When I was growing up and feeling lonely, I would sometimes hug a pillow and pretend it was my crush to feel comfort. When I became an adult, I stopped doing this, but my limerent tendencies remained. People who use limerence to feel better about their lives and themselves are effectively “pretending” in order to feel a sense of safety. Limerence isn’t really about our crushes. It’s about the ache of feeling unseen and misunderstood. For those of us prone to limerence, the crush becomes a stand-in for the warmth, safety, and connection we never fully received. Some people who didn’t get consistent love and attunement in childhood learn to soothe with fantasy. These daydreams offer the illusion of safety and connection when reality feels empty. The trouble is, if we don’t learn healthier ways to cope, those childhood fantasies become limerence in adulthood.
The Mirror of Erised shows the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts, and people go mad staring at it, unable to look away from the vision that makes them happy. In active limerence, a life with your LO (limerent object) is what you would see in that mirror. You imagine a future family with them, feeling warmth, security, and love reflected back. But just like with the Mirror of Erised, what you see isn’t real. It’s a projection. The dream is intoxicating because it soothes every wound, but the more you stare, the further you drift from reality…
Healing begins when you willfully let go of the fantasy and allow yourself to face the grief beneath it. That grief is the raw pain of unmet needs, the loneliness, and the longing that limerence was covering over. True healing means metabolizing that pain and emotional discomfort instead of numbing it with obsession. It takes courage to turn away from the illusion of what could be and face the truth of what is. In this phase, the work is about learning to hold yourself through grief. You must learn to cultivate the warmth, security, and love you once believed only others could provide.
Grieving What Never Was
There are really two kinds of grief we carry through life. The first is grieving what was—when something or someone we truly had is lost. The second is grieving what never was. It’s the sorrow of realizing that we didn’t get what we should have had in childhood: unconditional love, safety, and the sense of being deeply seen.
For most limerents, this second kind of grief is the hidden core. On the surface, it feels like you’re mourning the loss of a relationship, or the potential of one. But if you look closer, the pain runs deeper. You’re grieving the loss of an imagined life where you were chosen, safe, and cherished. The LO fills in the placeholder in your imagined “happy place”, playing the role of the person who finally makes up for what was missing all along.
This is why the grief feels so overwhelming when limerence ends. It’s not just about them—it’s about the collapse of a fantasy that carried the weight of your earliest wounds. Facing this kind of grief means letting yourself acknowledge that no one can rewrite the past. No one can give you the childhood you didn’t have. But what you can do now is give yourself the care, safety, and love that you’ve been chasing through fantasy.
Grieving what never was is tender work. You have to sit with feelings you may have avoided for years—loneliness, longing, anger, and shame. Instead of numbing them with fantasy which is your natural tendency, you will begin to feel them directly, but in doing so, you create a crucible for healing. Here are a few ways to approach this process:
1. Acknowledge the unmet need.
Say it out loud or write it down: “I should have had safety. I should have been loved without condition.” Naming the truth validates the child inside you who was overlooked.
2. Allow the emotions to surface.
Tears, sadness, or even rage may come up. Let them. This is grief doing its work. Suppressing it keeps you stuck; feeling it allows it to move through you.
3. Write to your younger self.
Tell your younger self what you never heard: “You are worthy. It wasn’t your fault. You deserve love.” This begins to re-parent the wounded parts of you.
4. Create ritual.
Grief needs shape. Light a candle, write a letter and burn it, or place a photo or object somewhere meaningful, etc.. Rituals mark the seriousness of what you’re letting yourself feel and helps create closure.
5. Seek safe witnesses.
Sometimes grief needs to be shared. Whether in therapy, with a trusted friend, or in a support group, being seen in your grief can be profoundly healing, especially when what you’re grieving is never having been seen or valued.
Grieving what never was doesn’t mean living in the past. It means letting go of the fantasy that someone else will arrive to repair what was missing and, instead, learning to offer yourself the love and care you once longed for. In making peace with what you didn’t receive, you create room for a present that is more grounded, authentic, and nourishing.
Your LO Isn’t As Special As You Think
Even after recognizing the fantasy, part of you still wants to believe your LO is different—that they really are the one, the missing piece who can finally make you whole. It feels impossible to let go of that belief because it’s tied to something much deeper than the person themselves.
That’s why, instead of asking, “How do I heal?” the limerent person asks, “How do I get him/her/them to love me?” or “How do I get him/her/them back?” These questions aren’t really about love… they’re coping strategies to avoid confronting the truth inside ourselves.
One of the hardest truths to accept in healing from limerence is this: it’s not really about how extraordinary your LO is. It feels that way—like they are the one person in the entire world who can make your life meaningful. But that feeling comes from you, not from them.
