Our search for love is a fallible, desperate and often unproductive venture. We can spend decades looking for some way to end our painful loneliness until we give up and isolate. It is a debilitating swing from one painful way of living to another. And it seems to be completely out of our control. We may make resolutions and goals. We may decide we won’t date any more addicts. We may promise ourselves we won’t ignore any more red flags. We might convince ourselves that we are strong enough to avoid self-erasure the next time. But when the next time rolls around, we are swept away by our dreams of the perfect love. We rush. We don’t set boundaries. We excuse the red flags. And we end up in another painful and futile spot.
So the inevitable happens. We isolate. We sit in our loneliness while feeling there is no hope to have a reasonable relationship with another person. We decide that the world is made of horrible people who we cannot trust. We agree that relationships are not for us. We stay away. We find new hobbies that don’t involve people. We watch lots of movies on Netflix. We scroll through a ton of social media. We work too much. We may even find other addictions to numb ourselves out. And we convince ourselves everything is okay. We are happy enough. The emptiness is tolerable on most days. But then sometimes, it isn’t.
And the cycle continues with painful extremes. There does not appear to be a way out. And honestly, we are all tired of the misery it brings. But it feels so hopeless. There doesn’t seem to be a way out of this excruciating pendulum of searching and giving up. But I am here to tell you that there is hope. I don’t have a quick fix. I don’t have a fix you will like. Your defenses will fight me every step of the way. They may even start distracting you now. But I have a solution. For those who are willing to power through their defenses, there is a way to live life with fulfilling relationships. But first, we must build our awareness of what is actually happening. We have to understand what is driving this process. So here are some secrets to help you make some sense of the process.
Your choice of partner is not random. Have you ever looked back on your history of partners and wondered why they all seemed to have the same triggering characteristics? You may have sworn they didn’t when you were in relationship. But hindsight was 20/20. And you can’t understand how it happened again and again. Well, that was your love seeker in action. They are desperate to resolve their pain about the love they never received. And they will resolve it by recreating childhood relationships until they figure out how to get their love. If they can do it, it will resolve the past pain without the need to grieve. They will have their answer and the pain can finally end. But they keep choosing and attracting the same type of people from childhood. They are the only people who would interest the love seeker. If someone healthy comes along and expresses real love, the love seeker rejects them as boring or a liar. And the pattern continues.
Your loneliness is a flashback. I am not suggesting you aren’t lonely today. Humans are meant to be with other humans. We desire connection. But when you feel the desperate, pained need for another person, you are feeling what it was like to be a child in an abusive family. You are feeling the life or death fear of being neglected and abandoned. You are feeling the desperation that convinced you to leave yourself behind for one or two snippets of appreciation and attention. You are experiencing a flashback. And you are probably experiencing the desperate desire to numb that flashback with any addiction or person available. If you can sit with the flashback and help your love seeker through it, you can stop the cycle. If not, the pattern will continue.
You are never going to find what you are looking for externally. As you may have gathered, there is not an external solution to your internal pain. You can make it stop temporarily. That is the truth of all addictions. They are meant to give you relief for a moment or two. But without the healing on the inside, the same patterns will continue on the outside. The love seeker needs to get their love from you. They need to be heard by you. They need to feel validated through your compassion. The internal re-traumatizing self-hatred has to move out through expression. These internal changes will give you the grounded self-respect necessary to set boundaries and reject those red flags. It is the way to end the pattern for good.
Your love seeker hates that idea. You may be thinking that your love seeker will love the idea of finally being heard. But this is not something the love seeker wants anything to do with. They want their external savior and they want it now. They will not stop until they get it. So even once you get past your defenses, you will have to work with a love seeker who doesn’t want your love … at least for a while. But that’s okay. Stay persistent. Persevere through the blocks. They will change their mind over time. And you will begin to feel peace for the first time in your life. This pattern doesn’t have to be a life sentence. You can change it for good.
