LIMERENCE: Abandonment Wounds Cue Partners to Discard You

any loss of a parent can leave an emotional wound on a kid that it can affect you all your life really but when the abandonment was intentional and your parent left the family for i don't know someone knew and they didn't return or they only sporadically made contact when it was convenient for them but not when you needed them or they totally went away a pattern gets laid down that can be really hard to break in your adult relationships how many times have you fallen for someone only to find that you weren't valued you were being used you were not treated like a real person you were the side chick and then you held on to the relationship anyway the consequences of this pattern they don't just go away when you meet the right person because the pattern actually will drive the right person away before they even get to know you and i want to talk about how that happens now i got a letter from a 25 year old woman i'll call emmy and she writes dear anna i had a crappy childhood which made me hyper-independent but deeply insecure about my looks and self-esteem my father was pretty much absent and he and my mom never really had a relationship but they didn't break up either he was an alcoholic and died when i was 12. but up until then the dynamic was that he was coming home to me my brother and my mom he lived in a different town and he would pick up a random job usually with my mom's help and connections and he would stay with us for several months not giving us a penny and after that all of a sudden without saying anything he would just leave and go back to his town my mom let this happen all the time and i was used to the back and forth relationship they had and now that i'm an adult i go to therapy because i need help with this as i realize the depths in which the whole situation has affected me so fast forward emmy says to a few years ago when i met someone at work who i thought would be amazing for me he was charming young smart and generally cool i was several months out of my three-year relationship which was a fail in its own right and i was concentrating on my job that i had recently started one day when i saw this guy let's call him noah i felt as if it was meant to be as if time stopped and i could only see him at that moment soon after that we went out after work and it turned out he actually had a girlfriend and that was the first red flag but i was too into him and we ended up secretly hooking up shortly after this went on for a while and it was good we went on dates to the theater and he treated me like a princess but he was still in a relationship and didn't do anything about it it was also his first time ever cheating and i felt as if i were a horrible person because i let him do this late around christmas time that year just before my birthday he said his girlfriend had come to visit him randomly at his at his university town and that they were on good terms and so he just wanted me to know and i was broken because this meant it was over now after that we had no contact for five months when i received a phone call from him saying that they broke up and he would like to take me on a date and see where things could go i still loved him deeply and i agreed we had sex on our first meeting red flag number two he was very clear he didn't want anything serious from me but my damaged self hoped he would maybe turn to love me if i was persistent enough stupid i know says emmy this hooking up experience which i thought would turn into a relationship would continue for a solid year with this being said i never got to meet his friends he would tell me about the parties he went to but i was never invited he kept my existence secret from his world and that hurt me very much but i coped with it because i thought i would lose him if i pushed for anything serious red flag i know the last month of that year of hooking up everything seemed nice and i was hopeful we saw each other the day before his birthday i gave him a present i had prepared in advance he really liked it the next day he celebrated his birthday and i was not invited then a whole month passed and he was totally silent no calls no messages nothing when i would message him he would not answer for hours finally i saw on instagram he uploaded a picture of himself with another girl clearly they are together and i broke down like i've never done before in my life the girl looks a lot like me which made me feel even worse because that to me meant that my personality was the issue all right some people really don't like the sound of my pencil but here we go because this is how i make notes for myself i really want to come back to that when we i'm going to read the letter again after this i had stomach aches for weeks after that when i messaged him to ask what was going on he said that he didn't feel obliged to inform me of what was going on in his life after two years of knowing this person being his friend and sexual partner he said this it made me downward spiral pretty badly and triggered my childhood abandonment issues i unfollowed him on instagram and facebook but throughout that the time that passed i leaned in to message him several times which i deeply regret it has now been seven months since i've seen him and this happened and i can't seem to stop thinking about him it got to the point where i obsessively check on him on social media fantasize about him and wait for him to come back again rationally i know this will not happen and i'm wasting my time and energy and that i deserve better but this is my childhood loop of waiting for my dad to return my therapist describes both my dad and this guy noah as narcissists and tries to help me let go but so far i've not had much success now we live in the same city and i'm constantly scared we're gonna randomly meet and he would be with this girl sometimes i fantasize about him seeing me on the street and regretting his decision to leave