Customer Reviews

Is It Love or Is It Addiction? - Second Edition

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can't believe I am the first one to review this book! After struggling with addictions of all sorts for years (including alcohol, drugs, sex, and love addiction), I finally determined why I kept sabotaging my relationships with women. My compulsive search for something to help me feel less pain came from my childhood, and this book was the stepping stone that helped me see that there was hope to overcome this tricky addiction, seek help, and learn to love myself and others with authenticity.

I highly recommend this book to any alcoholic, chemically dependent or sexually addicted person. There is hope for a relationship without painful addictive behaviors, and this book will help you find that hope!

I initially bought this book because I wondered if being in love was just an addiction. But I learned so much more than that. This book should be helpful for practically everyone. It talks about how our love relationships are related to unmet needs from childhood. It described my parents relationship almost exactly and I see how it affected me. It was amazing that anyone knew all this stuff.

Not only discusses the symptoms, but also walks you through some steps to stop it, and to work through it. A wonderful book. I keep it on my bedside and consult it frequently even though I have read it cover to cover.

As I've been going through the process of my separation and
divorce, I recently read the book Is It Love or Is It Addiction?,
by Dr. Brenda Schaeffer, as a means of learning from my failed
relationship. I figure we can always learn things about ourselves
from our relationships, especially the failed ones.

The 3rd Edition of the book presents new information about
Addictive Love by making distinctions regarding "love addiction,"
"romance addiction," and "sex addiction." I've found it to be an
excellent read that is giving me greater insights into myself and
has helped me become aware of some unhealthy patterns in my
relationships.

What I also found great about the book is that it talks about the
characteristics of healthy belonging and relationships and
provides some exercises for moving into and maintaining healthy
relationships.

As you think about your relationships, or care to help others with
theirs, perhaps my review of this book will encourage you to check
it out, to gain some additional tools.

Well written, explains the reasons behind the toxic codependent dynamics, how to recognise them, and how to heal. A MUST HAVE!

After suffering a painful, obsessive, unrequited love. I found this book that helps me a great deal. It opened my eyes, and helped me find the source of this addiction tracing way back into my childhood.

While everyone's source of love addiction is different, this book gives you a tool to understand the root of your own, buried deep in subconscious, and usually stem from childhood experiences.

The last part of a book gives a workshop type step-by-step guide to recovery. Recovery is never easy, of course. But this book gives a solid self-help guide to find the root of the problems and heal oneself with it.

I found this book to be the current authoritative text on love and romance addiction. (For sex addiction, I recommend "Don't Call It Love" by Patrick Carnes.) Not only did I recognize myself in its pages, I also learned a lot of new material.

I especially enjoyed the chapter on "The Psychology of Addictive Love", which provided a clear-cut explanation of how addictive processes begin. Dr. Schaeffer's introduction to Transactional Analysis as a way of uncovering the trauma that triggers love addiction was insightful and thought-provoking.

If you or someone you know suffers from love addiction, then this book is a must read.

The Third Edition is a vast improvement over the Second. I have read the second edition. This book was given to me by a friend. I returned it to the owner, and bought the Third edition. The Second edition read like a textbook. I found it to be very formal and technical. The stories in the Second were fascinating but I had difficulity connecting the concept the Auther was writting about. I found the Third edition to read much more cohesively. The concepts, I found, are more vibrant and more comprehensible. I completely understand the point the Auther is making.
I choose the Third edition to be in my library

This relationship of yours, is it love or is it an addiction? Of course only your therapist will know for sure, but for those of you that can't afford a therapist, "Is It Love Or Is It Addiction" is as good a way to find out as any. Psychotherapist Brenda Schaeffer appears to know her way around the subject, and the book is well researched, with quotes and images from the poets (Kahlil Gibran) to the psychoanalysts (Erich Fromm).

Healthy love, the love we all want to hope we have, is described as "energy," as "unconditional" and "expansive." To be sure these are difficult concepts to quantify, but Ms. Shaeffer to her credit tries and does a fairly successful job of it with her stories of healthy and failed loves.

Easier to find is that love that is actually an addiction: quoting Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, addiction is defined as "an unstable state of being, marked by a compulsion to deny all that you are or have been in favor of some new and ecstatic experience." That means if you never get enough of the strange stuff, you've got a problem.

Will "Is It Love or Is It Addiction" help you find love and happiness? Who knows, but it couldn't hurt. At least after finishing this book you'll have a better idea as to whether or not you need a therapist!

Mike Nardine, the author of this review currently has a romance novel on sale at the Amazon Kindle Store:Prickly Pear: A contemporary Romance set in Chicago and the Southwest

I had been involved in a relationship with one woman I believe is 'beautiful and sensuous', but soon found myself reeling under an extremely co-dependent relationship where I tried to define my life values through her eyes. In spite of red-flags, we kept 'seeping under', we found it difficult to get over our urges to contact/control each-other even when the relationship was over, and she had started dating other guys. As I realized that I was in a co-dependent relationship, I decided to fix it, I bought quite a few books on the subject. So far this is the best I have come across.

A very tersely written book that concentrates on what is right rather than giving several examples of what is wrong. What I find best about this book is that it attacks the distinction of love and addiction discussed in the most scientific viewpoint rather than from a purely behaviourial/psychological aspect. Of course it has all the definitions and explanations, but it never encouraged to 'spoonfeed' the solution. It rather created a background understanding of the problem from a clinical and philosophical aspect. It religiously encouraged clearing the concepts, and quite rightly, once the concepts are cleared the mistakes and solutions were just clear to see.

I am a scientist by profession and would not accept any argument without a chain of reasons supporting it (in that way, you can say I have a co-dependency on 'reasoning':)). I was finding it difficult to just 'eat-up' the solutions and recommendations presented by the other highly-rated books, until this book reached me, and taught me how rationally analyse such problems and create our own healthy set of recommendations instead of co-depending on books to recommend us.