Why We Get Addicted to Being Loved (And How Somatic Healing Can Help)

Have you ever checked your phone obsessively, waiting for someone to text back? Felt like you might actually die if this person leaves you? Stayed awake at night replaying every word they said, analyzing every shift in their energy, trying to decode whether they still want you?

If you’ve experienced this desperate, all-consuming need for reassurance in relationships, you’re not broken. You’re not “too needy” or “too dramatic.” What you’re experiencing is anxious attachment—and your nervous system is operating exactly like someone experiencing addiction.

I’m Abi Beri, an integrative holistic therapist, somatic practitioner, and family constellations facilitator. Through my work with clients across Ireland and internationally online, I’ve witnessed how anxious attachment patterns affect millions of people. Today, I want to share something rarely discussed with full honesty: being addicted to love, to relationships, to being wanted—and how to begin healing this pattern through somatic awareness.

Understanding Anxious Attachment as Literal Addiction

When you’re in a relationship or even just interested in someone, your brain releases powerful neurochemicals: dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins. These are the exact same chemicals involved in substance addiction. They create feelings of euphoria, calm, and safety. When that person texts you back, smiles at you, touches you, tells you they love you—your brain lights up. You get a hit. You feel relief, like you finally matter, like everything makes sense.

But when they pull back—even slightly—when they don’t text right away, when they need space, when they seem distant—your brain goes into withdrawal. Actual, physiological withdrawal, identical to what happens when someone stops using drugs.

The Withdrawal Experience in Anxious Attachment

Your nervous system panics. Your body floods with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. You feel like you can’t breathe. Your chest tightens. Your mind races with anxious questions:

• “What did I do wrong?”
• “Are they leaving me?”
• “Am I losing them?”
• “Did I say something to push them away?”

Then, like any person experiencing withdrawal, you seek your next fix. You text them. You reach out. You try to create connection. You might initiate physical closeness or intimacy. You ask for reassurance, directly or indirectly. You analyze their behavior obsessively, trying to figure out how to get them to give you that feeling of safety again.

This isn’t weakness or a character flaw. This is your brain functioning exactly like an addicted brain would. The desperation is real. The panic is real. The withdrawal symptoms are physiologically real.

The Tolerance Effect: Why Reassurance Never Feels Like Enough

Just like with substance addiction, you develop tolerance over time. The reassurance that worked last week doesn’t satisfy you this week. You need more—more attention, more validation, more proof that you’re still wanted. But it’s never enough.

Why? Because the problem isn’t actually about the other person. The problem is that your nervous system learned, long ago, that love is unreliable. That people leave. That your worth depends on someone choosing you. That without external validation, you don’t really exist.

You’re not trying to maintain a relationship. You’re trying to maintain your sense of being okay, of being real, of mattering in the world.

The Shadow Side: Behaviors We Don’t Want to Admit

Let’s address something most people struggling with anxious attachment don’t want to look at—the shadow behaviors. The manipulative things you do without even consciously meaning to. I want to be absolutely clear: I’m not calling you a bad person or saying you’re intentionally manipulative. But when you’re desperate, when you’re in survival mode, when your nervous system genuinely believes that losing this person means you’ll die—you do things you’re not proud of.

Subtle Manipulation Patterns

Perhaps you’ve used guilt. Not consciously, but subtly. Statements like:

• “I was really hurt when you didn’t text back”
• “I guess I’m just too sensitive for you”
• “I don’t know if I can handle this anymore”

These statements might be genuinely true expressions of your feelings, but they’re also unconsciously designed to get a response, to pull the other person closer, to make them feel responsible for your emotional state.

Testing and Creating Drama

Maybe you’ve tested them. You’ve set up situations to see if they’ll choose you. You don’t call first to see if they’ll reach out. You mention someone else to gauge if they get jealous. You create small dramas or conflicts to measure their reaction and commitment level.

