When Fantasy Becomes a Refuge

Using limerence to emotionally regulate

I have never been more acutely aware of the way fantasy has been my go-to comfort throughout my life—and with it, the loss of genuine presence.

When we’re in fantasy, we’re projecting ourselves into a not-yet-real future. We escape the present moment. And in doing so, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to actually feel and process our real-time emotions—the very thing that leads to more choice, more expansiveness, and more love.

Instead, we try to get our needs met indirectly, in a way that feels safer than confronting what’s real and right in front of us.

In the short-term, it feels like a no-brainer. In fantasy, I can feel excitement, hope, longing, titillation. When I let the fantasy go and return to reality, what often emerges instead is sadness, hopelessness, heaviness, and fear.

No wonder so many of us choose to stay in the mind and the world it’s crafting for us. Like a drug, fantasy offers an illusion of comfort, peace, and safety that’s so intensely tantalizing we forget it is, in fact, an illusion.

But regulating through fantasy—through limerence—keeps us from engaging with the real possibilities in our lives. And it’s only those real possibilities that can lead to deeper, more sustainable security.

Security within ourselves.
Embodied self-love and trust: not artificial love through external validation.

Feeling our grief, despair, and terror is not fun or easy—especially if we’ve spent our whole lives defended against letting them fully in. But when we’re finally able to truly feel them (no, not thinking or obsessing about them in the mind), they naturally release. They move us to a state of clarity, connection, and calm. It is this open-hearted state which opens us to where real love lives. Love bigger than any individual. A spacious, grounded, open-hearted love. This state is actually available to us if we learn how to work with our emotions and move our energy.¹

But to access that?
We have to feel our grief.
And that’s exactly what limerence helps us avoid.

Photo by Unsplash

Using limerent fantasy as a form of emotional regulation became especially clear to me during a personal experience that forced me to confront it head-on.

After breakups, I often unconsciously use limerence to buffer me through the transition. The pain of what caused the relationship to end feels like it’s safely on the other side—tied to the relationship itself.

The first thing I usually feel, once I’m single again, is a thrilling sense of relief and freedom. I’ve escaped the pain. I get to return to the world inside my head, where things feel familiar and alive.

This breakup was no different. I noticed the relief... and a familiar kind of fixation. The spark of a new crush. It wasn’t something I wanted. In fact, I had planned to stay single, to focus on my passion projects. But somehow, one of the most perfectly crafted-to-my-type individuals had just happened to show up in my life. What a coincidence, right?

Or so I told myself.

In a session with my coach, the truth began to unravel.

She gently pointed out what now feels obvious:

“It looks like the fixation and fantasizing is a way for your brain to dissociate from the pain of your present experience. You just got out of something really intense. Your nervous system is probably wrecked. Fixating on this new person is a way to avoid feeling what’s actually there.”

I could feel resistance rising in me. And at the same time, a quiet voice inside whispered: She’s right.

Still, I identified with the resistance first.

“I don’t know. Being in the relationship wrecked my nervous system. I’ve been a mess for months. But now that I’m out of it, I don’t think there’s that much pain left. It actually feels like relief. Like freedom. I feel like myself again.”

But as we kept talking, something deeper emerged. That small, calm voice grew stronger. I could feel the shimmering mirage of the new crush begin to dissolve—and in its place, a heavy, sinking feeling that descended on my whole body and spirit.

My coach saw it too.

“That,” she said, “that is what you’ve been avoiding.”

She asked me to close my eyes and be with the heaviness.

When I turned toward it, the sadness was immediate. So was the story: “I am alone.”

And with that, the illusion shattered. The limerent crush—the fixation—had provided an electric excitement throughout my body that masked the grief beneath. My mind had been trying to protect me. But in reality, it would’ve just rushed into a new distraction before I’d integrated what came before.

This was the pattern.
This was how I kept making a mess of my life.

Chasing the rush, the intensity, the excitement. Escaping what was real.

After that session, I followed up with breathwork on my own. I sat with the grief. The despair. The fear. Not just for a day—but for days, weeks. It was a process that asked for my presence, my vulnerability, my courage.

For awhile, rather than allowing that limerent daydream to send electrical excitement throughout my system, I consciously turned away from it and came again and again back to the present. Back to heavier feelings of hopelessness and despair. And what I saw was this:
When my mind doesn’t have a future love story to cling to, life can feel meaningless.

But I wanted to learn how to build meaning from what’s real rather than from projection.
From what’s present
From within my own bones.
Not from something external, elusive, projected, and fleeting.

The answer was not to escape the hard feelings, but to surrender into them and find my way. For the first time in all my years, it was time to stop seeking, and learn how to start being.

I had to let the new crush go. I had to focus on healing and learning to love the many parts of me that had been lost in all of this constant forward momentum and escape.

I had to start the long journey back to myself.

It would be nice if I could say that it felt right. But the truth is it felt very wrong. It felt like I was losing the one chance to be with the one person who could fit me like a glove.

And yet, I knew that I couldn’t keep following the same seductive logic that had ruled my whole life. There is always one unique, singular individual that holds the key to everything beautiful in this world.

Right now it happened to rest in her form. But tomorrow it would be someone else. And the truth is, the illusion has never lead me anywhere but where I’ve been a thousand times. For once, I owed it to myself to take a different path.

The reality is when we have used fantasy to self-regulate for most of our lives, limerence can follow us anywhere. It becomes a survival strategy to deal with discomfort.

When we’re single, we project onto complete strangers. We imagine that if they saw us, chose us, loved us—then our life could begin.

When we’re partnered, fantasy takes a different shape. We use it to regulate when we feel unseen or hurt by our real-life partners. We daydream about exes, coworkers, imagined future lovers who’d never treat us this way. It’s the same pattern.

Limerence becomes our emotional safety valve. A hope-generator. A distraction. A self-soothing mechanism.

But it’s also what cuts us off from real intimacy—first with ourselves, and then with others.

The truth is, choosing to feel rather than fantasize does not feel like relief. It feels like loss. It feels like death.

But I’ve come to believe that to change—to really change—we have to let part of us die. The part that clings to illusion. The part that would rather live in projection than in presence.

This is not the easy road.
But it is the true one.
And it’s the only road that leads somewhere new.

Ps. If this resonated with you, and you’re ready to gently start turning inward—to begin feeling what’s real rather than chasing what’s imagined—I’ve created a short breathwork audio to support you.

It’s designed to help you move stuck energy and release emotion from the body—not through overthinking or analyzing, but through presence and breath.

If you’d like a copy, just email me at sarah@limerencefree.com and I’ll send it your way, no strings attached.

1. If you are wanting to understand this idea more, I highly recommend reading the work of Hilary Jacobs Hendel and her book It's Not Always Depression for a deeper understanding around how processing emotions leads us back to an open-hearted state. Hint: limerence falls under the defense category.