Limerence: What Is It And How Do We Let It Go?

hey guys hedy preeb here today i'm talking about a topic that i have meant to make a video about for at least a year now and have somehow never gotten around to it because it's such a big topic when it comes to attachment healing and it's also something that a lot of us don't have a name for and for most of us this might be the first time you're hearing this term i heard it for the first time a year ago and was like i don't understand how i've never come across this term before it

is so relevant and what that term is is limerence so i'm going to start by reading you a definition of limerence off the internet and then i'm going to explain how i define it and what my kind of operational definition of limerence is going to be within this specific video so the internet defines limerence as a state of mind which results from romantic or non-romantic feelings for another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies as well as a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and to have one's feelings

reciprocated so the first time that you read this definition you might think so that is a crush and in many ways it is actually identical to a crush i think that many definitions of the word crush could be completely and totally interchanged with the definition of the word limerence the main difference there would be that limerence has a bit of an obsessive quality to it right but the way that i'm going to define limerence specifically is any relationship that you have where you have those limerent feelings so those feelings of wanting someone's time attention of

having mostly we're going to talk about sexual and romantic feelings for someone in this video but and this is where i define limerence versus a real desire to form a relationship with someone limerence is about when you are more attached to the idea of someone that you have inside of your head than you are to the actual person so it's what happens when you choose to prioritize maintaining a fantasy relationship with someone in your head over the real relationship that you have with them in real life which means you are willing to get into fights

with them about things that they did that are not what you wanted them to do or what the version that you have of them in your head would have done it means that you are unwilling to learn new things about them and integrate those things into your idea of who they are because those things might not go along with who you want them to be it's basically any time in which our idea of someone and what we want to believe about them and the way we want them to make us feel based on that belief

overrides our true genuine willingness to have a connection with that person and i think that for most people who are insecurely attached specifically those who are on the anxious spectrum so either anxious or fearful avoidant types it's possible that most of the romantic and sexual feelings you've had in your entire life have been limerence and that you may never have had a true genuine connection with someone or you may have only had that true genuine connection in moments and the rest of the time there's this constant push and pull between how you want someone to

be inside of your own mind and how they actually are and you might have always heavily prioritized maintaining your image of who you want this person to be in your head and we're going to talk about why we do that as well as how we can stop it because we cannot form real connections with people when we have limerence around them all we're doing when we have limerence around someone is kind of emotionally masturbating to them right we're just using this idea that we have of them to make ourselves feel good about ourselves and to

confirm something we want to believe is true about ourselves like if this person loves me then i'm worthy and we are doing that at the expense of actually getting to know them so this is not real connection this is not real love this is not anything that gives us real lasting power in a relationship so it is my fairly firm opinion that love and connection cannot happen until limerence is at least operating at an almost non-existent level real connection can only happen with people in real time okay but the first step of getting over limerence

is recognizing when we're doing it and in order to recognize when we're doing it we have to learn to recognize kind of the danger cues that happen inside of our own minds and inside of our own bodies that alert us to the fact that what we're feeling is limerence not true connection so let's talk about some of the things that we might mistake limerence for one of the biggest things i think we mistake limerence for is sexual attraction so we might think oh i'm just so attracted to this person i can't get them off of

my mind i think about them wanting me i think about us having sex i think about us being together in a sexual way and we might truly think that what we're feeling is sexual desire and i think that a lot of us of any attachment style but particularly of insecure attachment styles are actually not that grounded when it comes to recognizing what sexual attraction actually feels like in our bodies okay so when we feel limerence it's often a very mental thing so we're fantasizing about someone we're thinking about them we're almost like obsessively watching a

movie in our heads about what we want that person to do and say and feel towards us versus sexual attraction is a very imminent feeling it's very grounded in the body at least for myself and i would imagine for other people as well and something that i think we don't talk a lot about because so few people actually talk about sex in an embodied way is that sexual attraction actually requires us to feel a little bit calm it's kind of this mix of having our body be relaxed enough that we can feel sexual urges because

