Facing Love Addiction

By Pia MellodyJ. Keith MillerAndrea Wells Miller, et al.

Book Overview

Change the way you love, breakup with toxic relationships, end the shame spiral, and discover the key to secure, nurturing, and lasting connections--OVER 350,000 COPIES SOLD

Are you stuck in the cycle of "failed" relationships and are constantly worried you are unlovable or will never find true love? Do you find yourself overly needy or unable to communicate your needs properly in your relationships...always anxious when you are apart from your partner? Has your relationship with your parents negatively impacted your romantic relationships? If so, you may be stuck in a cycle of love addiction.

Facing Love Addiction offers a a way out. Through twelve-step work, exercises, and journal-keeping, this book compassionately and realistically outlines the recovery process to:

- Clearly outline the debilitating toxic patterns played out by love addicts and the unresponsive love avoidants to whom they are painfully and repeatedly drawn

- Clarify the distinctions between codependence and co-addiction

- Show how our childhood experiences of abandonment or engulfment influence our choice of romantic partners

- Illuminate how sometimes detaching from our emotions is necessary in ultimately feeling fulfilled and secure

Weaving together attachment theory, vulnerability, codependency, and generational trauma, this groundbreaking bestseller unravels the intricate dynamics of toxic relationships and shows us how to let go of toxic love. Pia Mellody combines more than 15 years treating addictions at the Meadows Treatment Center in Arizona, to help cure fears of abandonment and intimacy and curb harmful, self-victimizing patterns and modes of detachment.

Wherever you are in your love journey, this book will allow you to break dysfunctional and addictive patterns in relationships and definitively alter the way you view your partners, and yourself. Stop letting fear and self-doubt hold you back from the love you deserve--it could be right in front of you.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062506048
• ISBN13: 9780062506047
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: HarperOne
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Very insightful book for Love Addicts

This books is helping me heal as a Love Addict and gives me some insight on my Love Avoidant partner. I’m glad I stumbled upon this book!

Recovery Tools

This book was recommended by my therapist. After going thru the whole book and writing all the exercises, I have unlocked and unloaded a ton of childhood pain and trauma. You will shed floods of tears and feel terrible feelings you have buried, but this process is like the purging of toxins so you can begin to heal. One customer commented that the author didn't offer any recovery tools. I'd like to offer my experience: The most important recovery tool is to develop a relationship with a Higher Power that is not a person or object. For if you do not have a Higher Power, you will turn to a person or object for that love, which will result in addiction. From time to time, during recovery, painful feelings will surface, triggered by whatever or whomever you're dealing with day to day. When I was in a relationship, it was hard because I couldn't get away easily to process the triggered feelings. The book offers suggestions which are good, but not that easy to do for me. Now that I'm not in that relationship, I've followed my therapist's suggestion to identify the triggering event, the root cause (usually from your childhood), and replace the painful feeling with thoughts, words, and deeds that make me feel better. This 3-step process takes tremendous discipline because many times I just want to stick to my lifelong habit of self-pity, depression, and pessimism. I also begin my day with one hour of Prayer Walk. I meditate every day to empty my mind, and infuse my being with God's love. Since I've been doing recovery, I have stopped crying over loneliness, stopped longing for that "soulmate", and stopped the frantic search. After all, you are your true soulmate, because if you can't love you, no one can. Everyone accesses their Higher Power differently, but the most important thing is to receive all the love you need from your Higher Power. Without doing so, you will forever rely on a created being or thing for love, and be constantly frustrated because of his/its limitations. Before reading Pia Mellody's book, I was attracted to men who were challenging, difficult, complex, and provocative, which I found fascinating, but they in fact were unstable, emotionally melodramatic, and abusive. Now when I meet men who are intense, I feel less attraction, perhaps because I have processed my childhood trauma wounds and lowered my degree of intensity, becoming more at peace with myself. Today I see these people as wounded, just unaware of it. I know I can choose peace, not conflict; joy, not suffering; gentleness, not intensity. The book says "Love addicts are attracted to men who walk away from them." That was very true of me. But to change that, I had to open my wounds, clean them out, identify the pain, and patiently wait for the wounds to heal. I hope the pain you're feeling will be enough of a wakeup call to begin this journey.

I just didn't know.....

Holy Moley,I just didn't know until I read this book. This book clearly illustrated to me just what I've been doing in relationships that get me into trouble. It doesn't stop there either.While reading, I could begin to see the shroud of darkness lift from my eyes, and clarity begin to set in. I am a love addict, and have been picking avoidant addicts for years and never knew it. Now I can see the reasons for the pain I was forced to endure. I am now happily on the road to recovery.If you have any questions at all about your troubled relationships of the present or past, buy this book!

The pain of discovering the hidden self.

I found this book well written and comprehensive, but what was the most moving to me was the way in which it touched the most painful and sad and hidden part of my relationships. Not only does it talk about me and why I do this, but it clearly talks about my partner(s) and what they seek in this valiant but destructive and Quixotic dance we do. I did not need my highlighter, as my tears did the highlighting on each and every page. Strangely, the more I read into the book the more soothed I felt in that I understood, finally, that I am not alone, that I needn't be alone and that there is a way out from this. If you suffer in relationships in the dramatic push-pull way, if the relationships you have are frought with complicated manipulations, if you want a way out...please read this book. Best of luck. Tim

This Book Completely Changed My Life

I read this book about four or five years ago, and it helped me understand, in a way that nothing had before, why my relationships were not working. I have read several books on building healthy relationships, and many are good, but this is the one that saved my life. Pia's model explains that while I was searching for love, I was really much more afraid to receive it than I had ever thought. Before I read it, I hadn't been able to sustain any relationship for long, and had never been close to marriage. Now I am happily married, and I still turn to this book for tune-ups in my marriage. Thank you Pia, very much!