Learning

Being touch starved is also known as touch deprivation or skin hunger and it is more common than you think; to experience little to no touch from other living things.

However, aside from being touch starved, extreme craving for affection, whether physical or emotional, can sometimes indicate an overdependence on other people for ensuring your own wellbeing. It can even indicate love addiction, i.e. attachment dysregulation. 

The first and the most obvious reason why you may crave affection is because you don’t have enough of it in your life. You may crave someone and been lonely for a while, without anybody to provide you with the physical and emotional connection, and intimacy. Many people experienced this during the recent pandemic.

Aside from longing for touch, craving for love and affection can also happen for other reasons. You may actually have people in your life who love and care for you, and you still can’t satisfy your cravings. In this case, your need for affection may represent something deeper. 

People who experience intense love cravings often lacked appropriate affection in their childhood. Unfortunately, these people may go through life feeling as though they do not deserve love, and still desire to be held, loved, and appreciated. This can cause them to seek self-love through other people, trying to heal their wounds and make up for the lack of affection.   

However, love cravings can also arise from attachment dysregulation, or love addiction, involving obsessive behaviors towards other people. It tends to arise from survival patterns developed in childhood or a particularly stressful situation in your life where you had to learn to tolerate feelings of neglect and abandonment. 

If you tend to feel like other people don’t love you enough, fear that they may leave you, or experience anxiety over your relationship, it may be the case that you’re dealing with attachment dysregulation that requires your attention. 

https://www.lovetopivot.com/why-crave-affection-how-stop-love-addiction-retreat/