you can't feel sexual when you're not feeling relaxed because by virtue of being in fight-or-flight mode all of those lower-level systems are not being prioritized by your nervous system so the reproduction system is not the thing that comes out screaming when you're in fight-or-flight mode and when you are insecurely attached when you are engaging in a limerent redemption fantasy as part of your attachment system feeling threatened you are often in fight or flight mode and fighter flight mode is this very intense anxious energy in the body it gives you a lot of energy it gives

you a lot of drive it can make you feel like you want to go for a run it can make you feel like you want to reach out to people like you want to send 25 text messages in a row it can make you feel like you're desperate to get some sort of answer attention response from someone right that is not the feeling of being relaxed and present in your body and aware of your sexual system right and obviously there's excitation that happens when you're feeling truly sexually aroused but it's a very different feeling than

that kind of anxious heady desperate for validation feeling right those two feelings show up in different places in the body so to recognize whether you're feeling limerence or whether you're feeling genuine sexual attraction you really have to ground yourself in the moment and notice what's coming up for you so i had so many experiences in my life where what i thought was that i was so attracted to someone that i just could not keep my head on straight but actually what i was feeling was just an overwhelming limerence for that person so there was one

person in particular who i remember i met at a very difficult period of my life where a lot of was hitting the fan in a lot of different directions and i developed this out of control in my eyes attraction to this person but what that attraction felt like was this overwhelming desire for them to want me and i wanted them to want me so badly that i would actually get a little bit annoyed when i was with them because they were not allowing me enough space to engage with the fantasy version of them that i

had in my head so i ended up sleeping with this person multiple times and i would actually get anxious for the sex to be over so that i could go back to the part of my brain that was just imagining them wanting me so badly that was the best part to me and the reality of being with them either sexually or platonically was just kind of fodder for the fantasy like it was like this necessary evil that i had to do in order to return to my fantasy and allow it to deepen and so i

was never fully in my body when i was with this person and i think that this is actually really common i think that a lot of us i would say most of us have learned to have sex in a very disembodied way like we aren't present with the experience we aren't checking in with each other in a real way we're often even fantasizing about the person that we're with while we're with them and completely ignoring the actual version of them that is right in front of us and i think that we have been socialized to

approach sex that way a lot of the time but it is such a disembodied experience right even looking at someone while you're sleeping with them and thinking oh you're so into me right now that's a disembodied experience right you don't know that for sure maybe they're not into you at all they just really wanted to have sex that day because they were feeling horny right you could be completely misinterpreting why they're sleeping with you the only experience you can have in that moment that's true is your own experience in your body right and anytime we

are having sex but we're not focused on the actual feelings that are present in our body in that moment we are more focused on what the other person is thinking of us we're generally in limerence we are not genuinely in our bodies experiencing attraction okay so it's going to be a little bit different for everybody like what limerence vs genuine sexual attraction feels like it's going to show up differently in your body and in your mind but learning what those distinguishing points are for you is going to go a really long way in helping you

understand whether you feel genuine attraction towards someone or whether you feel limits towards them another key one is that generally we feel true embodied attraction towards someone in the moment right so if you are on your own thinking of this person and you haven't had a lot of interaction with them lately but you are still feeling that intense overwhelming feeling of attraction it might be because you are experiencing limits right so this also raises the question well isn't limerence just a normal part of being alive like when you have a crush of course you think

about that person when they're not there even in long-term romantic relationships you think about your partner when they're not there and you can have lots of warm feelings you can draw upon memories and that's fine there's nothing wrong with that i'm not trying to moralize this that might be a lie i'm trying to moralize this a little bit it felt untrue when i said that in my body but i think it becomes kind of pathological and it becomes very disruptive for ourselves and other people when we're prioritizing the fantasy that we have about someone over

