
In Kubler Ross's model of the five stages of grief, she describes bargaining as an attempt to temporarily ward off the inevitable knowledge of loss. It is a process of wondering what could have been, might have been, if you had been able to change what happened and save the person you loved.
Ordinarily in grief, this stage of bargaining is worked through, and this reframing of the past falls away. In limerence, bargaining becomes something else. Limerence does not allow for movement or a working through, it is an eternal replay of the longing for connection. What this means, is that in limerence, the longing for the other begins to loop, and bargaining becomes an ongoing preoccupation where it feels impossible to ever give up the attempt to win the other.
You might write a beautiful letter, pouring all of your desire and ability to connect into it. You send the letter, you are rebuffed. So you begin again, writing yet another heartfelt and exquisitely crafted missive. Surely this time you will say all that is needed, all that is wanted, your words must unlock the other. They do not. Usually someone at this stage gives up, but in limerence, it feels impossible to let go of the possibility of connection. You write again.
This intense need to try again and again to connect with the limerent object is being driven by a force the seems to create a deep sense of self forgetting around humiliation. Without remembering humiliation and its bitter sting, it is all too easy to move again and again towards it. What creates this in us? What is this blindness towards consequence? It is often abandonment.
Abandonment wounds make a person vulnerable to limerence, and highly vulnerable to this need to throw ourselves at another with no regard for our own self esteem. Limerence destroys dignity, as its engine is abandonment.
How do we heal this? We need to grieve. Bargaining as Ross said, is prolonging the inevitable. We need to feel the loss that we do not wish to face, and in feeling it, let go of the hope that we can win that which is unwinnable. This is so painful to do, and yet, it is growthful pain, it releases us from fantasy and restores, perhaps creates for the first time, true dignity.
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