Dear Notebookb6:

You are welcome. Before I answer your question I want to address Limerence, which is in the title of your thread, and incorporate it into my answer to your question.

Limerence is a term coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of  Being in Love. Wikipedia has an entry on the term, and the following definition: “an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object (LO) involving intrusive and obsessive thought, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation”. More from the entry: “Such intrusive thoughts about the LO (are).. comparable to those of people with obsessive-compulsive-disorder… ‘Little things’ are noticed and endlessly analyzed for meaning… What the limerent object said or did is recalled with vividness.. Each word and gesture is permanently available for review… those suffering from loneliness are significantly more susceptible to limerence”.

In your original post on this thread, you wrote that the lessening of the frequency of communication with (let’s refer to him as LO, standing for Limerent Object) has caused you the following: “I felt anxious, I had the intense fear of losing him.. I obsessively look up  online for solutions, and worst, I have insomnia just thinking about him.. get anxious and depressed, to the point I couldn’t focus on my career… sometimes I would get confident and feeling normal while chatting with him, only after a few hours the obsessive thoughts kick.. the negative thoughts.. snowball,, until the next text he sent me that calm me down”-

– and now my input and answer to your question: indeed your experience fits Limerence, and what is true to every person experiencing limerence is also true to you: the experience is a re-experiencing of abandonment by a parent. The abandonment is not strictly a parent leaving and not being in a child’s life anymore. It can be a parent who repeatedly withdraws from the child, ex., (1) a parent who gets depressed and withdraws into her room for hours and days, (2) a parent who repeatedly gives his son the “silent treatment” for hours or days, (3) a parent who repeatedly sees her child sad and worried but does not respond. When a child’s strong emotions are invisible to the parent, the child feels all Alone, alone and abandoned.

When the child is abandoned by her parent in any one of these ways, the child automatically focuses on the parent. Fearing the next abandonment/ rejection, the child focuses on every expression, word and action that the parent does (or does not do), trying to predict the next abandonment, to prevent it or be prepared for it, so it doesn’t come as such a terrible surprise.

At the times when the repeatedly abandoning parent attends to the child in any way- it feels euphoric, no better feeling. It calms the child for a while, but only for a while. Sometimes when the child has a very pleasant experience, maybe a vacation with lots of family, she forgets the anxiety and does not focus on the parent, but after the vacation, back at home, the anxiety and focus returns.

As the child grows up, eventually she/ he may give up on the parent, no longer obsessing on the parent, but she re-experiences that same experience in the context of romantic infatuations and romantic relationships.

In your original post you wrote about LO: “he might be the one that I’ve been looking for”- I think that all this time, within your romantic relationships and crushes, you’ve been looking for your mother and/ or father to come back to you, to want to really see you, to want to get to know you, so that you are no longer Alone.

About a previous boyfriend, B, you wrote: “he didn’t give me the answer I wanted.. when I told him I’m sad and asked him how to be happy, he would answer me ‘don’t be sad’ which I find it not a solution“- you looked up to B as the one with the answers, much as a child looks up at a parent. You looked for him to give you a solution to your questions and worries.

In your most recent post you wrote: “I constantly seeking for people to fill in  my emotional needs, without knowing how to make myself happy at first”- a child is not able to make herself happy when the parent or parents in her life are not happy. The parent is like the mirror for the child: the child sees herself in the parent’s expressions, words and actions. If the parents seems unhappy with the child, the child sees herself as …nothing to be happy about.

“Do you have any advice in overcoming this issue? By far I have tried solutions such as reading self help books, listening to Buddhist talks and making myself busy/ to be more socialize. Or is there a need to consult a therapist?”-

– Yes, I do see a need to consult a therapist for the following reasons: the sickness/ problem was born in the context of an interpersonal relationship, primarily the relationship between you and the parent to whom you were most attached when you were a young child.

The healing/ solution cannot be in the context of reading a book or listening to a Buddhist talk alone. Healing must be in the context of another interpersonal relationship- a relationship with a competent empathetic and patient psychotherapist.

It is not just any relationship that can be the solution because people like your ex-boyfriend B is not a therapist. If you asked a therapist “how to be happy”, a competent therapist will not answer you with “don’t be sad”, but instead will tell you something like: you want to be happy, tell me more about wanting to be happy.. opening the topic for exploration.

Plus, even if you happened to have a boyfriend/ girlfriend who was a certified therapist, he or she could not be able to be your therapist because they will lack the objectivity required to be your therapist.

Therefore, a competent therapist is the beginning of healing. Problem is that during the pandemic you may not be able to have therapy in-person and I don’t know about the effectiveness of online therapy with a professional.

anita