Love, Limerence, and the Emotionally Unavailable Partnership

No one ever said that love was easy, although we may have all had the experience that it can be.  I think that everyone can agree that love can be different, and with each new person that we love, we may discover a new version of love, or we may discover that we can love and be loved in a different way.  Some people think that ‘true love’ is very obvious and maybe even immediate, and others take a while to build on and grow into love.  There is no one standard of love, which is the beauty of it, because although we often know when we love someone, different types of love force us to grow and change as humans.

What we do know about love is that our formative love and family experiences can often define what we consider to be love, and what we go into the world looking for. Our young experiences and the things that we know about love from our families can shape our concept of love as we begin to explore at an early age what it may mean to us. And as adults, we may have to stretch our imaginations and try dating people who don’t feel familiar to us or remind us of our young relationships to find different experiences and definitions of how love can be. This is especially true in situations where the love that we received from our family of origin is not the type of love that we need, or that feels healthy to us now.

In this article, I’d like to talk about a type of love that is often very intense and extremely exciting, which can also cause a great deal of pain, and it may even be a version of love that is terrifying and can cause extreme turmoil when it falls apart. I’d like to define this type of love as “limerence”. I don’t think that everyone has had the experience of limerence, though many people can definitely say that they have had this type of love multiple times, even. Limerence is a state of infatuation or obsession with another person that involves an all consuming passion and intrusion of thoughts. I believe that limerence is a type of love that can sometimes be related to childhood trauma, and those who find this experience repeating in adulthood over and over again are working through some version of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (also known as c-ptsd) from a time in their childhood when they experienced neglect, or from when they’ve felt tenuous love from an emotionally unavailable caregiver. Symptoms of c-ptsd include fantasy, obsession, and longing among many other things. These mechanisms, also present in limerence, were all coping mechanisms to having an emotionally unavailable caregiver. The use of fantasy is usually born to protect one from the feelings of disappointment and the reality of loneliness.  The obsessive thoughts are a form of feeling like one has control over a situation when they do not, and the obsession attempts to block the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness that the person felt (and maybe still feels) in relationships, specifically with someone who is unavailable. And longing is in a similar vein, the feeling of longing implies that we don’t have our needs met, and so we may get stuck in a longing infatuation with the person who is unavailable as a way to meet our own need for them.

Limerence can begin as mutual love and become limerence if one person withdrawals or abandons the other. The withdrawal itself is the trigger of the original wound of being abandoned over and over again by a caregiver, emotionally or literally or both. The love that was once mutual and shared can become unrequited and obsessive,  and the obsession can become limerence,  the addiction to the unavailable partner and trying to get their love or attention again. Here is how limerence can be explained as a symptom of one’s earlier wounds.

In adulthood, when we fall into limerence with someone, we may be repeating this wound of obsessing about the breadcrumbs of love that we may be receiving from someone who is unavailable as a way to undo what happened to us in the past and finally have the unavailable person choose us and become available to us, which is likely something that our parents or caregivers could never give us and never will.  In therapy, we call this type of repeating event a “Repetition Compulsion”, and the compulsive aspect of us attempting to undo this trauma or get our needs met is what causes limerence.

Falling in love with someone who is unavailable means that you are unavailable. This is a tricky concept to understand, so bare with me.  As long as we are attempting to love someone who cannot properly give us love,  we are keeping ourselves unavailable to someone who can, who would like to love you. As long as you are in limerence, you are the unavailable one, because you are committed to someone who is not committed to you, who will likely never be committed to you, and you are keeping yourself from loving someone who can commit to you, who you can be committed to. If you have a habit of choosing unavailable partners who don’t want commitment, it’s possible that you are actually terrified of commitment and it feels safer to you to love someone who is not actually an option to keep yourself safe.  This fear of commitment is ironically also born from being trapped in a primary relationship as a child with someone who could not meet your needs, so in a way,  you are keeping yourself trapped by your continual choice to become attached to unavailable people.

