Are you in love with the person or are you addicted to them it's very important to
figure out the difference between the two because addicted type love almost always ends in disaster
for those of you who are new here welcome to put the shovel
down I'm Amber Hollingworth and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand
science and psychology of addiction so you can get your family and your life back on track get
back out there and live the life that you want to live I want you to know you are not powerless you
do not have to hit rock bottom and there are many things you can do to help an addicted loved one
if you want to be back in control of your life subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure
you are always five steps ahead of addiction and
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sometimes it can be difficult to figure out the difference in am I in love or addicted
and that causes a lot of confusion and mixed up feelings and sometimes really bad decision
making on our part so let's clearly define each so that way you'll know which category your
situation falls into now one of the reasons why it's so difficult to figure out the difference
in the two is because we tend to use the word love so broadly and to cover so many different
things or types of love that it can be confusing for example there's romantic love there's the way
you love your best friend there's the way you love your parents and there's the way you love
your child and all of those are like totally different kinds of love wouldn't you agree
and the other reason why this can get messy and confusing and complicated is because of
the way our culture represents love probably is really more like addiction and less like
love which leads a lot of people who are actually in love to think that they're not
in love or they're with the wrong person because they're not in an addicted state
and it leads a lot of people who are really in an addicted state to convince themselves
that they are in love but it's really two different one of the easiest fastest and
most helpful ways to differentiate the two is to think addiction or addictive love as
a feeling and to think about actual love more as a behavior when we're
addicted to something it's actually not that something that we're after
it's the way that something makes us feel inside that's the thing that we're after
whether you're addicted to a person drugs alcohol gambling whatever you're really it's
not the thing it's the feeling it gives which isn't necessarily a bad thing or that things
that are addictive are incapable of giving you that feeling consistently and long term
when you're addicted to something you end up spending a lot of your time in kind of
a desperate state there's this desperation to hang on to whatever it is that you are
addicted addiction is really a lot more of a thought process now there's behaviors that
go along but they're the result of this thought process that drives the behaviors
for example if you are an alcoholic the addiction is really the obsession about
the alcohol now you'll say the behavior and that the person drinks alcohol but not everyone
who drinks alcohol is obsessed with and just like someone can be like a normal drinker like
they drink alcohol sometimes they even drink a lot of alcohol but they're not addicted to it
you can have that being in love feeling without that desperate obsessive it's
taken over your whole life kind of thing when that happens you're really
in the addicted so let's talk about what it looks like and feels like to be addicted to
love now you can be the kind of person that's addicted to love in general and
that means it happens to you all the time over and over with different people
or you can be the kind of person who's addicted to one specific person just like you can be the
kind of person who's addicted to any kind of drug they ever put in their body or you can
be the kind of person who's only addicted to one thing but whether you're addicted to one
person or you're just addicted to the idea and the feeling of love in general these are the symptoms
the biggest most important and number one symptom of addictive love is obsess it's
the amount of time energy and space that you spend thinking about the person because there's
something about the way that person makes you feel that you crave and you long for
and that creates an obsession a constant need for I'm sure you've heard that when
people are addicted to something sometimes they're feeling some kind of hole inside
yes same thing with love it's like you have this
gap inside you feel like this is the only way to meet it and you become obsessive
about it but here's a really important key factor it's really not the person it's this
fantasy you build up in your mind about that person or about the relationships
what happens when you're in this addicted love state is you you develop this whole
fantasy world you are not In reality just like when you're addicted to heroin you're not in
reality just like when you're using alcohol you're not In reality when you are addicted
to love and you are actively engaging in that addiction you go into this fantasy state which
is totally separate from reality and then you become very reliant on that
which creates a desperation which then leads to a fear of losing that person because you feel like I
can't live without it the same way as an alcoholic feels like they can't live without alcohol you
become reliant on it to fix everything for you you become reliant on it to meet all of your needs
you start losing interest in other things in your life you might even give up hobbies
interest activities because you're so obsessed with this person so you're
either spending all your time with them or you're spending all your time thinking
about them or you're not engaging in this fantasy of the relationship with that person
you go into this immediate withdrawal type state which leads you to pursue
that feeling even more even the thought of not having that person in your life
will put you in a withdrawal crazed desperate which will lead you to do
desperate things now the action associated with love addiction I'm going to call it stalking
and stalking incorporates a lot of different behaviors some of them in the way that you
typically think about the word stalking like following a person around but this stalking
type behavior can manifest in a lot of different which we're going to cover in the next video this
is actually the first part of a series of videos because you really understand love addiction
kind of need to break it down into phases or categories the three different phases or
categories I'm going to break it down for you are being addicted to a person that you are not in a
relationship with then there's being addicted to a person that you are in a relationship
with and then there's being addicted to a person that you're broken up with or that you've lost
now sometimes you can go through all three of those phases with one person and sometimes you
just get stuck in one of the phase so it's going to be important for you to
watch the whole series to really understand where you're at why you're there and how to
get out of it because ultimately It's going to end badly just like any addiction does
you know that the way you feel about this person this desperation that you
feel deep down side you know that there's something wrong with that and it might be
hard to admit out loud but when you really dig down deep you feel ashamed about it you
don't necessarily feel ashamed feel that way but you will feel ashamed of some of
the behaviors that you're going to engage in because of the addiction
the same with any other addiction you will do things when you are addicted to
heroin that you wouldn't normally do and you will feel guilty and shameful about
it just like you will do things when you're addicted to a person that you
wouldn't normally do and that leads you to feeling really terrible about
when you have actual love for a person it's really more about that other person versus when
you're addicted to a person it feels like it's about that other person but it's not it's about
a feeling that you are chasing inside of you and you falsely think that person can give it to you
all right now join me in part two of this series where we will explore how
addicted love works when you are not in a relationship with that person