“I simply do not have ability to control these emotions” I need to be deactivated., emotion chip is fused and can’t be removed;

betrayal of a friend through fear leading to remorse”

About 25secs in?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz3CYcjdSaI

First emotional response is negative but ‘enjoyable’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifGzycUSFSM

The whole film is interesting Picard has just lost his brother and nephew in a fire.

Soren is ‘limerent’ to return to a ‘fantasy?’ world and will do anything to get there including mass murder.

*shelve

Thanks Snow! I appreciate you!

Oddly enough after I posted this I got a text from “mystery man”
He said “oh hi, I’m sorry but I forgot I was teaching a martial arts class this weekend”
I didn’t respond
Bye, Bye Mystery Man
I’m going to self the dating scene for a while.

@Anna,

I’m listening to you here!

I think you’re doing very WELL in terms of handling this “mysterious” guy, watching and understanding what has been going on inside you.

That’s been a fruit I’ve take from LwL, becoming more aware and watchful of my mind and heart… once we pause and analyze them, we would find some cautions and answers for ourselves, which in itself is a progress.

Yes, take it one day at a time, and gradually learn how NOT to judge ourselves, especially through someone else’s subjective lens. What we see ourselves in our mind is ALWAYS more valid and important than what is going on in others’ mind about us — anyway, one could never truly know…

🫂

RANT!!!

I may be rethinking my stance on not turning off Limerence.
I was doing quite well, therapy was going good and I thought I was beginning to finally get a handle on all of this crazy nonsense.

I was making an effort to get out more with friends and a couple of weeks ago I met someone and we really hit off.
We talked most of the evening and laughed on how much we had in common.
I gave him my number and we texted almost daily usually multiple times.

I promised myself that I would NOT turn him into LO#3!
He seemed to be as much into me as I was with him.
I was feeling really good about the whole thing.
And I was being super careful not to come across as desperate LOL

Yeah, you hear a BUT coming right?
You’re right.

Last Thursday we were talking and he wanted to get together on the weekend and I said that would be great.
That’s the last I heard from him, I got ghosted.
Not a peep, not an explanation, nothing.

I refuse to reach out to him because well, quite frankly I have dealt with that before. I will not succumb to going back and acting like I did with LO#1 and LO#2
Been there done that.
No more rabbit hole for me!

Anyway, as good as I was feeling about myself before quickly deteriorated.
All of the bad crappy feelings of not being good enough, smart enough, good looking enough resurfaced. I spiraled.

Sorry for who ever reads this but I had to get it off my chest.

It’s Tuesday evening now and as I sit here and reflect, I have come to the realization that (I knew this before) it doesn’t MATTER who is giving us the attention, the validation etc…

Our LO’s are just that, OBJECTS that are giving us what we so desperately crave.
What is missing in us. (me anyway)
That we are not invisible, that we are desirable and we are worthy of love.

So, in a nutshell I still have quite the journey ahead of me.
I will get there.
Another lesson learned to take it one day at a time and not to judge my self-worth in anyone else.

“You are better off not allowing yourself to take on another LE. If you have a good marriage and family life, then cherish that.”
Yes, I don’t think there’ll be anymore LE’s for me. They are all consuming and exhausting, I don’t want any more. The one I have still isn’t done with me!
I do cherish my family and they mean the world to me. But still there is that thing buzzing around in my brain labelled LO. I think it’s just a bunch of chemicals in my brain or some neural synapses going off. I don’t know very much about brain chemistry but it’s something to do with that AND let’s not forget the sympathetic nervous system etc.
I’m a big adherent of the body/mind connection. Read ‘the body keeps the score’ by Bessel van der Kolk.

‘Limerence like heroin doesn’t take much to overtake you. And it doesn’t take much more to kill you.’
So well put! In my youth me and some of my friends were highly critical of people who did heroin. I was judgmental. But experience and life have taught me humility. I’m addicted to thinking, silly fantasies and scenarios with you know who!? Plus I had a battle with the booze which happily I have cut right back.

Would I have lived my life without Limerence.? It’s hard to say. I had some terrible times in my youth, that I most certainly would not want to revisit. But, it’s opened my heart out, made me feel such intense feelings. Given me some empathy I think. There are people who don’t feel anything much. They function, perhaps they’ve never had their hearts broken. But they’re afraid or dismissive of strong feelings and emotions. I think I’d rather be dead than be like that.

Marcia,

“I have wondered that about a lot of limerents. They don’t seem to want anything much to happen with their LOs. They just want to experience the limerent feelings.”

It’s PRECISEly these limerents’ HIGH that inspired uncountable artistic creation throughout the history: Dante’s “inferno”, (saw his LO twice in his life), Goethe’s “The Sorrow of Weather”, Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” (finished before his LO knew who he was), Standhal’s “on love”, etc, etc, etc. Ask Sammy about his complete epic poem!

My limerence most likely have fallen in this spectrum in that what was/is inspired in my mind MATTERed much more than fleshy LOs themselves or however they reacted (of course, not always). This creative force sometimes was so high that it inhibited my biological pair-bonding desire for them… It might be one reason I rarely got turned on in their presence, but in my reveries, all my best SEs were neither with LOs nor SO, but emotionally untouched lovers…. It seems that my mind can’t hold two strong desires simultaneously…

In another word, I was more than often in limerence with my desires, not the DESIRED. LO served just as a catalyst. Poor me, and poor LOs if they reciprocated! LO #1 confessed the ruin of his life after I departed… LO #2 was on his knees to beg me to stay…SO fell into depression after sensing my “love” for him died within the marriage). I’m not at all proud of what happened, but feel deeply sorry for them and myself — I could not help it! It always saddened me deeply (had fell depression for them) when I saw that I had unintentionally but unavoidably “hurt” some LOs in my life.

It’s hard for majority of practical, logic-minded people to understand or estimate enough the power of limerence’s inspirational, creative highs and its detrimental, painful lows.

“I both long to see her and fear it in equal measure.”

Grego

I can get that. It’s been almost two years for me. And I say “Hey you got through this. Maybe just reach out to her to say ‘Hi'” and then you realize you are rationalizing something that would cause you nothing but pain. Because, as you said, they are probably not evening thinking of you. It’s a reality that is hard to accept.

I agree with MJ that LE’s are just painful no matter how they happen. I posited in another comment that even if I was single and available and still met LO and shot my shot and she turned me down that the aftermath of limerence would still tear me apart as much as feelings for a woman I wasn’t available to. Limerence like heroin doesn’t take much to overtake you. And it doesn’t take much more to kill you. Limerence is certainty something I could have lived my whole life without. And I am sure my family could have lived without it too.

You are better off not allowing yourself to take on another LE. If you have a good marriage and family life, then cherish that.

I often wonder how I would have fared, had LO come around now and I was still married. If we were still having the problems that we had years ago, I don’t think we would have made it.

You are right about some pain being involved as the LE subsides. I’m just arriving now to this feeling. I don’t like it but I’m not bottoming out like I was. I will probably always miss LO to some degree though.