How Acceptance (Not Control) Loosens Limerence’s Grip
The paradox of working with limerence
Photo by Unsplash
Trying to use control to outwit our limerence tends to only make it worse.
The first time I met with one of my clients, they were desperate to make the limerence stop.
“I’m trying everything. I’ve gone no contact, I’ve been monitoring my thoughts, I haven’t been checking their social media or listening to any limerent music. I’m doing everything right and nothing is working! I can’t wait one more moment, I’m losing my mind. I need a fix now or I won’t make it.”
The analgesic effects of early limerence were no longer working, and they were beginning to come face to face with their inner loneliness and despair. At this point, the part of us that is desperate to stop the pain can understandably take over the system. Yet it’s often this very fixation on finding short-term relief that keeps us stuck.
When Control Backfires
I have to be careful at this stage. If I start talking about relaxing the grip of control or leaning into acceptance with a part that’s in full desperation, I’ll likely have a mutiny on my hands -and that client may never return.
Instead, I first join with that part. I validate its experience and offer some short-term crisis survival tools, just enough for it to feel like there’s a plan in place. That helps the system exhale, even a little.
From there, I can gently suggest loosening the iron grip of monitoring thoughts and behaviors.
“I know it sounds counterintuitive,” I said, “but sometimes the harder we work to get rid of the limerence, the more attention and energy we feed it. It’s like putting a big spotlight on it. Instead, what if you just let the thoughts be? Don’t resist them. Let them play in the background like a song on the radio, you don’t need to give them meaning or try to analyze them. Just let them play.”
Both my client and their desperate-for-relief part looked skeptical.
“I don’t think I have the power to do that,” they said.
I didn’t argue. I know how powerless this state can feel.
To my relief, the client returned the next week looking lighter.
“I actually had a pretty good week. I remembered what life was like before I even knew what limerence was—before I started fighting my own brain. I just let it do what it was going to do, and strangely enough, it felt better not to fight. There were even a couple mornings when my LO wasn’t my first thought upon waking.”
That instant shift in his energy reminded me again how control is an illusion.
Many addicts spend years trying to manage, control, or contain their addictions. That’s why AA begins with the famous step of admitting powerlessness. To someone who hasn’t faced addiction, that may sound disempowering -“Of course I have free will.” But the reality is, in relationship to our addict part (or limerent part), we often don’t. When we go head to head with it, coming from a place of judgment, desperation, ego, or shame, it always wins. It humbles us every time.
Another client I worked with years ago tried so hard to “get rid of” her limerence that the stress landed her in a psychiatric hospital for suicidal ideation.
She had placed enormous pressure on herself to go no contact and enforce rigid boundaries with both her LO and her own mind. The problem was, she didn’t yet have the inner resources or ego strength to remove such a deeply entrenched, lifelong coping mechanism.
Taking away a survival strategy without replacing it with healthier alternatives can cause the system to escalate into panic.
This was another reminder that healing limerence is never about fighting, battling, or white-knuckling our way through it. That path only leads to exhaustion, hopelessness, and a sense of defeat.
The Shift from Fighting to Building
The emphasis should always be on building skills, developing inner resourcing, and alchemizing desire, while meeting it with compassion and understanding for why it’s there in the first place.
Limerence is not the enemy.
Our hatred and shame of it are.
The rush to rip it out of ourselves only deepens the wound. Real healing comes from slowing down and building a life where limerence naturally falls away on its own.
The sadness I felt watching that beautiful client in such conflict with herself drove this home. The simplistic behavioral approach of “extinction” might help one-time limerent experiencers, but for lifelong limerents, the pattern is woven into the fabric of their being and trauma.
To go to war with it is to go to war with a part of themselves.
We must find another way.
To truly heal, we must lessen the hyper-focus, redirect energy toward more neutral areas of life-building or more intentional value-based pursuits, and release the need to control the outcome or “fix the problem.”
When we accept what is, without pushing or forcing, limerence can begin to transform on its own.
The secret to healing limerence is that we can’t make it change by force. In fact, the more we try, the stronger it becomes. Only by creating the right conditions -inner and outer alignment, self-acceptance, an intentional shift of focus, and healing underlying wounds -can it naturally fall away.
The pain isn’t the problem we think it is.
The pain is the path.
When we learn to stay with it, to be curious and compassionate toward it, we discover that it carries the very medicine we’ve been seeking all along.
If you’re ready to begin working with your limerence in a compassionate, grounded way, and want personalized support as you navigate the healing process, I offer one-on-one coaching for this exact kind of inner work.
You can reply directly to this email or reach out to me if you’d like to explore whether working together might be a good fit.
This is one of the best articles on limerence I have read. It emphasizes not so obvious or counterintuitive aspects to limerence recovery that some of the other limerence sites do not. I am a serial limerent since my teenage years, and while I have had many limerence-free years in between, my most recent and ongoing episode is among the worst. It is also the one that I have tried the hardest to recover from, visiting a pretty well known limerence recovery site as well as seeing a therapist for eighteen months. However, in some ways the limerence grip feels even stronger than before. Now I am trying to heed Sarah's words. Let's see where that leads. Thank you for writing this, Sarah.