Latest / Intimacy After Infidelity | Cut Contact, Rebuild Trust, Shed Shame, Avoid Divorce, Forgiveness for Adultery / 123 | Was it love? Or limerence? The reason you can’t stop thinking about him

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123 | Was it love? Or limerence? The reason you can’t stop thinking about him · Intimacy After Infidelity | Cut Contact, Rebuild Trust, Shed Shame, Avoid Divorce, Forgiveness for Adultery

Friend, I am so glad you're here today.
Welcome back to the show.
I wanna talk today about a word, a buzzword, that you may have heard in the affair recovery space because this word is important so that you have a correct and compassionate view of yourself.
Because if you are anything like me, when you think about your story and your past, you may have said something like, "I feel so weak.
Why can't I just stop?" And the question that I hope none of you ever say, "What's wrong with me?" And so, friend, I want to introduce this concept that maybe this obsession for this person isn't actually a character flaw.
What if the intrusive thoughts and the need for constant reassurance and the way your emotions are completely hinged on whether or not he responded, what if that actually had a name, a clinical, researched, documented name that has nothing to do with being weak or broken or immature? And so today, I wanna give you that name, and I want you to feel the relief of finally understanding what's happening inside of you so that you can stop condemning yourself for it and start walking out of it.
Hey friend, before we dive into today's episode, I want to speak about what the episode might stir up inside of you because naming something as real and consuming as a limerence in your own story can feel really exposing, and it can leave you feeling really vulnerable.
It might bring up grief or shame or confusion or that particular kind of loneliness that comes from feeling like nobody else could possibly understand what you've been through.
And friend, that is exactly the gap that my community was built to fill.
This community, Rooted in Joy, is a six-month healing journey for women who are rebuilding their identity and their life after infidelity, and it's one of the most intentionally safe communities that I know of.
Women come in carrying exactly what you're carrying today, the obsession, the fog, the questions about who they even are anymore.
And you know what? These women find a room full of other beautiful, normal women who get it.
Friend, in this room, coaching meets you in your body and your brain and your heart and your soul.
This is a space where understanding why you got here is just the beginning of becoming all that God designed you to be.
So if today's episode opened something in you and you'd like to just talk about it, friend, find me on Instagram, find me in the Facebook community, send me an email, and let me know that this episode just touched a tender place.
I would love to talk with you more about it.
Okay, so let's dig in.
What is this name? You may or may not have heard this word before, and that word is limerence.
It was a term coined in 1979 by a psychologist named Dorothy Tennov, who introduced the term in her book, Love and Limerence.
When I first encountered this concept, I had one of those moments where you feel simultaneously relieved and undone because someone had finally put language to something that I had lived through but never been able to fully explain.
Limerence describes this involuntary state of mind that results from romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one's feelings reciprocated.
And let me say that again.
This is scientifically involuntary.
It's not chosen.
This is not a moral decision.
It is not evidence that you're a bad person.
This is an involuntary state of mind.
At the beginning of a limerent experience, thinking about this other person brings pleasure.
Of course, it feels good.
And that pleasure begins to intensify to elation or euphoria if there are hints of reciprocity, if the other person is reciprocating those same emotions back to you.
And the individual may start to replay and analyze every interaction for signs that the other person has feelings for them too.
So it's going back and forth on both sides of this relationship.
These intense feelings keep growing.
Does any of that sound familiar? Now, here is where it gets important for your story specifically.
Tennov found that limerence is remarkably tenacious, involuntary, and resistant to external influence once it takes a hold.
It can override your sense of wellbeing, your self-welfare, which means you were not crazy.
You were not uniquely weak.
You got caught up in something that has been documented in thousands of people across decades of research, something that once activated is extraordinarily difficult to simply decide your way out of.
Can I share what it felt like for me? Limerence in my life felt like I was thinking about him constantly.
Not just occasionally, sometimes, constantly.
He was the first thought I had when I woke up in the morning and the last thought I had before I fell asleep, and all in between.
My job, my kids, the grocery store, the conversation I had with a friend, on and on and on.
He was running like, like a background program the whole time.
My emotions were also completely tied to his responses.
If he reciprocated my intensity, I felt good.
I, I felt elated.
"Okay, the world is, is fine right now."
But if he pulled back, if he didn't respond to a message quick enough or in a way that sounded loving enough, I crashed.
I needed his reassurance constantly, not because I was a needy person, but because that reassurance was what regulated me.
Again, my emotions became based off of his emotions.
It was like he had become the thermostat for my emotional state.
And friend, here's the har- the part that's really hard for me to admit.
Honestly, it was a fantasy.
I had constructed this version of him in my mind- The way he understood me, the way he made me feel seen, and I convinced myself that what I was feeling was real and true and significant.
I was functioning on the outside.
