LIMERENCE & Lost Love: What Happens When Your Ex Comes BACK?

if you grew up without consistent love and safety and validation from your parents you've probably already noticed how vulnerable you are to the idea of a great love a great love that just shows up in your life like there's ordinary people who are actually in your life and maybe you're single maybe you have a partner but there's this other hypothetical relationship in your imagination and it's just legendary it's beyond what other people normally experience it's a perfect union kind of love and you have a deep sense of what that feels like for you to be loved for who you really are to be safe and to be certain that you are in the right place in the right relationship in the right life and chances are you have someone in your mind who feels like they are that person for you and chances are they aren't actually with you now these are the perfect growing conditions for what we call limerence which is a state of infatuation or obsession that people with cptsd can be especially prone to it can happen to anyone but with trauma and neglect in childhood it just seems to get a real foothold sometimes so sometimes you're going to get limerent feelings for someone you're acquainted with sometimes it's someone famous or imaginary and sometimes it's someone who is actually in a relationship with you but in a limited way that leaves a big empty space for that obsessive waiting hoping searching obsessively for clues and evidence that they love you that often goes with limerence so i got a letter yesterday from someone i'll call lisa and she writes dear anna my first marriage was 32 years ago with my best friend ever or at least i thought so mike and i were so connected in so many ways i didn't expect that i was in love with him until i was it took one and a half years for us to recognize that become a couple and get married it was great but then it wasn't he was doing drugs and i had to make him leave lisa says i was devastated and it seemed he was too he was sobbing his brains out yet didn't want to go to rehab he didn't want to do the work to keep us together i came from a nightmare home with screaming verbal abuse physical abuse mostly my mom and brother got the physical abuse what i did was hard-hearted as everyone seemed to observe mike was the best thing that ever happened to me i was so crushed confused and broken but i recall saying to myself i can't be like my mom and stay in an unhappy situation so i did what i had to do and we split got my pencil here and i'm circling things i want to come back to when i go through this letter again but let's just read through now i remained in touch with mike's parents especially his mom after our divorce he was married two other times and divorced two more times his mom used to fill me in here and there but he was not our main topic we were actual friends with other stuff to discuss i never saw mike after the divorce because he moved to another city and that was that as soon as the internet became a thing i searched for him on a regular basis even though i was with a new boyfriend to whom i eventually got married it took me five and a half years to agree to marry him and when i did it was because i needed his health insurance so i could return to school my new husband and i did have fun through traveling having lots of friends and a lot of socializing still i searched and thought about mike on a regular basis i don't feel this was normal but i could not stop myself she says after about 25 years mike's dad died i asked his mom to please ask him if it was okay if i attended services she said no need to ask but i didn't want to feel intrusive the day came and at the service mike and i saw each other we hugged and cried for what seemed like an hour it was very emotional his latest girlfriend was there and we were introduced it was all laughs and a great to see you kind of vibe he asked if we could be in touch on social media and i agreed we never talked after that but would occasionally like each other's pet photos and little things like that very generic but i was secretly thrilled to know this guy again my first and biggest love the funniest smartest person i've ever known was back even if it was just via social media so two years later mike's mom died and he messaged me directly and from that point we became reconnected talking and laughing and he apologized profusely about drugs and ruining our marriage he even had a tattoo of us on his arm i was a bit freaked out by that but loved it of course all of this communication led to meetups and i'm skipping ahead a bit she says or this will go on forever the meetups led to a first kiss and then an affair he was now engaged to the girl i had met and i was still married we both seemed to love every moment then he decided to get an advanced degree for a new career and it all slowed down but we still communicated almost daily just nothing about hooking up it was mutual and equal then it wasn't i could feel the pulling back on his end but we continued on discussing school jobs sports and always music which was our biggest bond it's now been two years since we've seen each other i go to therapy and he goes to class it's been almost three years that he's been engaged she is loaded and his keeper if you will even after many times of him saying it'll never end until one of us is dead he's slipping away i know it and he knows it the problem is that i cannot stop thinking or obsessing over him i know it's affecting everything in my life although my husband doesn't know i'm sure he can tell part of me is gone i watch every video out there go to therapy speak to certain friends that know the truth nothing stops me from thinking about him i'm obsessed and i do not want to be i will always love him because i loved him but i'm never going