Women Who Love Too Much

Old 08-15-2012, 01:09 PM
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Women Who Love Too Much

The following is the preface to a book I highly recommend to the women on SR romantically involved with addicts. If you like what you see here, go out and purchase a copy.

Author: Robin Norwood
Title: “Women Who Love Too Much; When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change”

Preface

When being in love means being in pain we are loving too much. When most of our conversation with intimate friends are about him, his problems, his thoughts, his feelings – and nearly all our sentence begin with “he…”, we are loving too much.

When we excuse his moodiness, bad temper, indifference or put-downs as problems due to an unhappy childhood and we try to become his therapist, we are loving too much.

When we read a self-help book and underline all the passages we think would help him, we are loving too much.

When we don’t like many of his basic characteristics, values, and behaviors, but we put up with them thinking that if we are only attractive and loving enough he’ll want to change for us, we are loving too much.

When our relationship jeopardizes our emotional well-being and perhaps our physical health and safety, we definitely love too much.

In spite of all its pain and dissatisfaction, loving too much is such a common experience for many women that we almost believe it is the way intimate relationships are supposed to be.

Most of us have loved too much at least once and for many of us it has been a recurrent theme in our lives. Some of us have become so obsessed with our partner and our relationship that we are barely able to function.
In this book we will take a hard look at the reasons why so many women, looking for someone to love them, seem inevitably to find unhealthy, unloving partners instead. And we will explore why, once we know a relationship is not meeting our needs, we nevertheless have such difficulty ending it. We will see that loving turns into loving too much when our partner is inappropriate uncaring, or unavailable and yet we cannot give him up – in fact we want him, we need him even more. We will come to understand how our wanting to love, our yearning for love, our loving itself becomes an addiction.

Addiction is a frightening word. It conjures up images of heroin users jabbing needles into their arms and leading obviously self-destructive lives. We don’t like the word and we don’t want to apply the concept to the way we relate to men. But many, many of us have been “man junkies and, like any other addict, we need to admit the severity of our problem before we can begin to recover from it.

If you have ever found yourself obsessed with a man, you may have suspected that the root of that obsession was not love but fear. We who love obsessively are fully of fear – fear of being alone, fear of being unlovable and unworthy, and fear of being ignored or abandoned or destroyed. We give our love in the desperate hope that the man with whom we’re obsessed will take care of our fears. Instead, the fears – and our obsession – deepen until giving love in order to get it back becomes a driving force in our lives. And because our strategy doesn’t work we try, we love even harder. We love too much.

I first recognized the phenomenon of “loving too much” as a specific syndrome of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors after several years of counseling alcohol and drug abusers. Having conducted hundreds of interviews with addicts and their families, I made a surprising discovery. Sometimes, the chemically dependent patients I interviews grew up in troubled families, sometimes they did not; but their partners nearly always came severely troubled families in which they had experienced greater than normal stress ad pain. By struggling to cope with their addictive mates, these partners (known in the alcoholism treatment field as “co-alcoholics”) were unconsciously recreating and reliving significant aspects of their childhood.

It was mostly from the wives and girlfriends of addictive men that I began to understand the nature of loving too much. Their personal histories revealed their need for both the superiority and the suffering they experienced in their “savior” role and helped me make sense of the depth of their addiction to a man who was in turn addicted to a substance. It was clear that both partners in these couples were equally in need of help, indeed that both were literally dying of their addictions, he from the effects of chemical abuse, she from the effects of extreme stress.

These co-alcoholics women clarified for me the incredible power and influence their childhood experiences had on their adult patterns of relating to men. They have something to tell all of us who have loved too much about why we have developed our predilection for troubled relationships, how we perpetuate our problems, and most importantly how we can change and get well.

I do not intend to imply that women are the only ones who love too much. Some men practice this obsession with relationships with as much fervor as any woman could, and their feelings and behaviors issue from the same kinds of childhood experiences and dynamics. However, most men who have been damaged in childhood do not develop an addiction to relationships. Due to an interplay of cultural and biological factors, they usually try to protect themselves and avoid their pain through pursuits which are more external than internal, more impersonal than personal. Their tendency is to become obsessed with work, sports, or hobbies while, due to the cultural and biological forces working on her, the woman’s tendency is to become obsessed with a relationship – perhaps with just such a damaged and distant man.

Hopefully this book will be of help to anyone who loves too much, but it is primarily written for women because loving too much is primarily a female phenomenon. Its purpose is very specific: to help women with destructive patterns of relating to men recognize that fact, understand the origin of those patterns, and gain the tools for changing their lives.

But if you are a woman who loves too much, I feel it only fair to caution you that this is not going to be an easy book to read. Indeed, if the definition fits and you nonetheless breeze through this book unstirred and unaffected, or you find yourself bored or angry, or unable to concentrate on the material presented here, or only able to think about how much it would help someone else, I suggest that you try reading the book again at a later time. We all need to deny what is too painful or too threatening for us to accept. Denial is a natural means of self-protection, operating automatically and unbidden. Perhaps at a later reading you will be able to face your own experiences and deeper feelings.

Read slowly, allowing yourself to relate both intellectually and emotionally to these women and their stories. The case histories in this book may seem extreme to you. I assure you that the opposite is true. The personalities, characteristics, and histories that I have encountered among hundreds of women that I have known personally and professionally who fit the category of loving too much are by no means exaggerated here. Their actual stories are far more complicated and full of pain. If their problems seem much more serious and distressing than yours, let me say that your initial reaction is typical of most of my clients. Each believes that her problem is “not that bad,” even as she relates with compassion to the plight of other women who, in her opinion, have “real” troubles.

It is one of the ironies of life that we women can respond with such sympathy and understanding to the pain in one another’s lives while remaining so blinded to (and by) the pain in our own. I know this only too well, having been a woman who loved too much most of y life until the toll to my physical and emotional health was so severe that I was forced to take a hard look at my pattern of relating to men. I have spent the last several years working hard to change that pattern. They have been the most rewarding years of my life.

I hope that all of you who love too much this book will not only help you to become more aware of the reality of your condition, but will encourage you to begin to change it as well, by redirecting your loving attention away from your obsession with a man and toward your own recovery and your own life.

Here a second warning is appropriate. There is in this book, as in so many “self-help” books, a list of steps to take in order to change. Should you decide that you really do want to follow these steps, it will require – as all therapeutic change does – years of work and nothing short of your total commitment. There are no shortcuts out of the pattern of loving too much in which you are caught. It is a pattern learned early and practiced well, and to give it up will be frightening, threatening, and constantly challenging. This warning is not meant to discourage you. After all, you will most certainly be facing a struggle throughout those years ahead if you don’t change your pattern of relating. But in that case, your struggle will not be toward growth but merely toward survival. The choice is yours. If you choose to begin the process of recovery, you will change from a woman who loves someone else so much it hurts into a woman who loves herself enough to stop the man.
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Old 08-16-2012, 10:28 AM
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TYPO ALERT!! OMG Sorry guys

last sentence:

“The choice is yours. If you choose to begin the process of recovery, you will change from a woman who loves someone else so much it hurts into a woman who loves herself enough to stop the PAIN.”

Now that makes WAY more sense.
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