I penned this in mid 2015 - with time and more deep work things are shifting at a great pace internally. Old corrupted scripts ingested from my early life and deeply encoded on my hard drive are being replaced by healthier beliefs. Its slow work as the grooves are so deeply etched.
If we want to deal with our limerence, we need to deal with their early life attachment wounds. The limerence is only a symptom. Limerence and romantic love is a reenactment of the Parental Rescue Fantasy (PRF).
What i suggest below is radical in the extreme and i would urge caution if you are going to attempt some or all of this rapid cure programme. You will need a lot of non judging support from friends that can hold you emotionally and give you unconditional love .
Everything i'm suggesting is stuff i've either done myself or am doing. Most of its been learnt since my own LE. It just took me 55 years to work all this out. As ever YMMV
- Go total No Contact with your LO. enough written here and elsewhere as to why. Our LO's are often high on the narcissistic trait scale and use us for their own narcissistic supply. They are literally toxic for us.
- Understand the dynamics at play in your Family of Origin (FOO). If they are highly dysfunctional (and when we have limerence, they often are) consider a break from them too. We need to break away not just physically but also emotionally. Many people do the former but not the latter. Emotionally separating away from parents will need great support from friends and others such as a 12 step group. I suggest you read Alice Miller and Daniel Mackler on this subject.
- Go celibate, no sex, no sex with yourself, no sex with others. Most sex is a reenactment of the PRF. Id suggest 6 months and see how this alters your perception on your parents and siblings.
- Read, read, read everything around the subject.
- If you're a man, join a men's circle or get yourself on the ManKind New Warrior Adventure training weekend.
- If you're a woman there are woman equivalents - Woman Within and Woman in Power.
- Find a guide or therapist that can support you with the grief work you need to do. Ask questions of your therapist to make sure they have done their own grief work. Many have not. In some countries, therapists (especially psychologists and psychiatrists) have no requirement to have bene in therapy themselves.
- Consider other forms of therapy that are not just talk therapy, things like Shadow Work, EMDR, somatic therapy, psychodrama, body psychotherapy etc.
- Join a psychotherapy group. This is a great way to understand yourself even more and how you behave with others.
- Join a 12 step group. Whilst not therapy, this is a great way to get support from others with addictive behaviours and where you will get help in a non judging way.
- If you have a toxic Family Of Origin, consider going NC with your family. This will likely be be even more painful and scary then going NC with your LO as you would have bene brainwashed by the cult of your family system. Many therapists will side with your parents as opposed to being 100% on your inner child's side. This is because they haven't fully dealt with their own PRF and so act out their own unresolved traumas on your inner child.
- If your parent/s are no longer here, chances are you are still enmeshed with them at an emotional level. Find a gifted person to help you with the grief work that's necessary. Not the grief of losing your parent, but the grief of not having the parent/s you deserved and grieving the pain your inner child suffered.
- If you are not in a romantic relationship (in most cases both sides are not very conscious so its just another reenactment of the PRF) then stop looking to be in relationship. The magical other is not going to fix you and being in a new relationship is going to trigger you at the deepest level. Is going to confuse the work you need to do on yourself.
- If you are in a romantic relationships have some radically honest conversations with your partner including disclosure and why you need some space to work through your own issues. I highly recommend you find a competent relationship coach / couples counsellor to support you and your partner through this process. Again ask the therapist what work they have done on their own relational trauma and PRF issues. Many therapists dont seem to really undertand romantic relationships and as for limerence, most have never heard of it.
- Do the necessary grief work. Let the feelings of your denial, anger, rage, sadness, depression, guilt, loneliness flow. My belief is that the only way we are going to heal and recover from limerence and our poor attachments that gives us low self esteem is to go into our grief. Its painful heavy work. You will need a lot of caring support during this phase. There are no shortcuts from this work and its where i see most people bolt.
