Love starvation: when your partner gives you just enough love to keep you hooked...
I was dating my boyfriend for a year when the “Love Your Spouse Challenge” trended on facebook. I loved reading people's proclamations of love and compliments about their spouses and pictures. But when that challenge came out, I remembered how my ex-husband used to gush my praises to the point of suffocation. When we were married, I knew I wanted to get better at receiving compliments, and while I grew more comfortable with hearing his devotions, I still felt overwhelmed, like he was chasing me around the table and I dreaded being caught. While it was flattering, I grew disgusted by the never ending praises simultaneously mixed with his own self-deprecation.
After divorce, I was much more comfortable dating a man who did NOT bombard me with praises. In fact, a year into dating him, when this trend came out, I wrote “you may not be a man of many words, but the words you use are sincere, thoughtful, and influential. You are reserved in your compliments so when you do give them, they have a huge impact. Thank you.”
Years later, my text messages echo in my mind and I am sad that I had only been comfortable with small and rare offers of affection. And I realize now that I had actually been justifying how little he was giving me. I reflect on how I had felt like I was drowning in my husband’s gushing affection. And how I felt that the scraps given to me by my next boyfriend were like fireworks because they were so infrequent. The extreme from flooding to slow starvation created a strange dichotomy.
In the beginning, the attention I received from my boyfriend was just right. It mimicked what I had been used to growing up (which was not much). But the amount and frequency of reciprocation became more and more sporadic. And this is the core of why “trauma bonds” are so addictive and hard to end.
Let me explain:
“Breadcrumbing” is a modern slang term for a psychological concept in relationship science where someone is giving you just enough attention to keep you on the hook and interested in maintaining that connection. But it’s not enough to actually meet your needs and satisfy you in a healthy and fulfilling relationship.
Breadcrumbing is a concept called “intermittent reinforcement,” coined by BF Skinner, describing how unpredictable rewards hardwire addictions. He placed a rat in a box with a lever that dispensed food whenever pressed. Initially, the rat would press the lever when hungry and receive food, but then the setup changed. The food reward became unpredictable, with both the timing and number of presses required varying. As a result, the rat became addicted to pressing the lever, repeatedly doing so until it exhausted itself.
We typically think of addictions with drinking, drugs, porn, or gambling. When you gamble and win, it feels amazing because your needs are satisfied. But when you lose, you feel terrible. This repeated cycle of winning and losing triggers your brain's dopamine reward system, creating anxiety and leading to addiction.
Breadcrumbing is what we call it when you are addicted to a person. It is not just a crappy situationship. It is literally ruining your brain.
The good news is the brain is neuroplastic and addiction is reversible. But the only way you can reverse it is to get off the drug. This means ending the situationship. The real reason you need to go no-contact is because you literally need to detox from the addiction. You must cut off the person that's breadcrumbing you.
The grief you feel when you try to untangle yourself from your love interest is complicated by the fact that you are also feeling the withdrawal of the addiction.
There are ways to lessen the intensity of the withdrawal symptoms, but the fact of the matter is that an attachment to a person is going to be painful and difficult. But it is the only way to stop the anxiety and get off the crazy train.
The long term solution is not just breakup. The way to never get addicted to a person again is to explore the roots of your attachment and reprogram what caused you to be susceptible to it.
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