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Beatty. J & Potter. S, 2024, Love Addiction : A CAT approach to excited misery, narcissistic longing and ‘hopium’ , Reformulation 57, p. 26-30
Introduction:
At the Annual ACAT conference in May 2023 we ran a workshop offering a CAT framework for mapping varieties of love addiction as reciprocal role procedures that orchestrate and restrict our experience of gender, desire and an intimate ‘conversational’ sense of self with others. We drew on the literature relating to love addiction and saw love addiction as a narcissistic solution that confuses excitement with ideal care and carries the dynamics of abuse into close adult relationships. In support we wrote a longer paper which is available on www.mapandtalk.com/downloads but here, as follows, is a summary version of the paper and the workshop. We are repeating the Love Addiction workshop on the afternoon of February 14th online as a webinar.
Background to the paper: The research for this paper was done by Jax Beatty as part of her final dissertation for the CAT psychotherapy training. Steve Potter brought lessons and ideas from a series of workshops on Narcissistic Traps, Dilemmas and Snags and an interest in the micro dynamics of everyday narcissism as a feature within and between us in contemporary cultures. Together they created the workshop.
Since they have worked on these ideas through an open dialogue, it is presented here in this paper as a conversation between them. But before that, here is the description of Love Addiction in CAT terms with a diagram to go with it.
In a nutshell:
Love addiction in CAT terms is a pattern of interaction which begins with chronic feelings of emptiness and a yearning for relationship which threatens to overwhelm a more relational and balanced sense of self. The yearning or ‘hopium’ is driven by hope of finding love and over-excitement in its first enactment then by teasing, fragile engagement, and the high octane of being on tenterhooks (or tender hooks) through high emotion and loss of self to the loved-up state. This is combined with the shimmering presence of misery at the anticipated or actual loss of the loved-up feelings. The combination of the self being in an entangled state of excitement and misery can be resolved by withdrawal of self from the addictive behaviour and a tolerance of the loss and the pain enough for a recovery of self in part but at the risk of a return to emptiness and yearning. It is reactivated or sustained by an idealising addictive return to ‘hopium’ (or despair) (for ever looking for loved up, ideal care) which is the driver of the emotional roller coaster ride. To help understand and engage with romantic and loving narratives outside of this cycle we have traced the love addictive pattern in CAT language showing the procedures that link different positions as role responses between several states within and between self and others.
The love addiction CAT map
This is the CAT map we made for the conference with a numbered guide to the ‘pinball’ effect of its sequences.
Key to numbered reciprocal roles:
1. Craving and yearning: the process of meeting the ‘hopium’ addictive need for love and putting self out there ready to lose self to the partial experience of being ‘loved up’. Creating a binary either-or procedural dilemma of heaven or hell.
2. Abusing and hurt (others to self, self to self) partially seen as the necessary pain of the excitement of love (excited misery’ captures the painfully simmering emotional mix of happy and hurt)
3. The nearly not yet teasing presence of restless love and trying the best to keep the good and mediate the bad leading to pinball movements within and between self and the loved person, object or activity.
4. The hiding place or safe place of ordinary, safe but boring love which is tolerated or dismissed but not a secure attachment.
5. The haunting thrilling desire for perfect fusion or ideal care. All the self’s ‘eggs’ are in the one fragile and easily broken or stolen basket.
6. What I really, really don’t want which is to be cast out, rejected and seemingly unlovable if not perfectly loved. For fear of this the chronically endured emotional pain of box 2 is preferred.
7. The moderating reflective and potentially therapeutic voice that sees that part of me is not all of me. How can it become part of the dialogue when love’s excitement kicks off and the pinball of love addicting threatens?
The conversation about Love Addiction
Steve: Love addiction was not a concept I had come across until you introduced it, but, as we talked, and as I read early drafts of your psychotherapy dissertation on the subject, I could immediately link to what I was calling narcissistic identity and attachment solutions. Whilst your focus is the trauma of intimate relationships that hurt and seem to rescue at the same time, I cannot help also thinking of some of the dynamics of love addiction behind the mass attachment to some of our more notorious and powerful political leaders in the world.
Jax: Peele (1992) points out we can be addicted to ‘anything that feels sufficiently rewarding and consuming’, as you say Steve an ‘idea’ can be addictive. Miller (2005:13) described the pain and the shame of the undeveloped self, because of emotional impoverishment from childhood, saying it can render us vulnerable to anything that can ‘change’ the way we feel. Addictions like food, sex and work can pop up interchangeably like a game of Whack -A- Mole. I have repeatedly seen another addictive way of relating long after, or as soon as the drink/drugs have been put down. Abstinence is just the ticket to get into the theatre, it’s not the ‘recovery movie‘.
