Suicide, Competition & Depression: The Consequences of Love Addiction

suicide depression and competition a world full of broken hearts

What are the consequences of love addiction and the early absence of love in life? These consequences do not just concern us as individuals but the world and our society in general. In all honesty, it is heart-breaking and an absolute must to understand. Did you know that the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2005? We are now living in a world full of broken hearts. If we are not angry, we are not paying attention! Look at how these consequences translate directly into the problems we’re facing today, not just from an individual’s perspective but also from the world’s perspective, as we dive right into the ten major consequences.

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Suicide, Competition, And Depression: Facing A World Full Of Broken Hearts

We will be talking about the consequences of the early absence of love and a life lived with an addiction to love. If you missed episode number nine, I suggest you read it so you know exactly what I’m talking about here. I’m finding this such an important episode as we will look at how these consequences translate directly into the problems we’re facing today, not just from an individual’s perspective but also from the world’s perspective. Let’s dive right into the ten major consequences in no specific order as they are all important.

Unconscious Hurtful Act-Outs

Number one, unconscious hurtful act-outs. As we know by now, the love addict has most probably been deeply wounded in their childhood. That wound is where we steer ourselves from because we haven’t learned to deal with that pain and how to safely feel it. We often act out our pain unconsciously. The reason for that is that the hurt and the pain, even though we’re trying to repress it, will come out in one way or another, as feelings that we try to repress never really go away. In fact, quite the opposite happens. They amplify, which means they’re getting bigger. Often, we also subconsciously want to hurt others the way we have been hurt. It’s not just pain that makes us act out. It’s also our repressed anger and frustration that makes us hurt others because our feelings seem unbearable and we just want to give them away.

I’ll be talking about acting out in detail just in a couple of episodes but here’s a little introduction. 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 expressed the repressed pain in overt behavior such as wanting to hurt the other person back. Instead of saying, “You hurt me when you say that,” and then cry about it, we blame the other person and maybe say mean things back or in worst cases, we become even physical. Act outs can be either subtle or very expressive. Some of the act-outs are passive-aggressive behavior in relationships. For example, when we belittle our partners, when we shame them, put them down, or ridicule them. More expressive act outs are violence, rape, shootings, and so on. We’ll talk about this in more detail as promised. All we need to know for now is that act-outs are a result of not feeling loved and in fact often a silent scream for love and help.

Fears

Number two: fears. Many of us carry around different forms of fear. Some are afraid of heights, some are afraid of darkness, some are afraid of being raped and killed, and some are afraid of driving through tunnels. We all have fears and most of us don’t know why we have them. I was deeply afraid of darkness, violence, rape, and murder ever since I can remember. At the age of two, I slipped into my parents’ bedroom every single night to sleep there, but before I could get out of bed to walk to their room, I lay in bed paralyzed and unable to move for what seemed like hours.

Later on, when I was an adult, I had to check each and every corner of my apartment before going to bed to see if there is anyone that could potentially harm me. Whenever it got dark in the evening, every move that I did was accompanied by that feeling of fear. I had to close every single door in my apartment and never slept without locking my bedroom door. Walking ten meters in the dark would have me not breathe anymore and sometimes I’d have goosebumps all over my body.

The fascinating thing is that ever since I have dealt with my pain of the early absence of love, my fears have vanished. I can now live a life in a much more relaxed way. Some things still make me feel afraid, but generally, my fears are almost gone. This was proof for me that the early absence of love is what creates fear. Arthur Janov, the Founder of Primal Therapy, also says that we need a focal point for fears. We make up fears so they make sense, but the origin of it is really the early absence of love, and I can only confirm that because I have experienced it.

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If you want more on getting the best out of your life and relationships, check out our new brand The Royal Path where you find everything about personal growth, deep healing, and emotional liberation.

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Insecure Attachment Styles

Attached: The
New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love

Number three, insecure attachment styles. The absence of secure attachment in our childhood makes us either avoidant or anxiously attached later on in adult relationships. We then mostly chose partners with the opposite attachment style for our healing. If I am an anxiously attached person, I will attract an avoidant one and vice versa. If I experienced secure attachment in my childhood, I also attract a securely attached partner in adult life and therewith have a good chance to live a healthy relationship. There is a very good book called Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, a real eye-opener if you have not read it yet, where they talk about the different attachment styles in detail.

Deep Loneliness And Isolation

Number four, deep loneliness and isolation. Many people in this world feel deeply lonely and isolated. We cover it up in many ways by going out all the time, drinking too much, binge eating, binge-watching TV or we engage in other addictions and so on. However, when the curtain falls at night or we experience the lonely Sundays where we feel depressed and alone, it becomes very clear that in our core we actually feel that deeply rooted loneliness, but we don’t know why. When I faced my deep feelings of loneliness and isolation, I was actually close to wanting to end my life. That’s how gut-wrenching these feelings were, but thank God I had help.

