Most people know about addictions. There are so many kinds, like smoking, drinking, gambling, eating, even shopping...but, did you know that you could actually be addicted to a person? I was for YEARS! Let me share:
When I was three years old, my dad left me crying on my front porch after he had called me on the phone and told me we would spend the weekend going to an amusement park, then to my grandmothers, like we had done so many other times during his visitation. He never showed up that day or other days for years till I was in high school! I only found this out years later when my mom told me she thought that's why I felt such loss in my life as an adult.
This formed my longing to have a person stay "steady" in my life at all times, and the fear that I might lose every "main" person in my life. It also shaped my person addiction that I would battle for years. From that moment on, I found myself always needing to have "that 1 best friend" in my life or I did not feel like a whole person.
On top of this, my mom remarried when I was 7 years old, and by the time I was a teenager my step-dad's mental illness began showing it's ugly head. He had symptoms of a lot of illnesses, but the main one we all suffered from was his obsessive-compulsive disorder and personality disorder. Life was insane in my house, consisting of dad's hoarding junk, being so perfectionistic that the chores (in his eyes) were never done good enough, having to accept weird, disturbing, intrusive behaviors from him, getting beat, having to pretend we were the "happy family" in public, etc. It set me up for a life of being ocd and struggling with odd behaviors in myself too.
I tended to befriend authority figures...the priest at church, a teacher at school, a counselor, any authority figure. The pattern was that I would choose the person, pour my entire life into them through writing them letters, doing favors for them, observing their behaviors, and even immitating them so much that I could almost be their "cloned twin." In one case, I actually gained weight on purpose, learned to play the keyboard, and changed my voice so I could be like a pastor's wife I adored. It was a sick way of relating to a person, but it had become an addiction, a compulsion with me to always have and "never lose" that one main person from my life.
As an adult, this became known as "stalking" and "toxic behavior." I was excommunicated from churches, shunned by people, seen as mentally unstable at times, and basically not a well-liked person overall. I was clingy like a leech toward the person of my affections, I was overbearing and insistent that I be with that person all the time, and when I wasn't with the person, I was busy drawing portraits of them in notebooks, daydreaming about them, and incessantly talking about them. Like I said, it was a SICK obsession! Some people thought I was a lesbian when the person I was obsessed with happened to be a woman.
I knew something was wrong with my behavior but I didn't know how to stop the cycle of it nor where it had come from. Nobody else that I talked to could figure out what was going on with me either!
Finally, after getting entangled with some borderline personalities and narcissists online, I came across some books that would radically change me and open my eyes to what started the whole situation in the first place. Of course, the Bible was a book I had been reading all along, and I did find some answers in there to begin with, but since the obsessions in my life often happened to be ministers, reading more scriptures simply cemented my unhealthy relationships to those people. No, the books that I believe God used to break me of this extremely unhealthy pattern in my life were: The Language of Letting Go, Beattie, and How To Break Your Addiction to a Person, Halpern.
On a few of my videos on my youtube channel DelusionDispeller you can find out more about Halpern's book that helped me.
I learned how to journal my feelings, how to actually "see" my addictive behaviors, and how to STOP it in its tracks!
You do not have to stay in your addiction and codependency cycle. There is a way out. I found it and you can too!
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