Limerance & Why You Can't Get Them Out Of Your Head

Hey y'all just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face. We've got things like Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events, and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey. So check out the link in the description below and back to the video. Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Aula Kenojo, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. So when we're a child we learn about the world. We start to form expectations about the world. And so if I'm living in an environment where my parents are intermittently available to love me and then this magical person shows up I have a brief interaction so I don't get to know them long enough to where the idealization can wear off. I have this perfect interaction. What does my brain learn? My brain gravitates towards the things that fulfill my needs. So in this moment my brain learns holy crap. There are perfect people who exist out there and this person can swoop in and this person can make everything perfect for me and they can exist. So lemon is the feeling of being in love but in in a way that is so overwhelming debilitating and unexpected that it usually leaves you pretty messed up. You can kind of think about it as like crushing so hard that it it kind of messes up your life messes up your sense of identity. If y'all don't know what limerence is congratulations you really dodged a bullet. And for those of you that have been struggling with limerence hopefully today's video will help y'all understand what it is where it comes from what the course of it is so what to expect over time as well as potentially how to resolve it. So this has been a hard video for me to make so I'm a psychiatrist by training and I trained at Harvard Medical School and one of the key things that they taught us there is that you know you shouldn't like open your mouth unless you have dated a back it up. And this is one of the biggest challenges with limerence because first of all it's not like a diagnosable condition. Most people don't even know what it is but the experience of it is definitely on the rise that's why we're kind of making this video. And there isn't a whole lot of data about it right so people won't do studies on limerence there aren't RCTs so it's really hard to sort of synthesize information and be able to confidently say this is what limerence is this is what causes it. So I've been working on this video for about two years and I finally feel confident enough to share something with you. So what we're gonna start with I think this is the best place to start is in 1975 there was a woman named Dorothy Tenov who wrote a book about limerence and I think the opening lines of the book are so phenomenal it's like poetry all that I think the best way to describe what limerence is is by just reading this off to y'all so you think I want you I want you forever now yesterday and always above all I want you to want me no matter where I am or what I am doing I'm not safe from your spell at any moment in the image of your face smiling at me of your voice telling me you care of your hand in my mind may suddenly fill my consciousness rudely pushing out all else the expression thinking of you fails to convey either the quality or quantity of this unwilled mental activity obsessed comes closer but leaves out the aching a child is obsessed on Christmas Eve but it's a happy prepossession full of excitement curiosity and expectation this prepossession is an emotional roller coaster that carries me from the peak of ecstasy to the depths of despair and back again so this is what limerence is it is this sudden onset invasion of your mind by something so there's another great paper that sort of describes this as a limer beast so it's sort of like limerence is something that invades you I almost think about it like a weirwolf where like you know you're a normal human most of the time except when the limerence becomes active and once you get invaded by the limer beast you kind of transform into this weirwolf where in your mind you have all of these obsessional thoughts you're thinking about this person constantly it's not even necessarily sexual in nature which is a feature of limerence but you're you're fantasizing about this person fantasizing about this person sort of being kind to you this person reciprocating these feelings that you have it's such an intense and overwhelming sense of like an obsessional love and limerence is something that is incredibly destabilizing for people so the weird thing about limerence is that it can strike people who are in the healthy romantic relationship so they're people who are married who will like suddenly wake up one day usually has a small interaction with someone else and then like they'll their mind will just be invaded by thoughts of these people you know thinking about them all the time thinking about like you know does this person notice me do they like me will they give me there's this weird ache that you have that you believe that only this other person can fulfill hey all if you want more info on limerence check out our limerence specific page this is a new thing that we're doing that has a ton of information on limerence links to additional videos in some info on our coaching program if that's interesting to you the link is in the description below and now back to the video so what are the features of this limer beast I think once again what we need to do is go straight back to ten of his book because I think she does the best job of describing this limerence has certain basic components intrusive thinking about the object of your desire the limerent object or L.O. who is a possible sexual partner but not always sexual a cute longing for reciprocation this is huge so you want the person to like you have all these feelings and when you want more than anything else is their approval and their reciprocation a dependency of mood on the L.O.'s actions or more accurately your interpretation of the L.O.'s actions with the respect with respect to the probability of reciprocation this is something we have to explain in a little bit more detail so people who are limerent usually have like their mood depends on the limerent object the person that you're obsessive about your mood depends entirely on how they react to you so you'll make maybe small overtures for their attention and if they respond in a positive way first of all you read so much into it so this person touched you lightly on the shoulder and then you're like oh my God this means that they notice me and you feel amazing there's this feeling of ecstasy this feeling of walking on air it's been described in ten of his book is buoyancy when the limerent object responds to you in some positive way you feel buoyant you feel amazing and when they don't respond in a positive way or they respond in a neutral way you're left with this incredible sense