How do you know this? Think back to other times in your life when you were convinced someone else was “the one” or a “perfect match.” You felt the same rush, the same sense of destiny. And yet, those relationships either ended or never even began. What felt so unique at the time was actually a pattern repeating itself.
The truth is, if you had been born in a different city or at a different time, you would have projected those same feelings onto someone else. The passion, longing, and certainty don’t come from the LO—they come from your own psyche trying to soothe unmet needs. The LO is simply the canvas; you are the painter.
This doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t real. They are very real. But they are not proof that your LO is your soulmate. They are proof that you carry within you both a deep hunger for connection and the capacity to generate intensity and passion. Understanding this frees you from the illusion that your healing depends on getting that specific person.
What you are truly seeking is not them—it’s safety, love, and a sense of being chosen. And those things can never be permanently supplied by another person. They have to be cultivated within yourself.
Deep down, most limerents already know the truth: the LO isn’t really the answer, and the fantasy isn’t real. There’s a quiet awareness that what they’re clinging to is an illusion, but facing that truth feels unbearable. Letting go would mean sitting with the loneliness, emptiness, and unmet needs that the fantasy was protecting them from. And so the cycle continues because limerence offers temporary relief from deeper pain. To understand why it’s so hard to move on, we have to ask a more important question: what are people with limerence actually running from?
What Are People With Limerence Running From?
1. Unmet Emotional Needs
Limerence is a way of avoiding the ache of unmet needs for love, security, and validation. Instead of facing loneliness or self-doubt directly, the mind fixates on a fantasy person who seems to promise perfect safety, belonging, and recognition.
2. Vulnerability in Real Relationships
Actual relationships require negotiation, compromise, and rejection. Limerence provides the illusion of intimacy without real vulnerability. The other person is often kept at a distance or idealized, so the risk of disappointment is reduced and acute pain can be avoided.
3. The Pain of the Present
Limerence functions as an escape hatch from life circumstances: boredom, dissatisfaction with career, family problems, unhealthy relationships, low social status, or an amorphous sense of emptiness. The obsessive fantasy becomes a refuge from the pain of reality.
4. Unresolved Trauma or Inner Wounds
For most, limerence is a replay of childhood attachment wounds—longing for an unavailable or inconsistent caregiver. By fixating on someone who doesn’t fully reciprocate, the limerent person unconsciously repeats the pattern, while avoiding the deeper grief of what they lacked as children. As seen with Snape, trauma such as bullying can amplify the shame and feelings of inadequacy that fuel limerence.
5. Fear of the Self
Silence, stillness, or solitude is uncomfortable for a lot of limerents. Limerence fills that void with a cycle of obsession that keeps the limerent from confronting deeper questions of identity, purpose, self-worth, and psychological deficiencies.
Limerence is a coping mechanism of self-deception. It makes you believe that you are running toward love, connection, and purpose, while actually running from acute pain, self-discovery, and acceptance that no other person will ever complete you.
Thus, the healing begins when you stop running and allow yourself to feel the grief, loneliness, and shame undergirding the obsession. After grieving and letting go, you must learn to give yourself the care you believe only others can provide.
Limerence As “Person Addiction”
Limerence can be thought of as an addiction to a person where one specific individual becomes the key to unlocking everything, and thoughts of them become the only way to get your fix. Like any addiction, it hijacks the reward system, narrowing your world until all roads lead back to the same person. The “high” comes from fantasy, anticipation, and intermittent reinforcement, yet it leaves you emptier over time, because no real human being can live up to the intensity of the projection.
The way out of limerence isn’t just cutting off the “drug”—it’s broadening your sources of nourishment. When one person feels like your only lifeline, the pressure on that bond becomes unbearable. The healthier path is to progressively expand the domain of things that give you purpose and pleasure: friendships, creativity, learning, service, physical movement, spiritual practices, nature, play. By diversifying where you draw joy and meaning, you make your nervous system less dependent on a single outlet. Over time, the pull of limerence weakens, because your life has many wells to drink from, not just one.
Takeaway: Healing from limerence isn’t just about cutting ties with one person—it’s about building a life rich enough that no single source defines your worth or joy. The more you cultivate diverse wells of connection, meaning, and pleasure, the less power limerence has over you, and the more capacity you develop for real, grounded love.
Take Relationships Veryyyy Slow
One of the most common limerent urges is to sprint at the start of a relationship. When someone feels like “the one,” it’s easy to pedestal them and scramble to prove your worth before they slip away. That urgency comes from fear, not love. It’s the nervous system trying to secure safety by locking things down fast.
Love built in panic rarely lasts. When you rush, you don’t actually get to know the real person, you just cling to the fantasy version in your head. And when reality shows up, the disappointment can feel like betrayal.
The antidote is slowness. Let people reveal themselves over time. Watch how they treat you on boring Tuesdays, not just during fireworks moments. A healthy relationship doesn’t require you to audition for belonging—it grows step by step, with patience, reciprocity, and mutual choice.
Takeaway: If you feel the urge to speed up, that’s your cue to slow down. Lasting love isn’t secured quickly—it’s built steadily.
Limerence Is a “Religion” Revolving Around “LO”
One way to heal from limerence is to reclaim those “religion-like” functions by anchoring them in a higher purpose or spiritual practice, rather than in one flawed, imperfect person. This doesn’t have to mean formal religion (though it can). For some, it looks like daily meditation or prayer that brings certainty and calm where obsession once lived. For others, it’s volunteering or service work—pouring energy into causes that offer genuine meaning and connection. Creativity is also a spiritual discipline: writing, music, or art that transforms longing into beauty. And for many, time in nature—long hikes, gardening, or even mindful walks—reconnects them to something larger than themselves. By finding a purpose that transcends one individual, the same longing that fueled limerence can be rechanneled into a life of depth, service, and grounded joy.
Takeaway: Healing from limerence isn’t about suppressing desire. It’s about redirecting it toward something larger than one person. When you root your longing in purpose, service, creativity, or spirit, you don’t just weaken the grip of limerence, you discover a life wide enough to hold your hunger and rich enough to make you whole.
Learning to Choose the Right Person
You don’t actually choose who you’re attracted to. Attraction isn’t logical. In the beginning, you’re gonna find yourself drawn to people who light up whatever wound inside you needs to be dealt with. And until you face it, you’ll keep ending up in the same story over and over.
But once you start making the unconscious conscious, once you actually do the work and grow and heal, your type changes. Suddenly, the people who used to feel magnetic just… don’t. You stop chasing people just because they are beautiful or just because they remind you of your mom or your ex. You start noticing people who are actually good for you.
That’s the gift of failed relationships. They’re not wasted time, they’re learning opportunities. Every heartbreak can teach you what you shouldn’t put up with anymore from others and from yourself and what you actually need. And once you’ve worked through your own stuff, healed that inner kid who always felt unseen or unworthy, you stop being attracted to the same pain. You evolve, and so does your taste.
The #1 green flag is someone who clearly and consistently wants to be with you. Not someone who might once you become extraordinary. Not someone you have to decode. Someone who chooses you consistently even on boring days.
Untangling Limerence From Anxiety/Depression
It’s easy to blame all your sadness or restlessness on the crush who doesn’t text back, but often limerence is just borrowing fuel from deeper currents—baseline anxiety, shame, and depression. When early bonds are shaky, the nervous system goes hunting for outside regulators. For some people that means substances, for others it means toxic relationships, and for a lot of us it means fantasies about people. Limerence can feel like the fix, but really it’s your brain trying to soothe itself the only way it knows how.
That’s why healing isn’t just about abstaining from contact or fantasy. You also have to look at your whole mental health picture. If you’re carrying untreated anxiety or low-grade depression, limerence will be impossible to get over in the long-run. Getting support like therapy or medication (if it helps) helps untangle what’s limerence and what’s your baseline mood state.
And don’t underestimate the physical side either. I noticed that when my diet was garbage, or when I was barely moving my body, limerence got worse. Poor sleep, blood sugar swings, dehydration—these make your nervous system even more desperate for regulation, which means your brain will latch onto a person even harder. Physical health is the boring but crucial foundation that keeps limerence from running the show.
Takeaway: To heal limerence at the root, you can’t just focus on getting over the person. You need to assess your overall mental health, tend to anxiety and depression, and shore up your physical foundation. A calmer, steadier body and mind makes it a lot easier to see a crush for what they are: a fellow human being, not a savior.
Practical Tips for Healing Limerence
1. Use No Contact—but Pair It with Grief Work
Cutting off contact helps your brain reset, but it’s not enough on its own. What makes the change stick is grieving what the relationship meant to you without clinging to the story of “meant to be.” Reframe: “This mattered deeply, but it wasn’t destiny.”
2. Practice Reality-Testing
Catch yourself when you’re replaying “signs” or fantasies. Write down what actually happened versus what you imagined. This simple split helps you see when you’re in story mode instead of reality mode.
3. Meditate
Meditation won’t erase obsession, but it helps you regain control. With practice, you notice the spiral sooner and can redirect before it crashes into rumination. Even five minutes of breathwork a day builds this skill.
