simply a mirror that reflected what needed healing inside of myself.

On one hand, that rejection was definitely playing into the beliefs that I had such as, “I’m not worthy to be loved and wanted.” On the other hand, it came from that place of needing to fill that void and emptiness inside that I had felt for all my life. I was trying to get something that I never got and that I never felt in my very early years. I was on the run to find anything that would stop that painful longing for connection and love. This is very common for love addicts. Erich Fromm describes this so well. He says, “Loving from this place is a result from one remaining attached to the figure of a parent.” In this case, we transfer feelings, expectations, and fears we once had toward the mother or father to the loved person in our adult life. In other words, we expect our partner to fulfill all of our longings so we feel better.#

In a healthy relationship, this happens naturally. Two people in a mature, adult and compassionate relationship will be more than willing to fulfill each other’s most important needs. A relationship where you have to fight for having your needs met indicates a rather immature love. Where two people involved need to do some major healing before they can fully enjoy a healthy and deeply nurturing relationship. Why are we stuck in this? Why does it seem that we can’t change it no matter how hard we try? Usually what happens is that the partner who is in a place of longing gets upset, becomes demanding, threatens to leave, is frustrated and blames. The other partner becomes even more repelled by that and comes to a place where he or she simply does not want to give it anymore. Then you’ll find yourself in a vicious cycle of desperation and hopelessness and it keeps going back and forth without any constructive resolution.

What can we do to turn this around now? Here is how I did it. My last partner was the guy that enabled me to wake up from the nightmare of love addiction. We had a very typical dynamic between a typical love addict, that was me, and avoidant love addict, that was him. I’ll explain the different types of love addicts in more details in coming episodes. I was the one that never got what I longed for and he was the one that had power over giving or not giving it to me. That put me into a position of desperation and hopelessness. Even in sex, he would decide whether we have it, when we have it and how we have it.

After many years of seeing that rejection over and over again, with him, I was finally able to turn things around. Besides his avoidant love addiction, he was a very deep, present, and fascinating person. When he was not triggered, he could be the most wonderful man. He was always very inviting and accepting of my emotional nature. I gotta say though, as many avoidant love addicts, he had quite narcissistic traits. Narcissists feed of an empaths emotion. It makes them feel alive as usually, they can’t feel. It’s their narcissistic supply, which is why he would always let me be vulnerable in front of him. Besides the love I felt for him, there were many dysfunctional parts.

Sex Life: We act out so we don’t have to feel the underlying feeling that actually causes our desperation.

Here’s what I did. I would lay in bed and all these thoughts came up. He felt that neediness and would of course not respond to it. By that time, I was already quite far ahead in my journey of overcoming love addiction. I had already learned how to feel instead of acting out. See, the bitchiness, the expectations, the frustration, the blame, the drama, that’s all an act out. We act out so we don’t have to feel the underlying feeling that actually causes our desperation. It’s not only that we don’t want to feel, but we don’t know how. We had spent a week in Italy together. It was the most wonderful week. It’s the same thing though. I needed to have him sexually as much as I could, at least once a day.

When I woke up, my body and my nervous system were pretty agitated. Everything inside of myself screamed, “Please fill me up. I need your penis inside of me.” Of course, he felt that and me coming from such a place made sure that he would not respond to it. I was fed up of seeing sexual rejection again and I knew that it is up to me to change it around. I asked him, “Would you hold space for me? Would you allow me to explore the feelings I feel behind my desperation of needing you?” He was more than ready to do this. I started slowly to tap into the feelings that were right there. What was it that I wanted to say to him instead of being desperate?

I heard myself starting to talk and say, “Why don’t you want me? Why don’t you want to give yourself to me? I need you to make love to me. I want to feel you. I want you to touch me. I’m begging you.” This went on for quite a while. I started crying. I deeply felt the desperation and hopelessness of not getting what I needed. I shared my deep longing to be touched by him, to be wanted and to feel loved and needed. Through feeling these horrible feelings of emptiness and staying with them, over time my nervous system started to relax again. With that, the urge to make love started to vanish. We did this a couple of times and every time he encouraged me to feel instead of following that unhealthy urge, every time, again and again, my urge vanished and my nervous system started to relax.

One morning though, he did something very profound and that is what shifted everything for me and healed a painful wound inside of me. After I had felt the pain again, really not expecting him to actually give himself to me anymore and my urge was gone, my nervous system was relaxed, he turned around and actually made love to me. He made love to me in the sweetest, most connected way. He gave himself to me so fully when I least expected it. He penetrated me with his whole being as if it was the last thing he would do on Earth with his heart in his cock. So deeply that it felt like he de-armored my heart. Whenever his penis would slide back into me, he would so deeply hit my heart again and again and it was the most intimate and wonderful and deepest sexual experience I had ever had.

Learn how to feel instead of acting out. Click To Tweet

What happened at that moment, and that was after many moments of feeling my feelings before it could actually happen, was life-changing for me. Ever since, my neediness never came back. That involuntary urge and neediness in my body are gone. That is so much freedom for me because now when I lay in bed with a guy, I don’t have to go anywhere. I’m not ridden by an uncontrollable urge to make love. I feel like the emptiness inside of myself is gone. This is what I want you to do. I know it’s not easy. That level of vulnerability demands a high level of respect. It demands that you feel safe and that you trust, and maybe in your relationship that is not the case.

If you do feel like you want to explore this, then I suggest that next time that desperation comes up, that you choose to feel instead of acting out and in this podcast, we will be talking a lot more about this, how to feel instead of acting out. I simply encourage you to become mindful when the desperation, the urge, the expectation kicks in. Ask yourself, “What would you have to feel if you were not acting that out?” and then stay with these feelings. Thank you for your time and enjoy your day.