to have him am i so bored in my marriage or am i traumatized once again by this ex-husband and due to my crappy childhood i have always missed mike and our fling just makes me miss him all over again it's ridiculous and i feel ridiculous i do not regret our time together but i need to make my brain stop because he's stopping and i'm now trying to stop reaching out i even sit on my hands so i do not message him he calls occasionally and we still text but i need to stop waiting and living just to hear from him and i can't my therapist said it's because of my miserable childhood and not getting my needs met then she says this is a trauma bond she's right you're right but how do i make it stop he can reach out that's fine but i need to stop living for it he doesn't want me back in the beginning i was the one in control and he wanted to know where i was and why he hadn't heard from me every five seconds but that quickly turned and now alas here i am lonely and longing for any bit of attention from him please help if you can from lisa oh lisa i'm so sorry this is one of the most painful things in life and right now the options that you're facing are all painful but i'm going to help you find the right way through okay i circled a bunch of things on your letter here that i wanted to come back to all right so i i believe you're in your 50s now so your first marriage was 32 years ago and mike had been your best friend ever and then you fell in love and you were married and it was really great at first but then it wasn't and the only thing you say about what was great then was it was great but then it wasn't that's a really short statement okay and the reason was because he was doing drugs and you didn't really say whether he had been using drugs the whole time and you just realized it or he got into drugs or what happened there but i know firsthand how devastating it is to love somebody who turns out to be using drugs and that it is an impossible situation and he didn't want to go to rehab and he didn't want to do the work to keep you together okay so clue number one about mike is not just that he was an addict and ruined your marriage but he he didn't want to do the work to keep you together all right and this shows up again later so here we go all right and then you explain and my heart goes out to you you come from a nightmare home with screaming verbal abuse physical abuse and mostly your mom and brother got the abuse that was how it was in my family too what i did you say was hard-hearted as everyone seemed to observe hold on a second there i actually think leaving somebody who's addicted to drugs and not willing to stop is not hard-hearted it's common sense it's common sense you don't give a lot of details about this but when i hear the whole story here of what happened and [Music] i i'm just going to take your word for it he was an addict and there is no happy relationship to be had with somebody who cannot stop using and some people who are using can stop and they can heal and it takes time but he wasn't doing that so i really think you did the right thing by getting out then all right but i can also see what it says to me that you feel like you were too harsh and i think that what got stuck in your mind is that you did it prematurely that you know maybe you shouldn't have that it was this great love it ended up being so hard to find anything and i believe that you guys loved each other i get it so then you say mike was the best thing that ever happened to you okay well okay i'm just gonna say accept that he turned out to be an addict and wasn't willing to do the work to be with you and so you know i know that later you married somebody who does do the work to be with you so i'm just going to sort of challenge that idea that this this like wild child guy that you were with was the best thing that ever happened to you what i what i'm hearing and i totally understand is that this relationship awakened a part of you that you don't ordinarily have access to and that's a beautiful thing and yet i i suspect in people like you and like me what that is is it's a it's a trauma memory and it's a it's the satisfaction of a trauma wound with a fantasy and as people with childhood ptsd we sometimes have a really hard time telling the difference between what is a great love and incredible compatibility and what is something that has all the painful knife wounds of what happened to us as kids when it was terrible and people could not do the work to honor us and treat us caringly lovingly in the way that we deserved all right you got that as a kid you got that in your marriage so i really questioned that it was the best thing that ever happened to you i at least know that something much better can happen for you okay and you say i was so crushed confused and broken but i recall saying to myself i can't be like my mom and stay in an unhappy situation so i did what i had to do and we split now i don't know if you noticed that but you've done exactly what your mom has done you are staying in an unhappy situation in this limbo and we're going to talk about what about your marriage um in a minute but i don't mean just instantly that that's the bad thing your limbo is a living hell you're suffering and suffering every day and you have been for a long time okay so um you know i'm the tough love fairy and i think on some level you kind of knew what i was going to say when you wrote but if you don't know i'm going to tell it to you with great love and great understanding and relatedness because i've been through this too so then you say i remained in touch with mike's parents and since you had been married to mike that's not crazy especially his mom and then he got married twice and divorced twice so he had had three marriages by the time you ran into him he's got a fiance for a