Limerence vs. Love Addiction? Difference?

Welcome bridgeburner, Thank you for sharing with us, you will find a lot of knowledge and support on this forum.

I just wanted to make a suggestion, if you did not feel comfortable in the SLAA meeting, you can always try to find a local CODA meeting, or a AL-Anon, because what I know now from working on myself for the last 3 years with this love addiction, love addicts have a lot of Codependency traits. I know for myself I was just looking for love and I wanted someone too love me the way that I loved them, and this is where my problem began. My unhealthy poa probably knew all of this, and this is why he picked me in the first place. Because no matter what he did to me, I would take him back because I was trying to prove how much I loved him, and I always wanted him too see he deserved to be loved back, well he was not interested in being loved, he was a total avoidant. I did not know anything about all of this love addiction either until 3 years ago.

I am going to explain how I understand limerance, I have to go back to how I felt when I found this forum, and the first time that I read about limerance, I could relate, it felt like someone had control over my thoughts and my brain, no matter what I did, I could not get the thoughts and the sound of my poa voice out of my head, it just replayed over and over like a broken record. I have obsessed over him so much, that all of the thoughts were so deeply set in my brain, that I have to start doing some thought stopping exercises, and I would say things like, ok brain I am only going to allow you 5 or 10 mins to think about my poa, and that is it, and what this does is it make us more conscious of our thoughts and how much we are obsessing.

We have to form new grooves in our brain, and put healthy thoughts where all of the obsession use to be, and this does take awhile. It is kind of like Stockholm Syndrome, by the time I realized what was going on with me, I felt like I could not get out of this web of lies and emotionally abuse, but I did, I know I felt like I was losing my mind.

This is the definition that I got off of this forum for Limerance:

Limerance--is not love, it is passion because it sets off many mind altering chemicals in the brain, endorphins, and all of those feel good chemicals, just like a drugs does.

Love addiction--comes in a lot of forms, and it is different for everyone. So which do you relate too?

I don't run from relationship to relationship either, but this was the first time in my life that anyboby had this much control over me and my every thought, so I knew this was not right.

You mention also that when you fear losing them that is when the obsessions start, this could also come from early childhood issue that have not been dealt with, it was for me, I had huge abandonment issues, and when someone who leave me it would just hurt me too the core, and it was hurting my inner child, I could go right back to when I was a little girl and my parents both passed away when I was young, and all of the feelings were the same today as they were then, and this will never change, I will always have abandonment issues due to being adopted, but I can stop myself and my fears now and I know it is normal in life to have people ebb and flow out of your life. Nothing is forever.

When we have abandonment issues, this leds to codependency, and we try harder and harder to make things work the way we want them to work, and in the process we smother the ones we love, and the things that we feared the most, is what usually happens, because we hang on for dear life to this person, because we don't want to feel the pain of someone walking out of our life.

Yes it still hurts, but this is where we learn and continue on our road to recovery.

So try to see who is running the show: your adult self, (logical thinking). or your little kid (emotional self), when I became aware of who was running the show, I could control some of my fears and calm my inner child down and let my adult self run the show.


Again welcome, Keep coming back