Becoming Love

By Nicole J. Barrett

Becoming Love is a self-help book for those who seek to recover from love addiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626759534

Book preview

Prevention

INTRODUCTION

The heart’s memory is stronger than death: the mind’s memory is not.

- Steven Forrest, author of Yesterday’s Sky: Astrology and Reincarnation

There are many reasons I have chosen to write this book. As we have all heard, love is all that matters and is the only thing that is real. Furthermore, it is all that you take with you when you leave this earth. All spiritual lessons are rooted in love. And as we evolve spiritually, we get closer and closer to becoming all that is love which cannot be defined and which cannot be understood until you get there. But getting there takes patience, acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, humility, gratitude, understanding and a whole host of other spiritual lessons that are there for our betterment. For me, becoming love is also about overcoming love addiction. I believe that love addiction is so prevalent in our culture because love is so ill-defined. The concept of love is limited to categories like romantic love, which is the form of love most of us readily identify with because of its overemphasis in popular culture and importance. Paul Pearsall, author of The Heart’s Code, says the modern view of love is a highly romantic one. While it often speaks in terms of such things as warmth and caring, what is frequently being conveyed is a need for a lover who meets one’s own selfish needs as expressed by the brain’s evolutionary directive for self-advancement. There is this hidden message in society that if you are not in a romantic relationship, than something must be wrong with you. I do not write this book from a top-down perspective. I am writing it because I want to learn more about love and recover from my own love addiction – namely torch-bearing where you have a tendency to put others on a pedestal. And what better way to learn something than to teach it or write about it. My highest intention for this book is to right a self-help book from my heart’s center. Most self-help books are written from the brain’s perspective.

So what is love addiction? Pia Mellody, author of Facing Love Addiction, defines love addiction as a process addiction that occurs when one person loves another with compulsive intensity and in ways that are not to the best interest of either person. I highly recommend Mellody’s book to learn more about the characteristics of love addicts and the cycles love addicts go through. There are many different forms of love addiction and Susan Peabody’s Addiction to Love is a great book to learn more about this. Becoming Love will focus more on love from a more spiritual perspective. While I highly recommend reading such books on love addiction, I think it is important to bring a different perspective to the issue of love addiction than the highly clinical and pathological viewpoints often expressed in most books. This book combines my personal story of overcoming love addiction with an emphasis on self-help for those who want to overcome their love addictions or simply want to learn more about matters of the heart.

My own story of love addiction begins in first grade when I first remember fantasying about different people loving me because I felt unloved. Feelings of unlovability stem from being neglected by my mother as an infant and small child. While I did feel loved by my father, he was often at work or school and I was left in the care of my mother. When I was around the age of 4 or 5, my parents went through a bitter divorce and we were left in the care of my father. Though he was the more stable parent, he emotionally checked out after the divorce. I remember feelings of loneliness as early as kindergarten when I would walk around the playground by myself during recess. I knew as early as age 6 or 7 that my older sister, Lupe, was the pretty one in the family and everyone’s favorite. I remember cutting my own hair around that age in an attempt to fix my perceived ugliness. It didn’t help that my male peers called me names like ugly duckling, dandruff lady and the most common one leper from 6th grade through high school. I think it is important to mention these things because a woman’s sense of worth and lovability are closely tied to how beautiful she is considered by the collective ego of our society.

As an author, I am incredibly redundant but I appreciate this trait in other authors because redundancy helps us learn something better. Therefore, rather than edit out ideas or concepts that repeat in other areas of this book, I allow myself the redundancy for the sake of the person reading this book .

I would also like to note that this book encompass ideas about reincarnation and other metaphysical ideas that you may not agree with, particularly my affinity toward astrology, especially evolutionary astrology. But I think it is important to be your most authentic self and that’s why I choose to write in a certain language that resonates with my soul rather than adopt a sterile, clinical writing style that isn’t me.

As a social worker, this book includes stories about patients I have worked with. I have done my best to protect any identifying information by changing the details of the stories while keeping the essence of the lessons to be garnered by these stories intact. I often find that I learn more from patients than they learn from me. Also, I find that storytelling is a great way to learn and a great way to teach no matter what the subject.

My hope is that something in this book, even if it’s only one sentence, will help you grow closer to the infinite love that I refer to as God for the purposes of this book. I believe that we are all a wave in His ocean but that we sometimes misinterpret the love that He is sending us. On a spiritual level, this misinterpretation is what I call love addiction.

CHAPTER 1: ROOT ISSUES IN LOVE ADDICTION

LOVE ADDICTION KILLS

Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. The past is closed and limited. The future is open and free.

-   Deepak Chopra, author of The Path to Love

The term love addiction is a misnomer because it, in fact, has nothing to do with love. When you are addicted to a person, whether you are a torch bearer like me or an abusive controlling spouse, you are treating that person as an object. They have become God to you or perhaps they have become the Devil, responsible for everything that has gone wrong in your life. Whatever you have projected onto this person has nothing to do with who they are as a soul. We have confused love with infatuation, lust, and/or obsession. We have made someone else responsible for our happiness, our anger, our sadness, or our life circumstances.

Love addiction is a huge problem today but it is given little attention. Love addiction can be fatal. Nicole Brown Simpson and other victims of domestic violence such as Susan Powell and Crystal Judson are examples of people who have died from a particular dark and twisted form of love addiction. Victims of assault such as Colleen Shipman who was attacked by a female astronaut who was obsessed with her then boyfriend, now husband, can be considered victims of love addiction. You hear stories of how sick one can become from love addiction when you watch the ID channel and watch such shows as Wicked Attraction. The issue of love addiction is not to be taken lightly. Like any addiction, even in its mildest form, it can ruin relationships, destroy families and railroad careers. An example of this is Jodi Arias and how her obsession with Travis Alexander caused her to kill him when she sensed that he was ending their relationship. Obviously there are other issues going on here such as narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder but throw love addiction in the mix and you got a lethal combination.

When you