![]() I am having an absolutely what seems like manic episode with my ‘LO’ of the past 9 years.? Well I think I used to be his ‘LO’. I’ve just discovered what being limerent is and it resonates so deeply with me. “Remember LO… *sigh*” becomes “Remember LO… and all the pain I caused myself.”įiled Under: Limerence recovery, Neuroscience of limerence, Person addiction Tagged With: addiction, deprogramming, friendship, rationalisation, reinforcement Reader Interactions So, whenever the hint of relapse strikes, change the script. It’s perfectly reasonable to replace the exaggeratedly-positive imagined LO with an exaggeratedly-negative one. Emotionally, however, you need to switch the narrative about the fantasy LO in your head from idealisation to vilification. Objectively you know that LO is an independent person with a complex mix of good and bad traits, and should be treated with respect as an individual. But remember point 1 – this is all in your head. It can feel like you are unfairly demonising an innocent LO, when they are actually a vulnerable and good person. If you suffer from white-knight syndrome this can be uncomfortable. You need to cancel out the reward-associations that your brain has established, by replacing them with negative associations. If they pop into your mind, remind yourself of their negative features and that you are better off without them in your life. Relapse is a feature of any addiction, but when that addiction is to a person you don’t have to interact with, your main challenge is to avoid thinking about them. When I stopped deliberately doing this, I felt happier and calmer and better able to focus on the important people and projects in my life. It was basically emotional self-harm, as everyday life became a distraction (rather than a purpose) and I became more irritable. I treated it as an experiment – deliberately fixating on LO, and then monitoring my mood. Kind of implicit with addiction, but it was noticeable that the more I gave in to the reverie, the more my day-to-day contentedness decreased. Slowly morphing into my idealised version of them, to meet my emotional needs. It was entirely within my head, and also the version of LO that only exists in my head, not the actual person that I used to interact with. They hadn’t re-entered my life, interacted with me at all, or popped up on social media. In the spirit of purposeful living, during my last episode of relapse I decided to analyse my thoughts to see what I could learn. Nothing like their happy smiling face in your timeline (or notification of a change in their relationship status) to set you back to square one. Urgh, social media! If ever there was a curse of the modern age for limerents, it’s that. It is as though my subconscious brain has learned to associate thoughts about LO with dopamine reward and resorted to reworking the old mental patterns as a stress-relief mechanism. In my experience, such relapses are often triggered by stress. ![]() As though the intervening time had never passed. Some limerents even report a sudden relapsing back into a deep, continuous, and intrusive obsession years after breaking contact with an LO. Despite successfully avoiding the company of LO for a long period – even a period long enough to lead to a fading of the limerence symptoms – it is surprisingly easy to be triggered to fall back into reverie and reignite the craving. Using the framework of “person addiction” as a way of understanding limerence, another feature that it can have in common with other addictions is relapse. Double meaning here – both the end to a work-induced blog hiatus, and another post on limerence as person addiction…
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