Using Intimacy as a Security Tool

Perhaps you’ve used sex or physical intimacy—not in a healthy “I want to genuinely connect with you” way, but as a tool. As a strategy to keep them close, to make them need you, to prove you’re valuable. You’ve given your body hoping it would secure their love, hoping it would make them stay, using intimacy as currency for emotional safety.

The Performance Trap

Maybe you’ve become someone you’re not. You’ve hidden parts of yourself you thought they wouldn’t like. You’ve laughed at jokes that weren’t funny. Agreed with opinions you don’t share. Made yourself smaller, quieter, more agreeable—hoping that if you’re just perfect enough, just right enough, they won’t leave.

The Monitoring Compulsion

Perhaps you’ve monitored everything obsessively. Checked their social media constantly. Analyzed their online activity patterns. Noticed when they were active but not responding to your message. Not because you’re inherently controlling or possessive, but because your nervous system is desperate for information, desperate to predict the threat, desperate to control what feels terrifyingly uncontrollable.

The Hidden Rage Beneath the Neediness

And here’s the really painful shadow piece: underneath all the neediness, all the declarations of love, all the desperate clinging—there’s often rage. Deep resentment. Anger that they get to pull back while you have to chase. Anger that they don’t seem to need you the way you desperately need them. Anger that you’ve made yourself so small, so accommodating, and they still might leave anyway.

But you can’t express that rage because you’re terrified it will push them away. So you swallow it down. And it transforms into more anxiety, more desperation, more performing, more attempts to control the uncontrollable.

Part of you knows this isn’t real love. Part of you can see that this relationship might not even be good for you. But you can’t leave. Because being alone feels worse than being in a painful relationship. Because at least when you’re chasing, you have a purpose. At least when you’re anxious, you feel alive.

The Obsession: Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Them

If you experience anxious attachment, you know what it’s like to not be able to get someone out of your head. You replay conversations endlessly. You analyze their tone of voice. You look for hidden meanings in text messages. You imagine scenarios—what they’re doing right now, who they’re with, whether they’re thinking about you.

You check your phone constantly. You reread old messages looking for clues about their feelings. You notice patterns—they usually text back within twenty minutes, but it’s been forty-five, what does that mean?

This feels like love. Like you care deeply. But what it actually is—is hypervigilance. It’s your nervous system scanning for threat. Trying to predict danger. Trying to control an outcome that feels life-or-death.

The Cruel Irony: Unavailability Increases Obsession

Here’s the cruel part: often, the more unavailable someone is, the more you obsess. The more they pull back, the more you think about them. Because your brain reads their distance as danger, and danger activates all your survival instincts and protective mechanisms.

This is called intermittent reinforcement, and it’s the most addictive behavioral pattern there is. Sometimes they respond warmly, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re affectionate, sometimes they’re cold. That uncertainty, that unpredictability—that’s what keeps you psychologically hooked.

When someone is consistently available, consistently present, consistently loving—your nervous system can actually get bored. Because there’s no uncertainty. No drama. No relief when they finally text back after hours of agonizing silence. No dopamine hit from the reunion after separation.

You might even find yourself unconsciously attracted to people who are emotionally unavailable. People who are ambiguous, hot and cold, hard to pin down. Not because you consciously want to suffer, but because your nervous system interprets that anxiety as chemistry, as intensity, as proof that this relationship matters.

But it’s not love. It’s addiction. It’s your body getting a neurochemical hit from the uncertainty itself.

Real love—secure love—feels calm. It feels stable. It feels consistent. And if you’re anxiously attached, calm can feel terrifying. It can feel boring. It can feel wrong, unfamiliar, even suspicious.

Because when you’re calm, when you’re not chasing, when you’re not anxious—what’s your purpose? Who are you without the drama? Without someone to obsess over?

Where This Pattern Began: The Roots of Anxious Attachment

This addiction to being loved didn’t start in your current relationship. It started before you can even consciously remember. Anxious attachment develops when you’re a child and your caregivers are inconsistent in their love and attention. Sometimes they’re emotionally there for you, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re warm and affectionate, sometimes they’re cold or distracted. You never know what you’re going to get.