of achiness like aching deep inside you so your life becomes kind of tethered to your perception of their responses and it feels like an incredible roller coaster so another big feature of this is some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerent passion through vivid imagination of action by the L.O. that means reciprocation the other thing that happens is not only you hyper sensitive to what they do and what they say and overinterpret their actions but when you are aching inside there is oftentimes a fantasy life that you will construct you will fantasize about this person touching your arm or this person doing this or texting you back or finally noticing the way that you feel about them reciprocating your love saying oh I've been longing for you as well so there's a big component of limerence is actually like the amount of time you spend in your head fantasizing usually about small things sometimes they can be things like sexual fantasies and what that means to you so another big feature of limerence is that there are small actions that have big implications in your head another feature is a fear of rejection and sometimes incapacitating but always unsettling shyness in the L.O.'s presence especially in the beginning and whenever uncertainty strikes there's also an intensification of the feeling through adversity so this can be them not responding to you or when challenges arise in your life that are not related to the limerent object oftentimes the limerence can intensify there is an acute sensitivity to any act or thought or condition that can be interpreted favorably and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent reasonable explanations for why the neutrality that the disinterested observer might see is in fact a sign of hidden passion in the limerent object so the first is that there is a hypersensitivity to small signals from the limerent object so that touch on the arm we kind of talked about the other thing that tends to happen is that in your mind you will notice a lot of mental gymnastics to interpret all kinds of things so if they don't respond to you and the weird thing about limerent objects is that oftentimes they don't you don't like necessarily know them well it can kind of strike like you can meet someone on the street and they can say hey how are you and then suddenly you get invaded by the limer beast so it is very rare that limerent objects are or I don't know if I should say very rare but you know it's it's unusually common I should say that limerent objects are not people that you have very close relationships with sometimes you can develop limerence for someone like a coworker someone that you do interact with but the whole point is that you are like your experience of interactions with them carries a lot more meaning than what is externally observable so even if they don't text you back or they say hi how are you or they don't say hi to you one morning your mind will be super focused on these small signals in interpreting those small signals and aching of the heart like literally this is like a physical sensation that people will have especially when uncertainty is strong okay a feeling of buoyancy a feeling of walking on air when reciprocation seems evident another key feature of limerence is the roller coaster nature of it there's the primary emotional experience of the people that I've kind of worked with who are limerent are is uncertainty they're obsessing over does this person notice me does this person not notice me have they stopped noticing me are they going to notice me more tomorrow they they're very very uncertain and anxious in relation to that person and like we said they're kind of hyper focused maybe all or hyper focused on small things that this person does or doesn't do which creates a lot of anxiety and then also when there is some form of reciprocation you read a lot into it and then you feel absolutely amazing so it's this kind of ping-ponging between intense uncertainty does this person notice you is it possible that they reciprocate and small gestures that usually have you know tectonic effects on your internal being and when you feel uncertain things become very very painful there's that achiness in your heart etc so the other thing that's really important about limerence is that there's a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in in the background and so this we got to talk about too so that there are other studies that kind of talk about this in a different way so limerence also does something called alter the motivational hierarchy of your life and this is why I think that the the limer beast is such a good description of it so if we think about like a normal human life right we have like all kinds of things that were motivated towards like so I want to do well in my job I want to do well in my romantic relationship I want to take care of my body I want to have fun and so we have this like motivational hierarchy and the whole problem with limerence is that you have like a life that you are living which is even like a somewhat arguably normal and complete life and the limer beast comes in and alters your motivational hierarchy you stop caring about the things that you used to care about including romantic relationships spouses etc like it's wild you stop caring about your career as much and when we talk about stop caring you know if I stop and ask you when the limer beast is not active you start caring about those things again but there's just something about the amount of time that your mind spends thinking about this person craving this person's reciprocation craving this person's attention fantasizing about it internal the amount of copium that you're huffing when they don't give it to you so it really disrupts your motivational hierarchy and then a lot of your thoughts and actions become related to the limerent object and then the last feature that Ten-Ov describes is a remarkable ability to emphasize what is truly admirable in the limerent object and to avoid dwelling on the negative even to respond with a compassion for the negative and render it emotionally if not perceptually into another positive attribute so this is why I love Ten-Ov's work so when you have a limerent object you idealize them a lot and you take the parts of them that could be demonized and you manage to idealize them too you turn their flaws into perfections in your mind so this is some weird once again kind of mental gymnastics and we'll get into why your mind does this in a little bit but this is another feature that is very common with limerence which is that you kind of see like all these amazing oh this person's great they're compassionate they're caring they're so wonderful and oh yeah the reason they're such an asshole to the people at work is because they're just so intensely brilliant their mind can't hold the space for normal human interactions which is why they don't say hi to me every