I’m Lovesick—And Now I know How to Handle It!

“Are you gonna be there?
Are you sure you gonna call back?
When I'm calling up and all that?
Did you know that I'm sick?
Did you think I would quit?
Did you think I'll go home?
Can't you hear I'm sick?
I'm lovesick
Can't you hear its bump?
Like my heart is quick
I'm lovesick
Can't you hear its bump?
All down
Can we make it up?

You don't know me
You don't know anything

I’m lovesick.”

Lindstrom & Christobelle, Lovesick (2010)

Codependent lovesickness emerges from a growing sense of neediness inside of us. The neediness is easy to understand. It’s about the ever-enlarging inner-hole in our souls. It’s about all of the love and approval that was withheld from us when we were children by our parents and other significant adults. And it’s about our perpetuating that emptiness by continually withholding love and approval from ourselves. We treat ourselves the same way our parents treated us. We do this because deep down we believe we aren’t really worthy of the deep love we so desperately want and need.

In many ways it’s natural that we look outside ourselves for love and approval. After all, the hole developed from the lack of outside love and approval that our parents weren’t able to deliver. Subconsciously we understand that much. What we most often don’t understand is how we have been perpetuating our own misery by neglecting ourselves and making the hole larger, deeper and more devastating to bear by withholding self-love.

It takes recovery to understand that we are the ones who are most responsible for the hole in our souls. Our parents laid the foundation for the hole, but we used that foundation to build a temple of inner-doom inside of us. We are now responsible for turning that temple of doom into a temple of eternal love everlasting.

How do we do this? Well let’s look and see. Let’s build a scenario. Meet Tony. Tony was raised by a mom who was emotionally unavailable to him. Even if he had been an only child, his mother was so overwhelmed by her own sense of unworthiness that she didn’t know how to express love toward Tony. To make matters worse, Tony had a little brother come along a year after he was born. Mom was so overwhelmed by two babies that both suffered from emotional neglect. Dad was working two jobs and was rarely physically present—and even when he was physically present, he wasn’t mentally or emotionally present.

So Tony grew up feeling unloved and unlovable. When he expressed a need to either mom or dad, he was shamed for having the need. Having needs didn’t go away, however. Instead, those needs—especially for love and approval—grew more and more intense inside of Tony. As a young boy, he began to look to his friends to meet those needs. The attention he needed was so great, however, that it overwhelmed his friends and many of them abandoned him.

This abandonment forced Tony into people-pleasing and caretaking forms of manipulation to hook new friends. After he had hooked someone, Tony then smothered the person with his need for love and approval. And further abandonment always ensued.

As a teen-ager and young adult, Tony still looked to lose himself in others. He tried harder and harder to attach successfully to a friend or a girlfriend. The more he tried, however, the more it backfired on him. It got to the point that if anyone at all showed even the slightest interest in him, he started the process of attaching to that person. For example, a waitress (we’ll call her Cindy) in a restaurant showed him the same smile and friendly disposition that she showed everyone. But Tony was so starved for affection that he thought she was coming-on to him. He thought “Wow! This is the one for me!” And so he started frequenting that restaurant and always sitting in Cindy’s station. He awkwardly tried to engage in conversation with her, and even though she wasn’t expressing any mutual interest, Tony wasn’t deterred.

One evening Tony waited for Cindy after closing hours and asked her out. She politely declined. It hadn’t taken long for Cindy to see through to Tony’s neediness. She knew he’d be a bad candidate for a boyfriend. She felt empathy for him. But all Tony could see was one more rejection slapped across his face. He felt shame and disgust for himself. It felt like all of the other times combined into one big ball of shame and self-hatred. The pain was so great this time that Tony knew he had to do something to get help for himself. So he sought out a therapist.

The therapist helped Tony to see that he was repeating the same failed pattern of behavior over and over again based in the neglect of his parents and his own neglect of himself. He helped Tony to see the empty hole in his soul that was caused by all of this neglect and helped him to see that no one could possibly fix that hole aside from Tony.

Ultimately Tony learned that he was now responsible for his inner-emptiness as an adult. No one was to blame anymore and no one else could be responsible for making Tony happy, except Tony. So Tony started attending Codependents Anonymous and he started to take responsibility for his own feelings.

Tony learned to recognize when he was feeling needy and wanting someone else to ease his neediness. When he felt that sense of lovesickness coming over him, he tuned-in to his feelings and became responsible for them. He knew what was going on and he knew that this new person he had met wasn’t going to be his savior. He had to be his own savior. So he stopped trying to transfer his feelings to that person and backed away from making that person responsible for his neediness.

Next, he chose not to fight the needy feelings by medicating them. He came to understand that this was a means of drowning them that never succeeded. Instead he learned to allow his feelings to simply be there. He chose to embrace them and say “It’s OK to feel the way I feel right now. I must need to feel this way. These needy feelings are simply telling me that I have wounded areas that still need healing—and I must be the one to heal them by treating myself with acceptance, love and kindness.”

As time passed, Tony often felt the urge to fade into someone else by transferring responsibility for his self-love needs to that person. The urge was there, but it wasn’t as intense and Tony was able to use awareness to then face his own needs and to be responsible for them. As a result, Tony was able to build relationships based on mutual likes and respect instead of codependent lovesickness or neediness. He learned to see people as they are and not as objects for self-medicating. And we can all do the same.