the actual experience of being with them and we're getting frustrated or resentful towards them for not living up to this fantasy version that we have of them that is not real connection that is not real love that is unkind towards the other person it's not allowing them to be seen and appreciated for who they actually are as a human being which leads me to my next point so we have to understand the function of limerence in order to get over it so until we understand why we're doing this it's going to be difficult for us

to catch ourselves in the moments that we're doing it and decide to do something else instead so limerence often feels like it just kind of falls out of the sky right like there's this book called living with limerence by someone named dr l who's unidentified and they talk about how when you have a limerent object so a crush that's kind of obsessive they have almost this glow about them like you think about them or you look at them and you almost see them as like this enlightened glowy uber attractive version of someone right and it

might feel completely random and like it's not your fault and it's completely out of control how you feel about this person but if you're paying close attention there's usually a function to the limerence itself okay and what i mean by that is there is something your brain needs that it is trying to fulfill through this limerence object so i'm going to give some examples from my own life and also some that i think are common examples of why people pick limerent objects but i think that a quicker way to do it for yourself is to

just really tune in to how your body feels when you think about someone you have limits around so i had an experience recently where i was noticing myself developing a bit of limerence around someone who it didn't make any sense for me to have this much of a focus on our connection because we didn't have that much of a connection it was like someone i met briefly but i really noticed that i wanted them to fill this role of very knowledgeable very together human being like that was the way that i liked to think of

them and when i pictured this person in my mind what i noticed first was that i actually was not picturing us interacting at eye level despite the fact that any time i'd been around this person we had been talking like normal people who were right in front of each other where i pictured them was kind of up and to the right like i saw them literally in my mind when i pictured them as above me and i was like okay that's interesting so when i have that visualization of someone as above me literally what does

that feel like in my body and i realized it makes me feel kind of protected like it makes me feel like knowing that there's someone wiser more knowledgeable more capable than me who i like to imagine as being in my corner close by but not too close makes me feel like i can kind of relax and trust that they have the lead for a bit and i like that feeling i like that feeling of i don't have to think about how to protect this other person which is very often how i feel around other people

i often feel like i need to protect the needs emotions and feelings of the people around me that's kind of this compulsive caretaking thing that i have going on but i like sometimes having a person where i meet them and i believe them to be better or superior to me in some way because i want to feel for once like i'm getting taken care of and this is where it's important to point out this did not match my experience of this person in reality they were not offering to take care of me there was no

true reciprocal relationship of care between us this was not someone i even knew very well but i liked the feeling that i got when i imagined them as better than me i liked the feeling of inferiority because it allowed me to relax a little bit and so that limits was serving the purpose of alerting me to the fact that i'm feeling a little bit overly responsible in my life right now i'm feeling a little bit like i want someone else to take the lead in certain areas i want there to be someone i can look

up to for advice for help for support and it feels very mentally safe for me very physically and mentally safe for me at this point in my life to have a fake idea of someone in my head where i believe that they know better and that they are more enlightened than me so i thought about that and i took that person in the mental image of my head and i just kind of move them down here like i move them into the area where i picture people when i feel like i have to be protective

over them and i went oh now it feels a bit scary i feel a little bit of tension in my body i feel a little bit of kind of anxious energy flowing through my arms and my torso and so now i'm aware that the limerence i was feeling was protecting me from this feeling protecting me from the feeling of nobody really knows what they're doing in life we are all the blind leading the blind and that means that i have to take extreme responsibility for everything that i am learning for the path that i'm walking

down for the choices that i'm making about how i develop next this person isn't going to make them for me even though i want so badly to believe that if i just looked up to them enough they would show me the way i want that to be the solution but it's not i have to find my own way i think at other times in my own life i've had limerence because i remember one time i met someone who shared a really bad habit that i had but they were so proud of it and so confident

in it and they wore it like it was a virtue rather than a literally life-destroying vice and i wanted so badly to believe that that habit for me could be a good thing not a bad thing as well so i just decided this person knows more than me they're above me i will follow them down this path and now anything that happens as a result of that bad habit i don't have to blame myself for i can blame them right and that wouldn't be overt it wouldn't be in my conscious awareness but it would be