Give yourself the gift of awareness when it comes to your love seeking patterns. You don’t have to be a victim to the beliefs your childhood abusers instilled in you. With the right understanding of how your past is driving your present, you can move out of this pain and into a better life … a life with real love. It is possible. Come join me in Survivor’s Guide for Life in June as we explore how to break this cycle.
I have noticed that several – not all – friendships that were at one time close, followed a pattern. I didn’t notice as much of a pattern in some dating relationships, but there were similarities that were expressed in different ways. I can see how I ignored red flags and made excuses in situations. That wasn’t healthy because it wasn’t respecting myself. The problem is that if you grow up making excuses for and accepting behaviors that aren’t good from a parent and some other adults, then you over look the wrong behaviors. When I was in these relationships, either I didn’t notice certain behaviors at the time, or I excused crazy behaviors when I did notice them. One (former) friend whose behaviors I stopped accepting, I later got back into a friendship with again and experienced the strange behaviors all over again. She had extremely rejecting and negative behaviors even though she wanted my friendship. I don’t know why I agreed to do things with her again. I think I need to be more aware of what my own boundaries are and respect that line.
Of all the patterns, this is the hardest to break, but it sounds like your awareness is leading you in the right direction here.
This resonates so deeply with me… I thought I was creating boundaries correction clear boundaries with people in my life whether friendships, relationships, family etc. I feel like I do not wish to speak with any of these people but at the most random times my mind brings up the thought of just reach out say hi or whatever and its when i think im in a peaceful place no drama etc. Its my loveseeker???? What about the controller???? Im so confused or am I????
Sometimes inner peace will bring up the most distractions. When we are still, we are at the most risk for connecting in with our deepest inner emotions and traumatic memories. Peace is dangerous to the controller. So they will enlist the love seeker to create some drama. They are tricky like that.
Elisabeth & Tracy:
“Sometimes inner peace will bring up the most distractions.”
Ironic, isn’t it? The rest of your response (Elisabeth) explains my experiences with it quite well.
Sometimes (Tracy) I get confused, too. So I just end up writing whatever comes up and not thinking about the names.
The next-to-last paragraph is flabbergasting to me: that the love seeker is so rooted in externalizing one’s source of love it will fight against one’s attempts to love one’s self. I think your label “love seeker” is helping. I have been solo for so long that it seemed irrelevant for the most part. And as I have explored my past I’ve identified some times that sowed the seeds of the shift away from internal drive and approval. It’s really, really hard to shift back! And I have learned to be a little gracious to myself when I slip back into the old ways. I try to feel what drives my choices even in “small” things, like how I word a work email. Or how I respond to a therapist.
And there’s a behavior I’ve become aware of — and started to dislike — along those lines: following a serious spoken statement with a bit of a laugh.
It really is alive in all these little ways. We do not need an intimate relationship to be love seeking from others. But it is hard to see. We have to stay aware. And as you say, we need to stay compassionate when we get pulled in by the love seeker. It is inevitable.
Today is June 20th and I’m pretty sure that my Controller has held me back from reading this post, which I knew would resonate with me deeply until now. I’m so heavily isolated right now (and have been post-breakup for going on 6 yrs now) that I’m at a point where I don’t feel the pain that much of being so isolated. However, when I read “But when you feel the desperate, pained need for another person, you are feeling what it was like to be a child in an abusive family. You are feeling the life or death fear of being neglected and abandoned. You are feeling the desperation that convinced you to leave yourself behind for one or two snippets of appreciation and attention. You are experiencing a flashback.” WHOA! Game changer! Because I have felt that pain but never in a million years would I have thought about it that way. But, alas, I struggle with turning “internally” unless I’m triggered, which is why I’ve isolated myself so much is because I don’t want anyone to trigger me. Then on the other hand, when I feel the pain of the “flashback”, I don’t trust myself to be in relationship because ALL of my friendships and intimate relationships have been nothing but recreations of my past trauma. I guess…I just don’t know what to do with myself at this point.
The key to breaking this cycle is in grieving the past. That said, grief is not easy for us to access when our controller is shutting it down. The best thing for you to focus on is your controller and how they are blocking your flashback emotions. This is going to be so important for moving forward.