morning even though I say hi to them in those few moments that they do say hi feel so amazing for me so limerence has this deep obsessional quality where your mind I don't know how else to say this but like I'm hoping y'all are understanding that it's really mental right so it's not entirely based in reality but there's an obsessional intrusive quality to it that dominates your thinking performs mental gymnastics causes you to really be longing for them and then how you feel on a particular day depends on how they respond to you as one person put it their limerent object is their hobby their passion and their obsession and oftentimes limerence leads to a disintegration of your identity and if we sort of understand like if we kind of integrate what we know about the features of limerence with sort of like thinking how it really affects their lives this will make a lot of sense so here you are living your normal life right you're going about your day you have to test to study for and then there's a substitute professor who's filling in one day for your professor and something in you clicks and this person is so amazing there's so much better than your professor they looked at you and then they nodded at you when you came in and you sat down in the class and now you're thinking about them all the time an episode of limerence can last their studies that show that it lasts somewhere between one in seven years okay so once you start thinking about this person they are dominating your thoughts potentially for years at a time and now I want you all to really appreciate this that it's hard to build a life around them right so these aren't necessarily real interactions there are interactions that are real but then your your mind amplifies them so you have your normal life over here where you're a student maybe married maybe have kids like super wild and then for maybe minutes or hours of the day there's this intrusive limer beast that comes in and dominates your thinking so now this becomes really really confusing to live through because you have all of this stuff over here you have a normal life but then you transform into this other thing for periods of time and then when you're like one person over here who's building a normal life and then like another person over here who's obsessively thinking about the limerent object it's really hard to get a sense of like an integrated life so very common feature is that people feel really really like a sense of disintegration like I disintegration like I'm over here and I'm doing one thing and I'm over here and I'm doing another thing so these are the core features and it kind of begs the question like how the hell does this happen to people right what is going on in them that they sort of end up with these up to seven year long obsessions over small interactions and where they're very very paranoid about reciprocation and they long for reciprocation to be noticed etc right so why does this happen so this is where this is why it's actually taken me a couple of years because the majority of the you know stuff out there I've seen tends to focus heavily on attachment theory so people will say basically limerence is a consequence of a particular attachment style that never really sat right with me for a couple reasons so you know people will say okay the reason you develop limerence is because you have an anxious attachment or something like that so that may be true that the limerence has been associated with an anxious attachment but let's understand the statistics okay so 50% of people have secure attachment 25% of people have anxious attachment which means the way that they relate to other people we have a whole section on attachment theory and stuff so you can check that out if you'll want but basically they're they're very very concerned about abandonment they're concerned about that this person doesn't care for them they they feel very very paranoid they don't feel secure in the relationship so they engage in a lot of behaviors to pull this person in so people with an anxious attachment style will utilize sexual activity as a form is a way to create intimacy so they'll they'll do things that sort of I'm afraid that you're not going to notice me or that you'll replace me with someone else or that I'm not worthy of your love so I'll do everything from cry to be passive aggressive to seduce you just so I know that you're not going to leave like please don't leave so people with an anxious attachment style oftentimes did not have attentive enough caregivers or their caregiving was highly intermittent so I'm not I can't count on you to always be there but if I express myself in the right way if I start to cry a lot then I can evoke caring behavior from you so this is a child who can't feel confident that their parents will notice them love them unless the child does a lot of stuff to sort of get their attention and and that that's how I sort of feel secure I have to do something to feel loved that's sort of the key feature of an anxious attachment now 25% of people on the planet are anxiously attached but 25% of people are not limmerant right so even though anxious attachment is a component of it it is it is not sufficient to explain out of the one out of every four people that are anxiously attached those this one to five percent of people who are very very unlucky and to experience limmerance there's a big gap between those two things 20% of people haven't avoid an attachment style that may have some relation to limmerance but probably not right so attachment theory in the way that you were raised is certainly a part of it this is where I sort of put on my like you know this is just the way that I was trained so I you know at Harvard I was part of a the people that I gravitated toward towards where what I would call the neuroscience philosophers so they're really really philosophical a couple generations before my time the chief of psychiatry at mass general was a Catholic priest so like these people like you know there's a big tradition at the program that I trained at about being like really like philosophical and thinking about like why does illness happen and then also these people are neuroscientists so they sort of approach it from a couple of different angles and I think attachment theory is a great way to start but I sort of lean heavily into sort of this neuroscience approach and if we look at limmerance there's some features of it that are basically very similar to OCD so if we look at OCD OCD is obsessive compulsive disorder and is characterized by intrusive thoughts you don't want to think these things you don't like to think these things and you can't control thinking these things we also know that OCD is highly inheritable so there's like a large genetic component to OCD so there's one really interesting specific attachment pattern which separates limmerance from a standard anxious attachment so when we think about