absolutely present in my unconscious awareness and there would be times where i would resent that person for it and not have the precise language for why other times i've felt limerence because i have wanted to be alone and i've known that if i pick someone to have limerence around and believe that they are up on this pedestal that i could never possibly reach then i don't have to go through the process of forming a real connection with this person i can just consistently tell myself i'm not good enough they're going to reject me i can

make that a self-fulfilling prophecy because when you're trying to impress someone you are putting a giant wall between yourself and them you are not allowing real connection which means two people showing up in real time sharing their vulnerable authentic experience of being alive and connecting on that that is the only way real connection forms but when you have someone up on a pedestal it relieves you from the responsibility of forming a real connection and it allows you to get really caught up in this fantasy of yourself as not good enough but when you are good

enough then you'll have that connection and that fantasy can actually be a very comfortable one if you are afraid of being seen if you have this fear which everyone who is insecurely attached does necessarily have that if someone saw the true you they would not love you they would not want to be around you they would not accept you it feels very comfortable to have concrete reasons in your head why someone would reject you that are superficial right so there's a point in my past where i remember picking someone and just deciding that the whole

entire problem the entire reason we didn't have connection was because i was not fit enough we had great conversations we hung out all the time we enjoyed each other's company but this person was not attracted to me and they had made that clear and i wanted to keep them in this limerent position so i just decided it was a physical problem it was not in my mind anything to do with the fact that i was completely not allowing them to be vulnerable and authentic and honest with me because i was so desperately trying to shove

them back into this place in my head where they knew everything i was like nah it's just like i'm not fit enough so i can't have connection with this person and that thought was way more comfortable to me than i actually could have connection with this person but i would have to take a lot of responsibility and show up in a very different way and care about them honestly and authentically even when it hurts to care about them or it's hard to care about them as opposed to staying in this place where i'm more comfortable

where i just get to decide that oh poor me they just don't like me back but i'm so good at loving them no you are not good at loving anybody who you have up on a pedestal anyone you have on a pedestal you do not have the opportunity to have a real connection with but sometimes we just want to feel good about ourselves by putting ourselves in that victim position and telling ourselves i'm so kind so caring so loving they just don't like me because of this superficial reason and that keeps us from recognizing the

realer reason which is that true connection requires showing up as our adult selves and actually being able to give as much as we receive to another person and accept that there are no inherent better or worse people there are just different people interacting with each other in different ways and being more or less willing to show up authentically now of course there are different levels of compatibility in terms of personalities etc but i think that if you are honestly and authentically showing up to your connections there is very rarely if ever going to be a

situation where one of you just absolutely loves the other person's personality and the other person absolutely dislikes the other one i think that real connection is kind of necessarily always matched because if you feel super connected to someone but they don't feel connected to you it's almost definitely because you're inventing something in your brain about these qualities that this person has that they actually don't have as opposed to actually being present with them and noticing and responding to what they are giving you that is real okay because those are the things that we can truly

connect on things that are real that we can explicitly and overtly have moments of bonding over with people so this leads me to kind of my last point which is more of the how to get over limerence in the moment and this is a tool that i took from radical honesty which is a philosophy that i talk a lot about on twitter but not as much about on here but i will make some videos about it because it has been revolutionary for me at this current point in my life and it can be extremely helpful

with getting over limerence so something that we talk about a lot in radical honesty is not hanging on to resentments towards people so expressing resentments directly towards people and there's a very specific way that radical honesty teaches people to do this so that we're not being cruel and brutal in our honesty but we're still able to express it cleanly but something else that's really interesting that radical honesty teaches people not to do is to hang on to appreciation for people so if you are feeling very warm and happy and appreciative towards someone in your body

radical honesty also encourages you with the same level of urgency with which you would feel resentment towards someone to express your appreciation towards them because if we hold on to appreciation without directly expressing it to someone what that can turn into is an expectation for that person an expectation on how we want them to always behave because we so appreciate something that they did in one moment and then maybe we extrapolated upon it in our brains and decided that they did that because of this and so that means in the future they're always going to

