Love provides a high like no other. It’s natural, too. I suppose some of the things people say are true—that good self-esteem can keep you more stable. You may not feel a need for external validation as much.
I’m a love junkie, too. Part of it is related to my anomalous brain chemistry. I process feelings differently from most people, and I have a tendency to be depressed and to feel bad about myself normally.
When I fall in love, I finally get to feel good about myself. It’s euphoric. Top of the world, and all that.
But then other patterns kick in. The pattern that says I’m worthless and soon my lover will figure out that and dump me. I better dump them first, or at least provoke them to dump me, because that way I have control over when it happens. It is so much worse waiting for it to happen than making it happen, even if you are depressed much more of the time.
Happiness is not for me, I guess. So I’m down in the dumps. Suicidal, sometimes. And then I meet someone else, and it’s euphoria time all over again.
It took me a long time to figure this out. Even longer to do something about it. In fact, it keeps on coming back, and that is a big problem. The depths and intractableness of my elf-esteem problem are troubling, to say the least. Frankly, it’s part of the reason why I spend so much time on fluther. I need people to validate me, but it has to be honestly. I can’t change my ideas to curry favor. People need to approve of what I say despite my discordance with conventional mores. Maybe there isn’t enough love in the world for me.
I don’t know if any of this is what you are going through. However, the conventional answer is meds and therapy. It takes a lot of work to learn to value yourself. It’s not just as easy as saying, “Value yourself!” You might as well tell a rock to grow a heart.
Certain things I know can help. You can learn to cope with the negative thoughts. Mindfulness techniques help. Some people swear by CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), but that made things worse for me. CBT tells you that you are responsible for your feelings. Thus, you can change them. The trap there is that if you fail to change them, it means you are a worse failure than you thought, and you spiral down. CBT tends to work with less self-aware people; people who have spend less time working on themselves and who don’t know their own tricks.
Mindfulness is more helpful to me because it doesn’t require me to be in control of my own feelings. It acknowledges that I have no power over what I feel. However, I do have power over how I react to my feelings. I don’t have to pay attention to them. I can judge them not, and let them pass away.
In theory, if you come to feel better about yourself, you won’t look for outside validation. Unfortunately, the high from falling in love is very, very powerful and very attractive and it is an instant fix for all our problems.
Well, it’s a pattern, and recognizing the pattern is the first step. Next, you can start working on the falling out of love phase. There are things to do to keep a relationship going longer. First, you must not expect perfection. You will have personality differences. You will have conflict. You can practice solving those problems. Eventually your relationships will lengthen and you won’t have so much of the up and down pattern. You can read about relationships and listening and communication and problem solving and apply those techniques. There are courses in these things.
Even so, some people either don’t want to or can’t stop. Maybe they don’t want to take any meds to get them through the high/low cycle. Mood stabilizers, for example. Maybe they enjoy the high too much. Maybe, crazy as it sounds, they enjoy the low, as well. It adds intensity and drama to a life. Some people need drama, while others can’t stand it. Although the drama I mean is not garden-variety soap opera stuff, but drama that helps you learn things even as you pass through the experiences. Stupid drama is drama that is the same all the time.
I need intensity in my life. I am drawn to people with problems. Usually they are bipolar, like I am. Most people see the model where you have few extremes of emotion as the most desirable model. So if you prefer some other model with high highs and low lows, they might think you are crazy. Some of us are crazy. Not that I’m saying you belong to us. But it’s one way of looking at it.
