Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
When we don’t have a nurturing, trustworthy attachment during infancy and toddlerhood, it seems there are two (2) main dysfunctional routes this can go—which carry on into adulthood until we heal ourselves:
1 - seeking attention in placement of love
2 - attempting to turn an emotionally-detached person into a loving, attentive person
What both of these dysfunctional routes have in common is looking for love in all the wrong places:
We make-believe we can get love from anyone and everyone (potentially: narcissism or passive-aggressor).
We latch on to any form of attention & make-believe it is love.
We lack self-awareness.
We don’t know that we’re looking for anything at all.
As such, we don’t know that it’s love we are always looking for.
We create a fantasy world in our heads to fill in the inevitable gaps.
create narratives to fool ourselves into thinking we love others simply by noticing they exist
fool ourselves into thinking others love us for our simply noticing they exist
We’re people-pleasers: performing for others
being ‘nice,’ do-gooders, looking good or cool, keeping people company, complying, conforming
to fool ourselves into believing that we are lovable
to fool ourselves into thinking that others love us for our performances
Self-respect, dignity, boundaries & personal-responsibility are avoided so as to not limit options for ‘love.’
We avoid intimate, committed partnerships so as to not limit options for ‘love.’
If we do get into a committed relationship, we are co-dependent (below) with that person.
But we refuse to give up looking for ‘love’ everywhere else.
We know better than to count on only one person for our insatiable need for love.
2. We find one or a few emotionally-detached people and spend all of our efforts trying to get them to love us (potentially: co-dependency):
We’re attracted to rejection with the hopes we can turn the person around to love us.
to heal rejection from infancy
We’re hyper-aware of our pain & know it’s because we want to be loved.
We try to change ourselves to the core, extremely willing to fix anything within ourselves, to get the person to love us.
The person in first category does this minimally, since they continue to look for ‘love’ everywhere else. So likely it will come in the form of pretending they are what you want, and highly-censoring themselves with you.
We give up what we enjoy doing (and might never even know what that is) so we can hyper-focus on the person whose love we are chasing.
The person in first category does this minimally, since they continue to look for ‘love’ everywhere else. So likely
They convince themselves that they are giving up & sacrificing everything they are interested in because they love you.
They will make-believe in having shared-interests or being easy-going: they are only interested in what you are interested in.
They seem frozen or far-away much of the time you’re together—likely because they are always scheming ways to get ‘love’ elsewhere.
Resentment is sure to follow since you’re keeping them from their other sources of ‘love.’
We’re always aware of the other person.
gives us the false hope that the other person will value that we are always there for them, and when they see that, then they will love us
helps us to know better, and prepare for, when their inevitable and comfortably-familiar rejection is on it’s way
gives us the illusion that we’re not alone & have a bond with the other person
If any of this rings true for you and you want help working through it, please contact me.