LIMERENCE: To Heal Obsession, Heal Wounds of Neglect

when we talk about trauma we don't talk enough about this the tendency in people who didn't get their emotional needs met when they were kids to form profound attachments to the idea of another person and to struggle to tell the difference between that idealized concept of that person and actual relationship it's happened to a lot of us and it's so so sad it sucks the soul out of you so i first talked about this a couple months ago i'll put a link to that video at the end of this one if you want to see it but the word for this phenomenon is limerence and ever since i talked about it there's been a huge reaction here on my youtube channel so many people have struggled with this before limerence is the word for a kind of romantic infatuation or obsession with someone that usually does not involve a full actual relationship sometimes it's with someone you know sometimes it's with a total stranger like a celebrity or someone from your past who you once knew but it takes over your mind so much so that it can seem to your friends like you're not yourself anymore it can seem crazy and one of the key signs of it is that rather than being in a relationship with someone you're thinking about them all the time going over and over the little bits of contact you had if you had any what they said what they did what they posted the dreams you had about them everywhere you go you're searching for a hidden meaning you know is it a sign that could possibly tell you that they actually love you even though they're not in your life so i'm going to be sharing some letters on this in the coming weeks and the first one i'm going to do is from someone i'll call elizabeth and she writes hi anna my name is elizabeth i want to ask a question about an emotionally unavailable man i have interest in it's more like an obsession she says let's call him max by the way i should first say that he has a public image in his country he's wealthy so he's not trusting of any person because as you might imagine wealthy people are taken advantage of easily anyway we knew each other through common friends but never really got to know each other there was no friendship between us when i wanted to pursue a relationship with him yeah i know it's unhealthy to chase a guy and tried to make my friend fix me up with him i was living in his country and was not far from where he lived anyway this happened in the past over five years ago i was very unhealthy back then i had a string of toxic relationships i had crippling anxiety and self-esteem issues so when i was chasing max then he didn't seem interested in me he also had toxic relationships to deal with and was also unhealthy he coped with his issues using alcohol but he got sober my friends told me about it although now i'm not sure that it was true that he got sober after a while i stopped being interested in him and found someone nice but we broke up shortly afterward after the breakup max contacted me on social media and asked me to talk with him over the phone however i wasn't at all in a good mental space at that time due to the breakup and a family death i was dealing with i was really crushed and i didn't expect max to message me so suddenly anyway i cut him short and said i couldn't talk to him but he should contact me later i truly thought he'd follow up with me later but he didn't this was four years ago and since then he has been silent three years ago i moved out of the country he was living in it wasn't the country i grew up in i moved to his country for studies and to get away from my abusive parents my mother is severely covert narcissistic person now i live in my native country i came back from abroad to live with my mother because i wanted to give her another chance it was a huge disappointment but i had to try it i sometimes think of max and what could have been between us and i'm not sure if this is healthy i also need to point out that he's 45 unmarried and with no children and i'm 39 unmarried with no children i did say goodbye when i left his country but of course there was no response from him on social media i don't know him well but from experience i have about men in general and my past relationships he's not toxic or unsafe he is however unavailable due to his own personal issues i'm circling things because i'm going to come back and go over this letter now that we live in different countries and don't have any contact with each other on social media he barely uses social media i'm not sure if something is ever going to happen again my question is this is what i feel for him limerence or healthy mature love you've talked about limerence on your youtube and i trust your opinion on this is it worth saving myself up for him or should i just bite the bullet and admit to myself that this was a fantasy that i indulged in and i only got crumbs from it you might ask why i'm holding on to him well we have many things in common we're both artists we're both smart creative and kind we have a sense of humor and we're world travelers we're friendly and we love people we also have similar values religious family work career values etc and we both struggle in relationships the difference is that he has accumulated a lot of wealth and i'm poor anyway my fear is that if i let him go i'll never find anyone like him the guys i usually meet are boring and have little personality or artistic skills max has an incredible personality which is why i couldn't cut ties with him emotionally all the time but i feel if i don't cut ties with him i'll wait for that social media message from him for the rest of my life and will stay single forever and this is frightening to me i feel like all this time i've built him up in my mind just because i was scared of putting myself out there and meeting someone new who's available and healthy who is responsive and does not run from me or ignore me i have cptsd due to being raised by my narcissistic mother and unavailable father and my mind believes that it is safer to stay in the past because at least i know what to expect from it i know how it will all go but change is unpredictable and gives me a lot of anxiety does this make sense all the best to you anna and thank you for listening to my story thank you elizabeth um yeah i think you got a case of limerence so let me see if i can help you uh go through and see where this is showing up and help you to set yourself free from it but let's see what you can learn from this alright so going back over the letter i wanted to ask a question about an emotionally unavailable man i have an interest in it's more like an obsession so right there i'm going to say yes it's more like an obsession and this diagnosis of him as emotionally unavailable i think that might be a misapplication of that now he might be he might not be what he is is i'm just going to tell you right up front he's shown no sign of being interested in you you got one contact from him on social media and it sounds like that's the only time he ever indicated an interest in talking to you all right so an emotionally unavailable person usually that would be somebody who you're in a relationship with and they try to be in the relationship but they can't love you or they can't be present for you but this is somebody who's just flat out unavailable it's not just emotional he's unable he's he's not there he's not even in your life you haven't had contact in four years so this is a big clue that this is a limerent relationship okay and then you say he has a public image because he's wealthy well so people who are wealthy probably get a lot more than the normal share of people who are interested in them and that's something to ask yourself um and sometimes the reason you know if he's artistic and wealthy you know you're not giving information about him and i appreciate that we don't really know but if he is well known and wealthy for his artistic abilities and he's very visible and known then sometimes that is a super attractive quality and sometimes could set off limerence and and when people have that highly visible profile it's easy to feel like we know them even when they don't really know us but i get that you were acquainted so you knew each other through common friends but never really got to know each other there was no friendship so big clue there there is not even a friendship you don't actually know each other when you wanted to pursue a relationship with him and you say yeah i know it's unhealthy to chase a guy um well chasing a guy trying to you know trying to get a friend to set you up with somebody that's not inherently unhealthy i think it might not be strategic but it's you know that's not that's not the part that's limerent um you were hoping your friend would fix you up the thing is here he did not he didn't bite he didn't respond to that so whether your friend did anything he had his chance to be interested in you and he he wasn't and i know that might be painful to hear elizabeth but i just see no evidence that he is interested in you at all or was when he had the chance to meet you this happened some years ago and i i think you're saying it started like 12 years ago it went on until five years ago and you say you were very unhealthy back then you had a string of toxic relationships you had crippling anxiety and self-esteem issues so yeah it sounds like you have cptsd it showed up in your relationships and when we're in that state when you're having horrible relationships that are making you miserable and you're having crippling anxiety and your self-esteem is bad limerent relationships are just delicious you know they look so good because you can kind of escape all of this you can escape the plane where everything's a struggle and imagine this happy relationship where you get your emotional needs met and i know you you're going to be talking about your parents here and i think that's a huge clue too that your mom was totally self-centered couldn't be there for you your dad was unavailable so i see this again and again i'm learning so much and it's not it's not like it was unknown to the world or to the people who are professionals in this field but what happens when you're a kid i just keep seeing this this this this pattern of cptsd where somebody wasn't even real to their parents and they become very vulnerable to relationships that aren't real and if you know what i mean by real like for parents to see the reality of their kid they know who you are they know how you feel they care about it they're down there on the floor with you working out problems and helping you understand yourself and loving you and helping you form self-esteem at the same time as having self-awareness to know when you're not sharing your toys so it sounds like if your parents couldn't do that for you there's a way that a person doesn't doesn't feel real and i just keep seeing this over and over again so we're going to talk about how you can become more real so you were chasing him then and he didn't seem interested and i'm just going to say since it didn't result in any kind of dating or anything this is the tough love elizabeth he wasn't interested if a guy is interested in you he will show up he will let you know he'll be present he'll ask you out so he wasn't interested it wasn't just seem but that's the limerence going well you know there's no evidence that he's interested but i'm looking for signs i'm feeling something we have so much in common some people go into magical thinking they think about like you know in reality he doesn't realize it yet but we're you know soul mates or he doesn't realize it yet but we had a past life together there's a lot of ways that we that we trick ourselves into so that we can keep obsessing on somebody because it's giving us comfort in a horrible emptiness and just like a drug it can kind of like get you off the hook in the moment but it ends up leading to greater emptiness down the line and that's what's happening here you still haven't had the kind of relationship that made you happy so let's assume that's the goal here and keep looking at what happened with this guy max in light of that of how we can help you move towards it so then you said he coped with his issues using alcohol and then he got sober and your friend said so but you're not sure that he did well so that's interesting you're obsessing on somebody who has alcoholism and um many of us have done that but it's just you know it's just a fact somebody who's an alcoholic is very unlikely to be a good partner somebody who has you know you go on to say he has toxic he drink he has alcoholism he has toxic relationships he has issues so it sounds like even if he were interested in you the chances of having a great relationship with him or you know he's not in that place but there's the main problem and that is that he's not interested enough to even stay in touch with you okay that's the main thing so whether he drinks or not is not even your your concern anymore he's not in your life so after a while you stopped being interested in him and you found someone nice but broke up soon after yeah that's what we do after the breakup max contacted you on social media and asked to talk over the phone okay so there's the big moment you were waiting for but you were not in a good mental space you had had a breakup there was a family death you were feeling terrible and you said i can't talk to you right now but will you talk to me later and you thought he would but he didn't you haven't heard from him since then that was 2017. so i would say when if you've been kind of pursuing a guy for what was that seven years and he never took an interest and then one day he calls you he reaches out and says oh give me a call but when you say you can't talk right then or you need a little time and he doesn't call back i would just say i don't know what that call was but it wasn't any big thing where he realized that you were the one for him if he did feel that way he would have called you back because again if a person is interested in you and i'm saying this to everybody a man or a woman they will let you know if they're interested they'll let you know especially if it's safe to be interested so the one case where people sometimes keep these things secret is if they don't think you like them but if you've been pursuing them for years they know and they will let you know if they feel the same way and he didn't okay it's sad but there it is and this is good it's really good you know sometimes just a clear fact is so helpful to set us free so that we can move on and actually have real love right so this is a good thing this is how sometimes the news you fear is the happy news because you go yay you're free you're free you can stop obsessing on a ghost right all right so then you said a couple years after that you moved out of the country he lives in you sent a goodbye message he didn't reply so there's your 100 confirmation right he's not in your life he's he's not in communication with you he could be but he chooses not to be all right so now you're back in your native country and you came back to live with your mom because you wanted to give her a chance and it's been a huge disappointment you know so you're in your late 30s and so a couple years ago you were still in your late 30s so it's interesting to me that you would make a move for the sake of your mom at that time but i don't know that's probably another story but i i get the sense of you kind of traveling around the globe trying to find the love that's going to help you get your needs met i mean your dad wasn't there at all and she was narcissistic so yeah you probably hoped i get it yeah you wanted love you wanted love and that's always what it is everything bad i've ever done everything dysfunctional i've ever did i i i did because i needed love and i was lonely so i think i think a lot of people can relate to that so it's okay it's not your fault it's not your fault you're showing a common pattern that people get from trauma so you say sometimes i think of max and what could have been between us and i'm not sure if this is healthy i think that sometimes thinking of people from the past there's no problem with that but when you keep thinking what could have been i think you have your answer about that and that's the fantasy it's it's it's just a temptation to go visit this fantasy where you are loved and everything's wonderful with this you know an artistically free and you say you're artistic but and maybe you're just not telling me stuff here but i'm not hearing anything in your life where that artistry is expressed and i think that happens too around trauma is that i believe you that you have artistic ability but it's kind of hooked on to this other person like if we could just be together i could set free this gift i have for art and that's really common but it's not true it there is a such thing as people who create um a life or an environment for you that allow you to set your gifts free but they're never the ones who treat you like crap they're never the ones who just like don't even return your calls that would not be it so then you say you remind me that he's 45 not married and with no kids you're 39. so yes those are marriageable ages that would be ideal except let's go back to the main fact he chooses not to have any contact with you and doesn't know you okay so you so yes you said goodbye he didn't reply you don't know him well but from experience you've had about men in general he's not toxic or unsafe so elizabeth i'm just gonna say i think you should handle that with tender hands because i mean to say hold it lightly that in your past experience you haven't had good judgment about who's toxic or unsafe you've had a string of terrible relationships and so if you're like the rest of us with cptsd that isn't healed yet it's just not something you're very good at detecting in advance it's really common you didn't do anything wrong the way that you were raised inevitably almost results in that kind of broken red flag detector but when you say i don't know from what you're saying there's no evidence that he's not toxic or not or unsafe and the drinking in particular i mean somebody with a problem with alcohol is inherently toxic and unsafe now they might recover but but again if somebody who you had had a relationship with had with had alcoholism and you were hoping that they would get sober if they got sober that would just be like the beginning of a very long road on the question of are they a suitable person for you when alcoholism is active the answer is no the answer is never yes with an active alcoholic it's a you know it's just a huge barrier to a real happy relationship or having your emotional needs met that's why alcoholism is such a bummer for the person who has it and the person who tries to love the alcoholic so um it's a challenge sometimes people are already married to an alcoholic and they have children and they're invested and there's all kinds of reasons to then you know go to al-anon and learn how to live with the alcoholism and find peace whether the alcoholic stops drinking or not right but if you're not if this person is not even your friend i'm just saying honey you know no don't pursue out relationships with alcoholics now that we live in different countries and don't have any contact with each other on social media i'm not sure if something's ever going to happen no there's no evidence that anything's going to happen and even if it did it would be random out of the blue from somebody you don't really know so i'm going to strongly encourage you to set yourself free from any hope in this relationship so that you can have hope in real relationships so then you say my question is this is what i feel for him limerence which is obsession with the idea of a person or healthy mature love i'm just going to say by definition this is limerence because what you're into is the idea of him you don't even have a friendship with him it's not possible to have healthy mature love for somebody you don't know that that could be admiration that could be attraction that could be obsession but it can't be healthy mature love healthy mature love is by definition a mutual thing between people who know each other who care about each other who are invested in the best for each other who are present for each other that's healthy mature love so let's go with limerence you diagnosed it yourself and then you say is it worth saving myself up for him or should i just bite the bullet and admit to myself that this was a fantasy that i indulged in and i only got crumbs from it there again you see it elizabeth i know you see it it is the latter it's a fantasy you indulged in and you only got crumbs from it you barely even got crumbs i mean one contact ah and then when you asked is it worth saving myself for him so there's this noble idea of saving yourself for someone and saving yourself for someone who's actually committed to you is one thing but saving yourself for for a person you don't even really know or have a friendship with i would say that's more in the category of avoidance you're protecting yourself you find it safer to be in the fantasy of future love versus all the difficulty and the slog of actual people love and i can see why you feel that way but if you want real love the path to it is to come back down from the fantasy back down to earth back to the real men of the world who you meet who right now you're judging is boring but believe me there are all kinds of men in the world there are men who have everything that you listed about yourself in common they have that in common with you too and they're available for a relationship and you have the opportunity you're you're at an age where it's entirely easy to date men and learn if there is some kind of mutual feeling there that could grow into real mature love real mature love takes time to develop and it's pretty hard to accomplish when you're still in so much pain and self-esteem difficulty and you know just the crazy making phenomenon of cptsd when you're in that it's pretty hard to have healthy mature love because instead what there is is what um some people call attachment hunger right you're just like i really want to be attached can't deal with real men but there's this guy i don't really know and i just remember my idea of him and it's so beautiful and i want to be in that idea but it's an idea so back to earth back to the back to all of us boring earthlings here we're not boring we're actually quite uh wonderful colorful different interesting and the reason people seem boring is because right now you're kind of high on a fantasy and just as somebody let's say they were addicted to heroin okay if they were addicted to heroin and they were hanging around a bunch of people who were spending the holiday together and they weren't high on anything and they didn't drink they would think that was boring too in fact alcoholics think people who aren't drunk or boring so effectively some people would call this a form of love addiction and i'm just sort of going to put a question mark like is it an addiction i don't know it's an attachment wound it's an attachment wound it's certainly you know it quacks like a duck it acts like an addiction this limerent idea it's like an addiction and when you're in your addictive behavior everything that's not that is going to feel boring nothing can seem to get in there and that's part of what com that's part of what makes it so hard to be in a limerent state is like you can't taste anything you can't smell anything metaphorically speaking you can't feel anything no one's getting through you're not getting through a huge part of yourself is kind of up in this fog here you know where you're imagining the relationship that you might have and you're not experiencing the person who's right in front of you and so it can be painful it can be like withdrawal to come back down out of that cloud and just be on earth and start paying attention to people and usually if the difficulty for you has been with men then women friends are going to be good if your mom has been difficult for you you you know a lot of