fourth marriage and you know hey people with cptsd that's often what it looks like so no judgment but just saying he does have in the way that he has relationships he has this pattern of you know going in and going out going in and going out it's not working out and that would be also extremely consistent with somebody who was an addict and very charismatic all right some people are addicts and nobody would marry them because the drugs just blatantly make them awful to be around but he's a charismatic addict that's how i would describe it from the little you're saying so his mom would fill you in here and there but it wasn't your main topic you had an authentic relationship with her and you know after the way you grew up i totally understand holding on to the family that you once had when you were with mike all right so you never saw him after the divorce because he moved to another city and that was that and good good there were 25 whole years between getting divorced and bumping into him again and that's good boundaries but as soon as the internet became a thing oh wasn't that a crazy couple of years for those of us who get limerent right as soon as the internet became a thing i searched for him on a regular basis even though i was with a new boyfriend to whom i eventually got married and so you searched for him even though you were with a new boyfriend it took five point five and a half years to agree to marry this guy and when you did it was because you needed his health insurance so that you could return to school okay so i think what you're trying to tell me is but i never really love this guy but what you're accidentally telling me is something quite terrible all right you're exploiting somebody but here's the thing if you're going to be happy lisa you cannot live in such a way that deeply deceives and hurts and uses other people it just won't fly it doesn't work that way you can call it karma or you can call it inner peace but you cannot have peace and you will not find love you now i'm not rendering judgment on this marriage we're going to talk about that in a minute but the fact that you're trying to tell me oh i just went into it for health insurance that's that's just so morally wrong and so going into it just for health insurance is sort of saying i'm going to do something that looks like this conventional thing that people do called marriage but i'm not really doing it it's a material reason for so that i can go to school and if you grew up with trauma i bet you your youth was extremely complicated you didn't get that education really or you couldn't be present for it or you couldn't stay regulated enough to keep up with studies and move your career forward and also the whole thing about money like so many of us get financially hurt because of our trauma and because the families that we came from are so troubled like there's there is no money and that's i mean that's how i i grew up i got a little bit of money when my dad died when i was a teenager it was it helped a little bit but you know i was on financial aid for a little bit i got social security benefits because my dad had died while i was a minor you know i scraped together and it took me a long time to finish college because i had to work and you know i know what it is to have to like scratch your way through survival and how relationships play a role in that and and and so i i'm not standing here above you you know i had relationships that i just needed so i had somewhere to live i can see now how much what a soul-sucking thing that was for all concerned that i hurt other people that i couldn't be happy that i was never free that when i did meet really great men i had weird stuff complications going on in my life that made me not seem like an ideal match to them and they weren't really interested so okay so then you say your new husband and you did have fun through traveling you had lots of friends you socialize a lot and you still searched and thought about mike on a regular basis and you didn't feel this was normal but you couldn't stop yourself so uh-huh yeah that's you know that's when you have limerent tendencies that's what you're going to do somebody comes along and the idea that you know you had this miserable existence before that was so terrible that you had to rip yourself out of a marriage to get out of it but now it's going to be better and that idea comes in and that is what we do that's how trauma distorts our thinking and when it gets control over our lives it takes us right off the tracks so i'm here i'm your tough love fairy i'm just calling it for what it is you got limerent you know that's a like a infatuation an obsession based on somebody you don't you're not actually with like if you were actually with him the same old problems would manifest and you it's interesting in your whole level letter you never say whether he stopped using drugs maybe he did and maybe he didn't but if that's not like a hugely significant fact about him whether he's using or not he's still in that addictive behavior that's i mean that's yes that he's having an affair he he gets into an affair right after he gets engaged like who does that right who does that is somebody who has just as much fear and avoidance as you have some people do avoidance by you know they just don't get into relationships but some of us have this subtler way where we want the simulation of a relationship or a marriage but we don't give ourselves to it and limerence really comes in as a way to sort of like take this huge piece of our heart and our love and our our like the thing that we have to give to another person if it were to be for real we we were like here i'm gonna i'm gonna direct that over here and then with this person i'm gonna have this limited thing and some people will criticize it and say oh it's a strategy so that you don't get hurt i don't think it's conscious it's not my experience that it's anything conscious it's uh you know it's just like i can't help feeling like i need to eat food every day i can't help feeling like i need to breathe every day and there's a lot of behaviors that we can't help they come so naturally to us because they're just wired in there but while we do have to breathe and eat every day we actually can change these behaviors we can uh work on that brain level we can work on the cultural level the social level we can heal these cptsd symptoms so take heart all right there is a way out of this there's a way out of this hell and into peace and happiness for you and something that feels good and just like organically good for your life all right it's here for you and so i'm going to go through the letter and find it okay i mean i know where i'm going with this okay so then mike's dad died and um he contacted you directly or no the mom contacted you and you came and you saw him and you got into the affair so yes we started talking about the affair you were thrilled to know him so what's interesting is when you first saw him he was with a girlfriend and everything was like hey great to see you we're friends we're introduced so right away everybody goes into a fake persona or at least you do i can't really speak for the other two uh surely this girlfriend has been jealous and upset about you i mean unless she's completely high all the time and doesn't feel anything she's noticing there's something going on right so you see him and you're thrilled but everybody pretends oh yes we're just friends you know we used to be married hi how's it going and then he says can we stay in touch and yeah you know that's not like crazy to stay in touch after 25 years it seems like everybody can be friends but the energy the electric energy that you were feeling probably he was too and especially because he's an addict or that's my experience that these things like sometimes we're just tripping in our own mind but sometimes both people feel them and the fact that he entered into an affair with you means he was feeling it so i don't doubt there was a real love between you and a real connection and that even 25 years like you could feel it right away but oh why is life like this sometimes the great love you feel is not compatible with daily life and there it is you know it's just it's this great you know thing that brings you out of yourself and helps you experience the eternal and feel connected with it and no union with another person except life with that person sucks it just it can't be done they won't do it they can't do it they have an addiction they're with somebody else and you know he was only engaged and i know you thought about this lisa you didn't write about it but he was only engaged he could have broken that engagement and he chose not to um so that was your clue and it sounds like you were like well my ro my marriage you know i i never was really feeling it and i feel this and maybe i can have both things all right you're certainly not the first person to give that a try and but just like everybody who's given it a try you got into a place of great pain and so another thing i wanted to say that was significant you know i noticed that you had a like a lack of empathy for your husband i noticed you have a lack of empathy for mike's now fiance that you have a lack of empathy for her i just didn't hear you say anything acknowledging what she was going through and so you know you may have seen my video about how complex ptsd can give us narcissistic traits and that's what happens the need for love is so voracious and so consuming that it drowns out empathy for other people ordinary empathy and i think intellectually you must realize that this woman is something terrible has been done to her by you and by mike and it's still being done by you guys because he's still in touch with you and you're still you know wanting him and hoping he'll leave and and what about her so again you know i i've been in your shoes but it's see when you're in the middle of limerence it is it's another sort of weird kind of brain state where you you cannot you can't perceive the full spectrum of reality and i'm just here outside your limerence just going oh yeah this is terrible you're a good person but you're doing a bad person thing that's really inconsiderate towards two people who are being robbed of something that they've been promised and that they showed up for in good faith right and that is just morally devastating and there's i there's just no way to really live your life that way and be happy so i want you to take hope it's like there it is and you it's funny like you've been in therapy all this all these years and your your therapist is talking to you about it your friends are talking to you about it and you know you say you're watching videos but none of those things are doing anything about it and i don't know if people are calling you out on the fact that you're not taking action on this what i hear you doing is you're waiting for him to decide if he's gonna like you know call you or give you a little bit of that you know intense love that you are craving now it is like an addiction isn't it it is and it's it's the stuff that what it does to your life is just like what drugs do to a person's life so i just keep going back like you could not stay in an unhappy situation so you did what you had to do and you split and um and that's where you are right now that's where we're going so first we're going to deal with the matter of mike okay it's been two years since you've seen each other you're going to therapy he goes to class he's still engaged he still hasn't gotten married and i'm not surprised and i feel for that girlfriend that fiance that he's having an