Obsessed love meaning
Symptoms, What It is, Causes, and More
What is obsessive love disorder?
“Obsessive love disorder” (OLD) refers to a condition where you become obsessed with one person you think you may be in love with. You might feel the need to protect your loved one obsessively, or even become controlling of them as if they were a possession.
While no separate medical or psychological classification exists for OLD, it can often accompany other types of mental health illnesses. Talk to your doctor if you think you or a loved one may have the disorder. Treatment can help decrease the symptoms while also preventing complications with relationships.
Symptoms of OLD may include:
- an overwhelming attraction to one person
- obsessive thoughts about the person
- feeling the need to “protect” the person you’re in love with
- possessive thoughts and actions
- extreme jealousy over other interpersonal interactions
- low self-esteem
People who have OLD may also not take rejection easily. In some cases, the symptoms could worsen at the end of a relationship or if the other person rejects you. There are other signs of this disorder, such as:
- repeated texts, emails, and phone calls to the person they’re interested in
- a constant need for reassurance
- difficulty having friendships or maintaining contact with family members because of the obsession over one person
- monitoring the actions of the other person
- controlling where the other person goes and the activities they engage in
There’s no one single cause of OLD. Instead, it may be linked to other types of mental health disabilities such as:
Attachment disorders
This group of disorders refers to people who have emotional attachment issues, such as a lack of empathy or an obsession with another person.
Types of attachment disorders include disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED) and reactive attachment disorder (RAD), and they both develop during childhood from negative experiences with parents or other adult caregivers.
In DSED, you might be overly friendly and not take precautions around strangers. With RAD, you may feel stressed and have problems getting along with others.
Borderline personality disorder
This mental health disorder is characterized by a disturbance with self-image coupled with severe mood swings. Borderline personality disorder can cause you to be extremely angry to extremely happy within a matter of minutes or hours.
Anxious and depressive episodes also occur. When considering obsessive love disorder, personality disorders can cause switches between extreme love for a person to extreme disdain.
Delusional jealousy
Based on delusions (events or facts you believe to be true), this disorder is exhibited by an insistence on things that are already proven false. When it comes to obsessive love, delusional jealousy can cause you to believe the other person has reciprocated their feelings for you, even if they’ve made it clear this is indeed not true.
According to a 2005 study, delusional jealousy may be linked to alcoholism in men.
Erotomania
This disorder is an intersection between delusional and obsessive love disorders. With erotomania, you believe that someone famous or of a higher social status is in love with you. This can lead to harassment of the other person, such as showing up at their home or workplace.
According to Comprehensive Psychiatry, people with erotomania are often isolated with few friends, and they may even be unemployed.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a combination of obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals. These are severe enough to interfere with your everyday life. OCD can also cause you to need constant reassurance, which can affect your relationships.
Some people are said to have relationship OCD, where obsessions and compulsions are centered around the relationship. However, this isn’t an officially recognized subtype of OCD.
Obsessional jealousy
Unlike delusional jealousy, obsessional jealousy is a nondelusional preoccupation with a partner’s perceived infidelity. This preoccupation can lead to repetitive and compulsive behaviors in response to infidelity concerns. These behaviors resemble OCD more so than delusional jealousy. This can cause significant distress or impair everyday functioning.
OLD is diagnosed with a thorough evaluation from a psychiatrist or other mental health professional. First, they will interview you by asking you questions about your symptoms, as well as your relationships. They’ll also ask you about your family and whether any known mental health illnesses exist.
A medical diagnosis from your primary doctor may also be needed to rule out other causes. Since obsessive love disorder intersects with other forms of mental health disabilities, it’s not classified on the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
For unknown reasons, OLD affects more women than men.
The precise treatment plan for this disorder depends on the underlying cause. However, it often involves a combination of medication and psychotherapy.