So your young nervous system learns to stay alert, to stay vigilant. To monitor their mood constantly. To try to figure out how to get their attention, their love, their care. To become hypervigilant about maintaining connection.

The Childhood Template for Adult Relationships

You learn that love is unpredictable. That you have to work hard for it. That when you do get it, you better hold on tight, because it might disappear at any moment.

Maybe your parent was overwhelmed with stress, dealing with their own unprocessed pain and trauma. Maybe they loved you genuinely, but they were inconsistent in how they showed it. Affectionate and present when you achieved something, but distant or unavailable when you needed comfort or emotional support.

You weren’t overtly neglected or abused. But you were confused. Because love felt conditional, unstable, like something you had to earn and then constantly fight to keep.

That confusion, that uncertainty, got wired into your developing nervous system. It became your unconscious template for what love feels like, what relationships should be like.

So now, as an adult, when someone is consistently available and emotionally present, it doesn’t register as love to your body. It feels wrong, unfamiliar, even suspicious. Your nervous system doesn’t recognize it as the love pattern it learned.

But when someone is inconsistent, unpredictable, sometimes emotionally there and sometimes withdrawn—your body recognizes that pattern immediately. That feels like love to your nervous system. Because that’s what you knew, what you experienced, what became familiar.

The Generational Pattern: Family Constellation Perspective

From a family constellation perspective, sometimes this anxious attachment pattern is even older than your own childhood. Sometimes you’re unconsciously carrying a relational wound from your mother, your grandmother, an entire lineage of anxious attachment. A family history of loving desperately, of chasing emotionally unavailable people, of believing love must be constantly earned and proven.

You absorbed that pattern before you had language to describe it. It’s in how you witnessed relationships being modeled. It’s in the unspoken family messages about love, about self-worth, about what it means to be chosen and wanted by another person.

This isn’t just your personal wound to carry alone. It’s a systemic family pattern. And recognizing that broader context can be genuinely liberating—because it means there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you as a person. You’re carrying something that was passed down through generations. And you have the opportunity now to see it clearly, to understand it compassionately, and to relate to it differently.

You have the chance to be the one who breaks the pattern, who heals the wound not just for yourself, but for the generations that come after you.

How Somatic Healing Can Help: Moving Beyond the Pattern

Traditional talk therapy can help you understand anxious attachment intellectually. But understanding it mentally isn’t enough to change it. Why? Because anxious attachment isn’t stored in your thinking brain—it’s stored in your body, in your nervous system, in your survival responses.

This is where somatic healing becomes essential. Somatic approaches work directly with your body and nervous system to create new patterns of safety, security, and healthy attachment.

Somatic Grounding Practices

Grounding helps bring your awareness into your physical body and the present moment. When anxiety spirals and you’re obsessing about someone’s behavior or fearing abandonment, grounding techniques can help regulate your nervous system:

• **Feel your feet on the ground.** Notice the physical sensation of contact, the support beneath you.
• **Focus on your breath.** Not controlling it, just noticing the natural rhythm of inhale and exhale.
• **Notice five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear.** This brings you back to sensory present-moment awareness.

Meeting the Anxious Part with Compassion

Rather than judging yourself for your anxious attachment patterns, somatic healing involves meeting the anxious part of you with compassion and curiosity. This part developed to protect you, to help you survive an unpredictable childhood environment.

Place your hand on your heart. Take a breath. And offer yourself this acknowledgment:

*”I see you. I see how scared you are. I see how much you need to be chosen, to be wanted, to feel like you matter. You learned that love was unpredictable. That it had to be earned. That without someone else, you didn’t really exist. I’m not judging you for that. You were doing what you thought you had to do to survive, to stay connected, to not be alone.”*

Building Internal Safety and Self-Regulation

Healing anxious attachment means gradually building a sense of internal safety and learning to self-regulate your nervous system. This doesn’t happen overnight—it’s a practice that develops over time.

