Most people consider romance a highly important facet of life. For individuals prone to limerence, however, it overshadows everything and everyone else.
While stuck in fully-fledged limerence, we all yearn for emotional freedom and stability. But, we are also faced with a paradox. Nobody likes the idea of their romantic implications being reduced to a mere array of biochemical processes that can be understood and manipulated scientifically. We feel that doing so somehow diminishes the value of our feelings.
Moreover, we simply cannot ignore the irrefutable role that genetics plays in contributing to our mental state (and determining which conditions we can experience in the first place). And genetics, by its very nature, cannot be entirely changed.
As a result, many limerents start to feel like they are a little too set in their limerent ways to actually recover.
But, just because you are naturally predisposed to limerence does not mean that you need to go through the painful experience of unfulfilled romantic feelings over and over again. It is entirely possible to rewire your brain in a way that it fades into the background of your day-to-day life, before disappearing entirely.
Addressing the psychological aspects of one’s issues serves as the first step towards finding a solution for them. In short, limerence is an indication that your subconscious wants something more. That it is seeking something, and desperately trying to hold onto someone who it believes will provide it with access to that thing. Your unmet psychological needs can pertain to the connections that you have with others, the intimacy that you receive, the freedom with which you can express yourself or how mentally stimulating you find your life.
Whatever it might be, the implication is that there are always unresolved unmet needs that you must pay attention to. And that if you don’t address them, you may recover from one limerence episode and fall right into the next one.
This is why it is crucial that you get to the root of your discontent, find new and healthier goals to pursue and change the way that you perceive things. This is the basis of becoming a limerence-immune version of yourself. And to change your perception, you need to re-code the way your brain is programmed to think.
Recognising the Role of Neural Connections
Previously, many psychologists and neuroscientists believed that your brain could no longer be altered or developed any further past a certain age. It was believed that after you hit a certain point in your life, your habits were solidified and inalterable.
However, after much tinkering and messing around with the weird and interesting aspects of our brains, recent studies in this realm now demonstrate otherwise.
We now know that the human brain is very much malleable, regardless of your age or the psychological condition that you are in. Much like how computers can be reprogrammed to modify their outcomes, our neuronal pathways can be tweaked to alter our thought patterns, emotional responses and behaviours.
Now, rewiring your brain does not mean you will be able to remove all memories of your limerent object (LO) from an internal hard drive of yours all of a sudden. What it does mean, however, is that you can learn and nurture new thought patterns that will help you in dealing with those unpleasant memories in a much more reasonable way. In other words, you can render yourself resilient to those memories – and incapable of being emotionally impacted by them.
What it all comes down to is our neurological pathways. The way they are built and the impact our external experiences have on them as we grow older.
For example, when a person experiences some sort of physical trauma, certain neural connections in their brain are severed and cease to function properly. As a result, they may forget to do simple tasks that they once performed with ease, such as speaking. Yet, all is not lost. The sufferer can still improve, by allowing their remaining neurons to form new connections with one another to make those actions possible again.
Learning (or relearning) how to do a task can be done through frequent repetitions that aid in the development of new neural connections. This is good news, because it means that you are never destined to fail. Plus, stimulating your brain to promote positive neuronal rewiring can be a lot of fun.
So, How Do You Modify Your Limerent Brain?
When it comes to recovering from obsessive love, the same principles apply.
Psychiatric disorders stem from an abnormal brain structure or chemistry. These causes can occur due to negative impacts on our brains that change our neural pathways.
As mentioned earlier, the rewiring of our brains follow a similar path to that of a computer. We can unlearn and relearn, even in our golden years.
Moreover, the better an engineer is at understanding the circuitry of their machine, the more they can alter it to fit their needs. The same applies to our brains. The more we understand how our neural pathways connect with one other and what alters those connections, the better we can actively influence them ourselves and promote the neural hardwiring of fruitful thinking patterns, emotional responses and behaviours. Which, of course, form the basis of the subconscious mind reprogramming that my book The Limerent Mind details in depth.
To modify your limerent mind, you need to communicate with your subconscious with complete honesty and intention. There are several ways to do this effectively, including specific visualisation- and affirmation-based techniques.
Regularly employing these techniques while your brain is most receptive is guaranteed to allow for the formation of new neural pathways. This will result in you stepping into a new version of yourself who thinks, feels and acts in congruence with the new goals that you have implanted (which will concern far more interesting things than trying to win over someone who is not interested/who cannot provide you with the romantic connection that you desire).
Reconfiguring your subconscious mind is like restarting and changing the inner workings of the most powerful machine in the world: your brain!
Despite being prone to perpetuating the same negative, obsessional narratives when left unchecked, the human brain is extremely flexible and adaptable. Its functionality can, therefore, be fine-tuned and modified much like that of the technology that surrounds us nowadays.
The Bottom Line
If there is anything that modern neuroscience proves, it is the impressive plasticity (and healing potential) of the human brain. And, the reality that being genetically prone to a condition like limerence does not mean that you have to actually experience it.
Psychological factors determine whether you fall into the ruts of obsessionality – the main two categories that line you up with limerence are a). unmet needs and b). limiting belief systems/a suboptimal self-concept. With consistent effort, it is completely, one hundred percent possible to both meet your needs and rewire your subconscious mind to align yourself with the limerence-free reality that you deserve to experience.