Understanding and Healing Addictive Attraction

“(Beside me)
Need your lovin' here beside me
(To guide me)
Keep it close enough to guide me
(Inside of me)
From the fears that are inside of me
You're the biggest part of me.”

Ambrosia, The Biggest Part of Me (1980)

I always loved the song “The Biggest Part of Me” by Ambrosia. It fed my codependent neediness; the belief that someone else could fill me up and make me Ok by being the biggest part of me. I used to believe that I needed to lose myself in someone else; that I needed to become less of me and more of them and then life would be paradise. And I thought that this process was all part of falling in love.

But I’ve learned that codependents don’t fall in love, they fall into addictive attraction. Believing that someone else can become the biggest part of me is an insane addictive obsession. Sometimes addictive attraction is totally one-sided and sometimes it’s mutual—at least early on. More often than not, a person with an addictive personality is attracted to another person who also has an addictive personality.

Every codependent suffers from emotional neediness. But this neediness is taken to new levels when the codependent engages romantically with another addict. Life, for the codependent, becomes a series of obsessive thoughts, desires and emotions. Twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, the codependent’s brain is focused on the other person, to the exclusion of everyone else in his/her life.

Constant focus on the other person is driven by endless fantasizing about being with him/her. And all of this obsessive mental energy leads the codependent into a heightened state of emotional neediness. It causes an intense anxiety for the codependent that can only be quenched by contact with the desired person.

So the codependent spends his or her day in an anxious state of emotional neediness hoping for a phone call or text from the other person. Subconsciously they want to know that the other person is equally obsessed with them. When that doesn’t happen—and it usually doesn’t, at least not often enough to satisfy the separation anxiety of the codependent—the codependent will become clingy. They will engage in calling or texting the other person more and more and more, to the point that they are becoming an irritation to the other person.

Emotional neediness will lead the codependent further down a path of destruction. The codependent will often begin to compromise him or herself to gain the attention and approval of the desired person. They will engage in doing things they don’t feel comfortable doing, like prostituting themselves to the every sexual whim of the other person, or cleaning up the other person’s messy apartment, or accepting blame for everything that goes wrong or giving large sums of money to the other person because he/she is constantly in debt.

It may take months—or years-- before the codependent gets tired of compromising themselves without finding any sense of fulfillment. And the truth is there is no fulfillment to be found in addictive attraction. The codependent isn’t “in love” with the other person. He/she is in obsession with the other person, and at the root of this obsession is the belief that the person of desire can fill-up all of the codependent’s needy emptiness and make him/her OK—eternally.

This will never happen. It’s impossible. The codependent has to fill up his/her own neediness with self-love. Anyone in a recovery program knows this, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. Recovery makes things better, but not necessarily easier. I’ve been in recovery for 19 years and I still struggle with needy, clingy feelings.

The difference is that I recognize those needy clingy feelings for what they are now—most of the time. There are days when I want someone else to fill-up my emotional emptiness and I feel needy off the scale. My thoughts will be obsessively focused on someone. I will be aching inside to be with this person. I’ll see them in everything and will be fantasizing about all of the fun we could be having. And the ache will grow inside and grow and grow till I feel like I’m going to explode out of my skin.

When this happens, I know now that I just need to sit with the anxiety of it all. I need to feel the obsession, the loneliness, the sadness, the neediness that is the result of years and years of self-abandonment. And I just need to allow it to be. Then I need to do things to better take care of myself, like going for a walk, opening up to my Higher Power, or reaching out to someone other than the person I’m obsessing about. Doing proactive things helps to clear my head and facing the needy feelings helps to ease them out of my body.

So I’ve learned to recognize addictive attraction for what it is—a cry for inner-help. I understand now that addictive attraction is NOT love. But it is a cry for increased self-love and self-care. This is how I alleviate the needy feelings and get my balance back.