By Debra Alper, LCSW
Most people who find themselves in an addictive relationship would not know to describe it that way. They may use adjectives like intense, complicated, or passionate but they almost always describe it as love. The relationship may feel like a roller coaster that they can’t get off. The highs being higher than they ever experienced and the lows being awful in ways that are very damaging, yet they can’t step off the ride even when they are aware of how erratic and harmful it has become.
Addictive love is not some social media buzzword or a dramatic explanation for a bad relationship. It is a recognizable pattern of attachment with very distinct features. There is always an obsessive preoccupation with the relationship and their partner, along with emotional dysregulation and an almost inexplicable pull back toward a relationship that consistently causes harm. Intermittent reinforcement plays a pivotal role. There is a loss of connection with self and individual needs and an increased hypervigilance towards their partner’s moods, tone and expressions. It mimics other addictions both neurochemically and in behaviors. The highs are euphoric. The withdrawals are excruciating. And the person caught in the cycle is often the last one to name it for what it is.
The Neuroscience Underneath
When people fall in love, the brain releases a flood of neurochemicals that make people feel euphoric and intensely alive. Dopamine is on overdrive. Oxytocin does its work by building the emotional bond. When people are in healthy relational dynamics, the neurochemistry settles down. But in addictive relationships, it never gets a chance to settle. Addictive relationships are inconsistent. There are intermittent periods of deep connection, followed by withdrawal, often sudden and surprising. Affection is unpredictable. Sometimes it is readily offered and other times cruelly withheld without ever really knowing why. There is no predictability other than knowing that it will happen again, both the good times and the bad. This keeps the dopamine system in chronic activation. The brain begins to organize itself around pursuing the reward the same way that a slot machine works. You keep at it long enough and eventually you hit a payoff.
What makes this incredibly painful is that the pain itself becomes a part of the cycle. When someone receives warmth, then withdrawal, then warmth again and can’t find a rhyme or reason for any of it, the nervous system doesn’t learn to stabilize. It learns to keep chasing, keep holding on, and this is one of the roots of the addictive relationship. The relationship becomes less about love and more about trying to return to some baseline that was once established that only this person can provide. It’s the pursuit of the beginning when things felt extraordinary, but that beginning was never meant to last, just to hook them into this relational pattern.
What It Looks Like from the Inside
People in an addictive relationship experience themselves as deeply in love with someone. They acknowledge the relationship has problems and usually refer to communication issues. They always have obsessive thoughts about the status of the relationship. Are things good, is the connection good, there is a hypervigilance about where they stand. These thoughts feel like devotion. After having massive ruptures, they pride themselves on being loyal and almost as proof of the depth of their love they feel pride in sticking it out through the hard times. The hypervigilance, constantly reading the other person’s mood, anticipating their needs and reactions, scanning for signs of approval or disapproval, all feels like attentiveness. None of it is experienced as abuse or pathology. It is reframed as deep, meant to be together, caring.
There are patterns that appear consistently in these relationships. The first is a dramatic disconnect from self. Interests, friendships, individual goals, likes and dislikes, even around simple basic needs like what kind of food the person wants to eat, all diminish as the relationship and the partner’s needs and wants to take up all of the emotional real estate. This happens subtly and becomes a quiet dismantling of the abused partner’s sense of being.
The second is what might be called borrowed perception. Over time, the person in the addictive pattern begins to trust the other person’s version of reality more than their own. Their feelings constantly get questioned and minimized. “You’re so dramatic.” “Why do you need to make everything about you?” Their needs get diminished or shamed. Their memory of events gets discounted. This erosion of self-trust is one of the most devastating features of these relationships because it is the very thing that makes leaving feel impossible. Without trust in one’s own self and instincts, there is no solid ground to stand on.
The third is the confusion between intensity and intimacy. In addictive relationship patterns, intensity is almost always present and genuine intimacy is almost always absent. The highs are real. The connection during good periods can feel like nothing ever before experienced. But the relationship lacks what true intimacy requires: the ability to be consistently seen and heard without consequence. When people say they have never felt anything like this before, they are often right. But what they are feeling is activation, not closeness.
Why Naming It Matters
There is a particular kind of suffering that comes from not having language for what is happening to you. People in addictive relationship patterns often know something is wrong long before they can articulate what it is. They feel confused and ashamed in equal measure, exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. They have left and returned so many times that they have stopped believing they will ever truly be done with the relationship. They may have been told by friends, family, or even previous therapists that they deserve better and that they should not let anyone treat them this way, as though the barrier is willpower rather than neurological and behavioral conditioning.
The act of naming the pattern changes the relationship a person has with their own experience. When someone understands that what they are living through has an understandable process and that their inability to leave is not a character flaw but a predictable response to specific conditions, something changes. Not immediately into resolution, but into the beginning of clarity. Identification is not the same as recovery. But it is, without question, where recovery begins.
Addictive love does not mean the feelings weren’t real. It does not mean the relationship was entirely without value. It means the pattern has become larger than the connection, and that the self has been slowly reorganized around someone else’s emotional weather. And here is what makes letting go so much harder than it looks from the outside: when the relationship has functioned as the primary source of regulation, identity, and meaning, releasing it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like erasure. The fear isn’t only of losing the person. It’s of what remains when they’re gone, because for a long time, the answer has been very little. That hollowness is not a sign that the relationship was irreplaceable. It’s a sign of how much was quietly let go along the way. People hold on not because leaving is impossible but because the self they would be returning to feels unfamiliar, even frightening. The vacuum left in the aftermath of addictive love is real, and pretending otherwise is one of the reasons so many people cycle back. Naming it honestly is not a small thing. For many people, it is the first honest thing they have been able to say about their relationship in years.
And that matters.
Debra Alper, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker with 26 years of experience specializing in coercive control, emotional abuse recovery, and relational strategy. She maintains two practices in Chicago: Life Transitions Counseling, PLLC, and Debra Alper, Divorce Consultant | Relational Strategy. She is the author of the forthcoming book Undertow: The ISLAND Method for Breaking Free from Addictive Love.