Recently I’ve been asked again to consider the subject of what has now become popularly known as “love addiction”; this is a subject upon which I could not claim any enormous expertise, and I have already been “severely reprimanded” for my previous attempts to explain this somewhat difficult and apparently contradictory concept.

Nonetheless fools and psychiatrists, I suppose, must rush in where angels fear to tread, so here goes, for I do believe in the concept, but perhaps what I don’t believe is that it’s something terribly terribly new.

Like so many aspects of human behaviour that are as old as the proverbial hills, it is inevitable that new generations bring new lines of thought, even if at times those new thoughts aren’t perhaps quite as original as their new gurus would like us to believe. 

What is different of course is the approach that people take to these subjects and obviously the days of “great Uncle Sigmund Freud” have been and gone for many a year, since most people neither have the time nor the financial resources to stay with a therapy that requires attendance four times a week for two to three years.  Nowadays everything must be more efficient, more up front, and more direct, and I write that not as a criticism, but merely to underline that new techniques have needed to be developed and certainly this area of “co-dependency” or “love addiction” is no exception to the rule.

She was a delightful lady, and I really mean that.  She had been a fully qualified nursing sister, and had had to retire from her work at a relatively young age because of severe physical illness, illness which had been worsened after the birth of her only daughter.  Her husband was in many ways, so I was told, a pillar of society, a man holding down a professional job of significant responsibility, who always wore a jacket and tie to work and generously supported charities.

They had been married for some years, and during that time he had increasingly abused alcohol, and then taken it upon himself to abuse his wife.  The details of such abuse are certainly not something which would improve one’s digestion over the eggs and bacon, but nonetheless he was not really a “Jeckyll and Hyde”, but it was tempting to see him in this way.

The problem was that in public “he scrubbed up pretty well”, but in private he was a very different kind of guy.

Eventually when this delightful lady’s health deteriorated to a considerable degree, he left her, going off with a series of secretaries, one of whom I believe ultimately he married and from whom he’s since been separated for some time.  The pattern goes on, however for some years after the divorce he would arrive on a fairly regular basis at his ex-wife’s front door, demand to be let in, he would then beat up on her, as the saying has it, insist on his “sexual rights” and then stagger into bed.

No, she did not take to his head with a large blunt object, she didn’t set alight to the house, she didn’t even go to the locksmith and change the front door lock or move interstate.  On the contrary, she got up early in the morning, washed and ironed his clothes, cooked him his breakfast, and waved him off, like a good little housewife, as if this was very much the matter of fact and the normal. 

That which cannot be cured must be endured.

It simply never occurred to her that it was okay for her to say “No”.  And this simple statement, probably vastly over simplistic, helps I believe to understand why it is that so many people put up with behavioural patterns in others that perhaps others would not allow to persist for more than 50 seconds.

This delightful lady had been brought up in a home in which the one things that was consistent was the inconsistency. 

Father drank, and was violent, both to mother and to the children, so that her way of looking at the way people behaved became considerably warped, and as many children tend to believe, she thought that the way her parents behaved was somehow her fault.  And therefore she would have done anything, and I emphasise that, she would have done literally anything to bring happiness to her family.

This had been the pattern of her life and she had devoted it to “doing things” for a series of people, hoping that as a result of “being good” she would be approved of, and she would be liked.

What she failed to realise of course was that “doing the right thing” is simply never enough, for it’s not so much other people’s approval we need, but our own of ourselves.  For what we actually need from people is respect, and what we should actually fear from others is indifference; if we stand up for anything that is of value in our lives inevitably there are going to be people who share those beliefs, and there are going to be those who are sharply opposed to them, and that doesn’t matter.

Maybe the expression should not be love addiction, but a special sort of phobia, a phobia to the word “no”.  This is very easy for others to see very clearly indeed, but such folk change very slowly if at all.

They experience all the withdrawal symptoms of any addict, many times returning to their “old ways”.  Some never make it and their spirits die whilst their bodies live on.  Others are able to release themselves from their own prisons, but the road is rocky and long.

How is it possible to distinguish between the two groups?