Feeling through these horrible feelings allowed me to keep pushing through the pain and finally get out of it at the other end. I realized that these feelings came from the absence of love and the lack of emotional support when growing up. If you don’t know what I mean with early absence of love, I want to remind you to please read episode number nine where I explain all of it in detail. While growing up, I carried around so many painful feelings and I had absolutely nowhere to go with them. I felt so much sadness from the feeling of not belonging, so much shame around my body and the way I looked like, so much longing for deeper connection and it just felt horrible. I felt like I lived in a bubble, separated from everyone else, like in a void where no one can see me or hear me. That was what I kept believing for a very, very long time. Sometimes even if you seem to have friends and a partner and a family, you can still feel deeply lonely as you are still carrying that imprint from early childhood.

Suicide

Number five, suicide. Have you watched Thirteen Reasons Why? Did you know that the suicide rate for adolescent girls has doubled since 2005 in the US alone? That is the reality we’re facing. Most of these kids walk around with a ton of feelings and they have nowhere to go with it. They experience rejection and fear on a daily basis and huge pressure in many ways that is simply too much to handle for them. If we taught our kids to feel and gave them an outlet where they can explore these feelings, where feeling becomes the norm, we would not face these teenage suicide numbers. We would be able to support them better because we truly listen and we validate them.

However, this requires parents and caregivers that feel comfortable with their own feelings first so they can truly support their children in how to deal with everything that is going on for them. If this doesn’t make us angry, then we’re not paying attention, and we’re silently accepting the status quo. I am not okay with it. It is one of the biggest reasons why I am a feeling advocate, meaning I give importance. I value respect and own mine and everyone else’s feelings, knowing the incredible value and insight they offer us.

Children need to be seen and validated in their feeling so much that they feel safe enough to share everything with us. Click To Tweet

If I had had an outlet for how I felt while growing up, everything would have been different. Let’s give our children the space to express themselves. Let’s make sure that we ask over and over again how they’re doing. We seriously must want to know in detail, no matter how insignificant something seems for us, it is never insignificant for them. We cannot be afraid of how it will make us feel. We cannot be afraid of the consequences that we think it might have for us. Children need to be seen and validated in their feeling so much that they feel safe enough to share everything with us.

That is why we have to take them seriously at all times, even when they’re very young, coming to us with what seems pretty insignificant to us. If we don’t take them seriously at that age, they surely won’t feel comfortable enough, later on, to talk to us. They will not trust us to share that they have been raped at a school party or that they made a mistake with potentially huge consequences. It goes without saying that adults commit suicide too. What is the emotional state of someone that commits suicide? It must feel unbearable and I am convinced that if people actually had the chance to share how they feel if that became the norm, a lot of harm could be prevented.

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Tolerating Abuse

Number six, tolerating abuse. Another consequence of the early absence of love is the fact that we tolerate abuse. We have impaired boundaries and we don’t know how to say no. I remember finding myself in situations sexually where I did not want to be in. I wanted to be accepted, loved, and wanted, so I would often let my boundaries be crossed. One time I found myself at the beach, I was maybe only thirteen years young, holding one penis in each of my hands and one guy told the other “Her breasts are so small.” Would I have chosen that situation? Of course not. I was in it because I did not want to potentially be rejected by them and I did not say no. I wanted to belong.

It was a gut-wrenching experience and I know a big part of why this happened is because I didn’t learn from anyone that my body is sacred, that I get to choose who to let in, and that I can always say no to what does not feel right for me, that I would actually feel secure enough in myself because I already feel deeply loved. I already have the ability to say no. No child that is deeply loved finds him or herself in such a situation because they have nothing to lose. They know they are loved already. We have to make sure that we make our kids feel loved so deeply that they don’t have to go out and try to find it from someone else that might only cause more harm and potentially hurt them.

Female Competition And Mistrust

Number seven, female competition and mistrust. The way we relate to other females is often a competitive one. Many women are secretly jealous of another woman and we get triggered by each other on various levels. There are many reasons as to why women compete with each other and a lot of it is based on our relationship with our mother, but here I simply want to make the connection to love addiction. When we are addicted to love, we constantly look for ways to get love, appreciation, and approval.

When we are addicted to love, we constantly look for ways to get love, appreciation, and approval. Click To Tweet

The sad truth is that we can be quite egoistic as soon as the possibility to get some love is in front of us. Not only do we find ourselves involved with guys that are actually in relationships, but we also tend to believe that we are slightly better than the other woman. Why else would he engage with me? It makes us feel more significant and when we feel more significant, we feel like we are worth more and that in the end is simply the need to be loved. We do whatever it takes to get love to a level where we quickly forget about our values or any form of integrity.