people with difficult moms don't feel a lot of trust with women or they don't feel affinity and they find it easier to be friends with men and so one thing you're always going to hear me recommend is to find groups such as 12-step programs because uh you know often if you've been in an obsessive relationship there's often financial catastrophe following that if you can't be present on earth well earning a living is a is an earth thing so unless you're independently wealthy i'm guessing this this is an area that's hard for you so you can you can go to 12-step fellowships they're free there's group therapy there's ways that you can be together with just women or men and women but something where there's no possibility of romance where you can just begin to practice connecting with other people and practice being real because that's what i wanted to address the little bit you told me about your childhood the narcissistic mom the unavailable dad what how i see you as somebody you're having trouble feeling the reality of yourself you are a real flesh and blood woman you crave love like all human beings you want to be loved by a real person who can actually love you not an idea and you're just having trouble like connecting that the reality of yourself to a real person so you practice real relationships with people and there's a way back you practice telling the truth you practice saying how you really feel because part of being an eliminate relationship is always kind of pretending you're not as obsessed as you actually are in there and so there's this there's this way you're always sort of translating how you really feel into something you think is socially acceptable one of the signs of limerence is that when you talk to your friends about this person you're so excited about they're always like you know they're acting like oh gosh we're sick of hearing about this guy or hmm you know they're worried about you when you talk about them they don't they're not quite on board with it that's a sign and obviously there would be exceptions like some friends just can't get behind some some love interest but in this case seven years of pursuing a guy and he wasn't interested at all i'm guessing your friends were sort of like getting a little tired of your quest right so so pay attention to what people think and become yourself start telling the truth those friends in that other country they're not around where you are right now there are people in groups who you can get together with and you can just talk about this you can say you know i feel like i want to go on a date what i'm worried about is this or you can say i'm having memories about this guy i would try to avoid social situations or groups where continuing to talk about or think about this guy max is encouraged or tolerated that's that sometimes is my unique perspective and some people don't like it but i'm telling you if you want to get over anybody whether they were actually in your life or that it's a limerent thing stop talking about them number one stop talking about them number two make yourself stop thinking about them when you catch yourself thinking about them say i gotta gotta stop thinking about that and give yourself a few go-to things that you can put your mind on you know a nice piece of music a cold drink of water run up and down the stairs or some happy memory some something that comforts you where you can just push your mind instead it's kind of hard to 100 control your mind but go in this direction just take them off your mind when they say that phrase wash that man out of your hair that's how you do it you watch him out of your thinking you wash him out of your thoughts thinking about him is you leaving your life it's you going off because you know it's not just a fantasy is it it's kind of like the world of the dead it's a world where there is no love and there is no interaction and there is no contact it's like the world of the dead so come back elizabeth come back to the world of the living where we can love you and we can hear you okay so one thing you said that was that i thought was important here you said i feel if i don't cut ties with him i'll wait for that social media message from him for the rest of my life and will stay single forever you don't even have ties with him to cut but the ties that you have with him are mental with the idea of him and that is i would totally encourage you to cut those ties it'll be sad at first but you'll be surprised how quickly it feels better it feels like clean it feels peaceful to cut ties with an idea that's been torturing you and that's what i'm hearing you had said that it's safer to stay in the past because you know what to expect from it i know how it will go uh-huh i just don't see anything safe about being alone for the rest of your life that doesn't sound very safe at all change is unpredictable and it does give you anxiety and i totally understand it the future the future is bumpy and bright it's both wonderful and scary and that's a fact we're all going to get hurt again here and there but as you continue to recover and you keep yourself out of fantasy and here on earth you can start to grow your open-hearted capacity to be solid with two feet on the ground and showing love and that's the kind of person a healthy person can love and i want you to have a healthy person to love elizabeth and who will love you right back in the same measure so i hope that helps you for anyone watching if you think that your upbringing has caused you to have cptsd take my quiz it's down there in the description section you can open it up more and there's more links down there below to all my courses and if you want to hear another letter from a limerent person see if you think you might identify with it i've got that video lined up right here and i will see you very soon [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 1,106,970

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Id: ga4VHjKkv70

Length: 30min 38sec (1838 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021