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christinefmcinnes

Love or Limerence?


How can you know if you are in love, or if you are experiencing limerence?


Often the rush of adrenalin, excitement and arousal you will feel with love, is exactly what you will feel with limerence. The key difference, is that the honeymoon stage of love, doesn't last. Intensity makes way for true intimacy. Limerence, however, never changes. The emotional highs remain, alongside the horrific limerent crashes that are part of its cycle.


Limerence is driven by insecure attachment, so abandonment and engulfment are its grounding. These are potent core emotions that create a deep often unconscious longing for their repair through emotional connection. If they are triggered in adulthood by a limerent object, this experience has such power that it can become highly addictive.


A child who has experienced an abandonment wound searches for repair of this experience by compulsively seeking reassurance in adulthood. Relationship means being externally soothed by someone who can play the parent role. A child who has been enmeshed with, seeks repair from this engulfment by connection through adulation. Pedestalisation feels like the way to manage what passes for love. Adoration is the substitute for love.


These cycles of reassurance and adulation create the necessity for an eternal returning to what the child has accepted instead of love. Reassurance temporarily fills the void where love should have been, adulation does this also.


Reassurance on repeat, adulation on repeat, this is not love, it is a transaction, the interplay of the insecure attachment wounding. Love is not the compulsive search for one, or both, of these two experiences. Love is not seeking reparative emotion from another person. Limerence, however, is exactly this, and this is why it remains so powerful in its intensity. It is the compulsive, eroticised search for what was lost, it can never change, mature or develop.


Breaking this pattern is the key to recovery. Recognising that you are using another person as a source of reassurance or adulation, can be extremely painful. Seeing how another person has become an object that you use to avoid your attachment wounding, is not an easy thing, it can feel very shameful to admit to this, but this is a crucial step in your recovery.


It also clarifies what love is. When you are no longer using another person to avoid feeling abandonment or engulfment, you are free to love maturely. The dance of the insecure attachment styles, the lurching highs and lows of limerence and the perpetual longing, fall away.



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