me my self-esteem has been totally destroyed and i have developed a fear of men in general i'm afraid i will remain alone and lonely because of this and i'm deeply scared i'm deeply sad and confused and i know i need to move on but i have no idea how thank you for helping me i really need help and advice warm regards emmy okay emmy i know how and i'm going to help you all right there is a way and i'm going to teach you how how you can do this tactically and how you can prevent this from happening again and how you can make sure that you leave behind all the intense emotions of what happened here it's gonna involve a little bit of tough love okay but it'll be said with love so get ready here we go all right i'm going through the letter again emmy your childhood i i my heart just flies out to you this is awful it's just awful this thing where your parents broke up and got together and broke up and got together and he was never really with you and he came back when it was convenient i can totally see how that would have affected you everything that you're describing just sounds like a really logical wound like acting on a wound i get it it's not that different from how i grew up to i understand it very deeply actually and then no money and and your mom putting up with it and not doing anything about it because whatever maybe you understand her feelings as few others can now because you're in the middle of you know tolerating that kind of behavior too or trying not to anymore so you met this guy noah at work and he seemed amazing charming young smart generally cool and you were several months out of a three-year relationship that was terrible so i and focusing on your job so you were like all good all primed you know all that good place that we get to after a painful breakup but we're kind of you know operating really well again so good you're in that place very attractive i bet and one day you saw him and i s i'm just circling the word saw all you did was see him and you got limerence about him and if you if if anybody hasn't heard the word limerence limerence is the word for an obsession or infatuation for somebody that's not really a relationship sometimes there's a quasi relationship or a friendship or a friends with benefits thing or sometimes there's no relationship at all it could be for a celebrity or somebody you once knew but the sign of it is you'll be looking for signs of hope that you can hold on to and it can go on a very long time and it's a horrible painful way to throw away good years of your life so we take limerance really seriously here it's really really common for people who are traumatized and abandoned and not treated like real people you were a real girl with real feelings and needs who needed real love and real presence from real parents so just this is not your fault that this happened but here it is and a lot of us here we totally get it all right so you had a feeling that it was meant to be it was like time stopped and you could you could only see him at the moment you know that's the kind of description that we grew up on in pop songs and love stories on tv but it also is just like classic limerence you know time stops it's meant to be it's possible that we could have those feelings with somebody it would work out with and that's considered one of the one of the ways that limerence can turn out turn out is that the two people actually get together and then real life sets in and and causes the limerence to crumble and fall away but usually it doesn't it doesn't end up with two people getting together it's a little different too than you know it has all those signs of what ordinary falling in love is like which is also kind of magical and you know hyper hyper real but the main thing about it is you're really zeroing in on somebody who is not giving it back to you that's that's kind of the main thing that's what we're concerned about here okay so soon after that you and noah went out after work and you learned right away he actually had a girlfriend so that was the first red flag and i just circled your use of the word red flag you mentioned that here you sometimes say it about yourself i think you're saying it about him here but when somebody has a girlfriend and you would like to date them that's not a red flag i just just for definition here i want to suggest a different definition a red flag is a sign that somebody is um bad for you now this this may qualify as that too but the fact that he's dating another that he's dating that he has a girlfriend is not a red flag it's a no flag it's a no-go zone it's a it's a barrier it's a wall it's a giant fence he's somebody you can't date because he has a girlfriend now we know that some people end up together because they went in and started dating somebody you know secretly that has happened before but it doesn't tend to go well it doesn't tend to happen often and if you have cptsd and your attachment wounds are running the show it will pretty much drive you into a very sad lost place and so for those of us with cptsd this is what this is what i teach here we set ourselves a higher standard we just set ourselves a higher standard and one thing we don't do is date people who already have somebody all right and then you mentioned there that you were too into him and you ended up secretly hooking up shortly thereafter so that's another thing if you want to heal from cptsd the high standard i suggest you adopt is don't have relationships in secret don't go out with anybody where you have to hide it from the people in their life or your life okay um and i would with the exception of maybe like some abuser from your past you know that would be appropriate to have that boundary but nobody with another partner already nobody who you ha who requires you to become a liar becoming a liar is so destabilizing for anybody let alone somebody with cptsd because what is that wound it's a wound to our ability to perceive like what's true and