Very busy week for me this week, but here’s a video on limerence, with lot of good insights:
I particularly enjoyed the sections on being more aware of what role the limerent object is playing in your life – and how you have pushed them into that role for your own emotional needs – and the section on radical honesty as a method for reducing limerent idealisation.
The concept that expressing gratitude for what LO has actually done for you is really important. It’s both a way of limiting your appreciation to their real actions (rather than extrapolating it into evidence of what a wonderful person they are), and also an effective way of revealing the times when they haven’t actually done much, but you have blown it up in your head into a big emotional drama.
Similarly, using radical honesty to not hold onto resentments for real or imagined slights is also good for overcoming obsessive rumination.
All very purposeful suggestions, and she also has excellent taste in literature. 😉
She did well in referencing the illustrious Dr. L!
What I felt a bit confused about is whether this is a potential alternative to a NC strategy. It seems to advocate adjusting yourself to a much more realistic appraisal of your LO when you are with them, matched with a dialing back on the fantasy expectations you have of them which they are failing to meet. As if the obstacles that can fuel limerence can be stripped away, as they are not really obstacles at all but the difference between your fantasy needs and who the other person actually is and what connection they are actually offering.
It’s like a locked safe door is the obstacle to the treasures inside it that you imagine could be yours, if only you had the key. The locked safe door, for which you have no key, is no obstacle at all if the reality is there is nothing in there. It surely is easier to tell what a person is really offering you, rather than what you want them to offer you, than it would be to see through a safe door. If I have understood her correctly it’s holding on to the fantasy offering you need them to give you, getting frustrated by their failure to do so, and not grounding yourself on the reality of the LO that is maintaining the limerence.
So could this approach really overcome
the neuro chemistry underpinnings of limerence?
It is absolutely helping me a great deal. I realize that there are two imaginary LOs in my mind, one of which represents my wishes (all my love needs being met) and the other of which represents my fears (he not only doesn’t reciprocate, he thinks I’m a creep and wants to hurt me). Recognizing that both of these are figments of my imagination and that I can focus on the real person who is just a person, has been life-changing and it’s only been recently that I saw this video! It’s definitely helping me break the addictive thought cycle.
I didn’t really track much with this woman’s version of limerence. For me, the fantasy of my LO is second to spending actual time with her. I don’t crave the fantasy of her, I crave her because I interact with her 3-4 days a week. The times I am away from her are the times I find myself more focusing on her bad qualities, it is when I am with her that I find I set those qualities aside and enjoy the feeling of being with her. This woman seemed to argue the opposite, that we enjoy the fantasy away from LO more than the reality of being with them. That is just not my experience.
Also, I didn’t quite track with whatever she was trying to explain about sexual attraction. I have a very high sexual attraction to my LO. Whether actual sex with LO would be fulfilling or not, I don’t know, but the sexual attraction and desire to experience sex with LO sure feels real to me, not some false sexual attraction she seemed to talk about.
Lady, she seemec to frame a lot of limerence as just thoughts about other people in various capacities. She never really emphasized the distressful nature of the thoughts. For me limerence is characterized by uncontrolled thoughts that cause distress and distraction in ones life. She never really emphasized this.
Hey Speedwagon,
I think this is interesting, about sexual attraction. I have an angle on this having had sex with each of my LOs (4 over the span of 25 years). In each case I remember the sex felt amazing. However, recently I have come to understand what was happening a bit differently I think.
I think it was the intense satisfaction and release from LO reciprocation that overprinted onto the sexual experience. Not to say it wasn’t enjoyable/fulfilling, but there was a lot going on that made it feel ‘better’ which was as much about LO idealisation as what was happening in bed.
I came to this realisation about my most recent LO, and the more I thought about it, it seemed applicable to the previous ones. Obviously getting a very intense LO fix from physical intimacy was a strong positive feedback… So I became obsessed with the sexual aspect of the connection.
Basically, what I’m getting at is, it’s not whether the sexual attraction you’re feeling is ‘real’, more the case of is it a means to an end of finding extreme closeness to an LO. So only as grounded in reality as the limerence itself?
I might not have been clear. It’s hard to put into words.
Limerence is a loop trap. The craving, the distressing constant intrusive thoughts.
