Codependent Lovesickness

“Many of us have come down with a case of lovesickness…

In severe cases, lovesickness can lead to delusional behaviors

(stalking, for example) or sexual obsession…

Many psychoanalysts think that lovesickness is a form of regression,

that in longing for intense closeness,

we are like infants craving our mother’s embrace.”

Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life

Lovesickness and codependency go hand in hand. The primary focus of every codependent is to find love and fulfillment through another person. The active codependent sees all of life through one filter: “I NEED you, whoever you are, to fill me up with love and make me OK. You exist only to rescue me from all of my self-loathing and emotional pain. Come, save me NOW!”

Seeing life through this filter means that the active codependent is constantly on the prowl, day after day, for that Prince or Princess who is their divinely appointed savior. The codependent is constantly on alert for fear that they might miss out on any signal someone may be sending off that indeed he or she is Mr. or Ms. Right. This is delusional behavior in itself. And I have certainly experienced it; both as a perpetrator of this behavior and as a victim of it.

In The Examined Life, Stephen Grosz speaks of a client named Mary who apparently didn’t find the savior she needed in her husband. While talking with a man at a party she began to attach to the man. He asked her if she’d like to have lunch with him the following Friday and apparently wedding bells went off in her head. She showed up for lunch with a bouquet of flowers, some wine and a van filled with all of her clothes, possessions and even furniture. She was ready to move in with the man!

Granted, this is a severe case of lovesickness, but there are many codependents who have planned such scenarios in their heads, even if they haven’t fully executed them like Mary did. And all it took was someone showing the slightest interest in them.

I remember a woman I met in college. We’ll call her Barbara. Barbara used to hang-out in my circle of friends and she was a pretty self-conscious and lonely person. Much of her insecurity had to do with the fact that she medicated away her emotional pain with food, and so she was probably 100 pounds over her ideal weight. I was always polite and nice to her because I could empathize with the habit of emotionally medicating with food.

After several months, however, I learned that my kindness had led Barbara into a great deal of delusional thinking. I had no interest in her other than being her friend and we had only done things together that friends would normally do. My kindness was seriously misinterpreted, however, as I later found out from a mutual friend.

This friend told me that Barbara had confided in him that she was looking forward to the day when she and I got married. She was even talking about how many children she wanted. That information caught me completely off-guard and set off big red flags with me. I had to explain to Barbara that I was only interested in being her friend, and it wasn’t a pleasant conversation. I burst her delusional bubble of a dream, and of course, she immediately believed my imagined rejection of her was all about her not being good enough.

I wasn’t rejecting her. That was impossible given the fact that I had never ever expressed any type of romantic interest in her. I wanted her to still be my friend, but that was all I had ever wanted.

Even in recovery it can be easy to slip back into delusional thinking based in lovesickness. I think it’s true that, as Stephen Grosz says, we do this because we are still wanting the love that we never properly received from our mothers or fathers. We are feeling that intense emptiness inside, that deepest of longing for an outside love to fill us up and satiate us out of our abandoned, empty void.

It’s at times when I feel this way now that I remind myself that no other person can fill-up that void. It helps bring me back to reality and pulls me out of the delusional dream that I am building in my head about any given new person who has walked into my life and shown any kind of interest in me. It makes me responsible for me again, and it takes away the delusion that someone else can fix my inner-emptiness. I have to do it. I have to love me better by taking the time to sit with the emptiness and love myself through it.