There is a fantasy that the person who abandoned you will come back, and the fantasy is the coping mechanism that you have formed to tolerate the loss.  In my next blog post,  I’ll be writing about how to grieve, work through the c-ptsd symptoms that have kept you unavailable, and how to become present and available to a partner who is also present and available.

“I Can’t Breathe” – How To Not Accept What Is Unacceptable, From a Therapist’s Perspective

George Floyd was murdered on camera, by police officers, on May 25th, 2020. The world is in a pandemic. We have just learned how to respond to a global crisis. And now, hopefully, we will respond to systemic racism and police brutality with the same amount of response and action.

There are a lot of painful things in the world, and mental health can be difficult to maintain in the light of taking everything in, even in the pre pandemic world, which was already a lifetime ago. If we let all of the pain into our hearts and our psyches all of the time, we would drown. Ignoring the pain of the world is a defense mechanism that we have formed to cope with our daily realities, with the news, with death, with the pandemic, with war. Ignoring the pain of racism is a privilege, a privilege only allotted to those who have basic safety in the world because they are not in danger walking down the street, from the police, the people who are meant to protect us. Please stop ignoring this privilege, fear, and pain. Because it’s painful for a reason. And it is imperative to treat the cause of the pain as a crisis.

When one accepts racism and murder as a reality, when one accepts police brutality against Black people as “the way things are”, they are normalizing something that is not normal, thus training themselves to accept a truth that is not true. In psychological terms, this concept fits somewhere in between societal gaslighting and mystification. We could also call this dissociation, it’s a type of splitting off of reality and of emotion.  The concept behind “un- intentional” is that it is unconscious. And in the case of normalized, systemic racism across a country over hundreds of years, it is the collective unconscious, which is the unconscious agreement of how things are within a group of people.  The concept behind “intentional” is that we have agency, we have a choice to make something conscious, to be conscious, to purposely choose our awareness. In the case of America, our violence against Black lives has been intentional in our past and in our present.  And our choice to ignore this or not fight this may have been “un-intentional”(and intentional as well, by many groups of Americans over the years), but now that America is finally trying to pay attention, we must choose to be intentional, and to be conscious.

Let’s think about the pain. Unlike a breakup or childhood trauma, which is rooted in the past or the recent past and is a concrete event that has happened, the pain that we feel when we consider what has happened to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery is in the present. Systemic racism is happening in our present, on a daily basis. We attempt to understand what is happening and the grief that we feel with each murder, but understanding what is happening and preventing future murders requires us to see this as something bigger, like a wound that does not go away even when the pain from yesterday has passed. What happens emotionally when one feels that they are trapped in a hopeless situation is that they shut down, and collapse into hopelessness. That is how many people may feel in the face of creating change. Instead of facing that pain every time they see a new death of an unarmed Black person on the news, they may shut it out or dissociate it out to cope with their daily life. This is a defense mechanism, and it’s a privilege only allotted to the people in society who can afford it, in this case, people with white privilege who can afford to not think about it because they are not in danger, and they do not fear that their death (or the death of a loved one) will be next.

Stop ignoring your feelings and your pain. It is there because the wound is being continuously opened. We are still all sick, we all have a disease and the pain is the symptom. Murder is the symptom. White privilege is the symptom. Misuse of power, via whiteness of skin and police brutality, is the symptom. We are still all agreeing to these terms of systemic racism on the level of the collective unconscious by choosing to brush off each death, minimize the extreme injustice, the hatred that ignites within us, the disgust that we experience in our gut, when we think about how wrong it is, really.