normal anxious attachment we're talking about your primary caregivers being unavailable to make you feel safe and loved part of the time so there's some of the time if you cry loud enough they will show up and love you so in people with limmerance there's a really interesting I don't know if it's unique I don't know exactly how common it is we don't have a great data about this but there's one really interesting pattern it's that when your primary caregiver was unable to meet your emotional needs there is a third party who is distantly connected who for a brief period of time gives you everything that you want right so this can be something like oh you know my mom and dad I'm going through a breakup they're not around or I'm getting bullied at school and my aunt flow visits from a different country and she shows up and for one day she takes me out she buys me ice cream she listens to my problems this third figure who's not part of my normal attachment system swoops in and provides me with everything that I want it emotionally I'm usually a kid I usually idealize this person and here's what happens in limmerance so I want y'all to think about this okay so when we're a child we learn about the world we start to form expectations about the world and so if I'm living in an environment where my parents are intermittently available to love me and then this magical person shows up I have a brief interaction so I don't get to know them long enough to where the idealization can wear off I have this perfect interaction what does my brain learn my brain gravitates towards the things that fulfill my needs so in this moment my brain learns holy crap there are perfect people who exist out there and this person can swoop in and this person can make everything perfect for me and they can exist so one of the things when I'm working with people who experience limmerance this is something I'll actually tunnel down into is there been a period of time in your life where you were really struggling and we had this kind of flash of perfection from another human being who made everything okay and then once that happens to you I mean maybe it happened to you maybe it didn't we don't really know once that happens to you it becomes like cocaine for your anxiously attached little kid inside right like this is the perfect thing and then your brain thinks oh my god we found it once let's start let's try to find it again and this is what we tend to see with limmerance which is so confusing about it is that it you know it doesn't happen with people that you know well like that's the whole problem is that you have this whole life over here you're maybe happily married and then it strikes from another person who demonstrates something and I think what's going on is in your brain this old pattern that was really really important and affected your developing brain now gets triggered with this limmerant object who is distant and perfect so the really interesting thing we'll get into this more a little bit later but is that as we get close to the limmerant object sometimes when people experience limmerance they'll start dating the person and as they date them the really weird thing will happen their fantasies don't become a reality in fact there are all kinds of problems that arise and then the most screwed up thing is oftentimes their limmerance will transfer to a different person they'll wake up one day in the prior limmerant object has now become a frustratingly normal human being in this other person the limmerance just shifts okay so that's and so that's kind of the attachment perspective I now want to talk about a couple of other features okay so attachment isn't really sufficient to describe limmerance right so the anxious attachment style ideal swooper let's call it that that's just one piece but not there are a lot of people with anxious attachment style who don't have limmerance so the other feature that we're going to talk about is something that's really I think something along the OCD spectrum so if we look at limmerance it's characterized by a lot of like I don't know how to say this but like the you know the nuts and bolts of the mental process of limmerance are very similar to OCD and then there's another feature which is that they're divorced from reality right so this is also consistent with OCD so if we think about someone who has like a germaphob like the amount of fear that the germs evokes like sure germs can make you sick but the whole point is that your mind does way more with a small stimulus then let's say a healthy mind would do that's the the nature of OCD okay the other really interesting thing is that if you look at limmerance there's a lot of ritualization associated with it so people will do things they will engage in certain actions to try to like so it's ritualistic they'll do certain things to get this person's attention they'll dress a certain way oh this person talked to me on this day because I was wearing red so I'm gonna start wearing red all the time there's a lot of ritualism associated with limmerance and then the last thing is kind of the compulsive nature of it so we have to explain what a compulsion is okay so a compulsion is something that you do in response to an obsession and this is what's kind of confusing for a lot of people a lot of people think that the compulsion has to be a physical behavior so people will think okay if I don't I'm afraid that the house is gonna burn down so what I'm gonna do is turn the stove on and off seven times to make sure the house doesn't burn down so I have the obsession this intrusive unwanted thought that the house is gonna burn down and I have to do something in order to make that obsession feel calm so sometimes that's a physical action but there are mental compulsions as well so compulsion is something that we do to relieve the mental stress that we are experiencing in the moment so sometimes what people will do is I worked with one patient who for example would say in her head all of my family will be okay all of my family will be home safe I will see all of my family tomorrow anytime one of her family members was traveling plane going back from work going to the grocery store if she became aware of it she would have to repeat those phrases in her head three times in a row and it was really really debilitating because like her mom is like hey do you want anything in the grocery store and then she has to stop studying and start going through the litany in her head so what do we see in in limerence we don't quite see that kind of compulsion but we do see a lot of mental reactions or mental responses to different kinds of stimuli or triggers I don't think that necessarily these people have OCD so this is where we also have to kind of understand something else about science so generally speaking human beings in terms of let's say let's say this is intrusive thoughts you know everyone has some unwanted thoughts but if