Are you love or approval addicted?

• Do you often feel empty inside if you are not in a relationship?
• Do you often feel empty inside even if you are in a relationship but your partner is not paying attention to you?
• Do you get anxious when a person you are dating does not contact you when you expect them to?
• Do you get anxious when your partner goes out of town?
• Do you tend to ruminate/obsess about what your partner or someone you are dating is thinking or doing?
• Do you get angry when someone is not saying or doing what you believe they would say or do if they cared about you?

People turn to addictions when they are not taking responsibility for filling themselves with the love they need. Love and approval addiction is like any other addiction: you are using something external – in this case another’s attention to you – to fill the emptiness that is the result of your own self-abandonment.

Most of us learned to abandon ourselves, with various addictions, as we were growing up because:

• We had no role models of how to take loving care of ourselves.
• We could not handle the big feelings of loneliness and heartbreak that are often a part of childhood.
• We did not receive the nurturing we needed to handle the heartache, heartbreak, and loneliness of childhood.

When your parents or other caregivers were upset or unhappy, what did they do? Did you see them doing an inner process to discover the inner source of their upset and shift their thinking and behavior to make themselves happy? Did you see them comforting themselves with deep caring and compassion when life’s challenges were causing them loneliness and heartbreak?

Or, did you see them: