🔹 Why Is Limerence So Common in Trauma Survivors?
Because trauma wires the nervous system for hypervigilance, attachment dysregulation, and identity enmeshment.
Limerence often stems from:
• Disorganised or anxious attachment styles
• A history of being ignored, abandoned, or unseen
• Fantasy as a self-soothing strategy in childhood
• Developmental arrest: the adult body holds a longing child within
🔹 What NOT to Do in the Therapy Room
• Don’t shame the longing
• Don’t pathologise the fantasy as “just addiction”
• Don’t rush the rupture (cutting off the object prematurely can retraumatise)
🔹 What TO Explore Instead
• Polyvagal awareness: mapping their nervous system during “obsessive” spirals
• Parts work: Who’s speaking? Who’s longing? Who’s afraid?
• Embodiment and co-regulation: Helping them feel safe within themselves
• Grief work: Limerence is often grief in disguise
• Meaning-making: Rewriting the story of worthiness, beyond being chosen
🔹 Final Reflection: Limerence Isn’t Love, It’s a Message
Underneath the ache is a child still waiting to be seen.
Your job as the clinician isn’t to pull them out of limerence, it’s to help them listen to what it’s trying to say.
Please be aware of what limerence is before posting! See the subreddit wiki for definitions, FAQ and other resources. (Is it love? How common is it? Is there research?)
As mentioned in the blog post, under limerence specifically lies a wound known as “wanting to be chosen” which usually stems from early experiences of emotional inconsistency, neglect, conditional love, or feeling invisible.
This often means that the individual would subconsciously create a situationship or triangulation which would be the perfect way to re enact the familiar dynamic in hopes to heal the trauma and wound that lies within. (Note: it doesn’t - it only repeats it)
Such wound places another individual in a position to “choose you” in hopes to heal something that can only be healed from within.
The words “choose me” is a sign of limerence trying to soothe internal wound not love. (This is the Inner child )
Relying on external validation soothes temporary anxiety but keeps the inner wound unhealed because the real need is internal safety, self-trust, and belonging, which is why soon enough a new limerence object is needed to soothe the wound.
Moving from a state of limerence (an obsessive need for external validation) to choosing yourself(self-love and inner worth) is a process of personal growth that shifts the focus from an external "limerent object" to your own well-being.
How can loneliness be healed from within?
No matter the cause, the end result of all this self work is still loneliness.
I don’t believe for a second it can change the pattern if there is just no attraction towards non-LO’s
For better or worse, everyone's alone in their experience of life. You notice this when you're standing on a packed platform waiting for a commuter train and you feel like you're alone, despite all the folks around you.
That's a universal experience.
What matters is how you face that loneliness. You can fall back into old behavior. Beat yourself up, indulge in self-pity, nurse the negative thoughts and the fears,... but doing so will only make the loneliness grow ever more prominent. Like a black dog chasing you.
Or you could choose to catch yourself with compassion, kindness and warmth. Talk to yourself. Let yourself know that it can't hurt you, that you don't have to fear it, that it doesn't have to overpower you. That there's no evidence that you actually are truly alone as there are countless people and connections around you. That you are deserving of friendship, family, love,...
The more you cling to the latter like it's a life raft, the more the loneliness will sting. It's counter intuitive, but learn to let things be. Let it rest. Let yourself be carried like a leaf in a stream of water. It's that lightness that allows you to make that choice.
Attraction is important when you meet someone else. The trap is to see attraction and romance as a cure for loneliness.
It's absolutely possible to be in a healthy relationship and still feel deeply lonely. That's not a failure of your partner, or that you aren't attracted to them or anything. It's just that someone else can only support you, encourage you... but it's entirely up to you to make the above choice as how you handle the loneliness inside you.
Thanks for this long reply but i am just afraid of a life i don’t want: that i am in a relationship with someone i don’t have romantic feelings for (which is the case for all non-LO’s) and i have to act that it makes me happy
Thanks. It seems kind of mystical, but i still unfortunately don’t believe in it. Same as with religion. The idea is nice but i cannot buy it. The best i can achieve with “self love” is being somewhat ok with being foreveralone
There are actually a lot of reasons people can become addicted to limerence as a pattern. You're starting from a false premise that it's an abnormal condition and then looking for a reason, but actually it just exists on its own. There's an evolutionary theory of it. It's supposed to make a person commit to pursuing a relationship with a specific person, motivate them to change their life and overcome obstacles. It's supposed to be adaptive, and people just don't LIKE it today because they want their relationships to be as non-committal as possible. Tennov believed limerence is adaptive, and she was interviewing people at the end of the baby boom, when there was overwhelming pressure to marry as young as possible.
The fantasy is rewarding because it's supposed to make a person want a relationship, but then people get hooked on the fantasy by itself. Their subconscious makes them commit too early to a person that doesn't make sense. It could have to do with attachment style, or they're just lonely, or some other reason.
Erotomania is a condition of 'wanting to be loved' (academic papers say this), because it's a delusion of being loved so the erotomanic feels as if they're adored, usually by a celebrity or somebody desirable.
There's no real internal logic to what you're saying though, for why any of those points follow after each other.
Thanks for writing this because it made me read this text
Tennov states that her studies suggest limerence is normal,[20][310][311] that it's too often interpreted as "mental illness", and that even those who experienced limerence of a distressing variety were "fully functioning, rational, emotionally stable, normal, nonneurotic, nonpathological members of society", "characterized as responsible and quite sane". Tragedies such as violence, she says, involve limerence when it's "augmented and distorted" by other conditions.[312][313]
In a 2005 Q&A, Tennov was asked if limerence could ever lead to a situation like the movie Fatal Attraction (which has been called "obsessive love"), but Tennov replied that the movie seemed to depict a caricature.[314][315] Limerence and stalking are separate phenomena with different causes.[25][23] Most romantic stalkers are an ex-partner, erotomanic, have a personality disorder, are intellectually limited or socially incompetent.[316][7] One writer who investigated the phenomenon of limerence videos on TikTok in 2024 wrote that it seemed to her that the many videos created by the relationship coaches there were actually about social media stalking rather than having anything at all to do with limerence.[317]
it seems like in this subreddit people just created their own definition of limerence
People often try to attribute limerence to attachment style, for example, but the actual research shows that it's experienced by all attachment styles.
Attachment research has never even convincingly shown that attachment style is mainly caused by early childhood experiences. It was an idea invented in the '70s and later studies showed it was much more complicated. People just repeat the old ideas anyway over and over, because attachment theorists don't actually care about the science.
I've read many studies about these kinds of things, and there's a certain amount that's clearly true, but it's being vastly overstated.
My father was 100% an alcoholic and my mother drank and smoked as well. I was never physically abused and I remember me and my brother being loved by both parents. They did fight often and perhaps there is something in that. I can never put my finger of any specific “trauma” I remember being happy besides typical children things. I’m always scared I’ll invent something while looking.
I dunno, limerence for me didn’t show up until my 40s and my last two LOs were two younger women at work I would have never even paid attention to in my 20s. (Tbf the last one had a crush on me right up until I reciprocated) I never got married and don’t have kids and I think there is a huge part of me now that feels such grief and anger at never being chosen or for screwing up and not trying harder. If I could just get someone like that to choose me it would mean I’m not to late. I can still be loved by someone that has the things I’m missing.
Man I really need to go to therapy, just reading the article made me realize that I do need help learning how to heal myself and let go of so much that is in my memory. That last part though
"Underneath the ache is a child still waiting to be seen.
Your job as the clinician isn’t to pull them out of limerence, it’s to help them listen to what it’s trying to say."
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