My job was fine.
I was showing up as a new mother.
But on the inside, I had completely lost the ability to separate this limerence from reality.
I didn't understand then that what I was experiencing had a name, that it had been, again, researched and documented, that my brain was doing something specific, like the way God designed my brain to work, and I didn't realize I was dealing with something really powerful and that it had almost nothing to do with who this guy was.
Let me geek out for one more second and talk about the neuroscience, what's going on in the brain.
And I want you to hear this.
Don't let yourself off the hook.
I want you to understand what you're dealing with.
Okay, the primary engine of limerence is dopamine.
We've talked about this in recent episodes as well.
Dopamine is the same neurotransmitter involved in addictions.
When you are in a limerent state, your brain's reward system behaves almost identically to the brain of someone who's addicted to gambling or other compulsive behaviors.
The key mechanism is called intermittent reinforcement.
Your limerent object, in this case, this person, they don't need to consistently reciprocate.
In fact, the inconsistency makes the obsession worse.
So that's why I said there were days when maybe his text response didn't come quick enough or didn't sound nice enough.
But every text, every smile, every moment of warmth, it did trigger a dopamine surge.
And it was intermittent.
It wasn't consistent.
And so then every silence, every vague response, those things would trigger a crash followed by frantic seeking behavior.
I hope you hear this, this cycle, this loop.
If I received what I was looking for, I felt good.
But then when I did not receive it, I felt bad and I started to frantically seek it out again.
Okay, oxytocin.
We've talked about this one before too.
This also plays a role as the bonding hormone.
Oxytocin is released during an emotional connection.
It's meant to bond you together.
In limerence, even brief interactions can trigger attachment chemistry, making this person feel uniquely significant, like they are irreplaceable.
Not necessarily because of who they are.
It's primarily because of how this bonding system has been activated.
That's why in my situation, I knew that my affair partner was not the kind of guy that I would want to get married to and spend the rest of my life with.
I knew that.
However, it was this oxytocin that kept me bonded to him, even when I would have said that I knew better.
Okay.
Also, with all of this, while the oxytocin is being activated, serotonin decreases during intense romantic fixation, which increases this intrusive thinking.
Okay.
Then one more thing here.
The prefrontal cortex, this part of your brain is where you have your executive decision-making center.
It's where you think.
It's where you make wise decisions.
However, that part of your brain is suppressed when this other system of your brain is dominating.
So basically, the, this neurological shift explains why intelligent, rational, wise women make devastating choices during these limerent episodes.
The brain-- the thinking part of your brain has literally shut off, and your brain has gone into a survival mode, not a rational mode.
This is what you've probably heard of before called the affair fog.
And if you have lived inside of this affair fog, you know exactly what that suppression felt like.
You couldn't think clearly.
You couldn't see him accurately.
You couldn't make decisions that aligned with your values.
Limerence needs uncertainty to survive.
The moment the limerent object becomes fully available, fully transparent, fully committed, well, then the limerence begins to fade because remember what I just described, that cycle, that loop? Well, if this person becomes fully available, then There's no need for that dopamine loop because f- in order for that loop to survive, it needs the intermittent reinforcement.
It needs those highs and lows.
But once the high is always there, the person's always available, well, then it begins to fade.
Which is why individuals experiencing limerence often can't describe the other person's values or decision-making patterns or how they behave under stress.
But what you probably could describe about your affair partner, you could probably describe the ambiguous gesture that might signal, signal interest.
Friend, in this sort of situation, you weren't in love with him, him as a human being.
It's possible that you were more in love with the possibility of him, maybe of who he could become or what your relationship could become.
Again, that difference of the fantasy versus the reality.
Your brain had been chemically wired to pursue that possibility with everything that it had, but it was pursuing the possibility, not reality.
Okay, here's a question because I love you, and I'm coming always with a Bible in hand.
I wanna ask the question, is limerence a sin? And I'm gonna answer no.
He-- and here's-- Before you start emailing me, here's my reasoning why I say no, limerence itself is not a sin.
Like I just described, everything that's happening in your body, with your hormones, in your system, God created humans like that.
We are created to bond and to attach and to experience the euphoria of connection and what it feels like to be fully known.
Honestly, think about the first year or so when you met your spouse, that dizzy, consuming, can't stop thinking about him, butterflies in my stomach kinda feeling.
That's the bonding system.
God designed it, and it can be very good.
So the temptation itself is not a sin.
Let me remind you, Jesus was tempted in every way as we are, and he was without sin.
So the temptation is real.
The feeling is real.
Even Jesus, he didn't shame himself for being tempted.
What did he do? In the moment, he met that temptation with truth, and he didn't act on the temptation.
Okay, so limerence, this involuntary emotional experience of intense attachment, that's not where sin lives.
