Love's Lantern

Shedding Light on Addiction & Healing

Jul 16, 2025

Love’s Lantern: Shedding Light on Addiction & Healing

What is it to love and to be loved, truly?

One of the deepest loves I’ve ever felt has been between me and my children, and that love has never been easy or painless. It is not free of sacrifice. In fact, it is defined by it. A mother’s love demands, at times, a complete giving over of self. We sacrifice our minds, our bodies, our sleep, our interests, and sometimes even our sense of identity to ensure the safety, sustenance, and growth of our children. We give life, and then we give our lives to nurture it. Surely this is a form of deep and honest love—a testament that love is not just sweetness or comfort, but labor, endurance, and self-emptying devotion.

Yet even here in the fulfillment of motherhood, the entirety of love is more.

Love is not just one thing. I love my family, each in different ways. I love my friends, my colleagues, my community. I love nature, animals, humanity.

And in all of this, it makes me wonder: What do we really mean when we say that we love?

The Many Faces of Love

The ancient Greeks had several words for love that help us make sense of these differences:

Storge: Familial love—the bond between parents and children. Tender, protective, but also sacrificial and demanding.

Philia: Deep friendship and companionship, grounded in mutual respect, loyalty, and shared values.

Eros: Romantic or sexual love, passionate and often idealized, but vulnerable to imbalance or obsession.

Agape: Unconditional, selfless love—a spiritual or universal love that seeks the good of the other without expectation of return.

Philautia: Self-love, which can be healthy (self-respect, self-care) or unhealthy (narcissism).

Ludus: Playful, flirtatious love that brings joy and levity.

Pragma: Enduring, committed love that matures over time—like that of long-term partners who choose each other daily.

When we say I love in English, we often collapse all these forms into one word, losing the nuance. But love has many forms and many demands. Some require sacrifice. Some ask for patience, presence, and discipline. And some offer us a mirror in which we see ourselves clearly.

Beyond Feeling: What bell hooks Teaches Us About Love

The closest I’ve come to understanding love is through bell hooks in All About Love. She reveals that love is not merely a feeling you fall into without thought or effort—it is a deliberate practice. It’s about care, respect, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and open communication.

She reminds us that love is impossible without justice. She says, “Without justice there can be no love.” Love does not require us to accept harm. It does not excuse abuse. If someone claims to love you while violating your dignity or safety, they do not offer love in any meaningful sense.

As Carl Jung says, “Where the will to power is paramount, love will be lacking.”

hooks pushes us to see love not as personal indulgence but as a transformative force—one that can change not only our individual relationships but society itself. She critiques how our culture commodifies love, reducing it to transaction, stripping it of its power to demand accountability. She also explores how patriarchal structures distort our understanding of love, often demanding women's self-sacrifice while offering little in return.

Yet she doesn’t reject sacrifice outright. Instead, she reframes it. Love requires work, care, and sometimes the loss of self-interest—but never the erasure of selfhood or dignity. The difference between loving sacrifice and destructive self-abandonment is found in justice, respect, and mutuality.

Connection as the Opposite of Addiction

What happens when the love we need doesn’t meet us in these deepest places of longing? When we offer love and are met with betrayal, abuse, or emptiness? When the stories we’ve been told about love don’t match reality?

In that longing and pain, many of us turn to something else to fill the void.

Johann Hari famously said, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” When love wounds us—or when it’s absent entirely—addiction can feel like the only refuge. It steps in to soothe the ache, to offer artificial comfort in the absence of real, safe human connection.

Addiction doesn’t always take the form of drugs or alcohol. It can look like overworking, binge-eating, gambling, sex, compulsive scrolling—anything that numbs us when we can’t bear the weight of unmet needs. As Dr. Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse explains, our brains crave the feel-good chemicals—like dopamine and oxytocin—that healthy love and attachment provide. When those are missing, addictive behaviors step in to mimic the reward, even if it’s only temporary.

But this isn’t simply about chemical hooks in the brain. Addiction is often a survival strategy—especially for those who have known trauma, abandonment, or emotional neglect. It can be learned early as the only way to cope with overwhelming pain. It becomes an anesthetic, an escape from confronting feelings of loneliness, shame, or worthlessness. And in that way, it’s less about the substance or behavior itself than about the emptiness it’s meant to fill.

My Own Journey

I’ve been on my own journey to overcome an addiction to food—an addiction I didn’t even realize I had. Over the past 14 months, I’ve lost a substantial amount of weight. That doesn’t mean all my problems have been solved, but I have discovered ways to move toward healing and toward finding fulfillment in healthier ways.

Sharing my writing has been immensely healing. Connecting with this community on Substack and with others in my graduate classes, workshops, and beyond has been life changing. Finding the confidence to do it in the first place—thanks to the support and guidance of trusted mentors at work and school—helped me step out of my protective shell and show the world what my inner world looks like. Attending school, meeting other like-minded people, and sharing creative and intellectual interests has brought me fulfillment beyond my wildest dreams. I now have confidence, vision, and hope. If it wasn’t for my mentors and family who supported and encouraged me, I don’t believe I would have found my way. It was their love that illuminated a pathway through the darkness. They established trust and created connection. This sense of safety and belonging opened a whole new world of possibilities within me. This is the power of transformative love.

We must first learn to heal our own inner brokenness—the places where we long and need—before we can love ourselves enough to illuminate anyone else with the light they deserve. Too often, loneliness and the need for connection drive us to fill that void with the attention of others or excess in some other form instead of spending time in deep introspection.

We’ll do almost anything to avoid deep contemplation and honesty with ourselves. But it’s in the depths of our soul that we find the missing pieces we’re looking for. When we reach in and uncover the pain—the unresolved hurt residing in the dark shadows of our inner selves where unmet needs, betrayal, and injustice hide—we can acknowledge these unhealed places and become empowered by taking steps toward healing.

Whether that’s through creating art, talking to a counselor or mentor, exercising, journaling, or even cathartic practices like writing down what you’ve been holding onto and burning the paper to symbolically let it go, these acts of facing ourselves can be transformative.

Love That Illuminates

I believe—more and more each day—that the kind of love that truly fulfills us doesn’t leave us needing escape. It doesn’t consume us or erase us. It doesn’t demand that we pour ourselves out until there’s nothing left. Instead, it helps us find ourselves. It clarifies and refines our vision. It illuminates—like a lantern in the dark, showing us both the path ahead and the truth of who we are.

When love is healthy, we don’t just sacrifice endlessly without return. We hold up that lantern for each other, to witness and affirm one another. We challenge each other to grow. It reflects our worth back to us. It makes us more whole, not less.

If the whole world loved like that—if we taught our children, our partners, our communities to love from that place—what a radiant world this would be.

But so often, society reduces love to Eros alone—to the sexual, the romantic, the idealized. It ignores Storge, Philia, Agape, Pragma. It sells us stories that love is about possession or passion, ignoring that it’s also about responsibility and justice.

Love as a Healing Force

If you’ve felt the ache of unfulfilled love—if you’ve found yourself turning to something else to silence the pain—you’re not alone. Addiction is not a moral failing. It is often a response to a world where connection feels unsafe or impossible. But healing and connection are always possible.

Healing can be found not only by reconnecting with others but with yourself. We find that healing through love—not the hyped-up, fantasy, mass-marketed version, but the real kind. The kind that is honest and holds justice at its core. The kind of love that respects your dignity even in its demands.

The answer to addiction isn’t shame, it’s connection through safety and honest expression. The answer to unfulfilled love isn’t abandonment of hope—it’s a commitment to practice love better, more consciously, more justly for ourselves and for one another.

The transformative power of healthy love can heal us and our world.