what's real and you know how when you get involved in something deceptive is you lose track of reality yourself it'll start to take your cptsd symptoms and just weaken you it'll start to bring you down it's very toxic to do have to do anything dishonest and as a practical matter who wants to date somebody who lies right who wants to date somebody who cheats now i totally understand a lot of us have done it here but i'm just i'm just like laying out reality here because i'm on the other side of that and i woke up and i'm here i'm just like no don't date somebody who cheats they're not a good boyfriend they're just not a good boyfriend or girlfriend somebody who cheats and they've just shown you it's more than a red flag it's a wall it's a it's a no flag okay so this secret hooking up went on for a while and it was good you say lightly oh it's good it's like uh well i questioned that word good i don't think it was good we went on dates to the theater and he treated me like a princess okay hold on emmy this is where you're crap fitting part you're compartmentalizing your experience so you can say when we were at the theater he opened doors for me he bought the tickets we had a nice dinner it was like being a princess except for the part where then he has to hide you from his life and doesn't spend time with you and you're not invited to his birthday party and he goes home and he's sleeping with somebody else okay that is not the princess treatment not the princess treatment at all that's treating you as a booty call okay that's the tough love it's not even friends with benefits because it involves a great big lie you know it's definitely putting you in this secret second-rate relationship and we could talk till the cows come home about what's wrong with this guy why is he doing this and people in the comments are going to want to but i'll just remind you he didn't write to me you wrote to me and i want to teach you how to get away from him and this kind of thing from this kind of thing and how you can head this off so that you just don't involve you you don't get wrapped up in this because once you go down this road it just has a way of like binding you to it it's so hard to get out it's a lot easier to stay out in the first place and i'll we'll talk about that in a minute okay so he was in a relationship and he didn't do anything about it so he had yeah this was comfortable for him to have his public girlfriend and his secret girlfriend all right that worked he was doing something about it he was juggling it all and you were making it work for him all right you were part of this too you made that work you you respected this thing where you had to be secret you continued to answer his calls and i'm not saying this to be mean or trying to get in your face or anything i'm just trying to help you because what happens i saw you know your therapist what you quoted your therapist anyway is like oh they're narcissists i don't know if your dad and this guy was a narcissist i definitely hear there's something with your dad i think this guy's being a jerk at the very least but our concern is not what is wrong with the other people our concern is about helping you take back all your power all of it and no longer relying on um the belief that other people are they're sick and they're going to change or they're sick and it's their fault like at this point in time if you continue to stay connected to people who treat you this way now the responsibility has just come 100 into your hands you are the one who gets to decide whether you date people like this and i know how hard it is i know how your mind plays tricks on you and i'm going to teach you how to support yourself so that you can exercise that power that you have and have always had that you just couldn't access because of cptsd you can access your own power to stay out of trouble like this and to instead save your energy to direct towards somebody who really fits what you want to then you say it was also his first time ever cheating maybe but but i have a feeling it's not going to be his last okay and i felt that it that i was a horrible person because i have let him do this so just just from from one woman to another from one person who has had codependent thinking around this stuff to another the problem isn't that you let him do it it's not your responsibility to stop him from treating his public girlfriend in this way it's your responsibility to not do this yourself so the horrible person feeling is some shame and the shame you know i always make a difference between earned shame and free floating shame that we just sort of inherit from people treating us badly but sometimes we do things that we authentically feel ashamed of and it would be like having a secret relationship with somebody is um it's wrong it's just wrong right and there is a third party this his public girlfriend who apparently is being deceived and and you're part of that even though the boyfriend i know everybody's going to be like no but the boyfriend he's the one he's the one totally he he's the center of the of the problem but anybody who goes along with it is corroborating with him they're being part of the problem too and that is a bad feeling and even if you can't acknowledge it in the moment it's going to be in the back of your mind you're like i don't know i just feel ashamed of myself so that's a really important piece of healing too is that learning to get real about anything anything that you're doing that is earning you a feeling of guilt or shame resentment at yourself that you're not living up to your own standards of how to be the good person who you really were made to be and can be and need to be that it feels good to be your best self all right so so just i'm i'm validating that that that feeling you have it's real so then you say later on christmas time that year just before my birthday he said his girlfriend had come to visit him randomly in his university town