But sin enters when limerence is misplaced, when it's directed towards someone who's not your spouse, when you begin to act on it by reaching out, by entertaining the fantasy, by feeding the thoughts and the contact.
When that person becomes an idol, when your emotional regulation, your sense of worth, your hope for the future is all organized around this person rather than God, then it's an idol.
Then your emotions have become misplaced.
You know, the Greek word for sin, hamartia, it means to miss the mark.
And limerence becomes sin the moment that it crosses from this involuntary feeling into a chosen direction.
The moment that you begin organizing your life around it rather than bringing it to God and saying, "God, can you help me? This feels overwhelming.
I feel stuck.
I can't get out of this.
God, would you deliver me?" Sister, nothing that I'm saying here is to condemn you.
Please hear my love for you.
You have likely already carried more condemnation than you ever needed to.
My goal here is to give you clarity, because clarity and truth, that's what sets you free.
You are not a monster for feeling what you have felt.
You are a human being with a heart and a nervous system that God designed for good connection.
And what happened was that somewhere along your journey, your longing and desires got aimed at the wrong target.
But the good news is this is healable.
God's love for you has not changed.
So I want to give you just two practical things that you can do, because awareness without a next step, uh, becomes just more information, and it becomes another thing to feel bad about, and that is not what today is for.
Okay, so first practical thing here.
I would encourage you to name what's going on without shame and bring it to God.
So the next time you notice this intrusive thought, the loop, the fantasy, the checking, the craving for his response- I want you to try something different before you either indulge it or just white-knuckle your way through it.
I want you to try something different.
Name it out loud.
Hmm.
That feeling, and if you wanna put your hand on your heart, you can, you can feel it in your body.
This is limerence.
This is my dopamine system seeking a reward that it's come to expect, and then bring it to God.
Not to confess it as a failure where you're beating yourself up, but to surrender, to hand it over.
"God, my brain is doing this thing again, and I understand now why it's happening.
I don't want to organize my life around this anymore.
Would you help me? Would you create a new path for me? Would you deliver me?" Naming this is limerence, that interrupts the automatic loop.
Right there, you are activating your prefrontal cortex.
That part that gets shut off, you're activating it.
You're bringing it back online.
This pause creates just milliseconds of a choice where there wasn't one before, and that millisecond is where your healing begins, in the pause.
Okay.
Practical thing number two, I would invite you to start redirecting the longing towards what it's actually looking for.
You see, here's what I learned after years of healing and coaching women through this.
Limerence is almost never really about him, but it's about what he represented.
He represented you feeling seen, you feeling chosen, you feeling alive and significant, like you mattered to someone in a way that felt real and urgent.
Sister, those are not shameful desires.
Again, God created you this way.
God created these feelings for us to feel.
The work is learning to get those needs met from sources that don't require you to betray yourself or to betray your covenant.
It is possible for those needs to be met in safe community, in an honest relationship with God, in coaching that helps you understand more about yourself, and also just connecting with yourself, and if this is your story, a marriage where you're learning to build the kind of intimacy that limerence can never provide and sustain So the real question after a limerence is, what happens when that chemical high wears off? Can you build actual intimacy, or do you just continue to chase the next dopamine hit? And that question and the healing that it requires is the most important work you will ever do.
And friend, you don't have to figure that out alone.
Awareness of what's happening in your brain is really powerful, but it's not just for understanding.
The, the reason I'm bringing you this awareness today is for change and transformation.
If you have ever felt wrapped up in this limerence, it may help to remember that your brain is doing what brains naturally do.
It's reacting to a reward, it's craving connection, and it's also reeling from uncertainty.
This does not make what you're going through invalid.
It just means that there are pathways for healing.
You are not weak, and you are not too far gone from healing and from peace and joy and love.
You are a woman with a nervous system that just got aimed at the wrong target.
And you are now, today, beginning to understand why.
And that understanding is the beginning of everything new.
So if today's episode gave you language for something that you've been carrying, and if you heard that word limerence and thought, "That's it.
That's what it was," friend, I wanna talk with you.
Not to evaluate you or give you a homework assignment, but just to sit with you, to witness you in a shame-free space, to help you name what you've been experiencing, and then to pray together about what your next step looks like.
You can schedule a free connection call with me at the link in the show notes.
Zero pressure, just a conversation between two sisters, one who's been where you are and one who's ready to take that next step towards freedom.
I would be honored to be that sister in your corner.
God, I pray right now for the woman listening to this that you would meet her in the fog.
God, would you meet her in the middle of that loop? Meet her in the moment when the craving comes back, and she doesn't know what to do with it Father, would you begin to rewire what shame tried to break? Would you redirect what got aimed at the wrong target? And would you remind her that the longing you placed inside of her is holy? And Father, you are the one that can fully satisfy.
We love you.
Amen.