we look at human beings there's a bell curve the people over here have very few on what intrusive thoughts the people here have an average amount of intrusive thoughts the people over here have a more more than average let's say greater greater amount of intrusive thoughts and the people over here this group of people qualifies as OCD okay so I think basically what's going on with limerence is we have people who are over here so they have a genetic predisposition for something like OCD so they tend to have a more obsessional or intrusive thinking style but it's not so severe that there is OCD instead what happens is we have these genetic predisp genetically predisposed people to OCD who then have and some kind of attachment injury so they when you take a kid who may who won't have OCD so if they were more intrusive if they had stronger genetics maybe they would develop OCD but you take a kid who doesn't have OCD but is high on that spectrum and then you put them in an anxious attachment environment and those two things combine and limerence sort of emerges out of it then there are a couple of other features that I think sort of combined to make this the pie of limerence like this limerence stew it's not just OCD and anxious attachment there's more to it okay the next thing is a tendency for fantasy as a coping mechanism so for example if you look at studies on like maladaptive daydreaming right so this is when people daydream so much that they have difficulty functioning in life right sound familiar so we know that maladaptive daydreaming maybe some feature is somewhat related to ADHD so your brain your mind is not brain mine is not capable of restraining your attention away from the daydream and focusing on what you should be focusing on you get caught up in the daydreaming the reason that we so there's the attentional component right and then you get lost in the daydream for a while the other reason that ADHD may be related to maladaptive daydreaming is that we know that maladaptive daydreaming is an emotional coping mechanism so when I am and I'm sure y'all have experienced something like this so in my case I used to be bullied a lot in school and so I'd have fantasies about standing up to my bully and then being able to fight them back and becoming a martial artist and this kind of stuff so we know that there is a normal human mechanism where when you have an emotional injury your brain can fantasize give you fantasies of triumph or whatever you're missing to make you feel better right because then you feel good oh yeah it's gonna be good you get that justice bone or where you're like yeah like I'm going to win so there's sort of a tendency for fantasy and once again we talked about this on the OCD side but I think once again we're sort of on this bell curve so here's the ADHD bell curve and if you're over here you get you get diagnosed with ADHD but the lemurance people are over here with a tendency to fantasize more than normal a tendency to use fantasy as an emotional coping mechanism right and an inability to control their attention right this is why you have those intrusive thoughts you can't stop thinking about them these thoughts come in you can't restrain your mind and so what I'm sort of envisioning with people who have lemurance is that there's like a constellation of these things they're not necessarily ADHD enough to have ADHD they're not necessarily OCD enough to have OCD they're not necessarily like you know it's not just anxious attachment that's not sufficient to explain it so when you have a brain that has a tendency towards fantasy a tendency towards intrusive thinking compulsive compulsive thinking and then you have an attachment injury that maybe that very specific kind where someone once shows up and saves the world for you for like an hour then all of these things kind of mixed together into a stew that results in lemurance and this is also why generally speaking it's on the rarer side right I think the amount of it is increasing very rapidly so it seems to be way more common we'll talk about that why that isn't in a couple minutes but you know this is why it's like you know on the rarer side the last thing that we have to talk about is there's absolutely a physiological component so this isn't nearly as sexy or interesting as the other pieces but we there are just studies that show that there's there's a certain activation of the nervous system where people tend to be highly anxious they get a lot of sympathetic nervous system activity their fight or flight response tends to be really really hyper active and it gets it also gets sued by their responses right so if someone actually responds to you then your nervous system really calms down but if they don't respond to you in the right way they're actually features of things like nausea and like other kinds of you know activation I'm gonna show you all there are studies that show that there's a lot of like bodily sensations GI upset shallow breathing nausea attack car headaches attack a cardia these are all like so there's also like a nervous system component where it's not just in your head your body responds by activating adrenaline activating cortisol and then that shapes your your thinking so this by the way is a case conceptualization for the development and maintenance of limmer it's okay we'll talk about this a little bit more at the end so that's what causes it I mean do we know that not really so that's why it's like taking me a couple of years right so like I read 10 of book and great book by the way highly recommended if y'all want to like it's just the language in it is beautiful and then it took me a while to sort of try to figure out okay like what's going on here what's really like what are the features of this how can we understand this from a neuroscience perspective from a genetic perspective like what's really what is this person's experience and how can we break apart and really understand the building blocks of limmerance by extrapolating from all of these other illnesses that we know a lot about and that's kind of what I think is going on okay now let's talk a little bit about the course of limmerance so if you're stuck with limmerance you know you you drew the short star for the short stars you got a little bit of those CD maybe a little bit of the ADHD maybe a little bit of anxious attachment style a little bit of sympathetic nervous system hyper activity what does this look like for people okay so once again what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a quick look at 10 of book because I think she does a great job of describing it the course of limmerance is as follows the limit reactions begin begins usually at a point discernible at the time and later recalled so people remember when the limmerance struck it was like an arrow to the heart you know like Cupid hit me sexual attraction doesn't need to be experienced but the primary experience is usually