affair on the whole time you're very logical you're very reasonable you i can tell you're a good person but this one little bitter line comes out about about mike's fiance she's loaded meaning she has a lot of money and she's his keeper if you will so that sounds like some envy that she has money and you don't and that's why he's with her uh and you might be right you might be right if it's any satisfaction i i don't think it's going to work out between them given the way that he's treated her and um it sounds also exploitative so he you you project that he's with somebody because he just wants the money but just calling you out here does that mean does that echo a little bit how you're with somebody also because you want the financial security so we've got two people here who had a great love but they were not spiritually ready for it and when i use the word ready i'm not trying to give you hope because i think that um this situation has been burned out too hard to call it back a really good relationship can only take so much and uh it will take it has certain like rubber band qualities a really good durable relationship like real love it has rubber band qualities in that you know there can be hurts and it can come back it comes back to its shape but the the stuff that you two have been through is so great and because um years went on with this like lying and hurting other people my take on it is this is too damaged it's there it's not only because he won't come back to you it's because the good thing has been tainted by the toxic stuff and it's so sad but that can really happen and that's why love is so precious that's why caring for other people is something we strive so hard to learn how to do as people with cptsd because our our traumatized behavior does spoil good and precious love and that happens but it doesn't have to anymore you can make today the day that you don't do that anymore today can be the day that you clear it up so you say you can't stop thinking or obsessing about them it's affecting everything your husband doesn't know i keep saying we're going to come back to your husband he's very important in this um he can tell a part of you is gone and um yeah i i called this out before you watch every video you go to therapy you speak to certain friends that know the truth so i guess you had the idea that if you just kept talking about your feelings about him that it would change i used to think that too when i was in a situation that was a little like this and i thought if i talked and talked and talked i would pop out of it but that's not what happened you know what happened it got worse and worse and worse and it took on properties that were nothing like love it was more like depression self-attack not wanting to live it was terrible and so you know what the day that changed it for me was is my friend who showed me the daily practice that i teach everybody every i mention it in every video it's always down in the description section if you want to try it but this is a technique what i really needed was not to be obsessed on something that wasn't there what i really needed was a way to find comfort and meaning and rest and clarity that's what i really needed and by a stroke of amazing good fortune i met somebody who showed me these techniques where i could just get these horrible thoughts and feelings out of my head onto paper and then rest my mind and it's two specific techniques it's easy it's free you can learn it too but that's what happened and my friend taught me this and then i said i'm still really troubled about this relationship you know so obsessed and can't let go she was just like oh having any kind of contact that has romantic intent with a married person is wrong and if you want to get happy now cut it off that simple okay and i literally nobody had ever told me that who i'd gone to for help now everyone knows that but i was being very selective i think about where i would go and so i was going to this therapist and we were drawing pictures about it and talking about dreams and you know why was i sad and what was the last interaction like and you know this is a long time ago but she had never said and i guess i had really carefully picked friends who wouldn't challenge me who would just say cut it off and when she said it to me it first it struck me like somebody just took a sword and stuck it through my heart and then i just realized of course that's it and i did it i cried for about 45 minutes and then i felt so good i felt free of course that's what it is you cut off contact with these people so you'll hear me say this we've been talking about limerence in other videos and you know people who get stuck and their whole you know your whole life it's like pouring cement on the engine of your life to get stuck in something like this it's it's so just life destroying and there's a solution and the first thing you do is you stop pouring cement on it you stop having contact so sometimes you need a friend like me to just get in there and say let's look at it were you happy no when you were with him you were miserable you know was he available to you no the one of the hallmark signs of a relationship that's good and right for you is that that person can be with you and will be with you and if they cannot or will not be with you they are not the love of your life they are not they might be an ex-love but they are not for you and there it is and i say that like in my really stern teacher voice because it just needs to get through it needs to get through the fantasy of like because when you are a kid and you're dealing with the abuse and the horrible stuff that you went through it's so easy to think right it's like yeah you know dad's hitting mom and my brother all the time but but actually everything's okay and then you go to school and