We grow up in a world that teaches us at a very young age that our surroundings are unsafe and to be cautious with whom we open up. The consequence of this is that we miss out on fully sharing our hearts; ourselves. Based on our upbringing, the beliefs we form, and the stories we make up about ourselves and others, we then attempt to be in a relationship with another person.

Do you ever find yourself blaming, judging, pointing the finger, or displacing your thoughts, feelings and actions onto another person? In a clinical sense, we call this transference. In a general sense, this is called projection. The fascinating thing about projection is that our minds tie things together by association. We may non-consciously associate something someone says or does with a memory of something our mother, father, siblings, peers, or someone else said or did to us when we were a child or teenager.

My favorite quote right now is: "The light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion. The tunnel is."

The same can be said for being addicted to love. Love is not the illusion. However, being addicted to another person  is. The belief that another person's "love"can give us self-esteem is flawed. Especially since the result would be having other-esteem, not our own. It is important to explore the definition of love addiction; the most recent of which entails "a condition characterized by severe, pervasive and excessive interest toward a romantic partner" ("Love Addiction….", 2014, Medscape.com).

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is Optional"-Haruki Murakami Have you ever avoided feeling a painful emotion out of fear that you would die? You may initially say, "Well no, logically I haven't feared I would die because of something I felt."

"We are surrounded by images pretending to be love" ~ Deepak Chopra (The Path to Love, 1997, p.24). Every day, in large part due to social media, we are bombarded by advertisements and images of sex, romance, and what we have learned to believe is "love." We are told what to buy, how to change our appearances, and ways to improve our social status in order to attract the "perfect" mate.  However, what we have learned is not real love or even intimacy, nor is it romance or sex. It is an illusion that breeds both fear and scarcity and a constant search for the next "fix".