In today’s post, we will be outlining the entire limerence recovery process in an easy-to-digest way.

It’s of utmost importance to me to ensure that every single struggling limerent who come across my website knows that there is a way out. That it is entirely within their reach to not only quickly get over their current limerent object (LO), but that they can also permanently transform themself into a version of themself who will never, ever become limerent again… who is 100% limerence immune. Every single one of you is more than capable of this, but it does require treating limerence as the unwanted, pathological addiction that it is, genuinely desiring change and being willing to accept temporary discomfort.

When You Actively Chase Bliss and Empowerment, You No Longer Need to Worry About ‘Avoiding Pain’

As those of you who are familiar with my content will know, I continually reinforce the idea that you must strive to ‘create the new’ when you wish to escape negative psychological patterns like limerence, rather than fixating on your current negative circumstances (and trying to ‘run away’ from them).

This is because your brain is simply not equipped to catalyse profound, exciting psychological changes within you if you opt for ‘avoid’ strategies. When you operate from this mode, it is forced to stay on ‘red-alert’ because it believes that you are in a life-threatening situation (because you are merely homing in on what you don’t want). Remember, the brain’s main, overarching role is to keep your physiological needs met. Since you currently are managing to meet your most primitive needs, despite being emotionally unstable and miserable, it will be incentivised to keep you exactly where you are – craving your LO and yearning for freedom, unsure how to escape your predicament.

If you instead ‘accept‘ that you are currently dealing with a horrible psychological affliction and choose to have faith in your ability to become someone new – a stronger, more emotionally fulfilled version of yourself than you have ever been before – your brain will be able to give free rein to its creative powers and actually ORCHESTRATE behavioural changes that let you embody this limerence-free version of yourself.

Your brain evolved to be inspired by goal-oriented behaviour, and to radically alter its neural wirings (and, hence, your subconscious and conscious programming) in response to goal-oriented behaviour. In response to visions of the future… to things that you want, rather than things that you don’t want.

So, the premise of this limerence recovery programme is to a). accept your current state rather than beating yourself up about it, but to b). channel your focus towards embodying a new version of yourself. For that reason, I strongly advise against fixating on your LO’s negative traits excessively or allowing resentment to build regarding how they have treated you. Even if they are a highly irresponsible, even manipulative individual, none of that matters – you have become addicted to them and have handed your power over to them, but you are going to a). get over them entirely, b). regain your power and start to feel wonderful and c). learn to never, ever slip into limerence again.

This is only achieved by catapulting yourself towards a radically different, more empowered, more resilient version of yourself. But, how is this done? How can you rapidly overcome your emotional dependency on this one person, while also guaranteeing that you never fall for someone else in this toxic, obsessional, derailing way?

1). Work out your unmet needs:

First of all, you must objectively and lucidly assess what is really going on between you and your LO. What type of dynamic do you two share – are they a best friend who you feel comprehends you better than anyone else and understands your expansive range of emotions? Are they a colleague who you admire, but who has a cruel edge … and who drives you euphoric when they give you rare compliments, because you know they don’t hand them out to anyone else? Or, are they someone you met on a dating app and had a fling with, but who suddenly changed their mind – someone you inexplicably cannot get over, despite their clear lack of serious interest in becoming a permanent part of your life?

Honestly admitting to yourself what is really going on is the first necessary step towards elucidating your true unmet needs… because your LO is only affecting you like this (i.e. driving you euphoric, depressive and obsessive) because you have unmet psychological needs that something about their personality/nature somehow shields you from.

Unmet needs typically pertain to emotional states that you love, but which you aren’t currently accessing enough (or frequently enough) in your life. For example, the desire to feel enlivened, confident, on top of your game, truly understood, motivated, protected. A lot of the time, your LO ‘meets’ your unmet needs (hence driving you limerent) by inspiring you to become a version of yourself that you deep-down wish you always were. You feel that they like – or even just tolerate – you more when you are a certain way… when you hone specific parts of your nature, or change specific things about your life. This, in turn, gives you the strong illusion that you can only be this way around your LO, and that they are the eternal key to your alignment with beautiful emotional states that resonate with you – and, hence, your happiness.

For example, if your LO is ambitious, passionate and an incorrigible workaholic, it may be that they inspire you to work harder and dream bigger yourself. You may see the world open up to you in a different way when around them, and feel yourself drawn to learning new skills that never really attracted you before. OR, your LO might be gentle, kind, spiritual and emotionally liberated, frequently dedicating hours to writing poetry and making little gifts for their friends. A limerent who falls for LOs of this nature probably feels intoxicated by them because they provide them with access to a sentimental, emotional world of delights that their current life keeps them detached from.

Naturally, there is huge interindividual variation with regards to what your LO ‘provides you with’ – it depends on your and their genders, ages and natures, as well as a plethora of other factors. But, analyse your current situation objectively with the goal of casting light on how and why YOUR LO is impacting you psychologically to this degree… while remembering that other people in their life are not intoxicated by them, and can even see them neutrally and/or negatively. This ‘reaction’ that you are experiencing – this dreaded limerent state that you are stuck in – is all about you and your unmet needs.

2). Meet your unmet needs:

As I explain in-depth in The Limerent Mind, you must learn to meet your own needs yourself by giving yourself as much access as possible to the special emotions that your LO (and only your LO) is currently eliciting in you. This is the trick – this is what lessens the disparity between you and your LO, and renders them unable to actually affect you in this way, killing the ‘limerence reaction’ and everything that it entails. This is what allows you to stop crying over them, to see their name pop up on your phone and genuinely not care (preferring to respond to your best friend or brother instead), and to viscerally – as well as logically – know that you are over them and deserving of far more than them.

