Unlearning Love: Reclaiming Desire from Diagnosis
A True Story and for the Unfinished Heart
"I am scared by how broken open I feel, but here I am, and I want you."
Sarah — from the letters
Dear Friend,
There is a kind of love that does not resolve.
It does not heal on schedule. It does not respond to protocols. It refuses to be pathologized, categorized, or cured. It lives in the body like weather, arriving unbidden, staying past its welcome, leaving traces the mind cannot name.
If you have loved this way, you have likely been told something is wrong with you, or more likely, “them.”
That you are addicted. Codependent. Trauma-bonded. A Victim. That your longing is a symptom, your devotion a disease, your ache for the one who is gone, a disorder requiring intervention.
Perhaps you have tried to believe them. Maybe you have sat in rooms where heartbreak was translated into clinical language, where the mystery of two souls colliding was reduced to attachment styles, narcissistic abuse, and intermittent reinforcement schedules. Perhaps you have scrolled through feeds that promised to explain your pain, only to feel more alienated from your own heart.
This book is not another explanation.
It is an invitation.
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Unlearning Love began as private letters written to a woman during the dissolution of a love I had chosen beyond reason. They were never meant for publication. They were written at night, in grief, in the aftermath of watching the person I intended to marry disappear into a medical mental-health treatment system that framed our relationship as her disease and me as her drug.
The letters became an inquiry. The inquiry became research. The research—four years, over two hundred sources—became a book that asks a question most in the relationship or psychotherapeutic helping professions cannot afford to consider:
What if heartbreak is not a diagnosis but a sacred threshold for transformation?
What if the modern recovery industry—with its labels, its protocols, its confident prognoses—has colonized the territory of romantic conflict, mistaking initiation for illness?
What if the soul knows something the system does not?
A Glimpse Inside
From "Therapeutic Fortune Telling"
I did not know I was walking into a self-fulfilling prophecy; I thought I was walking into dinner. The newish western-themed bar near her place smelled like smoked cedar and lemon oil, the kind of curated authenticity that photographs better than it feels.
That's when she brought it up. "Thirty days apart."
The words arrived like a soft verdict.
From "Symptom or Symbol"
Sarah arrives as Siren-Persephone, moon-crowned keeper of thresholds, inviting you below the daylight mind; you answer as Orpheus-Knight, lyre in one hand, vow in the other, descending into the vas of Love where opposites burn. Together you constellate the old syzygy—Lover and Shadow, Anima and Animus—circling the Black Sun that cooks what cannot stay naïve.
From the Letters
I thought of the house we might have built, the light on her easel in the morning, the arguments about whether our child would inherit her dimples or mine. I imagined two people who had chosen one another in adulthood practicing the ancient and unfashionable art of perseverance in the face of rupture.
Instead, the moral-industrial medical recovery complex did its paid-to-care work on schedule and called the outcome healing.·
The Chapters
Part I — Rubedo: Preparing for the Fire
Scarlet Letter — On the violence of labels, and the woman in literary history who refused to be reduced to one.
Beyond Labels — When the map becomes a cage, certainty replaces curiosity, fatalism replaces possibility, and self-love becomes self-indulgence.
Therapeutic Fortune Telling — How prediction becomes prophecy, and prophecy becomes prison.
Invented Realities — The cognitive architecture of borrowed belief about conflicts that shapes interpretation and vandalizes agency for group think.
Stats, Rats, and Cults — What the research actually says, who some of the bad actors are and what the for-profit mental health industry and coaching eco-system cannot afford to hear.
Part II — Nigredo: The Blackening
Symptom or Symbol — Two languages for the same pain. One diagnoses. One initiates. One collapses and the other transforms.
Myth and Meaning — The four phases of alchemical love, and why most relationships die in the second phase instead of progressing.
A Frog Prince — A fairy tale read that reveals a hidden psychological instruction.
Sleeping Beauty — The devouring mother, the glass coffin, and the kiss that is not what you think.
Dialectical Alchemy — Practical tools for holding what cannot be resolved, only transformed.
Parts III & IV — The Letters
Albedo — Her voice, then mine.
Citrinitas — Mine.
Also Inside
An extensive appendix featuring essays on the origins and critique of love addiction, codependency, the 12-step movement, treatment industry reform, and a glossary of depth psychology terms.
Nearly 500 pages. Over 250 academic and peer-reviewed research references.
“A work that refuses to choose between scholarship and soul.”
What This Book Offers
A careful examination of the concepts that dominate contemporary relationship discourse—love addiction, codependency, narcissism, trauma bonding—traced to their origins, tested against the clinical literature, and revealed as cultural constructions rather than medical realities. Not to dismiss suffering, but to restore precision to language that has been stretched until it explains everything and therefore nothing.
An alternative cartography drawn from depth psychology—Jung, Hillman, von Franz, Woodman—that reads the symptoms of heartbreak as symbols, the chaos of passion as alchemical process, and the beloved as a figure in the soul's own drama of becoming.
The actual letters—hers to me, mine to her—written in real time, unedited except for grammar, offered not as literary artifact but as proof that this work rises from lived experience rather than theoretical distance.
And throughout, an insistence on sovereignty—the reader's right to author their own meaning, to hold complexity without collapsing into clinical certainty, to refuse the borrowed narratives that flatten the soul into a diagnosis.·
For Whom This Book Was Written
For the woman who has done the therapy, read the books, attended the workshops, and still feels that something essential has been left unnamed. Who suspects that the language of healing has become another cage. Who longs for permission to feel the full weight of her experience without being told it is too much.
For the seeker disillusioned by the gap between the depth promised and the depth delivered, by systems that pathologize intensity while monetizing pain.
For anyone who has loved unwisely and wonders whether wisdom might be found not by erasing the experience, but by reading it more carefully.
For the reader who craves both rigor and resonance—who wants research that does not insult her intelligence and prose that does not bypass her heart.
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In the Tradition Of
Readers who have found nourishment in Women Who Run With the Wolves, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Iron John, or Come As You Are will recognize this book's ambition: to hold psychological insight and poetic depth in the same hand, without sacrificing one for the other.
It also stands in critical dialogue with the recovery literature—not to condemn those who have found genuine help there, but to offer an alternative road map for those who have not, and to insist that no single framework owns the truth of the human heart.
·An Invitation
I do not know whether Sarah will ever read these words. I do not know whether the love we shared will find its way to help others or remain between hearts that still beat, but do not speak, as so many loves do, an unfinished sentence.
What I know is this: the longing that brought me to the page was not a sickness. It was a teacher. And the letters I wrote in the dark became, over time, a lantern.
If you are holding your own unfinished story—if you have been told that your heart's persistence is a pathology rather than a pilgrimage—this book offers no cure.
It offers company. It offers questions. It offers an open door where others are fully closed. It offers an alternative map for when it feels like breakdown might be a breakthrough in disguise.
And it offers this:
You are not alone in the fire.
Jae Botávn, M.A.(c) Depth Psychology
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"The moment you think you've got it, you don't have it.
The moment you accept that you don't get it, is the moment you do get it."
— Alan Watts