like admiration like this person is amazing like you admire them you idealize them once limmerance begins you find yourself thinking about the limmerant object and receiving considerable pleasure from the process so this is where that day dreaming component comes in okay there's an initial phase in which you feel buoyant elated and ironically for this appears to be the beginning of an essentially involuntary process free free not only from the restraints the usual restraints of gravity but emotionally unburdened you may be more you may be attracted to more than one potential limmerant object you feel that your response is a result of the limmerant objects find qualities so in the first phase you feel really great and the reason I don't know if this kind of makes sense but the reason that you're so into them is because they are so amazing right so you think that because they are amazing you are into them it's not the other way around in your mind it is a justifiable obsession a justifiable admiration now we get to the scary part with evidence of reciprocation from the limmer and object which doesn't have to be a lot right so they can just say hi to you that's oftentimes sufficient you enjoy a state of extreme pleasure even euphoria your thoughts are mainly occupied with considering and reconsidering what you might may find attractive about them so you're replaying events in your head and appreciating qualities in in yourself which you perceive as possibly having sparked interest in you on the part of the L.O. so like you're you're really grateful oh I'm like really glad I look great and read and that was the day that they said hi to me so you kind of start to have this obsessional thinking you're spending a lot of energy thinking about it your degree of involvement increases if obstacles are externally opposed imposed so this is kind of a really important segment as well where setbacks don't really make things harder right so a lot of people will say oh if this person doesn't text you back like just move on so one of the key features of limmerance is when you get when you experience setbacks it doesn't push you away it only intensifies your attraction to the limmerant object usually with some degree of doubt its intensity rises further and you reach the stage at which the reaction is virtually impossible to dislodge either by your your own act of will or by further evidence of the L.O.'s undesirable qualities so what that basically means is like at this point you lose control the limmer beast has taken over well the limmer beast actually took over over here you're just just thinking about them because you so much pleasure and so this results in a doubt an increased intensity of limmerance to undermine your former satisfaction with yourself you acquire new clothes change your hairstyle you're receptive to any suggestion by which you might increase your desire ability in the limmerant objects eyes that's why I kind of referred to it as the disintegration of the self so sometimes people will change but other times it's more of an experience of like I recognize that limmerance is kind of nutty and I have a regular life over here but something about you begins to change your sense of self worth can get caught up in the way that the limmerant object responds to you okay so there are a couple of other features about the course of limmerance like we already said it lasts about one to seven years and then this is the really confusing thing so so far we've talked basically about the limmer object is being distant from you and like not really interacting with you so what happens when you actually start interacting when they start reciprocating or they don't reciprocate so how does limmerance evolve with the person so generally speaking you know you're striving for their affection sometimes you get their affection you feel amazing if you don't get their affection or there's a lot of uncertainty you start obsessing a little bit more you think about the more you think about how can I get this person to notice me like me etc. unfortunately as limmerance progresses it like never ends well so even if you get their attention oftentimes the real version of them and this is something that I think is kind of confusing but so this is what's kind of confusing if they do reciprocate at any point in the process if you perceive reciprocation your degree of involvement ceases to rise until of course you become uncertain again so this is what's like really confusing is that actually as you get closer to them the triggers for the limmerance actually disappear you know and if you get close to them they no longer become this idealized object if you start dating them like then your limmerance will transfer to someone else which is really perplexing and confusing so limmerance sort of exists in your mind it exists and is triggered by uncertainty in distance the nature of limmerance is that it is a longing for a fantasy it is not a reality you have a reality over here the limmerance is over here and if you make the mistake of moving the limmerance if all of your desires become true and they start to become a reality the limmerance actually disappears and a new limmerant object can form and so that's one of the ways that limmerance can end the other thing that can happen is the person can reject you which is really painful but then oftentimes we'll develop a new limmerant object and then the third thing that can happen in limmerance is that we can sort of get a mixed response from the person so maybe we confess our feelings maybe we become friends I don't want to push this person away and the interesting thing about like keeping them at the friend distance is it can actually intensify the limmerance right because like when this person when you're when you don't really confess to them they still remain idealized they still remain distant they still remain uh you know faint they're capable of continuing to exist in your fantasies generally speaking though as people consummate the limmerance in some way as they connect with other people as there's some degree degree of reciprocity usually the most common experience for limmerances that it's disappointing right so even if you move in the right direction it doesn't satisfy you and once again the reason for that is because limmerance is not like a real thing it is a fantasy that is constructed in your mind and so then the question becomes what do we do about it and this is where like I think it's really useful to think about these components of limmerance right so what creates it so you know if there's like a genetic predisposition for OCD there's not really a whole lot you can do about that so that's okay but we can also use some of these like approaches to OCD um we can use some of these approaches to ADHD some of these approaches to sympathetic nervous system activity and attachment theory to sort of figure out how to approach this so a lot of