It’s like driving round and round and round a roundabout. LO stands in the middle of the roundabout, sometimes waving, sometimes not. Most of the time LO is not even on the roundabout. But you keep driving round anyway. There are exit routes off the roundabout but when limerence is very strong we can’t or wont take any of them. NC is driving away from the roundabout. But you can still be stuck with a level of craving that reduces but persists in your head. If we are craving something that doesn’t exist, then this is a way to help reduce distress by weakening the remaining power that thoughts of LO have over us. The approach in the video is recognising the craving is an unmet need inside us that is being projected onto the LO, with the fantasy being that LO will meet our needs. If you realise the shop doesn’t stock what you need and never will then you can stop waiting outside for it to open. I can see her approach giving us more power to weaken limerent cravings and so reduce distress. It does require new thinking about LO and new thinking about how we are maintaining and chasing a fantasy goal. Limerence is a tough fight and I think there is potentially some armour here.
I like the roundabout analogy. Wish I would take one of the damn exits already. Naw I guess my brain just wants to keep going in circles for this woman until everything I have up until now is destroyed over the imagined perception of who she is.
Maybe she will come back and open up the shop again?! She’s only been gone 10 months now. Maybe she will come back?!
Now this is the idiot (me) that is wearing his wife’s wedding ring on a necklace because she took it off and doesn’t want to wear it anymore after a night spent listening to her husband speak of LO in his sleep.
But I still haven’t taken an exit yet. Maybe when she’s had enough of my shit and walks out the door I will wake up.
I really like how you described it, a loop trap. An unmet desire.
At least: my experience with limerence feels like you described. Have to remember this analogy.
I loved this video to be honest… it was impactful to me for several reasons. Her personal example of an LO that is wise and very together, allowing her to feel safe, fulfilling her need to not worry others for a change and not make the decisions, was a carbon copy of how I feel about my LO… scarily similar!
I partially agree with Speedwagon in that her definition of Limerence was overly narrow thus cutting out the large number of limerent’s that have a real mutual connection with their LO (often from before an LE even starts) with whom there is real sexual attraction. I have experienced both types of LE in my life, the more fantastical and the more real (current SO and LO), so I know they are both variations of the same problem.
Saying that, I totally agree with her in that the nature of ALL limerence is such that we do not differentiate fantasy from reality very well, which means, if we are being truly honest with ourselves, our connection with LO is actually less real and profound than we believe it to be becuase we subconsciously impart so much imagined nuance on every interaction with LO. Fantasy and limerence really does get in the way of real connection with people, becuase we are not truly seeing THEM. The nature of limerence obscures this fact from us, we tend to believe what we wish to be true instead becuase it feels so good.
The radical self honesty technique is bang on the money for me… i.e. focussing on the now, the embodied reality and constantly differentiating what is indisputably real in our interactions with LO, from the nuance, embellishment and assumptions added our creative story-telling minds. Plus appreciating a kindness without having any expectations of it being repeated. I find radical honesty to be a more subtle, honest and effective variant of LO devaluation.
When I consider my real life interactions with my LO over the last year, removing all my assumed (a.k.a. desired) meanings, not much is left really. Often as not it is awkward or entirely work focussed. He does nothing for me that he would not do for anyone else, if anything he is often cooler, more terse and less friendly towards me than others on the team. My working relationship with him does not make me feel good these days. Definitely not the safe & caring person in my fantasies any more!
“our connection with LO is actually less real and profound than we believe it to be becuase we subconsciously impart so much imagined nuance on every interaction with LO. ”
and “focussing on the now, the embodied reality and constantly differentiating what is indisputably real in our interactions with LO, from the nuance, embellishment and assumptions added our creative story-telling minds”
yes, I agree, Allie – these were the most useful points I derived from the video, too.
“Saying that, I totally agree with her in that the nature of ALL limerence is such that we do not differentiate fantasy from reality very well, which means, if we are being truly honest with ourselves, our connection with LO is actually less real and profound than we believe it to be becuase we subconsciously impart so much imagined nuance on every interaction with LO. Fantasy and limerence really does get in the way of real connection with people, becuase we are not truly seeing THEM. The nature of limerence obscures this fact from us, we tend to believe what we wish to be true instead becuase it feels so good.”
@Allie 1.