Steve: You are saying that it is the deeper relational dynamics of addiction that need addressing and we can see how CAT, for example with its idea of survival procedures and getting off the symptom hook can be a resource. You have identified one pattern you have called Excited Misery (a painfully wonderful description) and there are others that have all the qualities of CAT’s traps, snags and dilemmas in the search for appropriate intimacy. However, before going further with the value of the idea of love addiction, could you say something about addiction in general. I am wondering if love addiction is at the heart of all other addictions, or it is a relational aspects of specific addictive activities.
Jax: I think Tolle (2005) nails it when he says, ‘addiction starts with pain and ends with pain’. I do believe the ‘attachment’ injury (or early unformulated reciprocal roles) in some format is as you say at ‘the heart’ of all addictions. That was my experience in a residential ‘rehab’ for 10 years. Time and time again I have seen drug addicted clients whose relational, childhood history was insufficiently examined. Painful childhood relational patterns (reciprocal role procedures) borne out of traumatic experience are painfully re-enacted not least ‘abusing -abused’, where the drugs are now in the top role with the addict now abusing themselves, and often feeling ‘controlled and powerless.
Steve: The person lives out their sense of self at both ends of the reciprocal role poles.
Jax: But addiction can also be a way of narcissistically occupying the top role, no one can control an ‘addict’!
Steve: It is perhaps a narcissistic defence against any kind of open relational engagement and the vulnerability that comes with it.
Jax: Orford (2009) suggests that addiction has been unhelpfully confined to Drugs and Alcohol and the effect they have on the central nervous system. This narrowed focus has prevented a large amount of the population from receiving the necessary support and education for their addictive patterns. West and Brown, (2013) suggest that our understanding of addiction has not progressed despite the many theories that have been developed over the years.
Steve: It sounds like you are saying that addictive activity is always an expression of a relational deficit and has a relational context to its enactment. Can you say something about love addiction? Where did it come from?
Jax: According to Reynaud (Reynaud et al,2010:262) love addiction consists of feelings of euphoria, emotional dependence, and a strong emotional lability, with mood swings ranging from ecstasy to desperation. Excitement, then misery, misery then excitement becomes a felt experience of being simultaneously in a state of excited misery. It is a mood-altering experience. As in the diagram and nutshell summary at the beginning of the paper, love addiction like any addiction is cyclical, and the emptiness and the yearning (wanting) are as much a part of the process as the more visible drama of being in the high octane ‘loved up’ phase. Like any addiction the body is involved, and it is not clear within the sense of self whether the body is ‘leading or following’ the dance of the cycle.
Steve: And you are saying it is a closed system, an overvalued idea that cannot tolerate the ‘threat’ of an equal exchange. I believe the loss of negotiation can be attributed to the Love Addict’s intense fear of rejection/abandonment and toxic shame.
Jax: To pursue a healthy intimate exchange, the love addict would be required to summon a ‘good enough’ version of the self to the table. The capacity to do this is poorly developed due to an impoverished, narrow reciprocal role repertoire whose origins belong to the past. One way I have understood this is having been deprived of ‘maternal mirroring’ in a consistent containing, good enough manner, the love addicted person is left perpetually searching for themselves in the eyes of another.
Steve: That is a powerful phrase and I think of it in CAT terms of being haunted in the present by early reciprocal roles that are deeply woven and partially dissociated in the working of the self. They are prone to be transferred onto the present pattern of relating. There is a nod here in your phrase perpetually searching for self in the eyes of another to Echo vainly looking to Narcissus for affirmation of her existence. We used the relationship between Echo and Narcissus in the ancient Greek myth in our workshop. They both had a history of trauma and were vulnerable to fall addictively in love not with each other but with an idea or image of love. They pined away and died because they lost any wider and more relational and conversational sense of self to one narrow idea of love.
Jax: Some forms of love are forms of addiction and these may be potentially more destructive and prevalent than widely recognized opiates. ‘A seemingly idyllic love affair can mask a retreat from the world’ (Peele and Brodsky,2015:284). Seen in this light, love addiction is one of the most common forms of addiction, and yet it seems to be the least acknowledged.
