Love Junkies and Heroin Addicts
Is it Love or Narcissistic Abuse?
 I remember back after I broke up with my narcissistic boyfriend, before I knew what narcissism was. I was leafing through the books in the self-help and psychology section of Barnes and Nobles searching for the answers to my seemingly hopeless problem. I was obsessed with the man whom I had chosen to leave. I chose to leave him because I knew something was terribly wrong and I felt if I left him whatever was wrong would soon identify itself.
He moved on rather quickly and took up with a woman in our social circle and I slipped deeper and deeper into despair. I was lead to believe I was the one with the problem.
A woman friend whom we had sought couples counseling with suggested that I had some kind of issue with my Mother and she also suggested I move on and find someone new, like he did.
As I was leafing through the books at Barnes and Nobles, my eyes fell upon a book about love addiction. “Oh,” I thought “this is it! This is what I have! I am a love addict.”
I quickly purchased the book and ran home to read it. Every thing seemed to make sense. The obsession; the inability to eat or sleep; my constant longing for a fix; some kind of validation that he ever really cared about me. Yet this didn’t seem like who I was at all. I had not been like this before. The constant pattern of love addiction didn’t seem to apply. I was usually the one who left the relationship in attempt to upgrade to a healthier way of being. It wasn’t like me to linger in the after-math, longing for what could have been, dying to just have some kind of closure or resolution.
The self diagnosis of love addict just didn’t satisfy me. It didn’t seem to be the missing piece as to why I just couldn’t get on with my life. It wasn’t until I went under psychiatric evaluation did I discover that I was likely involved with a man who had narcissistic personality disorder. Suddenly everything changed. Suddenly the focus was off me and onto him.
But as I delved deeper into exploring narcissistic personality disorder I had to come to terms with the fact that I was still part of the equation. Apparently I had gone through a very subtle type of abuse that left me wondering what was wrong, what happened, why did I feel so low about myself? Why could he just transfer to someone else without batting an eyelash while I was left to deal with the fall out of our three year relationship?
I was the one suffering. I was the one who was alone and reeling in pain. I was the one who left him as my friends reminded me. I left him so why was I the one having the hard time getting over it?
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