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February 12, 2010
Are you addicted to love?
Robert Palmer sang happily in the mid-80s about being addicted to love. But love addiction can make a person a miserable, like alcoholism or drug addiction, says Betsy Stanfield, an Austin therapist with certification in love and sex addiction counseling from the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals.
She trained with Patrick Carnes, a nationally known sex addiction therapist at Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, Miss., where golfer Tiger Woods is reported to be receiving treatment. Woods has admitted infidelity in his marriage.
With Valentine’s Day here, how can you tell if it’s love, lust, love addiction or sex addiction? Stanfield sheds light in this edited Q&A.
Q: What’s the difference between love and lust?
A: For the average person, love is an emotional, mental and spiritual feeling. Lust is usually based more on a physical attraction and a need. Love requires discipline and commitment. Lust requires no attribute like that. Love is really focused on the growth, improvement and caring of the person who is the object, while lust is focused on the satisfaction of the self. Lust is integral in the first stage of a relationship, and it’s … a normal part of the courting process. But after that wears off, you’re either left with nothing or you develop love.
Q: What is love addiction?
A: It comes in many forms. Some love addicts carry a torch for unavailable people obsessively. Some get addicted to the euphoric effects of romance. They’re always looking for that high. When that wears off, a love addict is looking for that next fix.
Q: What is the difference between love and love addiction?
A: The question is what distinguishes an addiction from healthy love. When you’re addicted to someone you’re using them. It’s not about them or even about the two of you. If you’re addicted, you’re continually, unsatisfiable. You’re trying to take from them the love you never got as a kid. You’re almost holding them hostage with your feelings, and you’re absolutely terrified of being alone, terrified of abandonment.
Q: Do you have to have a bad childhood to be love addicted?
A: There are always biological and environmental factors that merge together. By no means is it exclusive to a bad childhood, but that is a big driver. A big part of how love addiction starts, it’s in childhood — feeling betrayed by a parent, or by divorce or with a parent leaving. The rejection leads to an object relationship, the need to possess someone of the opposite sex and make them love you. They want to undo what they didn’t get from a rejecting parent. In the movie Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise says to his girlfriend that famous line, ‘You complete me.’ As romantic as that was supposed to be, that really demonstrates … a lot of love addiction. We’re looking for someone to complete us versus that healthy love where you are two separate people coming together and having a healthy interdependence. When you are looking outside yourself to feel complete, then you are not strong and healthy in your own right.
The telltale signs are, a love addict always needs to be in a relationship, and there’s always a feeling of needing more. There’s a built-in feeling of incompleteness and desperation. This is where the addiction and the co-dependency really comes from.
Q: What is sex addiction?
A: It’s a progressive intimacy disorder characterized by compulsive sexual thoughts and acts. It’s giving the addict the same euphoric high (as drugs and alcohol). Sex addiction is compulsive and destructive behavior focused on different ways of acting out sexually.
Q: What’s the difference between sex addiction and love addiction?
A: Sex addiction can be completely done in isolation. Love addiction is focused on another person. Love addiction and sex both serve the same purpose — to avoid going to the real issue, the pain you have inside, which comes from something you didn’t get. It’s really sad because it’s such a painful and destructive onus for people. People think sex addiction is just being too horny, but it’s actually painful and destructive.
Q: How do you know if you need professional help?
A: If the behavior starts to create negative consequences in your life, yet you continue to engage in those behaviors anyway, that’s a sign. If they take up more time, energy and focus than you would like, or if they cause you to persistently act out in ways that cause you to go against your values and beliefs, that’s another sign. If you need more and more of it to get the same high, that’s another sign. If you find yourself minimizing it (as a problem) or denying it to other people that’s another sign. And another sign is when you don’t have access to your drug of choice, you express irritability, anger, anxiousness.
Q: How do you treat this?
A: A combination of one-on-one and group therapy and 12 steps, just like Alcoholics Anonymous.
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February 18, 2009
Austin hospital to screen trauma patients for drugs, offer counseling
Starting in June, trauma patients at the University Medical Center at Brackenridge determined to have drug problems will get some counseling, a referral for other services and will be asked to take part in a research project involving the hospital and the University of Texas, the school announced this week.
The trauma center screens all patients for drug and alcohol use, either by testing blood or through questionnaires, hospital officials said. And since August, the hospital has been briefly counseling patients identified as being at risk for alcohol abuse, said Craig Field, a psychologist who directs the program and is a research associate professor at UT.
Those patients also are referred to services and asked whether they want to take part in a research project aimed at reducing problems associated with alcohol abuse like injuries and arrests, Field said.
“Almost all of them agree” to the research project, said Field, who could not provide the number of people who participate in the counseling.
“You’re catching people … in a window of opportunity to talk to them,” Field said. “It’s a teachable moment.”
Many patients already know they have a problem before they get in a car accident or have a serious injury that lands them in a hospital bed, he said. About half of all serious injuries are alcohol-related, he said.
Field came to UT last year from UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas and brought a $2.6 million grant with him from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to do the study. He is trying to determine which intervention strategies work best with trauma patients.
In June, Professor Mary Velasquez, director of UT’s Center for Social Work Research, will lead a separate, four-year study to counsel people identified as being at risk for drug abuse.
Studies of the alcohol intervention have shown a 47 percent reduction in revisits to trauma centers, Velasquez said. A similar study has not been done on drug abuse, she said. So she obtained a $3.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to see whether the counseling would work with drug abusers.
She said the style of interviewing, called motivational interviewing, “is designed to be very respectful, very rapport building. The counselors will say, ‘Your blood alcohol level was high when this happened. Do you think there was some connection to that when this happened?’”
Her research also will seek to reduce the risk of HIV infection. Because drug abusers have a higher chance of HIV infection, she said, patients who agree to participate also will be counseled about HIV.
One reason University Medical Center started the counseling part of the program is because it wants to advance its trauma center to the highest level, Field said. The American College of Surgeons is now requiring Level 1 trauma centers to offer some assistance to people with alcohol abuse, Field said. University Medical Center is a Level 2 center and the only one serving an 11-county region. It aspires to graduate to Level 1 this year, hospital officials said.
“This is really setting the stage for a Cadillac (trauma) program,” Field said.
(From left are UT researchers: Kirk von Sternberg, Mary Velasquez and Craig Field)
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August 26, 2008
Is your kid's bad behavior ADD, or exhaustion?
Many misbehaving children who are labeled as having Attention Deficit Disorder may actually suffer from sleep apena, a disorder more commonly seen in adults, according to an article published this week on Newswise, a resource of news and research for journalists.
The article contends that thousands of children may have enlarged tonsils, causing them to stop breathing many times during the night and depriving them of sleep.
“If kids aren’t sleeping at night it can affect their school work and mental development,” says Stephen Landers, an ear, nose and throat doctor at Our Children’s House at Baylor Health Care System in Dallas. “If children are allowed to sleep properly a lot of these behavioral issues are improved.”
This is not the first time the connection has been made. Several studies in recent years also have concluded that many children labeled as ADD may actually have sleep apnea.
Apnea has some telltale signs. If the child snores loudly, gasps or snorts, the article advises parents to see a doctor. The solution? A tonsillectomy.
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