How Childhood Attachment Trauma Can Lead to Love Addiction
Hi, I’m Michele Ross LCSW, an addiction therapist in Los Angeles. I specialize in supporting individuals in recovery from love addiction.
If you think you might be struggling with love addiction, it can help a lot to work with a therapist who understands how attachment and addiction shape your relationship patterns.
What is Love Addiction?
Love addiction looks different from secure, grounded, healthy love. Instead of nurturing connection, love addiction can pull you into a relationship that drains or harms you.
Love addiction symptoms include:
Preoccupation or obsession with the relationship that hinders daily life
Social withdrawal from friendships, activities, and work
Constant anxiety about a partner, with self-esteem closely tied to the state of the relationship
Heightened discomfort when not physically with your partner
Unreasonable behavior, such as spending large sums of money, tracking your partner via apps, or constant texting.
What are Attachment Styles?
Attachment styles come from the attachment theory developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.
The core idea is that our childhood relationships with our parents shape our relationships as we get older (Cleveland Clinic).
The attachment framework divides attachment into secure and insecure patterns.
Secure attachment is the healthiest relationship pattern. It helps you feel at ease in friendships and romantic partnerships. People with secure attachment have an easier time trusting others and setting clear and healthy boundaries. Their self-confidence is within, not based on the status of their partnerships.
Insecure attachment can become your “style” of relating if your caregivers were emotionally unavailable or inconsistent. When you wanted closeness as a child, you might have experienced getting hurt or rejected. It’s natural that you learned ways to protect yourself from that pain, even if those ways cause problems now.
There are three main patterns of insecure attachment:
Avoidant attachment: You tend to push people away, prioritizing independence over closeness. Also known as “fearful” or “dismissive” attachment.
Anxious attachment: You tend to cling to others, and fear your partner doesn’t love you. Also known as “preoccupied” attachment.
Fearful-avoidant attachment: You simultaneously cling and avoid, swinging between the two.
Recent Research on Attachment Styles & Love Addiction
In the last few years, several studies have explored how attachment styles are connected to love addiction.
These studies suggest a strong association between those with anxious attachment styles and love addiction.
As a meta-analysis reports, looking at love addiction through an attachment style lens can help us understand the different ways that love addiction plays out in relationships.
For example, a hyperactive style of love addiction is parallel to the anxious attachment style. In this subtype, there is a constant desire for the partner to offer assurance that the relationship is “okay.”
People with this pattern rely on coping mechanisms to avoid abandonment and soothe separation anxiety, which can lead to unhealthy codependence (Journal of Behavioral Addictions).
The explorer type of love addiction is often linked to an avoidant attachment style. This type seeks romantic connection with many partners, and never stays with one person for too long, avoiding opening up for fear of getting hurt.
Here, coping mechanisms function to avoid rejection and hurt. People with avoidant attachment may try to stay “in control” by ending relationships or not taking them seriously (Journal of Behavioral Addictions).
Does insecure attachment mean I’m stuck with love addiction for life?
Understanding the research can help make sense of why these patterns feel so hard to change, but the good news is that attachment patterns are not fixed. Thankfully, recovery from love addiction is possible, even if you have a history of insecure attachment.
Working with an experienced therapist, you can understand your patterns, learn better ways to regulate your emotions in a relationship, and build a sense of inner security.
For many clients, love addiction is less about love and more about managing the anxiety, shame, and fear of abandonment that comes from insecure attachment. People with anxious attachment often try to soothe distress by turning to another person for reassurance.
The behavioral patterns of love addiction can soften as your nervous system learns that it is safe, and past instability isn’t something that is destined to be repeated in your present relationships.
The Multiple Layers of Healing Work in Love Addiction Therapy
Emotional regulation:
Early on in the therapy process, you’ll learn different techniques for self-soothing during times of anxiety and fear surrounding relationships.
You’ll learn different somatic skills, like breathing practices and connection with your body. You’ll practice tolerating uncertainty without immediately reaching for contact with your ex or current partner. Over time, you’ll learn to separate the feeling of panic from the status of your relationship.
Boundary work:
As you move forward in therapy, you’ll recalibrate your boundaries in order to respect your needs. It’s common for those with attachment wounds to ignore their own needs in order to maintain connection with others, even when it costs them something important. With a therapist, you can take stock of your needs and learn skills for how to respect your limits.
Relational Repair:
Attachment wounds can lead us to believe that conflict automatically means abandonment.
Relational repair can happen directly in the way you work with your therapist. For example, when a therapist names misattunements and supports you in fixing the problem with consistency, you are able to get experience in healthy conflict.
Over time, you learn how to be held accountable, and how to hold your partner accountable, without your self esteem or the relationship feeling shattered.
Navigating Trauma
A history of trauma is common among people with insecure attachment. If you grew up feeling unseen, unstable, overly criticized or emotionally alone, your idea of love might be something that you must chase, manage, or obsess over in order for it to feel stable.
With a history of trauma, your nervous system might equate any kind of distance as a sign of danger. You might begin to feel that your worth depends on being in a relationship, as though you’re only valuable when someone wants a long-term relationship with you.
Trauma-focused therapies, such as EMDR, can be helpful with uncoupling attachment distress from specific painful memories and unhelpful inner scripts.
Healing from Love Addiction
It’s important to understand how your attachment patterns fuel your love addiction. But it’s even more important to learn how to work through these past experiences with nervous system regulation, communication skills, and a deeper capacity for connection. Most of all, you’ll do this without losing yourself in the process.
As a therapist specializing in love addiction, I help clients to feel love that is secure instead of desperate, anxious, and co-dependent.
Contact me for a free 15-minute consultation to see what your life could look like without love addiction weighing you down. Sessions are available in my Larchmont office or online for California residents.
