Am I addicted to the dance?

Because an attachment disorder is an addiction and an addiction is an attachment disorder. It works the same way on your dopamine system as heroin would. It is so not about B, it is so about you and, your brain and dependence. We should all be in addiction treatment. I’m telling you.

There’s a difference though between a secure attachment and a healthy release of dopamine and an insecure attachment where you pine after an ex for example and you become addicted to the pining. I have been there.

Attachment is not addiction as iz42 shared. People don't forget any capacity that depends on 'feel' rather than on 'fact' and emotional learning happens implicitly, below the conscious level. We play out our unconscious knowledge in every unthinking move we make in the dance of loving and all of it's crippling variations. Attachment and being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek out ceaselessly in romance, religions, spouses, pets, athletic teams etc etc of life sustaining affiliations with each other. Attachment is critical to our survival and our well being and though we may have skewed 'attractors' and our systems triggered out of our conscious understanding, loneliness can outweigh much pain....and so the attachment cycle repeats itself.

Sometimes it can be because your chemistry is with partners most like your most rejecting parent, and you are still enmeshed with that parent; you still say and think you love them, they still violate your boundaries in perhaps subtle ways. You still choose to call it love because who wants to think their own mother doesn't love them? You'd rather believe "deep down" they love you and what they do isn't a violation, abandonment, and lack of care.

Its hard to reject one without the other, and fully rejecting a parent is very hard for anyone. 

tnr9
Well then maybe you are not a "love addict" but something else. At least not a love addict in the way the attatchment teacher has explaind it.

"Falling out of love" is in " "

I posted the link because people were talking about love addiction

(I can see that people are also talking about (attatchment)"disorders" which I know nothing about).

What does your therapist say ?

It's been a long time since I've been to one of those meetings.

There's this assumption in the Western world that relationships are natural and easy because people have been having them for millions of years, when quite the opposite is true. Relationships and marriages were for different reasons than today, and were largely arranged. People did not have rights to decide what happened in their lives. Our generations are trailblazers, especially women, and we are going to find out the pitfalls along the way. 

I think of it this way... yes, attachment is normal and there's a certain survival need for it.

Same is true of food.

Can you get addicted to food (or to restricting food), and in a way that's self-destructive? Yes. Why does this happen? Could be several reasons, but ultimately it's because you're lacking healthy coping mechanisms to regulate yourself in the face of some trauma that happened. And you on some level have turned food into that outlet and do not have healthy moderation or boundaries.

It's not the same as substance abuse addiction at first, though it does eventually adapt and change your body chemistry. With food, you can screw up your metabolism.

With unhealthy attachment, you can change your brain chemistry by getting stuck in something, too. The more you repeat thoughts, the more you strengthen those pathways. I always talk about insecure attachment as naturally evolving self-defense mechanisms that served a survival purpose as a child but you didn't naturally grow out of it (because, we as humans, just don't for whatever reason, we need to consciously work through it). So, the patterns of the attachment style can become another defense / coping mechanism that doesn't have healthy moderation. For AP, maybe that's being addicted to longing. For DA, maybe that's being addicted to numbness.

When you're addicted to something, my opinion on it is your baseline level of being is sub-par. At first, you feel a high off whatever you're addicted to, but later it becomes you need your fix to feel "normal" and functional, and maybe without it you feel sick. I think it's hard to address because you probably felt bad in the first place, lacking good ability to self- and emotionally-regulate (or maybe being in physical pain, like when people get addicted to prescription pain meds), which is why whatever the thing is you may become addicted to, is a bandaid. So the way this can manifest in attachment is, if you stay in those unhealthy patterns, covering over the real problems inside yourself, you can keep avoiding the pain of the real issues even if you're causing yourself other pain by how you cope. That pain may still feel more familiar and comfortable and easier to handle -- again, will use AP or FA anxiety as an example. The longing for a partner may hurt, but it feels comfortable. When you're with your partner, the connection and attachment may feel like anxiety relief, so then you feel better than your standard baseline (which probably has some past emotional trauma you're generally not thinking about, though you don't truly feel okay with yourself most of the time). When you're away from your partner, and feel closer to meh baseline again without the high (which now feels addictive), which feels better... bittersweet longing, or actually digging down into the original attachment trauma? Easier to stay addicted to your partner and avoid the deeper pain, even though it actually keeps you stuck indefinitely at the sub-par baseline level to do that, as you also avoid ever fully healing.

So yes, I think attachment disorders can be a type of addiction, even if attachment itself is a healthy and natural drive.