Medications can be used to adjust brain chemicals. In turn, this can reduce the symptoms of the disorder. Your doctor may recommend one of the following:
- anti-anxiety medications, such as Valium and Xanax
- antidepressants, such as Prozac, Paxil, or Zoloft
- antipsychotics
- mood stabilizers
It can take several weeks for your medication to work. You may also need to try different types until you find the one that works best for you. Talk to your doctor about possible side effects, such as:
- appetite changes
- dry mouth
- fatigue
- headaches
- insomnia
- loss of libido
- nausea
- weight gain
- worsening symptoms
Therapy is also helpful for all forms of OLD.
Sometimes it’s helpful for families to be involved with therapy sessions, especially if obsessive love disorder stems from issues during childhood. Depending on the severity of the disorder and your personal preferences, you might engage in individual or group therapy. Sometimes a mental health professional will recommend both types.
Therapy options include:
- cognitive behavioral therapy
- dialectical behavioral therapy
- play therapy (for children)
- talk therapy
While OLD is gaining more attention, it’s relatively rare. It’s estimated that less than 0.1 percent of people have the disorder.
If you or a loved one has possible symptoms of obsessive love disorder, you should see a doctor. They may refer you to a psychiatrist to help determine whether you truly have OLD. You may also have another mental health illness.
When diagnosed and treated, OLD may have a positive outcome. The key, however, is to not quit therapy or treatment if you think you’re feeling better.
Suddenly stopping your treatment can worsen symptoms, or make them return.
Love Bombing: 10 Signs to Know
When you first meet someone, being swept off your feet can feel fun and exciting. Having someone shower you with affection and admiration is especially exhilarating when you’re in the beginning stages of a new relationship.
Love bombing, however, is another story. It happens when someone overwhelms you with loving words, actions, and behavior as a manipulation technique.
“It’s often used to win over your trust and affection so that they can meet a goal of theirs,” explains Shirin Peykar, MA, a licensed marriage and family therapist.
Here’s a look at some of the classic love bombing signs. If you recognize some of these, it doesn’t necessarily mean your partner is toxic, but listen to your intuition if the person trying to woo you seems too good to be true.
Love bombing often involves over-the-top gestures, such as sending you inappropriate gifts to your job (dozens of bouquets instead of one, for example) or buying expensive plane tickets for a vacation, and not taking “no” for an answer.
All of this can seem harmless enough, but the point is to manipulate you into thinking you owe them something.
“Most often, love bombing is done by a narcissist with the intent of drawing in and gaining control over the person who is being love bombed,” says licensed professional counselor Tabitha Westbrook, LMFT.
We all crave admiration, but constant praise can make your head spin. If someone’s expressing their undying love after just a short amount of time, it’s a potential red flag that their feelings aren’t genuine.
Some common, over-the-top phrases they might use include:
- “I love everything about you.”
- “I’ve never met anyone as perfect as you.”
- “You’re the only person I want to spend time with.”
On their own, these phrases aren’t necessarily harmful, but it’s important to consider them in the larger context of someone’s overall behavior.
They call, text, and message you over social media 24/7. While being in constant communication is normal when you’re first dating, it’s a red flag if the communication feels one-sided and becomes increasingly overwhelming.
Take note if they begin texting you early in the morning and every hour on the hour.
When your focus isn’t on the other person, they might become angry. This can look like pouting when you’re on the phone with friends or refusing to leave after you say you have to be at work early the next day.
“True love does not want all your time and energy focused on them alone,” Westbrook emphasizes. “They respect other commitments, ideas, and boundaries.”
Telling you they dreamed that God told them you two should marry is a manipulation tactic. If what they say sounds right out of a film, take heed, Westbrook notes. “Hollywood is great for entertainment, but true love and relationships don’t look like the movies.”
Some other things they might say:
- “We were born to be together.”
- “It’s fate that we met.”
- “You understand me more than anyone.”
- “We’re soulmates.”
A love bomber might pressure you into rushing things and making big plans for the future.
They’ll mention things like marriage or moving in together when you’ve only known each other a short while.
The thing to keep in mind, according to Westbrook, is that real relationships take time to develop. “It’s very unlikely the person really can love you more than anything in the world in 2 weeks. Or two days. Or 2 hours. Or even 2 months,” she explains.