I highly recommend grabbing the book linked above; it is essentially a limerence Bible, boasting every last bit of information that you need to recover from limerence permanently. It is also a project that I have recently significantly extended and polished. If you do choose to purchase it, please consider leaving a review – it helps me out massively and allows more limerents (in marketplaces all around the world) to find and benefit from its definitely mental–health-saving, potentially life-saving contents.

3). Rewire your subconscious mind:

While you make changes in your life to meet your long-neglected psychological needs, you must engage in the equally important subconscious mind work. In combination, these two facets of the limerence recovery regimen will cure you of this affliction permanently and catapult you towards a future in which limerence does not exist (at least, not for you!).

The language of your subconscious mind is emotion – the two extremely powerful, neuroscientifically-backed subconscious mind repatterning techniques covered in The Limerent Mind are designed to ensure that you stir up the right emotions at precisely the right time, when delta and alpha-band oscillatory activity is highest in your brain. This slow, 0.5-12 Hz activity primes your brain to be receptive to new ideas, concepts and beliefs.

After a matter of days/weeks of implementing these subconscious techniques earnestly and optimistically, your belief systems will be transformed such that you genuinely feel, think and act differently.. without any conscious effort. In order words, your self-concept will be permanently rejuvenated and limerence-immune – your feelings, thoughts, intuitions, desires and behaviours will all be INCOMPATIBLE with limerence. You will no longer be drawn to anyone in this horrendously artificial, overwhelming way, nor will the types of characters who were once like a drug to you even appeal to you at all. You will instead be a match for exciting, stable, real love. Love that thrills you but does NOT break you into tiny pieces, subject you to harrowing painful emotions, make you pedestal your partner and lose yourself or divert you from your own personal mission in life.

The two subconscious reprogramming techniques that will grant you this transformation are a). visualising and b). affirmations. Some people like to create their own affirmations. However, if you’d like some that are guaranteed to influence your innermost belief systems in highly propcious ways, here are ninety-nine affirmations that I’ve recently created.

They’re specifically designed to generate nine different emotional states in you, all of which are absolutely crucial – you must bathe your subconscious brain with these specific emotions when it is most receptive if you want to heal and guarantee that you never fall captive to this nightmarish state again. Since they target very specific psychological feelings that limerence entails rather than external circumstances, these affirmations apply to all suffering limerence, irrespective of their gender, age, sexual orientation, and of the situation that they are caught up in with their LO.

None of that matters to the subconscious mind; innermost emotions are what it is guided by, and modifying the ones that you experience before bed with effective affirmation-use is a surefire way to transforms its neural wirings.

4). Take great care not to sabotage your results:

In short, there are many ways that nearly all limerents – even the most emotionally astute ones – trip themselves up while trying to heal themselves of obsessive unrequited love. I spent a great chunk of this summer working on a book on this topic, called Twenty Disastrous Limerence Errors. It covers all of the subtle, tragic ways in which limerents make their recovery harder than it needs to be (or sometimes downright impossible for themselves to achieve).

Definitely consider purchasing it – I am delighted with how it has turned out, and genuinely want all of you to benefit from its in-depth chapters and identify/correct these critical errors in yourselves. I can’t stress it enough – while limerent, your brain is hijacked by highly primitive and irrational incentives. It is incredibly challenging to pinpoint the thinking styles, attitudes and little behavioural shifts that it is stealthily guiding you towards. When these are highlighted to you by someone else, however, you are far more likely to be able to employ higher-level reasoning and actually stop succumbing to them… enabling you to gain the momentum and results that you deserve while diligently employing the psychological techniques we have covered.

I am certain that you will currently be committing at least half of these insidious limerent errors. The goal is to be committing zero, which is perfectly possible once you learn about them, why you are drawn to thinking they are ‘rational’ thoughts/attitudes/ways of interacting with others/life perspectives, and how to most efficiently free yourself from their grips.

5). Maintain faith, get excited by your progress and GO ALL THE WAY:

Once you start to meet your psychological needs and reconfigure your subconscious mind, your day-to-day state will rapidly ameliorate. You will first notice that the dreaded limerent lows that you will be accustomed to experiencing in response to your LO’s presence (or absence, or somewhere in-between) will be far less frequent, and far more transient. Rather than hitting you like a brick wall and immobilising you for the entire day, rendering you incapable of enjoying life with the people, things (and animals?) in front of you, they will feel like brief bad moods that pass.

At this point, your ability to employ cognitive reappraisal – i.e. thinking objectively in order to feel better – will sharply increase. Your LO will attract you less, physically, emotionally and spiritually. They will blend into the realm of ‘normal people’, and you will be able to genuinely and sincerely view them for who they are – someone multi-faceted with a mixed bag of traits, most of which probably aren’t that great (by virtue of their unpredictability getting you so hooked in the first place).

Once you start noticing these improvements in yourself (which you will, for the brain is like a computer and responds predictably to the correct techniques), you must maintain unwavering faith in your ability to heal. You must keep your eyes on the goal, keep feeling the reality of how you want to be, feel and live, and keep progressing forwards.

As Charles Bukowski wisely said:

If you’re going to do it, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. You’ll do it, despite rejection and worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There’s no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.”

Charles Bukowski, Roll the Dice

Stay curious, playful and aligned with your future bliss … and tackle the beast that is limerence once and for all.

Until the next time!

Lucy