Are you white? Let’s talk about shame and guilt.  Let me go first. I have privilege that I benefit from: this makes me feel guilty. I don’t know how to be a good ally or how to talk about racism without saying or doing something wrong. This brings up extreme, crippling shame within me. How could I not know? I am a part of the problem. I don’t already know, because I haven’t had to know. Because I haven’t had to learn, from an early age, what it’s like to be treated differently, what it’s like to be in danger, what it’s like to make a system work for me that was made to benefit someone else. I haven’t had to fight, to work extra hard to get the same grade, to be extra good to not get in trouble, to have to be three times more well behaved than everyone else just to not be made bad for not being white. I haven’t had to evaluate, on a daily basis, whether or not people are being racist towards me, in normal interactions at the grocery store or walking down the street.

 When I feel shame I shut down. In shameful situations that are not race related, that’s ok. When it comes to making mistakes around race (and white fragility) that’s the worst because then, I may unintentionally make it about me, and people then feel obligated to take care of me. But ultimately, it’s not about me. And, it’s also not about you right now, if you benefit from white privilege. A goal is to ideally push past the shame and  continue to try to be a better ally and to educate myself in how to do so if I make mistakes around race. That is my responsibility at this point as a white person. Shame and guilt are normal feelings for white people in this dynamic, they must be acknowledged and moved through swiftly so that one can continue to learn and try to stand up for injustice. They must be put aside so that one can instead acknowledge the guilt and rage of the injustices that are happening.

Let’s talk about power dynamics and the history of racism- up until the present time. America has the darkest of histories. White people came to the united states, killed Native Americans, and stole their land. White people kidnapped Africans and forced them into slavery. White Americans actively tortured and lynched Black Americans. Our history is bloody. People with power will always actively resist giving away their power. We are still seeing that today. Most of the senators, judges, and people in congress are White Americans. Most of the millionaires and Billionaires are White Americans. People in power are reticent to dismantle the system because then it will not serve them anymore. This is where white Americans who would like to dismantle white privilege and systemic racism must use their intentionality and awareness. By voting, and actually doing research. By supporting grassroot organizations and candidates. By choosing to support POC businesses and organizations, and choosing to withdraw support from corporate organizations that hold all the power.

So just to recap, systemic racism is a crisis in society that must be treated. Just like, say, coronavirus, it will get much worst if you ignore it, and it takes a lifestyle change, care, consciousness, and intention to heal. Most people will ignore the symptoms of an illness until their lives are threatened. In this case, people of color are having their lives threatened. But everyone is living in the environment that causes coronavirus. And in order to heal this environment, everyone must pay attention to the symptoms, our feelings, our gut. We just changed our entire lives to flatten the curve for the vulnerable during coronavirus. Can we change our lives to protect the vulnerable to police brutality and racism?

If you feel terrible after hearing about a racist event, a racist comment, a racist person, or the way that systemic intergenerational racism affects people, great, you have what we call “normal empathy”.  If you feel stuck and frozen about what to do, you are probably in a freeze response- induced by fear or shame.  Now is the time to change this freeze response to a fight response. Anger is not the enemy, it is an indicator that we need to change something. It is a protective emotion that helps us protect those that we care about. If we ignore our feelings,  we also ignore our care and our desire to make changes.

We are at a critical moment. If you are an American, you have a choice to fight, or not to fight. This week was a turning point. People are choosing (or not choosing) to pay attention. Couples are finding that it may be a deal breaker if their partner doesn’t care about fighting injustice as much of them. Many people are re-evaluating who they would like to be in this civil rights and social justice fight with, and who they’d like to leave behind. We are in an important historical moment. Who will you be in this moment?

Resources for Allyship and futher education:

An Antiracist Starter Pack:   https://parade.com/1046031/breabaker/anti-racist-tv-movies-documentaries-ted-talks-books/?fbclid=IwAR3sGgZGymDMnl8qvJGYZcihVaqYgAP0lNEIjXmTCaAg_1qN7blSgVYmWNg

Antiracism Resources for White People: https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1BRlF2_zhNe86SGgHa6-VlBO-QgirITwCTugSfKie5Fs/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR3SVmtbdTi1nZaT6E_qmipBR6S0_hnj6PJN3g_74AvYlCOnzsigqGw3378