Dear Laelithia:

I am concerned about you. I wish I read back from you. I don’t want to make this a long  post, figuring you might be too anxious and busy to be reading a long post. But I gathered more of an understanding of your mind and heart and I want to present it to you, hoping it may help.

Sometime in July 2017, you wrote: “any time I have alone, I am reminded of the emptiness I have always felt, only now it is even larger without his affection”- it doesn’t matter what man you referred to at the time, what matters is the emptiness you felt without a man in your life. About that emptiness, you wrote in the summer of 2017: “All my life I have longed for a love I did not feel I received… I have a hole, a deep longing that never seems to go away”.

In August 3, 2020, you wrote: “I met someone… I felt somewhat alive again”- it doesn’t matter who that man was.

You started your first thread in May 2017 sharing about a man you met in person during the course of 13 days over the span on one month and you felt elated, “so close, so attached and safe with him.. so intimately connected”, but also upset and obsessive as you looked for him to reassure you, there were a few arguments and the speed of light relationship came crashing down. Your post break-up experience: “Nothing feels right anymore.. It all still feels so surreal… the feeling of shock when it seems to be such a drastic change so quickly…. such a painful shock”.

You brought up the possibility that you suffer from a bipolar disorder, which could explain the elation when with a man and the crashing down into depression. It is a possibility, but I want to point to the bigger picture and bring up something that I believe neither of us mentioned before: the term limerence.

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term limerence for her 1979 book Love and Limerence, limerence described as “an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object (LO) involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair.. It can be experienced as intense joy, or extreme despair.. the state of being completely carried away by unreasonable passion or love… Limerence involves intrusive thinking about the limerent object” (Wikipedia)- all perfectly fits your experience.

Limerence is not a mental health diagnosis, but some therapists’ treatment plans are based on this term. Of course, lots of people fall in love and experience limerence to one extent or another, but you are on the extreme part of the limerence continuum. As I understand it, your childhood experience was of ongoing and distressing loneliness, trying to earn your mother’s love and failing to do so- that created the emptiness in you, a hole that you have been desperately trying to fill with this or that Limerent Object.

My further thoughts: a child is intimately connected to the mother, and when the mother rejects the child repeatedly, it creates a trauma and a painful emptiness. It is similar to having been in Heaven (intimately connected to the mother, feeling perfectly safe, cared for and protected) to being Exiled from Heaven and never again feeling safe. You have moments of elation with Limerent Objects, Heavenly moments, but only moments. I think that every child is exiled from Heaven, in this sense, but for some it is a way more painful exile than for others, for some it is a shocking Exile, where “nothing feels right anymore.. surreal… such a drastic change.. such a painful shock”.

You may want to look further into Limerence.

anita