Not all addicts are hooked on drugs or alcohol. Some get hooked on bad relationships. Which can sometimes be more life threatening than any overdose. The most common is with married, unavailable, unattainable or abusive men. A relationship rarely starts out with pain. Like any addiction the pleasure comes first. An escape from reality. The problem comes when you can’t have (it) when you want (it). That brings the pain. Pleasure + pain = addiction.

When you see a heroin addict shooting up, it’s not because he is in love with the heroin, he is in pain without it. Abusive relationships are addictive. You have to go through a drying out period just like an addict would. People are like sponges. When you take a sponge out of a bucket it’s been soaking in (a person), it has to dry out before it can absorb again. The drying out period is painful. Some people would rather throw themselves back in a bucket of mud (and call it love) than go through the drying out stage.

If you’re in pain over a relationship, it’s not love, it’s an addiction and it is time to dry out. You can live with someone if they are kind and you can live without them if they are not. But back and forth is dangerous. The more you do it. The higher the price. Pain + Pleasure=addiction

I had a beautiful woman come to see me whose husband said he would kill himself if she left. Instead he took a knife and stabbed her 10 times, shot her in the head killing her and then killed himself. I had told her “The line between suicide and homicide is as thin as stand of hair”. She said, “Oh, he wouldn’t kill me. Ten days later she was dead. Once you leave don’t go back, you can live without them.