The above comes with a grade A health warning. And when i mention fast track cure, im still talking of years and not months. I wish i could be more optimistic but i dont think a couple of decades of "abuse" in our early lives when our brains are highly plastic gets undone in a few weeks or months.
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Interesting question. Feels a kind of extreme treatment -then again chronic limerence is also extremely
1) My LO was NOT a narcissist. Anything but. She may have been cold and heartless toward me, but she never took advantage of my feelings.
2) My parents have nothing to do with limerence.
I blame my limerence, first and foremost, on my former religious beliefs. I was a fundamentalist Christian in high school, and this led me to having unrealistic expectations of relationships and life. Just think of the whole "god's match for you" mindset combined with the general sexual repression christianity imposes and you get the idea. Quite frankly, failure with limerence caused an existential crisis and turned me into an atheist.
I would argue that parents imposing their strong religious beliefs is abusive. In effect you have become narcissistic extensions for your parents beliefs. The codependent symptoms seen in Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA) are very similar to those raised in a strongly religious environment.
As for your LO being "cold and heartless" I would suggest possible narcissistic traits here. Narcissistic people project out a false self image as they have little to no sense of their inner True self.
Its common for us limerence suffers to initially want to protect our parents and LO's. Its culturally driven into us.
My LO totally does not fit the signs of narcissism at all. Heck, I wish I could say more to condemn my LO since that would make it way easier to not feel this way about her, but I'm afraid I've come up empty. But yeah, for all the theories I have for her behavior, she's definitely not full of herself and wanting attention. Total opposite actually.
My parents were way less extreme than my school was, which is where I picked up my fundamentalist beliefs. I have no problems with condemning the religion itself as narcissistic, particularly my former school's form, because there's certainly a lot of narcissism there, but my parents really aren't at fault in any knowing way.
1. Logically go through why a relationship isn't possible.
2. Exercise like crazy.
3. Read articles about limerence to reaffirm the idea that this is not a pleasant thing, its a pathology.
4. Assess the logic behind the attachment. Older, powerful men in positions of authority over me. See: Daddy issues
That is all I got so far. I'm in the initial all-consuming phase and I am desperately trying to keep my head above water here. I find the online support forums very useful. Just sharing the experience is cathartic, and takes some of its power away.
Wish me luck!
I struggle also and while I see it for what it is, I have this overwhelming need to speak with this person and hear it come from them that don't value me as their friend.
I am just beginning my journey and find posts here and on Quora resonate with me.
Secondly, there are a couple of things I disagree with:
1. I'm over 60; sex with myself is a must.
2. My narcissist mother is 85 and ailing. I can't walk away.
3. I separated from my wife. She was not my LO, but she
created the conditions.
4. The worst limerence I've ever had was when I was 23.
At that time, my therapist prescribed ORAP and it worked like a charm. 6 months later i was free. I think
that young doctor was especially gifted. He said nothing
for 6 months and then staged a fight with me that brought out all my latent, hidden conflicts. Wow!
Sex with yourself is not a must, you will not die without it!
Letting go of the narc mother is not easy but necessary. when she dies unless you've done the work, you will still be enmeshed with her.
I wonder if the conditions for your limerence were there before you separated from your wife. With most of us, the conditions were set up in childhood.
But I am a serial limerent... I don't think I realised how abnormal it was for a loooong time, or I was in denial.
I will add my last LO probably WAS a narcissist, and my obsession for him lasted all of about 4 months, and ended when I realised what sort of person he was (not to mention a "fuck boy" which was a huge turn off). So, for me, finding out my LO is not the person I imagine, actually works to my advantage! What is harder is when I know he's actually a wonderful person.
Smitty, Find a decent psychotherapist that has done their own grief work. Read Pete walker's book on complex PTSD, and Daniel Mackler's work. Both talk about the grief work required as do many other therapists.
Anything that gets us out of our heads (and out from the fantasy) and more into our bodies has to be a good thing.
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