Mind the Body Podcast

Limerence, Attachment and the Other We Create : Episode 19

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 19

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🎧 Episode 19: Limerence, Attachment, and the Other We Create

What happens when longing becomes more real than the person it is attached to?

In this episode of Mind the Body, I explore the psychology of limerence - the intense, consuming experience of longing for another person who often remains emotionally unavailable, uncertain, or just out of reach. Drawing on attachment theory, psychoanalytic thinking, and Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott, I examine why limerence can feel so powerful, why it is rarely about the other person alone.

Together, we explore how early attachment experiences shape our expectations of love, how the mind constructs an internal version of the other, and why healing requires more than understanding. Beneath limerence lies something deeper: grief, longing, and the possibility of creating a new experience of connection.

In This Episode:

  • What limerence is and why it can feel so consuming
  • How attachment patterns shape romantic longing
  • The internal world we create around the people we desire
  • Why insight alone cannot resolve limerence
  • The relationship between longing, grief, and healing
  • What it means to turn from fantasy toward reality

A Question to Sit With:

What might my longing be trying to tell me about the kind of love, care, or recognition I needed long before this person appeared?

References:

Chefetz, R., Soffer-Dudek, N., & Somer, E. (2023). When Daydreaming Becomes Maladaptive: Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 37, 319–338.

Sperling, M. B. (1988). Phenomenology and Developmental Origins of Desperate Love. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 11(4), 741–761.

Tennov, D. (1979). Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. Stein and Day.

Verhulst, J. (1984). Limerence: Notes on the Nature and Function of Passionate Love. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 7(1), 115–138.

Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of Breakdown. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1, 103–107.

