One of the most distressing and disruptive symptoms of limerence is the onset of obsessive, intrusive thoughts.
The “can’t get them out of your head” effect.
Early on in the limerence experience, daydreaming about your limerent object feels wonderful. It’s all giddy thrills and walking-on-air dreaminess.
But, there’s always a dark side too. At first it stays in the background, but as time goes on, the anxiety of uncertainty starts to ratchet up the thoughts until they become intrusive.
“I can’t stop thinking about them!” turns from a kind of happy amazement, into a psychological burden.
It becomes difficult to concentrate on other tasks, it disrupts your sleep, and it feels like you’ve somehow lost control of your own thought processes.
So, what’s going on? How does euphoria turn to obsession, and what can be done about it?
1. What is obsession?
One of the difficulties in making sense of romantic obsession is trying to be clear about exactly what it is.
“Romantic” means different things to different people. So does “obsession”. So let’s start with what the obsessive thoughts of limerence actually feel like in commenters own words:
When she’s around I don’t know how to behave, nor what to say. It’s a mixture of uncertainty, fear of rejection and joy from feeling she’s in the same room. Oh, my. It’s killing me almost!
It hurts how much I love him
I’m just obsessed. I can’t turn the thoughts off, I can’t escape from the downs, and I keep chasing the highs even though I know I always crash after. I just want her more than anything I’ve ever wanted before… Everything about her is perfect.
The intrusive thoughts of limerence begin as intense desire, combined with anxiety about not being able to secure that desire.
The two always seem to come together
I want them more than anything, I can’t give them up.
That’s a big clue as to what’s going on in the brain, and why it’s very different to other kinds of obsessive thinking.
The best known example of psychological obsession is probably Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. That state also involves intrusive thoughts and involuntary drives, but they have a distinctly different character from limerence.
I’ve done a previous video analysing the neuroscience here, but the fundamental difference is that limerence is driven by desire, while OCD is driven by threat sensitivity.
The obsessions of OCD are not about desperately wanting something, they are about anxiety – to do with cleanliness, orderliness, security, safety.
That’s why techniques that help with OCD, like exposure response therapy, do not help with limerence.
You can desensitize anxiety responses through exposure to an irrational fear, but you can’t desensitize desire for a limerent object by being around them more.
The same principles apply to other forms of obsessive love – like stalking, delusional erotomania, or relationship OCD – those obsessions do not stem from runaway desire.
The intrusive thoughts of limerence are “desire thinking”, and that leads us into the world of addiction.
2. Where do cravings come from?
It’s obviously natural to desire someone who we find romantically attractive.
It isn’t really surprising that we would want to seek them out, because being with them feels rewarding, but why does this natural drive sometimes… well, flip out, into a completely insatiable, irresistible desire that feels like a psychic assault?
Limerence sets in when one person becomes a singular focus of romantic desire. The natural reward of being with them is astonishing – euphoric, exhilarating, intoxicating.
Rewards that powerful can become addictive.
The reward system of the brain becomes sensitized, until that one special person becomes an object of fixation.
I’ve talked about the neuroscience of this process of incentive sensitization before, but in this post, I want to focus on what it actually feels like.
Cravings are an involuntary urge. They are a sign that your reward system has been driven into a habitual state of high sensitivity to limerent desire.
Cues in the environment trigger the urge to seek your limerent object before you are conscious of the impulse. Emotional states can do the same – in fact almost anything can start the impulse to seek LO to get reward or relief.
Sometimes this can be enough to prompt us into action – texting them or seeking them out – but there is another internal process that typically happens too.
The intrusion is followed by elaboration – a more active thought process that refines how we react to the impulsive craving.
This idea – known as Elaborated Intrusion theory – lays out how unconscious triggers (like seeing something that belongs to them, or hearing a love song, or worrying that you haven’t had a text from them for a while) start the craving process, and that leads into loops of “desire thinking”.
Often, desire thinking is dominated by mental imagery – of how good it would feel to be close to them, of their beautiful face, or happy memories with them – but it can also involve self-talk. Repetitive arguments or justifications for why it’s OK to seek contact.
I’ll just quickly check in on them
I can handle it
Another common pattern of Elaborated Intrusion, is when anxiety about the bond triggers imagined contact or indirect contact (like looking at a picture on instagram for example), as a strategy for mood repair.
You panic that they might not be into you, and then vividly imagine a time when you were together and they were happy.
This cycle of unconscious urge followed by mental rumination leads to a predictable outcome.
Reinforcement of the reward-seeking drive.
3. A well worn mental rut
Desire thinking is triggered by cravings, but then intensifies and reinforces them.
The immediate impulse triggers a predictable habit of getting stuck in the same thought loops. As time goes on, this habit gets more and more ingrained. What starts as a natural process – indeed a useful process – becomes dysregulated.
You feel romantic attraction, you think about them because it is pleasurable, that makes you seek them out, and that increases the odds that you’ll give evolution what it wants.
But, the wanting drive can get stuck.
Think of it like a car driving in circles.
Each impulsive craving pumps the gas pedal.
Each loop of desire thinking elaboration pumps it again.
Over time, the car will start to carve out a psychological rut.
Your thoughts will be trapped going round and round in the same direction, and breaking out of that rut and going somewhere new will get harder and harder.
4. Rumination and worry
To keep the analogy going, your steering wheel has got jammed in one direction, and as you start to try and twist it free, the wheels that are stuck in the rut will be fighting you. Your mind is so used to repeating the same loops that it takes cognitive effort to break out.
Unfortunately, instead of conveniently helping us moderate the out of control desire, our executive brain can spend that cognitive effort on rationalisation.
Beliefs about your desire thinking – both positive and negative – determine how we make sense of what’s happening.
These “metacognitive beliefs” – the thoughts you have about your thoughts – can get deeply ingrained. It’s like your brain has noticed the obsession develop and then comes up with explanations to explain it.
After all, there must be a reason why you’re driving round and round in ruts and churning your subconscious into a quagmire.
Early on in the development of obsessive desire thinking, these metacognitive beliefs tend to be positive:
LO gives me energy
I’m just really connecting with them and it’s great
I’ve never felt so alive
But, as time goes on, and if the limerence drive is frustrated by obstacles, they can turn negative.
I just can’t help myself
I always give in
I can’t control these thoughts
Sadly, both positive and negative metacognitive beliefs reinforce the addiction.
Positive thoughts make the desire stronger.
Negative thoughts remove your sense of agency (making you feel helpless) and often lead to counterproductive coping strategies.
Instinctively, many people try to suppress the intrusive thoughts, become hypervigilant about LO’s behaviour, and highly sensitive and reactive to cravings and cues.
They end up trapped in a mental state of desire thinking loops that spiral into constant worry and rumination.
5. How to break free
Unfortunately, it’s easy enough to set out how romantic obsessions can develop in terms of neuroscience and psychology, but the best treatment strategies are less clear.
The core strategy is going to involve disrupting those thought loops in a constructive way – not suppressing or fighting them, but accepting them and letting them pass.
Then, you start redirecting the old habits of desire thinking about LO and change the messages you tell yourself about them.
Finally, those metacognitive beliefs need updating.
There have been several studies into this sort of approach, using variations on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and mindfulness techniques, and even using a self-help manual to counter nicotine cravings, with varying degrees of success.
(There’s a good review of the current state of evidence here).
But, to date, none of these methods have been tested for limerence.
That said, on a more positive note, I’m ploughing through these papers at the moment and putting together a plan for how to adapt the strategies for managing romantic intrusive thoughts.
I’ll be running a workshop on it once the work is done.
And then we can test whether the ideas really work in practice…
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