Very well-put! I actually think I’m guilty of infusing ALL my relationships, and not just limerence-based relationships, with massive quantities of fantasy. Soooo embarrassing! The bubble has kind of burst though now that I’m getting older, and I feel really disorientated. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life in a dream and I want to run up and shake people and say: “Wait, wait, what? You mean all that wasn’t real? But it SEEMED so real at the time!” 😁😉
I think there might have been some really useful snippets in here, but honestly I was so distracted by her banging on, and her overuse of hand gestures, that I am not sure I absorbed her points properly. I agree with the above comments that her description of limerence, and her strategies for alleviating it (focussing on reality rather than fantasy/expectations), seem to be somewhat different from mine, and I am not sure they resonate. Maybe I need to watch it again, fast forwarding through some of the repetitive bits.
Ha ha! That lady could win speed talking contents1
I got more from it second time around for sure.
I’ve watched a lot of her channel previously. Recently really into attachment theory etc. She does great summaries of the key ideas and I find her very genuine and warm.
But she’s very handsy. Sometimes it’s almost parody! 😀
Very interesting video. With a slightly different suggestion of how to “fix” the problem, so worth exploring. The emphasis on this seems to be about parsing the difference between limerence and true connection. This vlogger takes the position that you cannot have a true (in-person, in-real-time) connection, so long as you continue to have a (fantasy) limerence for a person. What many of us limerents are doing here all the time is that we imagine the connection. So limerence is like an imagined version of the real thing that we all want.
Paraphrasing the vlogger: Limerence is when you are more attached to the person who is inside your head than the actual person. You choose to prioritize the fantasy in your head over having a true, genuine connection to the person who is actually there. Even fantasizing about the person while we are with them, rather than focussing on the actual person. We get frustrated and resentful with them when they act off the script in our head.
As someone who is extremely cerebral (in my head a lot, which I think most limerents are), when she is talking of feeling truth in your body is fascinating to me. It sounds almost like meditation, but while you are interacting with someone. Be present. Focus on what factually happened; not the interpretation you are giving it. How does it feel in your body when you …?
Because limerence is fantasy – and therefore per se cerebral, and in contrast in-you-head, being present, grounded, and noticing what is actually REAL is a way to get rid of limerence. Real connection is only possible over shared REALITIES.
A point she repeat a few times is that a lot of us think we want real connection but we don’t really want to – because being vulnerable and to take responsibility. False connections are more comfortable (but real ones makes one feel more alive). Take note, limerents. It could be you are suffering so because you actually prefer it! Before you bristle up in arms, really really reflect on this.
And finally, the crux of the matter: “You need to understand the function of limerence to get over it.” She ties it again to mindfulness and awareness. Pay attention: something your brain needs that it is trying to fulfil is what you are looking for in the limerence experience. How does your body feels when you think about someone your have limerence for? What role do you want them to fulfil? When you know that, you can “get rid of limerence in the moment”.
Radical honesty, which she mentions, is worth taking note of. Not to hang onto resentments AND not to hang onto appreciation toward people. It leads to extrapolating, and creating an expectation for future interactions. We all “idealise” aka over-appreciate our LOs. She’s saying by all means appreciate what an LO actually does in reality (as opposed to what you imagine they are doing), but for goodness sake don’t exaggerate it.
Anyway, I thought it was useful to go though this video in some detail since it presents an alternative to “devaluing” I think (since that is a discussion that is currently ‘live’ elsewhere on LwL).
“The concept that expressing gratitude for what LO has actually done for you is really important. It’s both a way of limiting your appreciation to their real actions (rather than extrapolating it into evidence of what a wonderful person they are), and also an effective way of revealing the times when they haven’t actually done much, but you have blown it up in your head into a big emotional drama.”
I think I’m out of limerence now. I had a dream recently about my LO, and there was no “magic” in the dream. (No feelings of ecstasy perhaps?) In the dream, we were merely interacting as friends and equals, and the relationship didn’t seem all that special or unusual… 😲🙄
However, I have also discovered that recovering from limerence is a double-edged sword. Recovering from limerence, as praiseworthy as that aim may be, doesn’t mean life is suddenly going to be roses, and free of negative emotions. Now I’m free of limerence, I’m actually experiencing more negative emotions than ever. For example, I’m experiencing both crushing depression and crippling anxiety. 😲
Fear and sadness are coming to me in alternating waves. The feelings aren’t hanging around, touchwood, as they do in depression, but they come and go, come and go. I think I’m experiencing “true grief”. Yesterday, I allowed myself to cry for the first time I’ve cried in years, and found crying to be somewhat cathartic. I used to resist crying because crying didn’t seem to bring relief from craving i.e. crying seemed pointless as it didn’t alter my circumstances or mental state. I’m experiencing some of the same emotions I experienced at the very start of my limerence i.e. uncontrollable desire to cry and “let something out”.