When you try to tell them to slow down, they’ll continue to try to manipulate you to get what they want. Someone who legitimately cares, on the other hand, will respect your wishes and back off.
“Love bombers also get upset about any boundaries with regard to access to you or you accepting their displays of ‘love,’ says Westbrook. “It’s like a tsunami of affection and they expect you to accept it all.”
No matter how much time and access you give them, it never seems to be enough. But ask yourself: Are you bailing on friends because they can’t stand to be alone? Or do you feel obligated to answer every text because they gifted you that expensive iPhone?
Someone toxic will make you feel indebted to them so that they can rely on you day and night.
They never turn down the charm and seem to be running on all cylinders when you’re with them. You never know what to expect from one moment to the next and feel pressured into seeing them round the clock.
Legitimate love has its ups and downs, but it’s respectful and not overbearing, says Westbrook. “It is patient, kind, and gentle.”
Being love bombed can feel intoxicating at first, but you might also feel a bit uneasy, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Pay attention to these anxious feelings, says Westbrook. “It’s important to be attuned to your intuition, so you can be informed instead of being carried away by love bombing tactics.”
If you’re in the early stages of a relationship and everything feels like it’s happening too soon, check in with your gut. Remember: Falling in love should be savored, not rushed.
If you’re worried your partner has crossed into manipulative territory, try reaching out to a trusted friend, family member, or mental health therapist who can help you assess their behavior.
You can also check out the below resources for additional guidance on next steps:
- Love is Respect is a national dating abuse helpline that offers support and provides information on unhealthy relationships and behaviors.
- One Love is a foundation helping put a stop to relationship abuse.
Cindy Lamothe is a freelance journalist based in Guatemala. She writes often about the intersections between health, wellness, and the science of human behavior. She’s written for The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Teen Vogue, Quartz, The Washington Post, and many more. Find her at cindylamothe.com.
How love drives you crazy and what to do about it
Articles
Love - the same true love - should be dramatic, passionate and emotional. We do not notice the moment when passion turns into pathology. Sometimes love and unhealthy relationships can become a catalyst, the “last straw”, provoking manic, delusional, depressive and other conditions.
ASI correspondent learned about the types of unhealthy relationships at a lecture by a psychiatrist, psychotherapist of the psychiatric hospital No. 1 named after N.A. Alekseev, candidate of medical sciences Elena Yurievna Onegina.
Health, Culture and education 05/22/2018
In classical literature, love is almost always described as a tragic feeling, lovers experience months and years full of dramatic events, and then either die or part, continuing to suffer all their lives.
To remember a novel or a poem about happy love that brings only joy and harmony, you will have to try hard.
From childhood, boys and girls absorb behavior patterns described in novels and drama series. Excessive jealousy, addiction, painful, codependent relationships, and more seem to be the norm until the situation gets completely out of hand. An expressive and passionate relationship on the part of one or both partners may not be a “crazy and beautiful love story”, but a pathology that a psychiatrist will have to deal with.
Obsessive Compulsive Love
This is the most common type of disorder. He is extremely masochistic and with him a person torments himself first of all, thinking about the object of love and suffering from uncertainty.
This is "thinking gum". If your close friend talks about how he is madly in love, how he thinks about the upcoming date day by day and tells you about this date when he endlessly imagines “how we will meet, how I will confess my love, and what will happen after that” . But in reality, absolutely nothing happens.
Psychotherapists say that there is nothing healthy and romantic about this rather common condition. This uncertainty can last for years.
Depressive love
A love drama typical of 19th century novels can be described as an example of depressive love. Almost all the heroines of Russian literature lost weight, turned pale, wringed their hands and suffered in every possible way.
They stopped eating and fainted, instead of trying to communicate with the object of love, or at least try to live with it without harming themselves.
A happy story is boring, says the therapist. - If we take poetry, cinema, literature with you, then it will definitely be some kind of tragic plot with a bad ending, depressive love, which is so often sung in novels. And why talk about happiness, you can’t write poems and songs about it.