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Hello, and welcome back to Mind the Body. I'd like to start with a line from a poem you might recognize, one that gets right to the heart of what we're exploring today. "And moving through a mirror clear that hangs before her all the year, shadows of the world appear." Tennyson wrote that in 1842, and what I wanna offer today is that he was writing about limerence, the mirror we build, the shadows we inhabit, the curse of the almost, and what it costs to finally turn. She saw only shadows of the world appear. Perhaps you know this place. You are already there behind the mirror in the other world. And in a world built so carefully, so completely, it seems to have its own weather, its own light. And in that world lives someone, a version of someone shaped from every gaze, every silence, Every moment that almost happened. Nobody knows you go there, and that is part of it. There is perhaps a protective quality to the other world. It holds all the feeling of a relationship, the closeness, the longing, the sense of being known while keeping you safe from the vulnerability a real relationship demands. In there, you are always chosen, always held. The door never closes because the more you return, the more real it becomes. More real sometimes than your actual life. Because like the Lady of Shalott, you are not really seeing them. You are seeing a reflection of your own longing, your own need, your own attachment history In the last two episodes, we explored AI, the simulated other, the relationship that offers connection without the full complexity of a real person. Limerence, in a way, is the original version of this. Long before technology could construct an other for you, your mind was already doing it Building someone from your own longing, your own need, your own unanswered questions about whether you are lovable. More perfect, more certain, more available than any real person could ever be. This is limerence. And if you recognize what I've just described, stay with me today. What I want to offer you today is an explanation, perhaps one nobody has given you yet So today we are going to cover three things. First, what limerence actually is and what it feels like from the inside. Second, where it comes from and why it is rarely about the other person. Third Why simply understanding limerence doesn't make it go away and what that means for healing So let's start with what limerence actually is. Limerence is the state of obsessive involuntary longing for another person. The psychologist Dorothy Tennov named it in 1979 after years of research into people's experience of being in love, and what she found was striking. At its core, Limerence is not primarily sexual. It is a hunger for reciprocity, for knowing that you occupy the other person's inner world the way they occupy yours, for emotional merger, for being held completely in someone's mind. But before we get to the why, I want to stay with the what for a moment because the word limerence doesn't quite hold what it feels like to be inside it. It's the thoughts that arrive without warning, Waking up and their name is already there before you've fully surfaced. Going through the motions of your day, the meetings, the meals, the conversations, while something underneath, the loop, is still running. You are there and you are not there. You are living your life and simultaneously living in another one entirely, You didn't choose this. It came, and it does not simply leave because you want it to. For some people, over time, the state becomes somewhere the nervous system begins to return to. This happens not only When it comes uninvited, but because something in there has become necessary. A song, a scent, something small and private becomes a way in. The inner world has become the only place the longing feels safe Heffex, Sofodudek, and Summer, writing in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in 2023, describe how immersive fantasy states can become somewhere a person goes deliberately, a preferred fantasy, a preferred focus of consciousness that comes to exist at the expense of living in the real world. They note that it tends to be concealed, and that it is very often accompanied by profound shame. That shame, the shame of needing it, of returning to it, Of not being able to stop it is exactly why we don't talk about it. And Tennyson seemed to understand something of this. The lady at her mirror weaving her web, seeing only shadows of the world appear. There is a quality of being held there year after year that goes beyond simple choice. Perhaps she was there because leaving felt impossible, because the mirror was the only world that could be safely inhabited. You see, the longing lives in the body, not just in the mind. It's in the chest, the stomach, the throat, a physical ache that doesn't resolve, and there is something intoxicating about that ache, something that makes the ordinary texture of life feel flat by comparison. Because inside the longing, everything feels heightened, alive, saturated with meaning. But underneath all of it, the almost, the not quite, the sense that something is just out of reach, and that if you could just close that distance, everything will finally be all right. What is particularly important to understand about limerence is that it is not simply intense attraction. It has a specific quality, a quality of uncertainty, of incompleteness, of reaching. Mutual, settled, love rarely produces limerence. It is the gap, the Ambiguity. Ambiguity. The recurring signal that keeps the nervous system in that state of heightened seeking. The almost is not a frustrating side effect of limerence. The almost is the engine of it. That feeling, that intoxicating, consuming, exhausting experience doesn't mean that you're too much, too intense, Or incapable of healthy, secure love. It is information, and it is pointing somewhere very specific. Now, before we move on, I wanna pause here for a moment, because there is often considerable shame around limerence. The sense that you should be able to stop, that you are making a fool of yourself, that nobody else has ever felt quite this consumed. But from a psychological perspective, limerence is neither unusual nor pathological. Research shows that the brain in a limerent state activates regions associated with reward, motivation, and craving. The same neural circuits involved in addiction. Experiencing limerence doesn't mean there is something wrong with you. It is a reflection of how profoundly attachment and longing shape the human nervous system. And if you have ever found yourself caught in this state, know that you are not alone, and know that the longing is trying to tell you something. It's just learning about how to listen to it So now we have a sense of what limerence actually is. Point two takes us deeper into the question of why. Why this person? Why this intensity? Why, for some people, this pattern repeats across relationship after relationship? Limerence is not about them. I wanna say that again because I think it's important. Limerence is not about them. It's about what they woke up in you. Something old, something that has been waiting, A part of you that formed long before this person arrived in the earliest relationships of your life when you were learning for the very first time what love feels like Writing in 1988, psychologist Michael Sperling suggested that this quality of desperate longing in love results from neither too much love in early life nor too little, but from an insecure form of attachment resulting from inconsistent gratification from the caregiver. The attachment that was sometimes there and sometimes not. The parent who was warm and then withdrawn. The love that felt conditional, that had to be earned, that arrived unpredictably and left without warning. That inconsistency, that almost, that not quite becomes the nervous system's template for what love feels like When early attachment relationships are consistent, warm, and reliable, when a child's needs are met with presence rather than absence, with attunement rather than unpredictability, the nervous system learns that love is safe, that closeness is sustainable, that needing someone is not risky. But when those early relationships were uncertain, when the people you needed most were also the people who left you waiting, or who were sometimes warm and sometimes frightening, or whose love had to be continuously earned and could never quite be trusted, something different happens. The nervous system doesn't conclude that love is painful and just move on. It concludes that this is what love feels like: uncertain, almost, not quite. And it builds a template, an unconscious map of what closeness is supposed to feel like, how safe it is to need someone. You don't consciously decide to seek out the uncertain, but the nervous