Steve: It is a loss of self to the addictive and compulsive pattern of loving. It sounds like a narcissistic identity and attachment solution in that it takes the person out of dialogue with themselves and imprisons them in a fixed sequence of state shifts orchestrated by narrow procedures of interpersonal control and self-management. As CAT therapists, we have our tools of mapping and writing to bring out the nuances and see links and patterns but also see gaps and jumps between memories and feelings. Do you think you needed CAT to see this complex and intense pattern of interaction simultaneously within self and between self and others?
Jax: I noticed in my work in residential rehab, that the relational history of the client was invariably neglected as was developmental trauma underpinning the addiction. Equally noticeable was the searching for a ‘special relationship’. I have learnt that their relationship with themselves, their entangled experience of intimacy and harm with others (now and then) is as important as the various forms of addiction. Once there is an all-round, relational, and integrative focus to the therapy, the patterns of interaction around drugs or alcohol seem also to be in play in relationships. It is the pattern of addiction to a temporarily intense, idealised, and fragile interpersonal relationship. It can be summed up as a form of love addiction. It is both exciting and miserable.
Steve: You talk of excited misery as one of the painfully shimmering, fragile and unstable states.
Jax: ‘Excited misery’ is a description- I can’t trace where it came from. It is a fusion of pain and arousal and can be used for many things, but in terms of love addiction I think it’s about a fusion of pain and arousal, and it has an addictive quality in that it takes the sufferer ‘out’ of themselves where, although there is misery, there is equally the ‘promise’ of a ‘hit’. We have it on the map at the beginning of the article.
Steve: Put movingly like that, it might be judged as something we have transitional experience of, especially perhaps in adolescence. It is a rather familiar reciprocal role to many pop songs. What I think is striking in what you describe is the compulsion to seek it out and recreate the pattern between self and others. I am specifically struck by one term you have coined to capture the driving and addictive quality to this compulsion for love. You call it ‘hopium’. Not just a way of coping but an identity solution. It is also on our map.
Jax: ‘Hopium’ is the part in a haunting cycle of love seeking when there is a yearning for connection which can link to early harmful patterns of attachment and the relational damage of developmental trauma. The love addict finds themselves frantically trying to survive the bodily onslaught of ‘excited misery’. It is in this extremis that they are trying to manage their belief/terror in the inevitable loss of ‘love’, whilst attempting to sustain their ‘Hopium’, a deluded belief that their salvation lies in the reciprocity of feelings from the chosen ‘other’, who provides a template for them to project their unmet needs onto. This ‘other’ invariably resonates both negatively and positively with actors from their past, formative years. It’s like going to a butcher wanting a bag of sweets, it’s just not there.
Steve: CAT would define love addiction as a reciprocal role procedure. It can be mapped as a trap, snag or dilemma showing the loss of a more open and conversational sense of self to a narrow and or binary way of coping within self, with others and the world. When clients tell us life stories of love and intimacy, desire and hurt we are listening for the narrative patterns of relating. The patterns capture how they lost themselves to a specific kind of painful intimacy and merger. CAT’s tools can develop the healing powers of relational awareness, reflective capacity and narrative competence. As long as it holds simultaneously in mind the internal, interpersonal, social and power dynamics.
Jax: I think CAT offers a framework that does not imprison the person in a system that can present as an external authority, thus re-enacting the top down, vertical, parent /child reciprocal role. The collaborative, ‘doing with’ spirit of CAT offers potential healing from addiction, that can involve ‘all’ a person’s potential, their creativity, personal power and cognitive awareness.
Steve: I know there is so much more to explore. You have a case story of your work with one person whose experience fitted with the idea of love addiction. It is available in the longer version of this paper available through attending the workshop or on request www.mapandtalk.com . I think we need to look at love addiction from the comparative viewpoint of healthy romantic love. Does it exist? I suspect love can be disturbing and have a dizzying impact on sense of self. I think you talk more about love addiction being on a continuum of intensity and harmfulness. We have not room to talk about the normal range of the love addiction cycle and the capacity for ‘hopium’ and yearning in all of us. Nor have we have touched directly on the wider, gendered and commercialised dynamics of love addiction that were discussed in the workshop. Nor linked it to the separate phenomenon of sex addiction. What I am thinking is that by working along CAT lines with love as an addictive pattern of interaction we are raising the idea that all reciprocal role procedures - to the extent that they are deeply woven into us and make up the structures of our sense of self - are compulsive or addictive and hijack our capacity for reflection and dialogue. I have been working along these lines in my frequently repeated Narcissistic Traps, Dilemmas and Snags webinar – which can be booked on www.mapandtalk.com.
References
(for the full list see the longer version of this paper on the mapandtalk website)
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