I think, for me, limerence was never about love or sexual desire, though limerence did seem to mimic both love and sexual desire. I think, for me, limerence was about wanting attachment in my life. Specifically, I wanted a strong emotional attachment to my father, and I wanted those feelings of attachment to be mutual. Limerence was definitely about longing. But it wasn’t longing for sex. It was longing for attachment, and the security that such attachment would in theory bring. 🤔
I have now come to the conclusion that my father is autistic, and that’s why he could never give me the emotional warmth I wanted growing up. I still live with my father, and I love him very much. However, he still can’t show me any signs of emotional warmth and he still can’t read my emotions or the emotions of anyone around him. Autism is a permanent condition that has a huge impact on the quality of social interactions. Basically, my dad’s autism means that proper father-son attachment for us never occurred… My dad remains a psychological stranger to me to this day, even though I’m arguably also on the spectrum! 😢😢
If I’m grieving anything, I think I’m grieving not the loss of an attachment to my father. I think I’m grieving an attachment with my father I wanted and never got. The whole situation is so unbelievably sad. There have been incidents in the past, when I was a child, for example, when I cried or expressed great personal distress in front of my father, and my father couldn’t see or interpret the emotions I was showing.
My main LO did give me crumbs of emotional warmth, affection, understanding, etc, at times, and in my mind I massively overvalued those crumbs from him, because I wasn’t getting anything from my dad or from my other male peers. If some commodity seems super-scarce, that drives up the perceived value, right? 😁
So, in sum, I think for me limerence was very much a product of unresolved emotional trauma. My (lack of) a warm emotional relationship with my autistic father traumatised me deeply, and I latched onto the first male who seemed to offer me what my father couldn’t. (Didn’t hurt that the young man was drop-down gorgeous. I think eros and emotional needs can very often get mixed up in human brains, especially the brains of people who are lonely or immature).
If limerence is about unmet needs or unresolved trauma, then to my mind it’s not true “love”, and it can’t even be real “sexual attraction”. Although I guess “love” and “sexual attraction” can both feature as ingredients in the overall limerence cocktail? 😉
I feel limerence was a mental state that allowed me to live in denial for a time – a dysfunctional coping strategy, a temporary defence mechanism if you will. I feel limerence helped me survive when I was younger by tricking me into believing I wasn’t feeling what I was feeling e.g. depression and anxiety stemming from lack of authentic connection with parents. 🤔
I’m trying to accept now that my autistic father will never love me in the way I want him to love me, and that no satisfying mutual attachment will ever exist between us. My dad treats me like a housemate. My dad doesn’t understand emotional attachment. At times in the past, I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I was inadequate. I thought I was a disappointing son. Alternatively, at times in the past, I thought my dad was acting the way he did because he was conforming to some unspoken masculine gender norms, and I just had to learn the right norms in order to win his acceptance. Now I see that my father, as an autistic man, doesn’t really pay heed to social norms of any kind. 😲
In other words, my dad just acts like a robot around everyone. His “rejection” of me isn’t personal. I can understand why my mother was so unhappy being married to him. I can understand why our family never felt like a safe haven for me and my sisters. It’s very hard living with somebody who can’t connect at all, and then being told that such disconnection is normal. My father has definitely gaslit me and guilt-tripped me over the years for wanting a real emotional bond with him. I have given up asking him for something he can’t provide. 😢
In essence, I don’t think my LO was ever my primary problem, narcissist or not. I think my primary problem was the absence in my life of a much-desired connection to my dad. However, for people who do believe their LO is the main issue, I think I have calculated the exact ratio of hope-uncertainty that gets people hooked. I believe a 50-50 ratio of hope and uncertainty, or friendliness and neutrality, is what very likely triggers limerence in the human brain. I.e. if an LO is 90% friendly and 10% neutral, there’s no challenge, so the brain doesn’t embrace the limerence game. Alternatively, if an LO is 10% friendly and 90% neutral, the pay-out from the limerence game is too low, and the brain resists addiction. 😉
Wishing all you beautiful people the very best! Life can be very hard sometimes. Please take good care of yourselves. 👍
Sammy,
Your post brought tears to my eyes.
There’s so much in it. But, what I see in it is hope for the future. Pieces are falling into place and I have no doubt that you’ll emerge so much better as they do. I don’t see how you can’t come out better!
Wow! Just wow!