do that when i say this and then when we do this and they don't say that we get angry at them and then we don't express that resentment and it becomes this giant never-ending cycle of limerence and people just not looking at each other and having real moments of connection but only looking at each other and getting frustrated by the ways in which they are not living up to the fantasy version that we had of them in our heads so in order to get over appreciation which means get over limerence in the moment we have

to express directly to people what exactly it is that they did that we appreciated them for so this is going to get interesting if you have a lot of limerence around someone because often the appreciation that we feel for people who we have limits around in our minds is not tied to anything that they actually did in reality the appreciation that we feel for them inside of our minds is often tied to something that we imagined them doing based on something we extrapolated from reality so let's say i'm having a bad day and my friend

is really present and attentive with me and there for me and instead of telling them hey i appreciated you spending an hour with me today when i was having a hard time i decided in my head this person cares about me so much and they are always going to be there for me every time i need someone now i've accidentally created that expectation right because i didn't just appreciate them for what happened and then moved on with no expectation about the future so now it's not just a nice time that i had with my friend

it's a relationship i'm having with them inside of my head that doesn't necessarily resemble reality in which i think that they will always be there for me so this is now no longer a present authentic experience of connection it was in those moments when they were present and attentive with me but even then i'm gonna correct my own example even then i don't know for sure that they were being present and attentive with me unless they told me that directly they could have just been staring at me thinking about something completely different and i could

have interpreted that as presence and connection so the only thing i could really say to them that were true is i appreciate you speaking with me or spending time around me this afternoon so we have to be really careful when we're telling people what we appreciate them for that we are not telling ourselves any story about what they did and this is extraordinarily difficult to do extraordinarily we are so trained to attach motives to people's behaviors that it is almost impossible at first to root out what actually happened versus what we believe their motive to

be so actually in the enough peaceful boot camp course we talk a lot about this so we talk about looking at situations that happen as though you are a robot who can only note down what tangibly happened in real time so a robot watching me interact with my friend would not be able to note down the friend was present and attentive all they could note down is the friend was looking in the other friend's face friend one spent three hours with friend two when friend one said i'm sad friend two said i'm so sorry that

you're feeling that way those are the only types of things we should be expressing appreciation towards people for because those are things that concretely definitely happened and that have no layer of interpretation on top of them right so if i tell my friend i appreciate that you spent three hours with me today that is expressing appreciation for something that definitely definitely happened i appreciate that you supported me i appreciated that you were there for me those things are all interpretations right they weren't necessarily supporting me for all i know they were manipulating me and they

were just using my weakness as a way to get something they want out of me right it is inaccurate to assume anything about what's going on in someone else's inner world and so to stop ourselves from making those assumptions and then running away in our brains with them we have to learn to appreciate people in real time for only things that we can be concretely sure happened okay and we can report what that made us feel so when you spent three hours with me today i felt very warm and happy and safe in my body

and we can maybe explain to them what that means and radical honesty would say that's even taking it a little bit too far and you should only report what you feel in your body but for the purpose of this video and the purpose of not making this a video that is just describing the communication tactics of radical honesty i just want to make sure i'm emphasizing that it's about centering yourself in your own experience not assigning judgments not assigning values not assigning positive qualities to the other person and just noticing what happened what you felt

when that thing happened and then thanking them for that and moving on not making a story about how they're always going to do that not making a story about why they did that not making a story about whether or not they owe you a continuation of that all of those things are limerent thoughts that keep us out of reality and out of real time connection with someone so this has to become an ongoing practice of recognizing what is concretely happening versus what we imagine that to mean and the more that we can separate out reality

from fantasy or imagination the more we can experience real-time connection with someone because we're actually grounding our experience with them in reality right so some real-time grounded experiences might be i appreciate that you smiled when i told you a joke i appreciate that you went to the mall with me and we spent a day together i appreciate that you cooked dinner tonight and gave me some okay so things that actually happened and so when you have a limerent object it could be really helpful to just think about what has concretely transpired between myself and this

