When you can't live without love - BPD and Obsessive Love

hi it's dr fox licensed psychologist in the state of texas an expert in the area of personality disorders and today i wanted to talk about obsessive love and attraction and bpd now imagine that you're attracted to someone and you have a strong need for love right and you must have it but you're overcome with fear and you feel like you don't deserve it so you have no frame of reference to identify on what it is or on how to build it and when you try to get it it's like this tornado hitting dorothy's house right in the wizard of oz the desire to feel that love is one thing but it gets compounded by the need to have it reciprocated intermixed with the confusion about whether or not you deserve it now this is what it's often like for individuals with bpd when they feel attraction and find an object to love now this is also called limerence this is defined as a cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another individual and that's what we're going to talk about in this video so let's learn more about it and don't forget like share and subscribe and let's get into it now in this video we're going to look at limerence from the bpd standpoint now i'm not familiar with any research that examines both bpd and limerence from but but i can tell you though from my clinical experience i'd say there's certainly a commonality right and i'll put a reference at the bottom of the comments about a book on limerence if you want to learn more about it but many individuals with bpd have a core content of emptiness abandonment low self-worth and many others that directly lessen your sense of worth now when limerence comes into play things get even more complicated and they get complicated really really fast in many cases bpd makes you think that you don't deserve love particularly healthy love and perhaps you've even seen unhealthy love and affection and this could be in your family as you're growing up this could be as it's played out and with your current partners and things like that but you have this inherent almost like this inherent this intense drive or desire to have this conceptualization of healthy love however though you have this identified love object and you want those feelings reciprocated but you're also struggling with the idea of whether or not you deserve it the inner critic that voice from your past you loudly hear that it tells you over and over no you don't know that you don't deserve love no you don't deserve compassion no you don't deserve good treatment but let's challenge that and you want to challenge it with the knowledge and exploration of the four components of limerence and that's what we're going to do here this is intrusive thinking and fantasy fear of rejection hope and loneliness now let's break each one of those down from the viewpoint of bpd now when we talk about intrusive thinking and fantasy what happens with a lot of individuals along the bpd spectrum is that they have a lot of intrusive thoughts and typically they tend to be very self-degrading highly hypercritical a lot of times their voices from their past that just keep echoing in their head about the things they've done wrong about their failure to act about anything that was negative in their life even though all of us have negative experiences individuals that bpd spectrum really tend to focus a lot of their attention and their feelings and their energy on their negative negative experiences negative outcomes and intrusive thinking and fantasy when we talk about obsessive love and attraction what happens is is that this intensive thinking is how can i keep this person here how do we stay together are they going to leave me things like that and the fantasy see i think sometimes when we think about fantasy we think the fantasy is this positive thing but it's not always there can be negative fantasies as well and i think that it's playing out those nightmare fantasies over and over and over again what's interesting about human beings is that when we put a picture in our head and we keep playing it over and over for ourselves we start to follow it we start to engage in behaviors that fulfill that nightmare fantasy intensifies this intrusive thinking and we know we go to the next component which is fear of rejection that that's pretty intense for a lot of folks along the bpd spectrum now it is for a lot of folks that are not on the bppt spectrum too but we're going to talk about bpd spectrum in particular here and that fear of rejection is so intense that these folks will almost do anything to make sure that they don't encounter that fear of rejection and sometimes it means selling themselves out sometimes it means lessening their own sense of worth their own sense of value or their own values to keep somebody close and what happens is is that fear of rejection and the more self-compromise they engage in the more resentment built up and that resentment that builds up over time starts to pollute that relationship so does it sound confusing to you because it is for for a lot of my clients as well is that they have this obsessive love and attraction but this fear of rejection that's intermixed with this intrusive thinking and fantasy but they want someone there not that one person but someone there and it's really important to make that distinction between someone and that one see because someone just means it could be anybody but when we want the one that's then and i'm not talking about soulmates that conceptualization what i'm talking about is this one person who you feel like you kind of fit with but you want to be in the relationship not that you need to be in the relationship and that obsessive love and attraction and limerence that is that need to be in the relationship that dependent type of relationship and another component that i mentioned earlier that we're going to explore is also hope this sense of hope and a lot of times that sense of hope can be used against the individual along the bpd spectrum and they use this idea of hope that well maybe it'll get better or if i did this better or if they hermits all these questions