everybody's like well how are you lisa and you're like i'm fine and right you get so good at that i call it crap fit you probably know that if you watch my videos you fit yourself to crap and you've been doing that all along you've been fitting yourself to crap and you've been trying to survive you've been using crap fit to get by in the world and so one little thing i want to put out there for you is if financial insecurity is a thing for you whatever you do about your marriage i really encourage you to get out there and get away to make money and to have health insurance so you never again have to set up some fake relationship that you're miserable in so that you can have health insurance i know how hard it is it's crazy expensive but it would be better to go on public assistance and get that kind of insurance which is not ideal i know and a lot of hassle and paperwork it's not ideal but it's still you still get to be a free person and not exploiting anybody else for your security not deceiving anybody else oh yeah your therapist says this is because of your childhood it's like yeah but i just wanna yeah obviously your childhood everything that's happening here is is what we do it's what happens to people with cptsd so i agree that it's because of that but i don't know what came after that you say you don't know how to make it stop so since your therapist didn't tell you here's what you do you're not going to see mike again all right if you want to use what my technique here don't see him again you send him a text if that's the safe way that you can communicate without harming any ever again his fiancee now whether they work it out or not that's no longer your concern but you're not going to get in there to apologize you're not going to try to explain anything and you're not going to try to get closure closure is a fake word it means opening really when you when you're addicted to somebody so you go in there so you send a text and say i've thought about it and i've realized that for my own mental health i need to not have contact with you this is goodbye and i wish you the best that's all you have to say you don't even have to say i wish you the best but go ahead you know just send that goodwill and then what you do is you block you block text calls social media if you ha and you can social media lets you block people as a person on youtube i know all about it when people get yucky i can block them so you can block people and if you have to change your number change your number you know since he shows signs of being somebody who's in active addiction either with substances and or in in relationships um getting cut off by you could trigger a fake you know that this like reaction of like oh give me give me give me and he might try to make contact with you so for you to be strong for that i'm just telling you he may do that again but it's going to be the same fake kind of interest in you that doesn't involve saying i've realized i love you i totally stopped using drugs i got my life together and i only want to be with you right now if you're willing to leave your marriage like if he he didn't say that and if if he anything he says now to try to keep the little dopamine thread going with you because that's what it is right life feels empty and and you can always like send a little text and get that little he called and he's getting the same thing from it and he makes contact when he needs a little lift when he's feeling empty all right if when a person loves you they don't put you through this this is such a hard video isn't it lisa and um but i i just want to be straight with you it's not love when somebody does this to you keeps you on a string and does not show up to be in your life and and and give you love so you can have love you can have it and this brings us to the question of your husband so you're in a marriage that what you're saying is not really a real marriage that you got into it for financial reasons and that you have friends together and you've had travel and it's fun but you're not really feeling it it may be that you got married under false pretenses and the right thing to do for his sake and we really have to consider what's best for him because getting married is making a promise to somebody and sometimes we have to break that promise but this this requires careful thought whether you think that if you could detox from this addictive relationship you've been in if you if you would like to give that some time to see if your feelings can blossom for your husband i would totally back you on that but it has to be a really clean thing and and whether you do that or whether you immediately exit the marriage i'm really encouraging you to have to possibly change your therapist i think i think therapy is a great idea but if you haven't been if you had therapy for two years and you don't know how to make these things stop which is just a tactical set of actions if you don't know i think you may want to get a therapist who's a little more experienced with love addiction and who can help you draw your boundaries and hold them and talk more about the boundaries and not the feelings that make you want to cross the boundaries the feelings are going to be there it'd be like if somebody were addicted to drugs and just wanted to go talk about the drugs all the time and how it felt to be high and how much you miss them rather than okay what are you going to do to stay clean today right what are you going to do to stay away from the people who you know are going to be tempting to you let's make a plan so those are the people you need friends too so friends who really support that one thing you can do i have a dating course and this you know i feel like this is not the time for you to go dating but what i want to call your attention to is that i start everybody