Dr. L,
I think you’re seeing the trees for
the forest. appealing to the
reward system of the brain as
an explanation for ” person
addiction” sounds fancy. i dont
feel its an explanation.. it is but
a miniscule, microscopic fixation
on one part of the evolutionary
process of sexual selection, no?
That is after all why the reward
circuitry evolved in the first
place, to induce pleasure to that
which is evolutionary adaptive.
surely? Food. Sex..another person
who becomes a facsimile for
these targets maybe.. money
is but a proxy for food, shelter,
and sometimes sex also. You
could call it “money addiction”
but again i think your missing the forest for the trees.. i don’t
know.. maybe im confused or
being too simple, i don’t see the
need to interject b.f skinners
school of thought, behavioralism,
mixed with neural science as
an explanation for limerence,
because evolution has already
designed our neural systems
to seek and repeat what is
adaptive anyway. Surely
what a person labels “person
addiction” is simply the universal
feeling of romantic longing for
a lost love designed to arise
from the evolved structures of
the system mixed with genetic
personality differences on the big
5. E.g. Neurotism. Some people
take it worse than others.
It would make sense to feel
pain when blocked from your
evolutionary success. E.g. your
limerent object.. maybe highly
neurotic people feel it twice as
hard. But that would be a genetic
differencee of personality trait
Neurotism?

LE,
“Out of nowhere comes the thought, you should check out LO #4’s YouTube channel and FB page.”
Thanks for the suggestion. Because I didn’t stop myself. A very, very bad idea. And he’s not even on FB! So no pics. He has no “online presence.” Just seeing his name attached to whitepage entries has set me off. What a colossal waste of time that was. And he just blithely goes about his life, not a care in the world.

Thanks for your comments Allie! I have a friend who doesn’t see the point of getting hung up on someone who’s not interested. I told her it must be nice to be like that! My last boyfriend was a nice guy, but there wasn’t that spark there. He met the right woman and I was fine with that as I could tell they were well suited! I’ve never been in a relationship with a LO! Interested to know if that’s how the limerents’ marriages start out?!

@DrL,

“Finally, your prefrontal cortex is an executive layer on top of everything else that helps us to make sense of our instincts and habits. It is where our reasoning resides, but is a cognitive miser, and will happily let habits run on autopilot unless there is a real need for intervention. That takes an act of will.”

So, how does the prefrontal cortex decide when it needs to intervene? The US Supreme Court accepts some cases, it declines others.

For, at least weeks, maybe months, I’ve had no desire to check out LO #4. The thought hadn’t occurred to me.

Today, I have the house to myself. I’m all caught up at work. It’s blissfully quiet except for the dog going off at the mail carrier, a few peels of thunder and the air conditioner.

Out of nowhere comes the thought, you should check out LO #4’s YouTube channel and FB page.

Immediately, the thought comes back, “You really don’t want to do that” and I didn’t. The prefrontal cortex overrode whatever sent up that thought. Why?

I’ve also been thinking about how conscience fits into all this. Where in the brain does the conscience reside? If you look in the index of Sapolsky’s book, conscience isn’t mentioned but compassion and empathy are. If I remember correctly, Robert Hare and Martha Stout maybe, talk about psychopaths and sociopaths having abnormal amygdalas. Both those groups are considered to have little to no conscience.

I agree Sara. I think there are a whole host of factors that will influence how distressing an LE is, both mind and circumstance related. Plus, the earlier in an LE that someone finds this site the better their outcome too!
I have said this before, my SO is a non-limerent. And it is not because he has no passion, or does not fall in love – he does, but always in the context of a relationship. I believe he is a non-limerent because he quickly accepts when there is little hope in an uncertain situation and moves on, instead of getting stuck and being unable to let go like I tend to.
No contact for a few months is fantastic self-discipline, well done for resisting.
Wishing you well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmo8L7NlURQ

One of my favorite Harrison songs.

Replacing “art of dying” with “limerence” is a stretch.

I really like this part:

“But you’re still with me
But if you want it
Then you must find it
But when you have it
There’ll be no need for it”

I think some people feel it more strongly than others, so like with a lot of things there’s a spectrum. However, a person’s circumstances can change how deeply they might fall on it. With a lot of other stresses and anxieties at the moment my current LE is more extreme than the previous one.

Thank you, Sammy,

It’s only my experience. Everyone’s story is different.

What I find amazing is how well it all fits together. The things I’ve read, the people I talked to, the therapists I worked with; it just all comes together. There’s nothing I can’t explain.

I sort of miss the whole Twin Flame aspect of things, the “what ifs?,” the familiar feeling I got when I was in a full blown limerent funk, the responsibility-dodging notion of a cold, indifferent universe blocking my happiness as opposed to my blocking my own happiness, but overall, getting rid of those is way better.

I still have a “what if?” list. I have two of them, actually. One is people I wonder what might have happened if I’d encountered them under different circumstances, (e.g., I was available or I wasn’t getting transferred in 3 months.)

The other is what might have happened if either I or someone else had made a different decision when given a choice. The latter is far more interesting but since I’ve dealt with things, I don’t spend as much time ruminating about them. Even I can beat a dead horse so long.

It served a purpose at the time. It helped me understand what things in my life were causes and what things were effects. Cause and effect is an important concept. A lot of us get those wrong in more than one area of our lives. Once I understood that I had reversed cause and effect with LO #2, I began looking back on other things and realized that I’d done it in other situations in my life. That was huge.

I explained to LO #4 about reversing cause and effect and how it can lead you to make some really bad assumptions. The worst is you tend to respond to effects, not causes, which is why nothing changes for long. For example, it’s like treating the symptoms of cancer without ever going after the tumor. You may keep it in check for awhile but you never get rid of it and eventually, it can overwhelm you.

She came back with, “Wow! I’d never considered that before but it makes so much sense.” She later said that I opened her eyes to what was happening in her relationship with her now ex. I wonder if that might have been what she was referring to.

Probably more than you wanted to know.

Thanks, again.