Thanks, mate. Your kind words of encouragement mean a lot! 👍
Sammy
“My main LO did give me crumbs of emotional warmth, affection, understanding, etc, at times, and in my mind I massively overvalued those crumbs from him, because I wasn’t getting anything from my dad or from my other male peers. If some commodity seems super-scarce, that drives up the perceived value, right?”
This is how I fell for LO. My wife and I had (and still are with the limerence) been going through a rough patch even before I met LO. Like you mentioned with your father, LO was filling unmet needs I wasn’t getting at home. A mere “thank you Adam” for bringing donuts to the office some random morning would send me to the moon and back. I was seeing more than what it was because rarely does/did I get a “thank you” at home for stopping by the grocery store after a 10 hour day at work when my wife could drive to the store at some point that day herself.
I feel like unmet needs are a huge reason why a lot of people fall into limerence. Even when the LO has no idea that they are fulfilling those needs. Then BAM! we start to see this person for more than they are. They could just be a kind soul and not have any idea what is going on in our heads.
For example I brought assorted donuts to the office one day and LO expressed that she liked sprinkled donuts. My supervisor told me, some weeks later when the subject came up, that the very next day I bought a dozen assorted sprinkled donuts. I didn’t even remember doing that lol Still don’t to this day.
“(Didn’t hurt that the young man was drop-down gorgeous. I think eros and emotional needs can very often get mixed up in human brains, especially the brains of people who are lonely or immature).”
LO is one of the most beautiful women I have ever met in my 45 years of life. She’s the kind of beautiful that makes you feel that she is so out of league that it hurts. I often wondered what a romantic relationship with her would be like but I never really actually pursued it. She was single when I met her. But she could have definitely manipulated me with her looks if she wanted. Just her innocent smile and beautiful green eyes and her wonderful laugh alone made it hard to resist. But in the end it usually faded. More than anything I just wanted to be in her presence. Agape seemed far more satisfying that eros. Even though my stupid man brain seemed to fall for eros here and there.
It has been a rough past week. One year to the day from when we plunged from an EA to a full blown PA which lasted 6 mo before I left town. Oh it was so hot. My intrusive daydreaming didn’t even match his creativity. Now, I’m on the other side of the US and NC for 3 months. Yay me, but summer plans are going to put me right in his path again. And my heart is beating faster. My breath feels lighter. I cannot sleep. And that surge of neurotransmitters means I feel better than I have in months. I am terrible at resisting these feelings. To clarify, WANTING to resist these feelings. And that’s the first step in self help, so now what?
Hi Free Fall, I don’t know how to answer your question of “now what?” because I’ve never had a PA. My instinct is for you to run away. It sounds like the PA escalated the already-intense limerent feelings. I can’t remember if you are married, but I wonder if you could find some help through Affair Recovery or Marriage Helper. They have great videos on YouTube. I would also encourage you not to have sexual relations with anyone who you are not married to. Sex creates a bond. I think you are experiencing the aftermath of having and then losing that connection. It would be so hard. Can you change your summer plans so that you don’t have LO exposure?
Good luck!
I finally got around to listening to this.
What I found interesting was she specifically references the Fearful-Avoidant Attachment Style.
Marry that to “For Dutton and colleagues,35 both fearful and preoccupied attachment, as assessed by the RQ and RSQ in abusive men, were predictive for borderline personality, but fearful attachment was so strong a predictor that the authors concluded that having borderline personality was the prototype for this particular attachment style.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1857277/
I tend to think of limerents as LOs but I suppose they could just as well be limerents.
WRT the rescue fantasy, I’ve said it before that it’s not so much that we want to save them. We want them to save us.
I also think that the reason LO #4 never spoke directly to each other was because it would make this quaint 19th century thing we had going real. I know I didn’t want that and I don’t think that she did either.
“I particularly enjoyed the sections on being more aware of what role the limerent object is playing in your life – and how you have pushed them into that role for your own emotional needs – and the section on radical honesty as a method for reducing limerent idealisation.”
That goes to understanding the difference between fact, presumption, and speculation. Facts don’t kill you. Presumption and speculation kill you.
If you want to read more about Heidi, check out https://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/. I don’t think she’s still affiliated with Thought Catalog but I like her stuff, especially her MBTI stuff.
If you’ve got time to kill: https://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/2017/01/heres-why-they-pulled-away-when-you-were-starting-to-get-close-based-on-their-myers-briggs-personality-type/
This video changed my life for the better. Thank you so much!