out with writing down what they really want what do they really want and so you can start now writing that down and as you detox and as your mind clears you can keep updating that and to get clearer what you really want but under no circumstances i just know you don't you don't want some guy who's like engaged to somebody else like why would you want that right that's not what you want so you can begin to just lay out there there is something you want and that can kind of help you endure the withdrawal that's going to come it is withdrawal as you let go as you let go for good and make no more contact with this guy who's been life sucking for you you were doing okay and then this came and so now there's still time for your life to be happy there's time for you to have a wonderful relationship so your husband is stuck by you somehow he doesn't know that's a little odd because it seems like it might you know anybody sensitive might know but maybe you've been very good at hiding it but i think that a therapist and friends could help support you over time to make a decision within 90 days if you're going to try to make it work with your husband or not and he certainly deserves a chance as a person but if if you're not feeling it then the most loving and honorable thing to do is to end it is to end that relationship and i thought a lot about this question of whether you tell them what's been going on that's a hard one a lot of people are just like an automatic yes tell always you you know honesty you can't have a good relationship without honesty and so that's that's one that needs to be worked out with you and people you trust who know the details of the situation with you and your husband but i will just say that if you do decide to be honest it needs to be entirely limited to what needs to be said for him to understand the situation that you have not been fully in the marriage and either yes you want to work it out with him or know you're ending the marriage that it needs to be clear and not drag him into a chaotic confusing you know heart-wrenching thing so for that that's why i say i really encourage you to do this with a strong therapist or perhaps consider going to a 12-step program for love addiction and getting the best sponsor in the room you know go to enough meetings notice the woman who's really kick ass and ask her to sponsor you and to help you do this cleanly the thing about cptsd and especially um limerent thinking is we we can't think clearly for ourselves we have to bring other people into the decision process you can too okay you can do that the other thing i'm going to recommend whatever you decide to do or how to handle this is try out my daily practice you need a place to to self-comfort there needs to be a way to do that without resorting to texting him thinking about him talking about him and did i mention that don't just not have contact with him don't think about him don't talk about them and i know some thoughts are involuntary they'll come up in dreams but you can do this if you cut you have to like start training yourself if you catch yourself thinking about him have a go-to happy thought that you have instead all right and if you catch yourself talking about him just pull back and with your friends just say i'm trying not to talk about them i think this is an extremely underrated technique for getting somebody out of your mind don't think about them don't talk about them and so sometimes our friends and even therapists can enable us in continuing to stay obsessed by letting us talk about it and as if that's going to lead to some breakthrough if it hasn't led to a breakthrough by now i mean talking about it is necessary up to a point but if you haven't had a breakthrough yet i don't think it's going there i don't think that's going there what i see here is you need peace you need a nice clean slate sort of like somebody who walks into a river and bathes themselves and comes out on the other side and wraps themselves in a white robe and just being safe and putting down and cleansing away all this stuff you've been doing to try to find love that's hurting you and hurting other people and you'll find that when you're making a good and noble endeavor like this the right people to help you will show up and sometimes you'll just find that the wind is under your wings you get help you get help to get through the hard nights there's going to be a lot of tears a lot of feelings because that's what addictions do is they're helping us handle and suppress this well of pain we've got and the interesting thing about pain is it's just sadness it's grief it's some anger and if especially if you have a comforting technique like the daily practice that i teach it can just kind of come up and you cry and you feel mad and it just like rolls through you and it's a it's just a wave that passes and then you have a quiet period where you can do the laundry get a job you know do the dishes call your friend get your nails done you know whatever it is that's just daily life for you right so that's how it's done you asked how do i make it stop and that is how all right so i just wish you every blessing and good luck and i know you can do it now for anybody watching this if you think that childhood trauma has affected your ability to have relationships i have a quiz that's about the symptoms of cptsd related to how we get into and form romantic relationships you might want to take that quiz and if you want to see more about this kind of relationship and how we can draw boundaries on it you can watch this video right here and i will see you very soon [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 132,388

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Id: hGG54he9XMs

Length: 42min 53sec (2573 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021