therapists will believe that basically it's an attachment injury right so an attachment base so if you heal your anxious attachment style which can be done through therapy which can be done through stable relationships that will be a big part of it um so that usually the way that that I start this is to track back to this origin story so think about when did I first start to develop this idea that these fantastic relationships with these idealized people exist and that's why I gave you all that very specific scenario you know has there been a time in your life where you felt unloved and someone swooped in and made everything perfect for you how did you feel at that time you know like that that kind of stuff like there's really just sort of process that think about it think about how that maps on now think about the lessons that you learn what conclusions did you form through those experiences how do you carry those in the present that oftentimes you need to work with a therapist to really do that but that's kind of the direction of what I do with people when I work with them also related to that is to think a little bit about what were your unmet needs at that time and you may notice that there is a correlation between those core unmet needs and the intensity of limerence so remember that limerence is triggered by oftentimes something within you either a sense that you're not good enough a desire for admiration a desire to you know be worthy of someone there's all kinds of stuff within you that can trigger the limerence so it helps to kind of look back at that original episode and try to think about okay what were the needs that were not met within me because remember that limerence is triggered by some kind of unmet need within you right that's all you have this fantasy coping mechanism to make those emotional needs kind of calm down so so really think about okay what is the thing that is triggering the limerence what is it in me that feels unfulfilled incomplete or unmet once you understand what that thing is hopefully you can get the process of metabolizing it digesting it etc now the other thing that that I think is very helpful is to really take a reality-based approach so this is more of like the the cognitive aspect of it but to notice your mental gymnastics so what does my mind perceive from this person and what literally happened so I think a really good exercise for this is like imagine that you are an alien observing these interactions what would the alien infer about what the significance of these interactions is when someone nods at you in the hallway does that mean that they're deeply in love with you no right so this is the nature of limerence this is the challenges limerence is that there's a lot of cognitive reactions a lot of intrusive thinking a lot of distortions and what we really want to start doing is noticing the discrepancy between what the reality is and everything that my mind attaches to it so this is where we have we have a membership lecture on something in the yogic tradition called glistah so glistah is all of the coloring that our mind attaches to experiences and if you really the what's really wild about this y'all can go watch that that lecture if you want but like you know by the end of it we were really able to understand how most of your experiences in life are actually shaped by what you add to them so when your boss says hey I have some constructive feedback for you and we feel terrible it doesn't mean that we're doing a terrible job we may be doing a great job and our boss wants to see us do a better job that's why they give us constructive feedback it's a positive thing it's one opportunity for growth it demonstrates caring on the part of the boss but that's not how we perceive it so to really start to tunnel apart and tease apart you know what is the reality of the situation what is my mind adding to the equation and so as we sort of take a more reality-based approach what we'll discover is there's oftentimes some kind of negative thing that the limerence is protecting us against right so I don't know if this kind of y'all kind of remember but like here's the basic mechanism okay right we have unmet need okay we have our parent and then we have our swooper who comes in and then makes this better so then what happens is our brain develops this idea that kind of like a programming if unmet need for swooper right look look for this perfect superhero kind of person who's going to fix everything in our life so the unmet need is what triggers the limerence okay now remember that the key thing here is that when we have this unmet need and we have this fantasy remember fantasy is an emotional coping mechanism that decreases our negative emotion right so the fantasy makes the negative emotion go away so unmet need equals negative emotion then we have our fantasy which goes and knocks this out and that's why when our fantasy becomes a reality the reality doesn't knock out the negative emotion right so the reality doesn't actually fix the problem because now our the fantasy is the mental construction the day dream that soothes the negative emotion so what we need to do then is go to this unmet need and really understand what is it that we're afraid of what's the problem here and oftentimes what people who experience limerence what we'll have is they'll have some sense of like rejection that they're terrified of and this is why all this uncertainty around the limerence starts to come up where I'd like I'm terrified they're going to reject me I'm terrified they're going to abandon me if they reject you and if they abandon you and that need goes unmet what will happen what is this so terrible thing that your mind is so terrified of that it'll create all of these mental mental gymnastics so this central fear usually must be faced the cool thing is once you face it you'll realize that this central this central fear especially if you've built a normal life over here is not really applicable right so this central fear that you still primitively or so scared of is oftentimes traumatic in nature so if y'all want to understand how to digest these kinds of things we talk about it from the yogic perspective and Dr. K's guide to trauma so this is the key thing is that the fear is not doesn't exist in your regular life it's something that you carry with you as a traumatic injury the last thing not the last thing the next thing is your sympathetic nervous system needs to be recalibrated so what we want to do is do traditional mind body practices to tone down our sympathetic nervous tone okay so what does that mean so what this sort of means is that you know if our if our if there's lots of studies that show that yoga tai chi breathing exercises all this stuff is going to calm down your sympathetic nervous system as your adrenaline cortisol and blood pressure is all of these things start to drop from these practices this will alter the way that your