system is always pattern matching, always scanning for the familiar. And familiar, even when it was painful, registers it as home. And there is something important here that is often missed. Inconsistency is not the same as absence. You don't have to have experienced severe neglect or obvious trauma for this template to have formed. It can develop in families where love was present but unreliable, where a parent was sometimes attuned and sometimes preoccupied, where affection was warm but perhaps conditional, where connection was real but could not be counted on. The wound doesn't have to be dramatic to be formative And when someone comes into your life who fits the shape of that wound, who replicates the emotional architecture of what love first felt like, the nervous system doesn't register danger, it registers home. Because uncertainty in a nervous system shaped by uncertainty feels like aliveness. Because the almost, the not quite, the just out of reach, that was the frequency your nervous system was tuned to a very long time ago. And the constructed other, the version of them you carry in your inner world, is even more perfectly attuned, because that version never withdraws, never disappoints, never fails to choose you. The fantasy is not a distortion of the relationship. It is the relationship as the nervous system needs it to be The mirror that hangs before her all the year. The shadows it shows were not conjured up from nowhere. They were shaped by everything that came before, by the earliest experiences of closeness and withdrawal. By the template the nervous system built when it was still learning what love felt like. The reflection in the mirror is old, far older than the person it appears to show. So that is point two, where limerence comes from and what it is really reaching for. Point three takes us to perhaps the most important part of today's episode, because understanding limerence is not enough to resolve it, and I wanna be clear about why what I hear most often from people in the grip of limerence is this. They will say things like, I know it isn't real. I know it isn't good for me. I can see exactly what's happening, and still I can't stop." I wanna say something about that. Understanding the pattern completely, seeing it with total clarity, and still being unable to stop tells us something important about the nature of where limerence lives Writing in 1984, psychiatrist Jona Verhulst described limerence as an affect-dominated state of mind, pre-linguistic, unmediated by language. He was precise about this. When consciousness is overwhelmed by affect or emotion, language as a function breaks down, and without language, there is no analysis, no insight, no rational override. Because you cannot think your way out of a state that exists before thought It lives somewhere older, somewhere that formed before you had language for any of it, before you had any choice about what you were learning or who you were learning it from. It lives in the nervous system, in the body, in the implicit memory that holds everything that happened before words existed to describe it. You can reach it with your mind and find that your mind simply cannot touch it. Behulst observed that the limerent object becomes internalized, carried around through the day, talked to in imaginary dialogues, psychically present even when physically absent. That inner world, built from need, sustained by longing, becomes more reliable than the real person could ever be. And for some people, over time, the nervous system begins to return to it, because it has become the place where the unmet need feels held. Where the longing has somewhere to live. The version in that world never leaves, but the real person might. And somewhere in you, that is the point That is also why so many approaches to resolving limerence don't work. Telling yourself to stop, analyzing the dynamic endlessly. These are language-based, cortically driven strategies being applied to something that lives in an entirely different part of you. They can help at the edges. They cannot reach the root. But what does reach the root is relational and somatic experiences. The nervous system learns through experience, not through understanding. It needs to encounter repeatedly over time in the context of a safe relationship something different from what it learned We need to feel that love can be safe and consistent, And to have that experience repeated until it becomes the new template. This is slow work, it's not linear, and it requires sitting with the grief of recognizing what was missing. Underneath limerence, there's almost always grief. The grief of a child who waited, Who earned and performed and hoped and waited. Who learned to call that waiting love. Healing asks us to mourn what we needed and didn't receive so that we can stop looking for it in people who replicate the wound. It asks us to build slowly and relationally a new experience of what it feels like to be met, what it feels like to be in a safe, loving, consistent relationship so we have covered three things today. First, what limerence actually is, a consuming, embodied state of longing, primarily involuntary and intrusive, with a very specific quality, the almost, the not quite, the just out of reach. A reflection of how profoundly attachment and longing shape us, pointing towards something significant. Second, where it comes from, the attachment wound formed in an inconsistent early relational experience, and the way certain people fit that template so well that something in their nervous system stirs in recognition. And third, why insight alone is not enough, where limerence actually lives in a pre-linguistic, affect-dominated state that exists before thought, And what healing actually has to involve if it is going to reach the root. I wanna finish by coming back to the poem. She left the web. She left the loom. She made three paces through the room. She saw The water-flower bloom She saw the helmet and the plume. She looked down to Camelot. She turned away from the mirror. She reached for the reel, and the mirror cracked from side to side. This is what healing from limerence asks of us. It asks us to turn away from the inner world we have built, the world that has kept us safe, that has held the longing, that has never once withdrawn or disappointed or left, And to look down to Camelot. Winnicott wrote about the fear of breakdown, and what he said is important here. He suggested that the fear of breakdown is not a fear of something that might happen in the future. It is the fear of something that has already happened, an original agony that the ego could not yet integrate at the time it occurred. Something that was lived through before there were words for it, before there was a self solid enough to hold it The person is not afraid of breaking down. They are afraid of the breakdown they have already survived. And this is why the inner world is so necessary. The constructed other, the internalized object, the reflection in the mirror. They are a structure built around an original wound. A way of continuing to live in the proximity of longing without having to risk the breakdown again. Perhaps the Lady of Shalott understood this. She wove at her mirror year after year. She saw the shadows of the world appear, and she did not turn, because somewhere in her, in her body, in her earliest experience, she knew what that turning cost. And then she turned. She made three paces through the room, she looked down to Camelot, and the mirror cracked from side to side. What she experienced in that turning was the original breakdown, the one the mirror had been built across all those years to hold at bay. The crack was not new damage. It was the original wound showing up, and yet she turned anyway. This is what the work of healing limerence asks of us, to turn toward the real, knowing what it might reopen. To take three paces through the room in the presence of that fear rather than in the absence of it. To allow someone to be genuinely other, imperfect, unpredictable, capable of leaving, and to allow ourselves to be truly seen in our need, our history, our imperfection. To bring the self that has been living behind the mirror into contact with another real person, and to stay present with what that reveals. This work is slow, relational, somatic. It's about building over time enough inner safety that the turning becomes possible, that the three paces can be taken, that the looking down does not have to mean the end If you've recognized yourself in any of this today, I'd like you to hold that recognition gently. The longing is pointing towards something that was needed and not reliably received a long time ago, and that reaching, however painful it has become, deserves to be understood, and slowly and with support, moved toward and worked through. Until next time, stay curious.