Self-Abandonment, Self-Harm, And Self-Hatred

Number eight, self-abandonment, self-harm, and self-hatred. Another consequence of the early absence of love and love addiction are the ways we abandon ourselves. Abandoning, meaning not loving ourselves, criticizing ourselves, judging ourselves, and disrespecting ourselves. For example, by shaming our body, all the ways we do not live our talents and don’t see our self-worth. It can take critical levels where this turns into self-hatred, where we cut ourselves or battle eating disorders or even attempt or commit suicide. The endless feeling of not being good enough falls exactly into this category. That voice constantly shows up, keeping us from following through with a great idea we have or a vision we want to make happen, but all we hear is that we can’t do it and that we don’t have what it takes to pull it off. If we walk around thinking that we don’t deserve healthy and compassionate love, we surely won’t attract it either.

Mental Problems

Number nine, mental problems and people’s general emotional health. Another consequence is the level of mental problems we’re confronted with in this world. Depression, being on the forefront. A depressed system is often an unloved system. I have been depressed for years. People are suffering emotionally and all we do is numb the pain through various coping mechanisms. Some drink it away, some take painkillers or drugs and some eat it away. We’re all just trying to cope and think that the only solution is to repress and ignore it but that is not true.

We live in an age and time of broken and unloved hearts and brains. Many people are unwell, dysfunctional relationships, depression, suicide, violence, rage. In many cases, these symptoms are a direct result of people’s broken hearts due to the early absence of love. We are also a highly addicted nation. Love addiction is one of the many forms. It seems like we are very much disconnected from our hearts as we have never learned the wisdom and the language of the heart. We see vulnerability as a weakness when in fact it is the most powerful thing.

Consequences Of Love Addiction: We are a highly addicted nation. Love addiction is one of the many forms.

We live in what I call empty relationships, where we are out there to get instead of to give, where we don’t share how we truly feel, and where we don’t rely on each other to hold space for our wounds so we can actually heal them. We live in a world full of pretense and edited versions of ourselves. We’re preoccupied with keeping up a mask instead of our authentic real self. Many of us do not ever dare to speak or behave the way we really feel.

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Do you ever see posts on social media that are not perfectly handcrafted, shaped, and edited to present ourselves in the best possible version? Do you ever see a post where someone says, “I feel sad about this and that and I want to cry?” Never. We do this so we keep getting the love, appreciation and approval through the likes, the number of followers, and the great comments on our posts. That itself is a form of love addiction because if we don’t get the supply of love and approval and also appreciation, we feel miserable. The problem is that this need to pretend kills many of us slowly. It’s like a slow, painful death that manifests in very dysfunctional and unhealthy ways and there are consequences already from that. We are a nation of broken and unloved children.

We see twelve-year-old kids killing themselves. Why does the kid want to kill herself? It’s because he or she feels horrible. There is no one that catches how they feel early enough so they can express their feelings and get what they need for their agitated and frightened nervous system to calm down and see other possibilities than ending it right then and there. That’s how deep the fear of the absence of love goes. We need to make sure that we end that emotional suffering and this really is serious. We have to allow humans to be real and allow them not to pretend as if everything is fine. When you ask someone, “How are you doing?” listen to their answer, inquire further, give them space. It takes time to feel and share that, but with true intention and patience, the person will dare to open up one little bit more at a time.

Loss Of Identity

Our last consequence, number ten, is the loss of identity. While I was still on the run for love, I had no clue who I was. I had no edge, I did not know what I stand for or what I choose to believe in. I was a standard girl who just adapts a couple of spiritual concepts and tries to live up to them as much as I could. I had answers for everything. It was exhausting. When I took all of that away, I was faced with an emptiness I did not see coming. I felt that I was nothing. I was so unimpressed with what I found. I realized that I have no clue of who I am and I had to take baby steps and little by little learn who I was at the core of my being if I am not running after love. In other words, I had to finally grow up and today I feel that I know what my heart stands for.

I know what truly matters to me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not enlightened or anything close. I don’t even aspire to be, but I do have a sense of understanding who Aleah is and I am open for this to change over and over again because we do change so much over time. That’s the consequences for us as an individual. Now, only imagine what that means for us as a nation with mass shootings. Everyone’s screaming for attention on social media. The mistrust we feel towards each other, the competition, the act outs, the violence, rape, and murder. I’m going as far as to say that all of that is a result of the early absence of love and a silent scream for love, to be seen, to be heard, to be validated as a human being. I understand this is a little bit of a heavy chapter and I’m sorry about that.

Happiness comes from scraping away layers and layers of what made us unhappy in the first place. Click To Tweet

Happiness comes from scraping away layers and layers of what made us unhappy in the first place. There is no search for happiness. Happiness does exist within us, but we can’t feel it because all we feel is the pain that lies on top of it. Once we cleared that up, that happiness comes shining through more and more. The bliss that you experienced for no reason, walking somewhere in nature, is your birthright. The warm feelings you have when being on your own, deeply satisfied, is available for all of us. Unfortunately, though we have to do some major healing work before we can access that, it is so much worth it because what lies ahead of the pain is truly melodious, marvelous and epic. There is light at the end of the tunnel and together we will explore how to get there. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I’ll see you in the next episode.

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