**Self-soothing techniques** like placing your hand on your heart, gentle rocking, humming, or bilateral stimulation (alternately tapping your knees or shoulders) can help regulate your nervous system when you feel anxious or triggered.

**Developing a relationship with your body’s wisdom** means learning to notice when you’re activated, when you’re in withdrawal, when you’re seeking that next hit of validation. In that noticing, you create space. Space to choose differently, even if just slightly.

Working with Family Constellation Healing

If your anxious attachment has generational roots, family constellation work can be profoundly healing. This approach helps you see and release patterns that don’t belong to you personally, that you’ve been unconsciously carrying from your family system.

By acknowledging what belongs to previous generations and consciously choosing not to pass it forward, you can begin to free yourself from inherited relationship wounds.

The Path Forward: Integration and Gradual Healing

You’re not going to become securely attached overnight. You’re not going to stop feeling anxious in relationships tomorrow. This is a deeply embedded nervous system pattern that’s been decades in the making, possibly generations in the making.

But you can begin to notice when you’re in the pattern. When you’re obsessing. When you’re desperate. When you’re performing. When you’re seeking validation outside yourself. And in that noticing, in that awareness, you create space. Space to choose differently.

Not perfectly. Not every time. But slowly, gradually, consistently, you can begin to untangle your sense of worth from being chosen. Your sense of existence from being wanted. Your sense of self from someone else’s attention and approval.

Practical Steps for Daily Practice

**1. Notice without judgment.** When you catch yourself checking your phone obsessively or ruminating about someone’s behavior, simply notice it. “I’m in the anxious pattern right now.” No shame, just awareness.

**2. Ground in your body.** Use simple somatic techniques to come back to present-moment awareness in your physical body.

**3. Self-soothe.** Practice offering yourself the comfort and reassurance you’re seeking externally. You can learn to be a secure base for yourself.

**4. Question the urgency.** When you feel compelled to text, to seek reassurance, to chase connection, pause. Ask yourself: “Is this genuine connection, or am I seeking a fix to calm my nervous system?”

**5. Build tolerance for uncertainty.** Practice sitting with the discomfort of not knowing, not controlling, not having constant reassurance. This builds nervous system capacity.

**6. Seek support.** Work with a somatic therapist, holistic practitioner, or family constellation facilitator who understands nervous system healing and attachment work.

Meditation Practice for Anxious Attachment Healing

I’ve created a comprehensive guided meditation specifically for healing anxious attachment patterns. This talk-style meditation walks you through understanding the addiction, meeting the shadow behaviors without shame, and beginning to separate your true self from the survival pattern.

The meditation includes:

• Understanding anxious attachment as nervous system activation
• Meeting and witnessing the anxious part with compassion
• Releasing inherited family patterns
• Building internal safety and self-soothing capacity

Final Thoughts: You Are More Than This Pattern

Before you continue with your day, I want you to know this truth: You are addicted to being loved because you learned that love was unpredictable and had to be earned. But you are so much more than this pattern. You are more than your anxiety. You are more than your desperation. You are more than your addiction to external validation.

And you’re learning, slowly but surely, to exist even when no one is actively choosing you. To feel real even when you’re alone. To know your worth even without someone else’s constant confirmation.

This is the journey. This is the healing. And it’s absolutely possible for you.

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About the Author:

Abi Beri is an integrative holistic therapist, somatic practitioner, and family constellations facilitator based in Ireland, offering sessions in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online internationally. He specializes in attachment healing, trauma recovery, and body-based therapeutic approaches. Abi creates guided meditations and healing content available on YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Insight Timer.

Connect with Abi:

• Website: www.blissfulevolution.com
• Somatic Therapy: www.somatictherapyireland.com
• Family Constellations: www.familyconstellationseurope.com