and they were on good terms so he just wanted me to know and i was all broken up because this meant it was over so gosh what an inglorious ending i just wanted you to know she's here and you knew it was over but good over is a good place to be in this situation because it was tearing your life apart and keeping you out of having any kind of real love so after that you had no contact for five months when you received a phone call from him saying that they broke up and he'd like to take me on a date and see where things could go so when i was reading your letter i was like oh see where things could go so maybe that kind of you know cruddy second-rate relationship that you guys had maybe it planted a scene and he thought you know maybe maybe really he really did have feelings and you say i still loved him deeply and i agreed then you say we had sex on our first meeting okay i'm gonna circle that you knew i would right red flag number two you said the next thing you say is he was very clear he didn't want anything serious from me and then so i'm just wondering so what does it mean when he says he wants to see where things could go i'm guessing it just means what first base second base third base fourth base right where can it go if he's not going to do anything serious so i guess he was testing the waters to see if you would go back and be a sort of secret friend with benefits you say your damaged self hoped he would maybe turn to love you if if you were persistent enough and you say stupid i know and i want you to stop calling yourself stupid i would just say traumatized that's trauma that's trauma driven thinking it's it's not just you it's like everybody who got treated like you will go into that thinking and just think maybe i can earn the love because i i agree that that is probably a vestige of what came from your parents on the other hand i don't think it's that helpful to just keep thinking i act this way i feel this way because my parents like yes that started it but now you're busy creating your own self-traumatizing behaviors and in time those will start to take over your life till you can't even remember the original you know hurt that happened it'll be what you've done to yourself and how that's accumulating and putting a pattern kind of burned into you and that's not good you don't want that all right it's really good that you're only 25 and you're willing to change this now that would be very positive you absolutely can change the course of your life and people do do it at any age just saying but you have the opportunity to not have more relationships like this and i'm happy for you with that so tip number one in any kind of new relationship or uncertain relationship or somebody's had no contact and they treated you terribly and they come back one workaround you can do now your attachment wound is gonna say i'm gonna take everything i get if sex is a possibility i'm doing that i'm gonna i'm just running into the fire here i'm just gonna get everything i can and then hope love comes but i that's trauma driven thinking it makes sense for a trauma brain but it's very unstrategic so if a guy is interested in you you running towards sex especially after you've been mistreated actually cues him this is true for people of any gender you know like you cue another person i don't value myself you can do whatever you want with me you can treat me bad and i will just run towards you and sleep with you and i know you feel shame about that and i'm not saying this to shame you i want you to not feel ashamed about this i just want you to forgive yourself because you have trauma you're just like everybody with trauma and then i want you to adopt a strategy a set of workarounds that put guard rails on that behavior so that you don't self-sabotage like that because i don't think this guy i don't think there's there was any hope for this guy very early on but when you meet somebody again who you're really interested in you treating yourself with self-respect going slow and if they treat you badly getting out that's everything if you get out that gets you out and now you're not in a terrible relationship and you're free to try again with somebody else but let's say someone was rude to you or inconsiderate towards you you creating distance in response to that which is healthy appropriate is a signal to them oh wait this is a self-respecting person this person has boundaries i better get on my toes and so a lot of people are not terrible people necessarily i don't really know about this guy you dated but you know a lot of people walk around and they're um you know they're just following attraction and they're attracted to people who have a level of mental health and self-respect that they value and so that's it's important to have respect not just for yourself even though for yourself is the number one reason but also just consider how people see you when they meet you so strategic sometimes you act as if you have boundaries even though you don't honestly have them yet you just want to call the guy you want to keep calling the guy who's not calling you and chasing him and sleeping with him when he finally gives you an evening you want to do it but you have to be strategic sometimes and just make yourself not because intellectually you know that that's going to bring you down it's going to cause him to disrespect you it's going to get you entangled in a terrible situation again you just have everything to lose by that so we use guard rails and it's the same way that somebody who maybe had had problems with drinking is going to maybe not hang out in bars anymore you know at least for a while until their sobriety is really easy for them and they're not going to maybe when i um stopped smoking i didn't want to hang out with other people who smoked i just couldn't do that for several years because i knew if i was around i would i would just make that like self-destructive decision if it was there for me so i did