other person that a neutral third party who had no ability to mind read at all could observe and note down as something that concretely happened those are the true experiences that you share with someone those are the true connection points you have those are the true moments you need to be referencing in your relationship with someone what's not real is any interpretation you're making about it and i feel like i am rambling a lot now but it's an important ramble because i think that we are so not used to making those distinctions we are used

to taking one interaction we have with someone or a series of interactions that we have with someone making a story about it then getting so attached to that story that we cannot for the life of us figure out where is reality and where it is not reality and that is one of the most important tools we will ever learn in our lives when it comes to forming real connections because real connections can only form over shared realities and so i will do much more follow-up content on this because i'm realizing as i'm speaking that i

have so much to say on it and so many thoughts on it but the important takeaway points are i'm going to go over the three things that we've talked about today one limerence is not the same thing as sexual attraction it's also not the same thing as true connection limerence is about the relationship that we have with someone in our heads and that relationship is not real you might have a real relationship with someone in reality but the limerence you have around them the version of them that you have in your head is not real

and we have to be able to recognize that if we want to have a real connection with them and i also want to note a lot of us might think we want real connections but we don't because real connections require us to be vulnerable they require us to take responsibility for our actions and show up in our adult selves they require us to not project onto other people and blame them for things and for a lot of us that's really scary i still feel like it's really hard for me to have connections that don't include

any of those things so really really think about that right don't beat yourself up for it don't tell yourself you're wrong or stupid or doing things wrong if you have trouble letting go of any of those things and if you do prefer that fantasy connection i still actively fight with myself all the time i love my fantasy connections they feel much more safe to me than real connections but real connections make me feel more alive and i'm learning to follow that feeling which has its other perks and benefits but anyways second takeaway to get rid

of limerence we have to understand its function and what it is that we believe this fantasy is protecting us from or giving to us because until we understand that and until we find a way to get that feeling or to change the need for that feeling in our lives we're just going to continuously replace limerent objects in our brain with other limerent objects literally until we die and many people do this many many many people i would almost argue most people live that way and they go the majority of their lives not having very many

moments of true connection right so figuring out and taking responsibility for meeting your needs requires us to notice when we're putting a person in some stand-in position for a real need that we have in our minds and expecting them to meet that need so that we don't have to meet it for ourselves third thing recognize what your real relationship is with someone what the real connection moments and points that you have are versus where you're just feeling connected to the story that you're telling yourself in your head about this person and then you have to

be willing to get over and let go of the story and all the nice thoughts you have about them in your brain in order to stay present in the actual connection that you have with them how will you know you're having real connection with someone you are actually physically in their presence you are noticing the feelings in your body they are telling you verbally or expressing towards you that they feel a connection between you right there are very literal connections that we have with people but a lot of us just run away with the stories

in our heads and keep ourselves warm with those and that is how limerence will leave you lonely your entire life if you choose it and you can many people do again this isn't necessarily an argument for the moral benefits of letting go of limerence it is only an explanation of what you ought to do if you want to start having real connections and again sometimes we think we want real connections but what we actually want is for our limerent objects to act in real life the way they're acting in our heads right real connection means

people are really not always going to do the things we want them to do people are really not always going to feel the way we want them to feel people are really not always going to show up the way we want them to show up but there is immense benefit to choosing those connections anyways and that is way outside the scope of this video but for today i just wanted to talk about what limerence is and if you want to get over it which i think most of us have to think long and hard about

whether we actually do what you can do to do that and these are all of your starting points all right this has been a longer video so let me know in the comments if you manage to get to this point what your thoughts are what's coming up for you as we talk about limerence and limerent objects and the experience of getting over limerence how you feel when you think about getting over limerence because for a lot of people it's a lot scarier than we think to let go of limerence to let me know what's coming

up for you as always i love you guys i hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and i will see you back here again really soon [Music]