In case of depressive love, portrait descriptions of the hero of a love story can be written from a person. Psychosomatic symptoms make a person lose weight and turn pale, anxiety increases and there is a need for sedatives, there are disturbances in the functioning of other organ systems: the gastrointestinal tract, skin, and the cardiovascular system.
Manic love
Excessive euphoria, excitement, desperate dramatic acts for love, the need to share love with others and ignoring the feelings of the object of "blind love" are all signs of manic love.
The lover has a feeling that he is a godsend for his beloved, but at the same time he absolutely ignores his feelings and needs. Whom does a person love in these relationships: the object of love or himself - so wonderful and beautiful?
Bipolar relationships (codependency)
Bipolar relationships are absolute instability. What is called "I love it, I hate it." All this happens in accordance with the phases, which sometimes even depend on the change of seasons of the year, the psychiatrist claims.
“At one stage I accept my partner with all his strengths and weaknesses, at another he irritates me, I cannot forgive him for the slightest slight fault. Such love requires constant reinforcement and confirmation from the partner, constant words and actions expressing love, and this is impossible, ”says Elena Onegina.
Delusional love
Delusional love is the most difficult option. With her, a person in love loses touch with reality in the literal sense.
He can talk about the fact that someone is in love with him, although in fact "love" exists only in his head. In this case, urgent psychiatric help is needed.
There are many cases in which girls who are persecuted by men had to change their place of residence. This is already called stalking and it is very important to recognize it in the early stages.
Pathological jealousy
At a certain age it is very pleasant to be jealous. When they arrange scenes, when they ask: “Who is he, why is he calling you, and why is he writing to you, I don’t want him to call you, but I don’t allow ...”, quotes Onegin’s common phrases.
According to the psychiatrist, at some point ordinary jealousy turns into persecution. It becomes impossible to convey to a person that this is not the norm and one has to turn not only to a psychotherapist, but also to the police. In the classifier of diseases there is a special disease “alcoholic delirium of jealousy,” Onegin continues.
In contrast to ordinary jealousy, which can be removed by a heart-to-heart talk, persuasion and logical explanations do not work on a person suffering from a disease. Even if the girl says that the courier called her, the jealous person even then begins to see the catch and say that she specially persuaded someone and is deceiving again.
The most important thing is to recognize any of these pathologies or any other unhealthy moments in a relationship in time. And immediately go to a specialist who will help save the relationship and the health of both partners. In recent years, the situation has changed for the better even in budgetary neuropsychiatric dispensaries and there is an opportunity to undergo treatment while in a day hospital, without consequences in the further search for work and obtaining rights.
So if your partner, friend, or yourself is trapped in one of these pathologies or is experiencing other difficulties, advise him (or yourself) to see a therapist.
The lecture was held within the framework of the interactive psycho-educational project “I can't keep silent” in the space of the Blagosfera. The event was organized jointly with the Regional Public Organization "Psychiatrists Club" and Hospital No. 1 named after N.A. Alekseev.
The essence of the phenomenon of love and its purpose
Katkova Yana Andreevna 1 , Pyatletova Lyudmila Vladimirovna 2
1 Ural State University of Railways, student
2 Ural State University of Transa, Associate Professor "Philosophy and History"
ANTISTIC Love is one of the main phenomena of human existence. The philosophy of love is aimed both at searching for its invariants and at explaining the inescapable fact of the paradoxical nature of love feeling, already fixed by the ancient philosophy of love. The article is devoted to the consideration of these issues.
References to the article:
Katkova Ya.
A., Pyatiletova L.V. The essence of the phenomenon of love and its purpose // Humanitarian scientific research. 2018. No. 11 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://human.snauka.ru/2018/11/25300 (date of access: 02/25/2023).
One of the main phenomena of human existence is love (along with power, play, death, reason, freedom, conscience…).
The theme of love is one of the oldest themes present in philosophy. Philosophical analysis of love implies the search for its invariants: constant signs and properties of this feeling. Revealing the "pure" conditions of love allows us to talk about the low core of the essential characteristics of this phenomenon.