a couple of likes changes i didn't drink alcohol i didn't hang out with other people who smoked and i did this for like eight years it's a long time and and i think when i first quit smoking i thought that i would um find that impossible to even do a week but i just did it one day at a time and then i made similar changes around how i did dating and it really didn't take long once i made a decision to behave as a self-respecting person in dating even during moments of crisis when i was just like i don't care i don't care i'm just so sick of being alone i just you know just gonna run right into the fire and i stopped running into fires and it turned out like so quickly did it change the outcome so i really would like you to look at that if you want to learn the techniques of how i did it i teach it in my dating course the dating course is linked below every video i make you can go check it out if you want it's an online course and and then i provide coaching around that as well so then you said this hooking up experience which i thought would turn into a relationship went on for a year and with that being said i never got to meet his friends he'd tell me about the parties he went to but i was never invited he kept my existence secret from his world and that hurt me very much but i coped because i thought i would lose him if i push for anything serious emmy i just i just want to say like you could have written all that about your dad when you were a kid you know that you you didn't get to be in his life he just came when he just you know needed a little something your dad just needed a job and you put up with it because you thought you would lose him all together and that's what trauma-driven thinking does it just it stays stuck in that when you are a kid like that will be all the parent love you're gonna get and you take what you can get and you learn to do whatever mental tricks you have to do to just live with it and accept it and feel loved by it and and spin it up in your mind as like real love when you're dating the job is to stop doing that like that was your coping mechanism now your job is to stop doing that stop crap fitting stop fitting yourself to crappy treatment and get and wake up and look what's happening if you have already lost him a guy who doesn't even invite you to his birthday he's not with you you've already lost him and trauma thinking goes well i better just hold on to this because that's all i'm gonna get but you know what you're a 25 year old woman there are going to be so many chances if you are a 25 year old woman who treats herself with love and self-respect that's what it is and has boundaries so many new possibilities will open up before you so i know you know that that's your trauma talking that goes i have to hold on i should put up with this i should never complain that i'm being treated as dirt here i know you know and i know it's really hard to change but here's what you can do okay so when he didn't call you and he didn't reply and you called him i know you know this but don't call you're basically just signing up you're basically just sending a message saying please disrespect me i'm in a bad place i have limerence and limerence for somebody who's not into you feels like stalking it's really uncomfortable it never leads to love it's pretty awful and you may have had people do it to you before and i want you to think about what it's like so the thing about limerence is you know you tend to hide it like when you're in it you tend to hide it from people because when even when your friends hear about it they're like oh my god stop what are you doing no this feels weird it's very uncomfortable for people because it's coming from a really distorted place it scares people you know that you're doing that so that's part of why healing limerence means having at least one person that you're totally honest with about what's going on and allowing them to keep bringing you back and saying yep yeah i remember when you did that like last month too and and you know then right that he told you not to call him and he's not into you right and you keep having to be told and i'm not just you we everybody who gets limerent that's how healing begins you open up to reality and you quit hiding it like your secret stash of escape fantasy like you know it's a fantasy and it's it's basically like a drug it's like a little thing you're taking a hit off of to cope with life and how scary it is but i'm telling you you're ready you're ready to stop using a fantasy to get yourself through the day it's now officially causing you more pain than it's giving you relief and it's blocking you from finding love and i want you to find love i want you to have that and trust me this is the path limit relationships this is what you do you cut off all contact forever this some people will require an explanation not this guy he doesn't want to hear from you anymore all right and you saw on instagram he was with somebody else and he likes them enough that he doesn't even want you to be calling so that's your job is to take this now here's i i wanted to i set something straight for you you said it hurt that this woman looked like you because it meant that your personality is the issue and you know what we don't know that your par your personality might be exquisite it could have been perfectly perfect the thing that is the number one barrier here is the way you're treating yourself with disrespect you're a woman who allows herself to be the side chick i hate that word actually i'm sorry i'm saying it but let's just say it for what it is it's a it's a horrible role to play and side chick doesn't get loved side chick doesn't get respected and there are certain people who will use such a person for sex and they will go to any lengths to keep that person compartmentalized out of their life so it's not your personality it's that your trauma wound was was making it clear i don't know maybe your personality but i