4. Normalize the Withdrawal
You’re not weird or broken—the craving, the cringe flashbacks, the blocking/unblocking cycle, they’re all part of the pattern. Reading or hearing others describe the same thing mitigates shame which is the main fuel for limerence.
5. Retrain Your Nervous System
Find new regulators: exercise, journaling, breathwork, creativity, or nature time. The more ways you have to soothe and recharge, the less one person feels like your only lifeline.
6. Broaden Sources of Joy and Meaning
Limerence narrows your focus to one person. Heal by expanding your life: deepen friendships, pursue creative projects, serve others, or learn something new. Multiple wells of purpose make obsession less sticky.
Professional Help
If you can afford it, this is one of the most powerful investments you can make.
Attachment-informed therapy: Helps you trace how early bonding patterns play out in current relationships, and how to form secure ones as an adult.
EMDR or somatic therapy: Useful for processing the body-level imprints of rejection, shame, or abandonment that fuel limerence.
Group therapy or support spaces: These offer practice in truth-telling, being seen without performance, and repairing missteps—skills that translate directly into healthier intimacy.
Think of professional help not as “fixing what’s broken,” but as getting expert guidance on rewiring your nervous system and rewriting old relational scripts.
Sharing With Trusted Friends and Family
Limerence thrives in secrecy; shame loves the dark. Bringing trusted people into the loop breaks both patterns.
Pick a safe circle: Choose friends or family who can listen without judgment and who won’t minimize your experience.
Be specific: Instead of vague confessions (“I’m just obsessed”), share concrete examples (“I keep checking their social media 20 times a day and it makes me spiral”).
Let them reality-check you: Ask them to gently challenge your interpretations when you start reading too much into crumbs or coincidences.
Three Pillars That Change Everything
1) Radical self-acceptance
Shame sits at the center of limerence. You believe that love will make you worthy of a happy life. The longer you chase, the more shame you will feel, and the more fantasy you need. Acceptance doesn’t mean “I’m perfect as I am.” It means “I have intrinsic worth independent of what people think.” Radical self-acceptance means owning that you are already enough, not because you’ve earned it, not because someone else validated it, but because worth isn’t conditional. From that place of peace, you’re free to choose relationships that are mutual and kind, instead of compulsively chasing the ones that keep you stuck.
2) Presence over potential
I used to live in future-tense: “When I get her, then I’ll start living my life.” Now I try to meet people and moments as they are. Everything that begins eventually ends: honeymoons, jobs, relationships. So practice being here. Enjoy cooking. Sit with your family without checking your phone. Take a walk without your phone and actually look up at your surroundings.
3) Letting go of the idealized life
I had to face the hardest truth: the story in my head isn’t the story I get to live. None of us do. The tighter you grip that imagined script—the perfect partner, the perfect arc—the more it slips through your fingers and leaves you miserable. So I stopped worshipping the fantasy and started chasing beauty itself. A line from a book that leaves me buzzing (the Watchmen graphic novel did that), a piece of music that cracks me open, a moment of kindness that makes the world feel less cruel. I let awe become my fuel. I study, I write, I pay attention. And in that shift, I’ve accepted something freeing: no single person will ever be the source of my meaning, and that’s okay, because meaning is everywhere if you’re willing to see it.
Questions to Ask Yourself
What am I asking my LO to heal in me that predates them by decades?
What part of me is terrified of living without this storyline?
If I operated my life completely differently, what should change first?
Which fears are really driving me (confronting myself, confronting my parents, dying alone, not being enough, giving up the dream, repeating my past)?
If love is built, what habits would a loving life require today?
The Lies of Limerence
“These feelings will last forever.” (Nothing does)
“You complete me.” (You don’t need to be completed to be loved)
“You’re all that matters.” (The world doesn’t revolve around any one person or even group of people)
“I need closure to have peace.” (You need acceptance. Closure is optional)
Hope
Healing takes seasons, not days.
The goal is not to erase the past,
but to build a life strong enough
that old memories no longer sink us.
Grief is not weakness;
it is the passage to freedom.
Sensitivity is not the enemy;
it is a gift awaiting steadier hands.
No one person is the source of our meaning.
We drink from many wells—
friendship, creativity, service, spirit, nature.
We are not alone.
Others have walked this road of ache and return,
and their footprints remind us we can too.
We are worthy of love that is mutual, slow, and kind.
Fantasy may dazzle,
but reality is where healing takes root.
If we stumble, we rise again—
one honest, ordinary, human day at a time.
Read the entire limerence series here:
https://danielyee.substack.com/s/limerence
Best article I have ever read on limerence. Thank you for sharing this!!
amazing as always!