In the treatise "Feast" Plato laid the foundation for the fundamental process of searching for the foundations of love being: love changes being, transforming it.
Until now, despite the presence of historical modifications of love (each era leaves its mark on the composition and structure of love feelings), "platonic love" is undeniable [1].
In explaining the phenomenon of love, they do not resort to searching for an external reason that determines it: it itself defines its being as God (God is love), although at the level of “everyday”, ordinary explanation of the “causes of love”, as a rule, they point to the specific properties of the beloved who aroused love (beauty, intelligence, talent, etc.).
Thus, the ability to love is the defining quality of the phenomenology of feeling, the qualities of the object of love in this respect are secondary, accidental, not really defining.
Love transforms a person, his soul develops, becomes more complex, sensual erotic experience is filled with depth of content.
And even the inevitability of parting as a fragment of a relationship does not change the quality of the latter: having become intense, they continue to enrich the “experience of love” in their own way: “What is your dream, Svetlana,
Anguish diviner?
A friend is with you; he is still the same
In the experience of separation;
The same love in his eyes,
The same pleasant looks;
The same on sweet lips
Sweet talk” [2].
Love for many people becomes the meaning and justification of their earthly existence [3]. Love, therefore, is always a “work of love” [4].
Many sciences try to explain the nature of love by physiological, psychological, and so on. For reasons, however, the appeal to the theoretical developments of philosophical anthropology (philosophy of love) makes obvious its metaphysical roots, the fundamental non-reducibility to any one basis.
The metaphysical horizon of the possible experience of love is so great that it seems to exceed the possibilities of a human being, acting rather as an ideal of love (God is love).
Within the framework of earthly existence, a person is looking for ideal forms of materialization of a high feeling of love [5].
Thus, the Russian philosopher N. A. Berdyaev, in his classification of love, justifies the conclusion that the erotic love feeling makes it possible to most fully embody the human potential of love.
Another prominent Russian philosopher V.
Solovyov [6] wrote about that. that perhaps the feeling of love was never encountered in the experience of man. Perhaps the reason for this is too high requirements for the quality of a person: a fairly high level of spiritual development (responsibility, freedom, awareness ...).
E. Fromm wrote about these qualities in detail in his key work "The Art of Love": the characteristics of love are the mirror qualities of a person capable of love. The underdevelopment of human nature makes the experience of (earthly) love impossible for him.
Love is inherently paradoxical, which indirectly manifests itself both in the existence of numerous types of love and in their content. This was already fixed by the ancient (ancient Greek) philosophy of love, focusing on the diversity of the latter. Since then, little has changed, except for the fact of expanding the classification and highlighting the dominant type of love - depending on the cultural and historical context [1].
Seven types of love in the philosophy of ancient Greece make it possible to fully realize the fact of the paradoxical feeling of love: eros, or passionate love, in modern terms; ludus - a superficial, short form of love, a game-competition to the "first boredom"; storge - love-friendship, love-tenderness; philia as an ideal type of love, sung by Plato, is based on spiritual attraction; mania - passionate, obsessive love, destructive passion; agape - selfless love, self-sacrifice love; pragma is love based on calculation.
The ancient classification of love, thus, informs about the division of types of love according to the basis: “real” love and pseudo-love. In turn, the basis for such a division is already the fact of the paradox of human nature: being represented by the triad "body - soul - spirit", human nature also determines the feeling of love.
Thus, the essence of a person can find its expression in the structuring of love feeling characteristic of him.
References
- Pyatiletova LV Essence and structure of erotic love feelings: sexual and erotic revolutions against "platonic love" // Scientific and methodological electronic journal "Concept". - 2018. - No. 11 (November). – URL: http://e-koncept.ru/2018/183069.htm.
- Zhukovsky V. Svetlana [Electronic resource]. URL: https://ilibrary.ru/text/1085/p.1/index.html (date of access: 11/24/2018).
- Pyatiletova L.V. Love as the meaning and justification of human life.