and all this wonderment and it pollutes again this idea of hope of having this sense of hope that we can grow together right whatever your partner that you're with today that you're going to change even a tiny little idioty bit from until tomorrow you're gonna change a little more and a little more and hopefully in healthy relationships you grow together but in unhealthy relationships you can grow together as well the problem is is that you grow in chaos you grow in resentment you grow in conflict and those issues as well and hope comes into that the hope that things will get better the hope that you can get better and that you can find the things about yourself and you totally can you can learn about yourself we're going to talk about that in just a second about how to do it different but this sense of hope can sometimes for folks along the bpd spectrum is that it's this carrot right you can't quite get it it's kind of out there you know and you can't quite get it but it keeps you going this idea of hope but if you engage in particular behaviors and patterns that are more adaptive and healthy you can eat that carrot and that's what you want you want to eat that carrot that carrot of hope and the last component as it relates to limerence is loneliness loneliness i've noticed in a lot of my clients along the bpd spectrum that this is very much like an insidious poison in them and it's this sense of emptiness that they have now we know that emptiness is one of the criteria related to bpd it's experiencing a lot of a lot of folks that i've worked with over the years as it relates to bpd and things like that and it's dealing with the sense of loneliness and it's confronting this sense of loneliness but it's sometimes there and sometimes it can be this spiral that pulls you downward and it is for a lot of my clients loneliness can be really problematic and he can drive the sense of obsessive love and attraction but in a very unhealthy way now that we've discussed the components of limerence let's explain something to your bpd so this is me talking directly to your bpd just because you may have not had a model of love and attraction that is healthy it doesn't mean that you cannot have one and make one to do this you have to challenge your core content resist the default urge to obsess to overcome with fear and loneliness and instill yourself with hope the hope is not through another but through yourself and i understand the intense need to connect with another to feel whole right as i've worked with this with many of my clients over the last two decades that i've been doing this and focusing on this field but they've overcome it and so can you remember that you define your worth this is a hill to climb and it takes effort and commitment to do it differently and you totally can doing it differently means changing core content and those maladaptive patterns that come out of limerence it means building a sense of self but you may be saying but how do i do this and it may sound a little cliche but there's a reason a cliche is a cliche is that you have to believe you're worthy of love that is healthy and that is directly related to your core content we have negative core content and positive core content and you want to be in relationships that fulfill that positive sense of your core content it's easy to say and hard to do absolutely it is for sure but you want to resist that inner voice right that supports your negative core content and feeds your urge to self-destruct a lot of folks along the bpd spectrum when they have a good experience they don't feel worthy so to engage in maladaptive patterns which then drives them back to this sense of loneliness the sense of hurt the sense of pain whatever it may be that fulfills that script that you have and that is what you're used to so when you're outside of that when that comfort zone outside your comfort zone that is maladaptive and unhealthy and you get outside of that which is healthy you engage in the maladaptive patterns to bring you back but what you want to do is you want to resist going back when you have good experiences you want to relish in those and appreciate those and recognize that you have the efficacy to engage in those push back and commit to going forward i want you to be ever cognizant and aware of your core content and its impact on you push back on those spirals that loneliness spiral that depressive spiral whatever it may be stop the spin right when it's small before it becomes dorothy's tornado right and you stop the spin by sometimes you can put like some cold water on your face and recenter yourself you can if if you start to isolate when you get senses of loneliness then go out and be in public just people watch do things that break the spin feeling worthy takes time and i know i know it's scary it's scary for a lot of my clients too but you can build a solid sense of self and through doing this you find that the love that you want not the unhealthy love you feel that you need to breathe or the dependent love that is unhealthy and scary and that's been feeding you for too long but that healthy love that you want to be experiencing the relationship you want to be in that feels satisfying that is good that helps to build you up that's the love that you get by defining and building this sense of self and controlling the spin and building your sense of positive core content and you totally can do it and i hope that you enjoyed the video please like share and subscribe and thank you very much have a good day thanks bye

Channel: Dr. Daniel Fox

Views: 125,832

Keywords: anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, borderline relationships, bpd, bpd favorite person, bpd relationships, bpd symptoms, bpd treatment, daniel fox, depression, dr fox, dr fox personality, i love you, life hacks, limerence, lonely, love, love obsession, mental health, mental illness, mood, narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, npd, obsession, obsessive love, personality disorder treatment, personality disorders, treatment for bpd

Id: JaYLZB0zLIc

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020