Love Deprivation And How to Heal/Love Yourself
There are three intimacy disorders: love addiction, love avoidant, and love deprivation. Some people get confused if there’s any difference between love avoidant and love deprivation but let me lay out their differences below:
Exiting out of love addiction looks like detaching from the trauma bonds you’ve attached to with unavaialabl/e people. Doing no contact or detoxing may feel very dangerous to you, but there’s freedom on the other side.
On the other hand, exiting as a love avoidant is just as painful as being a love addict because it looks like opening up to people and being vulnerable. It looks like not running and not cutting people off.
Lastly, with love deprivation, leaving this disorder looks like facing those deep internal feelings of shame. You may have been rejected or experienced family trauma, so when it comes to love deprivation, you’ve internalized those beliefs as a coping mechanism.
What Is Love Deprivation
Love deprivation is all about extreme restriction because you have low self-worth, and you may even put yourself in self-loathing. You are very much aware that you don’t like yourself or that you wish things were different.
Often, people who are love addicts or love avoidants have other ways to compensate and have more self-esteem in different areas of their lives. But when you struggle with love deprivation, you see the problem and think you are the actual problem.
Let’s focus on love deprivation today by discussing your symptoms and how to exit it.
How do I Know If I’ve Love Deprived?
First, how do you know if you are love-deprived and suffer from the love deprivation disorder?
You find you have a lot of fears and hangups, especially when it comes to relationships. You fear being suffocated by other people, losing yourself, and having intense feelings, so you suppress them a lot.
You avoid intimacy at all costs. You have a lot of distancing strategies. For example, you avoid dating and even friendships. You do so in a way that you believe you’re better than other people or the opposite extreme, which assumes that you’re not worthy of connections and no one wants to connect with you.
You have a fantasy addiction. Living in your head makes you feel safe because you don’t have to go out in the world. However, a fantasy life does not help you feel more fulfilled. You may feel at peace for a while, but there’s still that longing inside you.
You are worthy of love and born intrinsically valuable. Still, along the way, through trauma, circumstances, heartbreaks, and miseducation, you started to create patterns of denying your worth and waiting for someone else to affirm that you are good enough.
Having healthy relationships reaffirms that love is always a good thing. Still, when you struggle with love deprivation and low self-worth, you typically operate from a place where there’s never enough of that type of affirmation to make you feel good. You’re set on believing that you’re lacking and things don’t work out for you.
How to Deal With Love Deprivation - 4 Ways to Exit
These four ways will sound so simple that you may not even do them. However, you must do them for you to fully step out of love deprivation and show up as your full self.
1. Don’t wait until you feel like it.
If you struggle with love deprivation, you’re living in extreme restriction. You’re used to putting others or things first and yourself last (or maybe you’re not even on the list you need to take care of).
The first way to escape love deprivation is to not wait until you feel like it. Waiting until you feel like doing something means waiting until it’s the right time, waiting until you have money, waiting until you’re less busy, or waiting until you get a promotion. You get the idea.
So many fears stop you from shining, and that’s why you can’t wait until you feel like it. You’re never going to feel ready unless you stick your toe and see. Love deprivation is the intimacy disorder that will have you putting yourself on layaway your whole life
2. Be willing to rewrite your story.
I’m not telling you to live in delusion but look at how you’ve constructed your story. Is the story you’re telling yourself helping you be more peaceful or present in your life? If not, is there another way for you to construct a story where you can take the lessons and values you’ve learned to live by but in a way that doesn’t stop you from being present and enjoying life.
3. Be honest about what you want.
Living in deprivation also means rationalizing why living your life solo is better than living and connecting with others. You villainize pleasure because you haven’t had access to it. You may have tried in the past, but it didn’t work, leaving you heartbroken.
When you’re not honest with yourself about what you want, you’ll tend to look for other ways to compensate for what you’re missing out on.
Instead of trying to convince yourself that you’re happy with the things you haven’t had access to, maybe it’s time to try and dream again. Perhaps it’s time to pick up a new hobby, reconnect with old relationships or even find new ones.
It all goes back to being honest: Do you really want to glow up? Do you want to show up differently? Do you want to connect with the right people? You have to be honest with yourself moving forward.
4. Be patient with yourself.
You’re learning new sets of skills. You’re learning how to communicate better and show up actively in your life, so it’s not going to be easy, especially at first.
Access to support, tools, skills, and experiences will not magically make it all better overnight. You’ll have to learn how to prioritize yourself every day. There will be days when you miss out, but the important thing is that you get back up again.
As you’re being patient with yourself, you may notice that you start to have more emotions about your past and trauma, and it may feel even more confusing to have these feelings when you’re actively working on your healing.
However, as you have been living in restriction and deprivation for so long, you have a sense of protection from the things that have hurt you. So when you start to process, it’s very common for anger or sadness to come up. You didn’t allow yourself to grieve before, so it’s all just coming out now.
Did these tools help you assess your situation? If so, please share them with a friend or someone you may know who needs help. Our site is filled with free resources, including how to find a therapist to help with several love disorders.