Dr. Janie Lacy, LMHC, NCC, CSAT-S — Relationship Trauma Therapist in Orlando, FL

What is the difference between love addiction and codependency?

They overlap, but they are not the same thing — and the distinction matters, because it changes what actually helps.

Codependency is organized around the other person's needs. You lose yourself managing, fixing, and anticipating someone else. Love addiction is organized around the feeling. It's the pursuit of the high — the intensity, the reconciliation, the chase — even when the person delivering it is causing you real harm. A woman can be codependent in a relationship that is merely unbalanced. Love addiction has the neurological signature of any other addiction: tolerance, withdrawal, escalating consequences, and a promise to yourself that you break again and again.

If you have ever left, felt physically ill for days, and gone back — that isn't weakness. That's withdrawal. And it responds to treatment.

Do you offer virtual therapy across Florida?

Yes. I see clients in person at my Casselberry office and virtually anywhere in the state of Florida.

Virtual sessions are the most common choice for the women I work with, and there's a practical reason for that. My clients are executives, physicians, attorneys, and business owners whose calendars don't accommodate a forty-minute drive twice a week — and many of them want this work to stay private. A secure session from your own office or home removes both obstacles.

Florida licensure requires that you be physically located in Florida at the time of your session. If you travel frequently for work, tell me during scheduling and we'll plan around it.

What happens in the first session with Dr. Lacy?

We find the pattern.

Most women arrive able to describe the most recent relationship in detail. What they usually can't see yet is the thread running through all of them — the same dynamic wearing a different face. So the first session is not you reciting your history while I take notes. It's the two of us mapping what's been driving your choices, and naming it out loud, often for the first time.

You will leave with three things: language for what has been happening to you, an understanding of where it started, and a clear picture of what the work ahead looks like. Not a vague sense that therapy might help someday. A plan.

Many women tell me the first session was the first time anything about their relationships made sense.

What makes the Woman Redeemed™ approach different from traditional talk therapy?

Talk therapy works on one layer. Relationship trauma lives in three.

Woman Redeemed addresses the MIND — the beliefs and thought patterns that keep you choosing what's familiar over what's healthy. The SOUL — the childhood wounds and attachment history underneath the adult pattern. And the BODY — because your nervous system stores this. It's why you can understand your pattern completely and still feel your chest tighten when his name appears on your phone.

Insight alone has never been enough. If understanding your relationships were sufficient, the smartest women I know would have healed years ago. They haven't, and it isn't a character flaw. It's that no one worked all three layers at once.

That's the difference. That's why it holds.