Love and Relationship Addiction
For most women with unhealthy love and relationship addiction, we are dealing with depression, isolation, and a lack of trust. Unhealthy use of love and relationships is used as a means of achieving worth.
Characteristics of Someone Struggling with Love and Relationship Addiction may include, but are not limited to:

• Lack of nurturing and attention when young
• Feeling isolated, detached from parents and family
• Mistake intensity for intimacy
• Hidden pain
• Seek to avoid rejection and abandonment at all cost
• Afraid to trust anyone in a relationship
• Inner rage over lack of nurturing, early abandonment
• Depressed
• Manipulative and controlling of others
• Perceive attraction, attachment, and sex as basic human needs like food and water
• Sense of worthlessness
• Escalating tolerance for high-risk behavior
• Presence of other addictive or compulsive problems
• Using others to alter mood or relieve pain
• Existence of secret “double life”
• Use fantasy or unhealthy relationships to escape painful feelings or reality
• Unrealistic or unhealthy expectations with our spouse

How We Find Recovery
Through a relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior and Higher Power, and by working through the Christ-centered 12 steps, we can find freedom from our destructive thought, beliefs and behaviors.
Characteristics of Someone in Recovery for Love and Relationship Addiction include, but are not limited to:

• Accept Jesus Christ as Higher Power
• Working the 12 step recovery process diligently and consistently.
• Shifting our worship from our sexuality to God.
• Finding healthy coping mechanisms for negative feelings, emotions, and circumstances.
• Developing a healthy identity and positive self-worth that comes from God, not our bodies or others.
• Learning to love ourselves as God loves us, so knowing we are worth the work it takes for Him to heal us.
• Emotionally connecting with God, self, and others, and developing safe relationships.
• Identify difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships with others.
• Not engaging in sex with self, phone sex, cyber sex, pornography, fantasy, or a sexual relationship outside of marriage.
• Seeking a biblical definition of healthy sexuality.
• Become willing to experience grief, forgiveness, and acceptance.
• Discerning the difference between physical “need” and “want”.
• Avoid cross over addictions; i.e. food/alcohol/drugs.
• Identify triggers and avoid these people, places, and things that tempt us to act out.
• In our recovery, we become willing to be used by God to bring hope to others with similar struggles.