Mental Health

Limerence: Four Things This Psychological Experience Reveals About You

What does it mean psychologically when you can't stop thinking about someone?

When I dug up my old journals to process my patterns of trauma bonding, I cringed. There’s a reason I don’t regularly re-read my life’s scribbles.

Pages and pages and pages fixated on this boy, or that boy, this friendship, or that friendship.

I wanted to slam the journals shut and scream, “He’s just a dude! He wasn’t even that impressive! He abused you! Your life is way better off!”

It’s embarrassing to see myself fixated on people who were not worth the pedastal I’d propped them onto.

In garnering self awareness, I could see that my romantic partners and friends were, just like myself, nuanced and imperfect human beings struggling with mental health issues.

It’s also difficult to look back on my reflections without recognizing the ways I was being obsessed over and stalked by narcissists.

Because I had such low self worth and deemed myself so uninteresting, I could never imagine anyone becoming fixated enough to stalk me; thus, I was a perfectly oblivious stalking victim.

I didn’t realize the danger of a stranger’s attention on me until I was face to face with the life or death consequences of someone else’s limerence.

Even now, three years after my stalking and sexual assaults, I still think of my stalker every day. He’s like a ghost that haunts me.

Like him, I, too, have been prone to limerence since I was a child.

Whether it was my favorite celebrity or my crush at school, when I developed affection for someone, they flooded my brain — a rash of endorphins, adrenaline, and cortisol.

But no one person could be singularly special enough for the kind of obsession that limerence causes the brain.

So, what does it say about YOU psychologically if you fixate on other people?

What does it mean when we obsess about someone?

1) You Have Unprocessed Despair

A person afflicted with limerence is a person who has buried grief they’ve not processed.

In order to process grief, a person must go through the full stages of grieving: Denial-anger-depression-bargaining-acceptance-meaning.

A person who has limerance has grief inside of them in which they’ve suppressed and denied.

That grief may sometimes manifest as anger and depression, but the person hasn’t fully processed the grief yet to integrate the lessons learned from it into meaningful change and growth.

Instead, they’re denying the grief and masking it through things that feel good to distract from it.

For me, that grief was both for my father and for my first love who committed suicide.

I’d denied that they had Narcissistic Personality Disorder to survive the traumas of my childhood and my earliest experiences with love.

A person afflicted with limerence who has a tendency to obsess over people also generally struggles with other forms of addiction too. All of those feel-good things are serving to numb the iceberg of buried grief that the person can’t process or rectify.

Generally, this happens because the unprocessed grief is rooted young, before our brains had the ability to process it, in which we didn’t have a safe or supportive place to feel our feelings and no adults around us had the empathy to help us.

2) You Live in Fantasy

If you were the child of a narcissist or you experienced child trauma that caused you to develop attachment issues, then you’ve likely survived most of your life by living in fantasy to escape despair.

As a child, I fantasized that I’d work really hard and be good enough to be loved; I had a lot of big dreams about travels and ambitions.

I also fantasized that whatever mental illness of unhappiness that plagued my parents was rare, that most people were “normal” and “loving.” I projected good intentions onto people and fantasized that people were not as traumatized, sensitive, and as damaged as they are.

Additionally, I fanatasized that I had a lot more control over my mind than I did.

I knew something was wrong with me — a person would not harm themselves or attempt suicide if there was not — but because I did all the things I was supposed to do, such as get an education and therapy and self care, I had it under control. I falsely believed other people’s trauma responses were within their control also.

True healing has meant facing difficult, and humbling, truths beyond my control.

And, of course, I fantasized that love would save me.

I prayed that a perfect match would come along who just looked at me and knew all their was to know; who saw my flaws and immediately forgave them; whose love would endure any storm; who would make this monotonous life…happy, endurable.

I fantasized that someone could come along and be just the right shape of pain to repair my bursting dam of a heart.

I fantasized that someone could come along and be just the right light of sunshine to make waking up something to look forward to.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on an imperfect human being who has their own unique traumas.

3) There’s Something You’re Avoiding Looking at in Yourself

A major reason that cluster b’s fixate is projection.

