Obsession Re-visited (Part 1)

She woke up every morning thinking about her and went to bed each night ruminating about her. As much as she wanted to focus on other things, Sophie’s thoughts would return to Julie like a magnet. By the time Sophie found her way to my office, she looked depleted and on the verge of tears as she felt like she was losing her mind.

I reassured her that she wasn’t going crazy, but I told her that her brain had been hijacked by the fantasy of Julie. Although this was going to be a gradual withdrawal, Sophie seemed to accept her anguish as a symptom of what can be described as love addiction or romantic idealization.

Love addiction is not really about love; it’s about the fantasy of love, and Sophie was drowning in fantasy and obsession. In this case it was a rescue fantasy because Julie was older and financially-stable and seemed to represent someone who would save her from what she described as her lonely, boring life. Although the earlier moments of obsession were exciting and pleasurable at times, it had snowballed into agonizing ruminations.

We all get obsessed with someone or something at one time or another. It’s part of being human. Obsession actually serves a purpose as it gives you the hope that you will feel better by getting together with this person or by getting something from this person. Unfortunately, this is a myth. The mind falls hook, line and sinker into this distortion, and the torment deepens.

So what might be the purpose of obsession? It’s actually an opportunity to learn about life, learn about your mind and learn about your identity. Obsession is extremely useful, and there’s really nothing quite like it in life. Pain grabs your attention, and sometimes you’ll even get addicted to misery. Not only does this happen with romantic relationships but also with friends, family or colleagues.

How can you connect it to something productive and use it throughout your life, now and in the future? The romantically-obsessed person desperately wants something from the idealized other. It’s generally not a conscious experience, but instead, a deep hunger as primitive longings are awakened. When the idealized other is not readily available, this often leaves the obsessed person in acute anxiety and despair as the other person falls short and cannot fulfill the depth of these desires.

Then the obsessive person leans even further into the fantasy, loses their identity and carries the belief that happiness and stability is solely based on what the idealized person does or does not do. As a result, it’s ungrounding and dysregulating resulting in symptoms such as insomnia, panic attacks and even rage. Obsession is based in shame or the experience of “not being enough.” Waiting for just the right level of contact from the other person is an attempt to feel better. This is also what a baby longs for from their primary caregiver—being attended to in just the right way, at just the right time, at just the right temperature. If the fantasy person (or parent) doesn’t respond in these idealized ways, it often results in profound hurt, intolerable fear and inconsolable grief.

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