This week’s video:
If you’re trapped in a mental state of limerence—a state of intense romantic infatuation—one of the best ways to recover is to go No Contact with the person that you’re obsessing over.
It makes sense: if limerence is like an addiction, you should cut off your supply of love drug.
But… what if you can’t?
What if you have to spend time with your limerent object?
In this video I’ll show you how to deal with that limitation, and, in fact, how you can turn it to your advantage.
Right, what to do when you can’t go No Contact.
This problem is actually one of the commonest questions I get from struggling limerents: I know I should go no contact but I can’t, because I work with my limerent object, or they’re my neighbour, or my child’s teacher, or my sister in law.
And, well, fair enough. Life is going to throw obstacles in your way, barriers that can’t easily be overcome, limitations that you’re going to have to find a way to work around.
To figure out how to manage it, we need to analyse why no contact works, what it really means in practice, and how you can turn contact into a tool for recovery if you really can’t avoid it.
Why No Contact works
Limerence, fundamentally, is a massive natural high that can be caused by another person.
They make you feel amazing.
Just being with them can cause euphoria, exhilaration; love intoxication.
At the level of neuroscience, the arousal, reward and bonding systems are all maxed out and enhancing each other, and driving you into an altered state of mind that really feels like you are “in love”—and an especially dizzying and overwhelming type of love at that.
It’s a natural high so high that it can become addictive.
If the state of limerence persists for long enough it can transition into a behavioural addiction—addiction to the other person.
Now, I’ve detailed all the neuroscience in a previous video, but the upshot is that once limerence has progressed to this stage, all the problems of addiction begin to manifest.
Just as for any other addiction, recovery is going to depend on you stopping the supply of your drug.
And if you’re addicted to another person, No Contact is the obvious way to achieve that.
However, going cold turkey and cutting all contact with your limerent object in one go is not necessarily the best way to manage it. It can be better to sort of taper off contact more slowly, reducing the time you spend with them progressively, so that you don’t feel the full shock of withdrawal in one go
And that approach generally causes less of a disruption to your established routines too—people do notice if you suddenly ghost them.
So, sometimes limiting contact is the best first step in recovery, and that can be a useful mindset if you can’t go No Contact completely.
Focus instead on what you can limit.
Look at your daily routines. How much contact do you have with your limerent object? How much of that lies within your control? How much could you limit contact while still meeting all your professional and personal obligations?
That baseline is the target to aim for.
Strategise about how to get from where you are, to the point of limiting contact as much as you can.
What does Contact mean?
Now, not all contact is physical. We don’t need to actually be present in the company of our limerent objects in order to reinforce the addiction.
Nowadays, we have a very powerful tool for getting an indirect, but still intoxicating, high.
Your mobile or tablet can give a sneaky hit of limerence sugar at any time of the day and night.
There are lots of indirect channels for contact that can feed limerent desire.
Texting, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, all the many ways that we can communicate with our limerent object through technology are going to fuel limerence and slow recovery.
Social media is another common pitfall. I mean it’s easy to justify. It’s not really “contact” is it? It’s totally passive.
But many limerents use the massive database of pictures and words that their limerent object has put up online as a way to repair their mood.
When they feel down or anxious, that picture of their limerent object looking really happy and gorgeous is only a couple of clicks away.
Browsing can be a self-medication strategy.
Like methadone for heroin, social media can be a second-rate hit of limerence relief—just enough to kill the craving, without solving the problem.
So, look at all the many ways you expose yourself to your limerent object, figure out which ones you can cut out, and limit your indirect contact as much as you can.
Use contact to deprogram yourself
OK, so it’s obvious why limiting contact is useful for recovery, and you can eliminate all the channels that are within your control.
What do you do about the contact you can’t avoid?
Well, one of the guiding principles behind my limerence recovery system is that you work with the situation you’re in, not with an impossible ideal.
If something is outside of your control, don’t waste time getting upset about it, just try and turn it to your advantage.
In this case, you can accept the power that your limerent object has over you and your emotions, but direct that power into recovery not reinforcement.
It’s sort of a form of mental judo. Don’t try and stop the emotions head on, instead try and turn them around.
You might have to have contact with your limerent object, but you don’t have to enjoy it.
If you want to break free from limerence, use contact time to focus on the negative aspects of the experience. Dwell on your limerent object’s flaws.
If they have poor hygiene or terrible dress sense then maybe that makes it easy, but the same tactic can be used for personality traits too.
Instead of the old habit of glossing over their rudeness or impatience or arrogance, focus on it.
Again, work with what you’ve got: find the things that you dislike about your limerent object and make that the centre of your attention.
The goal is to retrain your brain—to break the association between your limerent object and reward, by making your contact time less enjoyable.
Go into every meeting with the mindset: this is a chance to practice my mental judo skills, rather than going in with the giddy mix of hope and uncertainty that is keeping you hooked.
One bonus of this approach is that it will probably make you less good company too. So, you’ll get a nice negative cycle going, where you’re concentrating on nitpicking their flaws and they stop wanting to spend time with you.
So, I’ve been a bit flippant, but the idea works.
You need to reframe the way you interact with your limerent object if you want to free yourself from obsession.
Disrupt the old dynamic of your contact time. Because that was reinforcing limerence. Make contact feel burdensome rather than arousing.
Break the subconscious link between them and reward.
If you have to have contact, use it, to rewrite what your limerent object means to your subconscious.
Now like many challenges in life: it doesn’t feel good in the moment, but it pays off in the long term when you free yourself from the obsession.
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