When I’d fixate on narcissists, I’d fixate on elements of GOOD QUALITIES in them that I was denying that I held MYSELF.

For example, I thought they were sexier than me, smarter than me, funnier than me, more creative than me.

I admired and obsessed over these good qualities in them because I denied that I held these good qualities myself.

I could only love myself through loving them as they mirrored a fraudulent version of me.

Narcissists, in contrast, focus on people’s BAD QUALITIES that they deny holding themselves.

For example, they may be cheating on you, but they are obsessed with surveilling you to ensure that YOU aren’t cheating.

They’re denying their own cheating to fixate on YOU having those negative qualities.

My stalker engaged in stalking because he said, “Women can’t be trusted.”

In reality, HE was the one who couldn’t be trusted, as he violated every boundary of trust and human decency.

But he projects that onto those he obsesses over.

He also said he was looking for evidence that I was a bad person who deserved to be raped.

Narcissists often obsess over “all bad, evil people,” who they deem “deserve abuse” because they have split thinking, and they project all of their bad traits onto others and deny accountability for their actions, erasing any humanity of their victims, justifying why they feel no guilt.

My stalker also told me “most women are jealous and possessive.” That was also his projection: as a stalker and sociopath, he was extremely jealous and possessive.

Additionally, when people fixate on another, it’s because that person has traits in which they see WHO THEY WISH THEY WERE.

I find that people will sometimes idealize me in ways that I don’t recognize, and too much praise can be triggering and isolating, as it triggers my fears of lovebombing and engulfment from narcissistic abuse.

I know from experience that when I’m idealized, I can never live up to that ideal and I’ll be punished when my reality doesn’t match the fantasy people make of me.

I’m an imperfect person like anyone else: this is where limerence and obsession can be very dangerous.

If a person is a narcissist and lacks empathy alongside their limerence, they get angry when fantasy doesn’t match reality, and they respond with abuse, sometimes even to the extremes of attack or murder.

When we’re fixating on someone else, it’s pertinent to ask:

“Does this person have positive traits that I’m denying myself love for?”

“Am I projecting my negative traits that I don’t want to look at onto this person?”

“Am I making this person into an impossible ideal that no person can live up to?”

4) You Don’t Love Yourself

This is the hardest truth to remedy, but it’s likely the one that is most obvious to anyone afflicted with limerence: lack of self love.

You wouldn’t fixate on someone else being the solution to your life if you felt you were whole on your own.

You wouldn’t obsess over someone else at all if you had genuine self love.

Self love is self sufficient: it’s not a child’s vulnerable or needy love.

True self love means you have all you need within you, you can regulate your own emotions, and any other love you receive is NOT a drug addiction for you to rely on, it’s a blessing.

As long as you need others to regulate your emotions, then you still have healing work to do.

You aren’t healed until you can be utterly alone and fully okay with that, able to grow and to realistically integrate both your positive and negative traits without descending into self loathing.

I always knew I didn’t love myself: no matter what I accomplished, I could always find too many imperfections, and because the people I loved ended up betraying me, my self hatred was reinforced through my trauma bonding.

I thought a truly lovable person wouldn’t get so horrifically abused. I must be missing something.

People always told me I wouldn’t resolve my issues until I loved myself.

But a life without loving others felt so empty, meaningless.

I didn’t know HOW to love myself independent of other people when the only thing I loved in the world was other people.

Ironically, it was my stalker and rapist who forced me to see my own lovability through how deeply he hated me. In facing his hatred, I faced what he envied in me: traits I didn’t know I had.

In seeing myself through his warped obsession, I started to see myself in contrast to my own warped self hate.

I’ve had to heal from him alone — in doing so, I had to face how strong I am.

For the first time in my life, I started to FALL IN LOVE.

It was a healthy love.

It was a match made in heaven.

It was TO MYSELF.

It’s been the greatest love story I’ve ever known, full of surprises and lessons beyond my wildest dreams.

And we’re just getting started…

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

If you’d like to support my writing, check out my books, or Buy Me a Coffee.

Follow Blooming on the Borderline on Facebook.

Anne M. Champion is the author of Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.