I spent years understanding this pattern from two directions at once. I sat across from clients who could not leave relationships that were hurting them, and I also lived inside one of my own for four years, fully aware of what was happening to me and still unable to walk away. Both experiences taught me the same thing: the labels I had been trained to reach for were not wrong exactly. They just were not enough.

For a long time, when I saw someone stuck in a relationship they could see clearly was destructive, I reached for codependency first. It is a real pattern, and it fit a lot of what I was watching: the caretaking, the self-erasure, the difficulty separating their needs from their partner’s. So we would do the work that framework calls for. Boundary setting. Self-care. Rebuilding an identity outside the relationship. My clients would do that work, genuinely and hard, and some of them still could not leave. Or they would leave and go back. And go back again. I remember starting to wonder, in the quieter moments after a session, whether they were resistant, whether some part of them did not want to get better. I know better now. What I was watching was not resistance. It was withdrawal, and I did not have the framework yet to recognize it as that.

Attachment theory got closer. It explained the hypervigilance, the way a client’s whole nervous system seemed to orbit around their partner’s mood, the fear of abandonment that never fully went quiet. But attachment style describes something that develops early and shows up across a person’s relationships. What I was seeing in these clients was not general. It was specific. It was activation directed at one person, in one dynamic, built and reinforced by inconsistency: warmth, then withdrawal, then warmth again, with no way to predict which was coming. Telling a client they had anxious attachment and coaching them toward a more secure style was handing them a map to the wrong destination. They were not anxious in general. They were addicted to one specific person, and no amount of work on their general attachment style was going to touch that.

I did not fully understand why until I lived it myself. Four years into a relationship I had recognized as harmful within the first month, I was still there. I had the clinical vocabulary. I could have described the pattern to a client in my own office with complete accuracy. What I could not do was stop needing the resolution that came after a cold stretch, the relief that arrived when the warmth returned and made everything before it disappear. That gap, between what I understood intellectually and what I could do, is the same gap I now see in every client caught in this pattern. What holds someone there is a physiological pull that insight alone does not touch, not a failure to understand what is happening.

That is where the framework I had been trained in ran out of room. Leaving a relationship like this runs closer to substance or gambling withdrawal than to ordinary grief: obsessive thinking about the person, insomnia, loss of appetite, an overwhelming pull back toward the relationship, and a distortion of how the relationship and the person are experienced. I call this the Fog. Everything blurs and softens, and the partner starts to feel irreplaceable, not because the relationship was good, but because the Fog itself works to keep the bond intact. It numbs the memory of what just happened and replaces it with craving for how things felt at the beginning.

When I did not have language for the Fog, in my clients or in myself, it was misinterpreted as unresolved attachment, or as evidence the relationship must have meant something after all. Neither is true. It is a predictable mechanism, not a verdict on the relationship or a character flaw in the person living through it.

Here is what changed once I understood that. Codependency, even addressed with real compassion, carries an implicit message that the client’s own patterns are the primary cause of what is happening to them. For someone caught in an addictive bond with a controlling partner, that message adds shame exactly where a client needs less of it, not more. People in this pattern already carry enormous shame about not being able to leave, about the distance between what they know and what they can do. A framework that locates the problem in their relational style, their attachment, their self-worth, hands them one more reason to blame themselves for something that was never a matter of willpower.

None of this means attachment theory or the work around codependency is wrong. Both matter, and both are often part of the picture. But addictive love needs to be treated as what it is: a pattern with its own neuroscience, its own withdrawal process, its own timeline for healing, layered on top of whatever attachment history a person brings into it. Naming it precisely does not just change the treatment plan. It changes what the person believes about themselves while they are still inside it, and that belief is often the difference between someone who keeps returning and blaming themselves for it, and someone who finally understands what they are recovering from.

I did not break free in one decisive moment. I freed myself slowly, by learning to notice the pull while I was still inside it, one cold stretch at a time, until the noticing did more than the craving. That took me years, even with everything I knew. It was only afterward, looking back at what had helped, that I began shaping those steps into something more deliberate, a structured way of working through this that eventually became The ISLAND Method: A Framework for Relational Recovery™. I was not following a method while I was living it. I was just trying to survive it, and the method came later, built from what I learned surviving it and from everything I had already learned sitting across from clients doing the same thing.

I do not say any of this to discourage anyone. I say it because the length of time it takes to leave a pattern like this measures how well the pattern was built and how much more precise our understanding of it needs to be, not how much is wrong with the person living through it.

Debra Alper, LCSW, is a Chicago based psychotherapist and divorce consultant with 26 years of experience specializing in coercive control, emotional abuse recovery, and love addiction. She is the author of the forthcoming book Undertow: The ISLAND Method for Breaking Free from Love Addiction.