don't see any personality problem it's that your trauma wound was making you behavior rationally and accept bad treatment and you were signaling to him that you were a person without worth of course you have worth you're just acting like somebody who didn't but forget that guy he cheats we don't even want him anymore okay all right so you felt terrible and you tried to message him several times and it's embarrassing yeah i know we all know it's embarrassing being that person and now it's been seven months and you're still thinking about them and that's what we do but you may have seen me tell other people this and a lot of people will not tell you this but at a certain point when you can't stop thinking about somebody and you know that you must and you know that it's best for you here's what you do every time you catch yourself doing it you make yourself stop and you never ever talk about them to other people because that's what your limerent urge wants to do it wants to tell stories and i used to have this therapist i just went for years and i'm just like and then i had this dream about him and she'd be like oh why don't why don't you draw a picture of that or why let's draw that in the sand how you feel about that and i mean she would have talked to me forever about this it was finally when my friend who showed me my daily practice techniques and which by the way anybody who wants to learn them they really help get that excess emotion kind of grounded again she taught me this techniques and she was just like stop talking about it stop thinking about it if you have anything to say about this obsession you have put it on paper in these techniques and read it to me but i don't want to hear you talking about it i was like oh she's so mean oh it was the most loving thing anybody ever did so she would only hear about it if she was hearing me read what i wrote which was these techniques to get free of these fearful resentful thoughts that i need to be with this person i'll only be happy which was irrational it was totally irrational so your therapist says it's a childhood loop of waiting for your dad to return that much is true but i would just say you know i know you had you still have a relationship with your therapist so i don't want to mess with anything they're telling you but my two senses okay established no need to talk about that anymore all right you know why you're this way and the reason it's important to know that is to see that there's a rhyme and reason and to know it's not your fault honey okay it's not your fault you got like this but now this guy noah your dad none of them they are no help to you at all they are toxic influences and maybe you'll have a relationship with your dad at some point but all your healing is going to be about you getting in touch with what's going on and when you start having those thoughts about the ex you can just say ah i'm trying to run away from something sit down with your pen and paper and begin to use your techniques to just get real about what is it that's causing you to get scared or angry here and that's what my techniques do um i anybody wanting to try them i recommend you actually you can learn it in less than an hour but use the specific techniques because if you don't use the technique as taught it can make you feel more sad more angry more scared so this is a way to get free of the feelings to get a vacation from them you'll find that sometimes the hard feelings come back but they're a little bit less complicated now they're a little bit more actionable now so that can be really helpful so you're scared your self-esteem is down you're afraid you're going to be alone forever i'm so glad you see that that's like everybody's core fear with cbtsd that you know if we don't heal that's what's going to happen and there's some truth in that where if we keep pushing away real love that's what can happen so it's time emmy it's time it's your time to heal and i'm happy for you and it's not confusing how to cut this guy out of your life no contact block everything if you catch yourself thinking about it stop don't talk about him all right if you if your therapist indulges you in talking about it consider talking to your therapist about what i said and show them this video about why it's helpful to just quit quit talking about it there's nothing more to be learned about it bring all the talking into how are you going to make your life fulfilling for you today how are you going to deal with your cptsd triggers when little things come up and make you feel abandoned how are you going to deal with it when you feel attracted to somebody because you're saying you have this fear of men in general but you know what i realize you've been treated badly by men but you do not have to continue to be treated badly by man by men and the person who's going to do that is not some it's not a magic man who's going to come in and transform that it's you setting your boundaries in the way i'm describing all right you with boundaries you're going to have a great deal of control over the men that enter your life so it starts with getting clear about what you want what you deserve if anybody watching if you think that past trauma has affected your romantic relationships or gotten you stuck in limerence you might want to take my quiz my dating quiz it's down below there's a link to my free tools page on my website and there you'll find quizzes for different aspects of cptsd as well as my free course and if you open up that description section you'll also find all my courses and other tools down there that you can use to advance your healing if you want to learn more right now in a video about limerent relationships i've got one of my favorites lined up right here and i will see you very soon [Music] you

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 644,880

Keywords:

Id: 8VAR0Yt6H5c

Length: 35min 5sec (2105 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 25 2022