brain functions right because adrenaline and cortisol travel to the brain and make us think rapid intrusive thoughts that's like literally what adrenaline and cortisol do so I want y'all to think about this for second when your adrenaline is pumping you can't control your thinking and that's the way that's supposed to be so when adrenaline is pumping through our brain and I'm being attacked by a pack of wild hyenas I'm going to be thinking about the wild hyenas is nothing else I could think about and that's like an evolutionary feature it's not I don't want to be worrying about what I'm making for dinner that night if I'm being attacked by a pack of wild hyenas so you need to work on a on nervous system level as well and this is what I love about being like a medical doctor is that you know when I work with my patients I I notice that now a lot of psychologists will do meditation and things like that but they're just not trained in physiology in the same way that we are so I lean heavily into this stuff I see a lot of great stuff a lot of great outcomes because you're altering the nervous system contribution to this stuff and thankfully like this is something that now all psychologists are learning in terms of mindfulness techniques and stuff so it's great you can also work with a therapist so the case study that I showed y'all which I'm going to flash to real quick you know so here's a paper that shows that treatment of lemons using a cognitive behavioral approach a case study this is in the open is in open access paper thankfully so you guys can all get it but this paper is great I'm not going to go over this I think it's a bit so I'm not going to go over all this y'all can read this if you want to but this is a great case study that really goes through like the process of lemons and how how this person goes about kind of treating it okay so you can absolutely work with a therapist or psychiatrist and so that's kind of how we deal with lemons right so I think you can absolutely get treatment but we got to understand that it is the sudden limb or beast invasion of intrusive thoughts and fantasies and daydreaming and all these kind of coping mechanisms and it strikes people and we don't know exactly why it strikes people there isn't really great data about it but if this is something that y'all struggle with hopefully this will give you some pathway of at least understanding and dealing with it now that I've said all that I'm about to torpedo everything that I just said so bad I should just stop now oh my god okay so last thing that I'm going to say is really going to mess everybody up and it's probably something that is better left unsaid but I got to say it so the other thing the other way that I understand limerance actually this is good to say so there's there's studies that also show that acceptance of the fact that you have limerance and just to say okay I have limerance it doesn't mean that it's real this is just a struggle that I have I have these unmet emotional needs I have these traumatic upbringing experiences this is just how things are so studies show that just accepting that you have this problem actually helps dissolve the problem okay so if I don't accept that limerance is a problem that I have what I'm going to be stuck in is believing that the limerance is real and that if this person if I can get this person to notice me then I will be happy forever but we know from studies on the course of limerance that that doesn't happen so until you know you're limerant you are chasing the limerant object as a source of salvation buoyancy everything so the moment that you accept chasing this limerant object will never it's a fantasy there's it's never going to it can't be a reality because I manufactured in my mind the moment that you do that it the limer beast loses power over you right because then you stop trying to make the fantasy a reality and when you try to make that fantasy a reality that's where a lot of the depression and anxiety see been so last crazy thing that I'm going to say is that you know there's a part of me in the back of my mind that wonders whether the reason we have limerance could be a very complicated neuroscience genetic predisposition circle jerk Harvard whatever the fuck Dr. K of ADHD and OCD and attachment injury and sympathetic nervous system all this scientific VES that sounds great but in in the deep bottom of my heart I wonder whether limerance is a past life karmic connection that in a past life you were attached to this person in a past life you loved this person and the ache that you have is not about this life it is an echo of love and connection that kind of true love kind of crap that you may even have in this life which I unfortunately believe in I believe in true love and that something about that experience that that love conquers all and is so transcendent in the Hindu tradition we believe that when you get married you buy yourself relationships for the next seven lifetimes six or seven I'm not quite sure I don't know if they count this one or seven more I don't know so there's this idea or you know that that in these karmic religions that there's some aspect of you that doesn't end with death that carries forward that we have these karmic bonds with people and I wonder whether limerance is just one of the manifestations of that it's not some super complicated genetic whatever the f okay now the key thing to understand is that even if that's true it doesn't mean that this person is that for you in this life right that is a memory it is an echo of times past it is a longing for an ex doesn't mean that y'all are good together and so on the one hand I hesitate to share that because I I don't want that to feed your limerance like oh my god I don't care this person is my limerance object and you are telling me there is love from a past life this means that I need to chase it oh my god I'm good don't I'm actually saying the opposite right that this thing is over now but the reason you there's a good reason you have those feelings you're not crazy that this is coming from somewhere if you're scientifically oriented you can use my doctor keg extrapolated OCD ADHD daydreaming empath I mean attachment injury sympathetic nervous system hyper activation you can use that model if you believe in science and if you believe in love you can use the karmic model but just because there's a karmic connection does not mean that it needs to be lived in this life so what I'd say is just even if you believe that say like okay this is just a memory of things past I will accept it and let it go and study show that once again acceptance will help you I hope I helped I hope I didn't torpedo everything right at the end and good luck and report back thanks for joining us today we're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life if you enjoy the conversation be sure to subscribe until next time take care of yourselves and each other