How Shame Drives You to Obsess on Someone You Can’t Have

Limerence strikes me as almost a metaphysical phenomenon; it winds itself through the wreckage of family breakdowns. It’s an obsessive, high-intensity fixation on people you can’t genuinely be with romantically, yet you can’t stop replaying them in your mind. It blocks the possibility of true love and clings like an addictive drug. I picture it as a huge, murky, poisonous fog that settles between you and another person, one you have mentally loaded up with imagined virtues. That haze overlays the actual person with idealized traits, making them appear astonishing, uniquely attuned to your soul, and irrevocably real — even though you aren’t really perceiving who they are. On some level you may sense you’re in danger of making them uncomfortable; you’re objectifying them. To cope, you craft a counterfeit self and slowly withdraw from authentic engagement in life. People sometimes call limerence a projection of your own inner life or even of the Divine, but I wonder whether the empty space left by parents who failed to truly see or love you can generate that toxic mist.
Today’s letter comes from a man named Daniel. He writes: hi Anna — when I was a child my parents were emotionally unavailable in subtle, corrosive ways. I’m an only child; they tried to love me unconditionally. Okay, I’ve got my little fairy pencil ready to mark things on a second read, but here’s Daniel’s situation. After I was about five, there was no emotional connection. My dad concealed serious mental health struggles — probably CPTSD — and he’d lost two brothers in traumatic accidents when he was young. I can’t remember him ever teaching me anything. My mom had been neglected by her own mother for not being pretty enough and carried deep low self-worth. Both parents were morbidly obese while I was growing up. Throughout my childhood they worked hard to keep up appearances and hide their troubles. At school I was mercilessly bullied and pushed out — I had no one to turn to and lacked the psychological or social resources to cope. At home there were no supports either. Eventually my mom went back to work and had no time for me; she’d forget to pick me up from school, miss my activities, even forget my first communion. I had no peers to play with and was lonely my entire childhood.
By age 11 we discovered my dad had quietly failed in business, and we had to drastically reduce our standard of living. The shame and suffering I witnessed were terrifying. My mom became an alcoholic — I remember thinking, after she took me to a few AA meetings, that she was in some strange cult — and my dad sank into a severe, decades-long depression. I put on a lot of weight and was further ostracized. I cried myself to sleep; simply existing felt unbearable. Long story short, even if my problems might not have been the worst anyone has faced, I developed severe CPTSD. For a long time I battled self-hatred, intense emotional dysregulation, and a chronic sense of separateness from others — feeling hated, judged, utterly alone. Whether those fears matched reality didn’t matter; the belief felt real. I dissociated frequently and after high school I turned to drugs; my life unraveled. I failed college and ended up in a psychiatric ward. That was seven years ago. Since then I’ve slowly begun to heal. I’m 27 now and proud of my progress: I’ve rebuilt my core self-esteem, found a career I love, am physically healthy, and have a large circle of friends who care about me — even if I sometimes can’t fully see it.
A while back I found your content and finally understood that it was complex PTSD all along. Since then I’ve been doing the daily practice and started the courses, but I still carry a lot of unhealed mental programming and emotional volatility. The worst thing, though, is limerence. I’ve struggled with it my whole life — that addictive, romantic obsession with people you can’t have. From my first crush onward I developed severe limerence for almost every girl I liked. It became a curse in adolescence and led to public humiliations and painful rejections that reinforced my core trauma. By nineteen, everyone had rejected me. Ever since, when I’m attracted to someone, an enormous internal wall stops me from making any move or showing interest, even when it’s clear she’s attracted to me too. If she makes the first move I get overwhelmed and terrified, which then triggers full-blown limerence that ruins friendships and diminishes my quality of life. Limerence dysregulates me and causes real pain. I don’t want to come across as a disgusting creep — that’s not who I am, it’s not my intention, and I don’t need the shame I feel when I can’t even try. The only relationship I had happened under very unusual circumstances that prevented limerence from forming first: we became infatuated at the same time and she had trauma too, so our damage fit together like matching puzzle pieces. The only other woman I got involved with had borderline personality disorder and was as damaged as I was; my subconscious recognized that. I understand my worth: I know I’m valuable, have a lot to give, and I’m reasonably attractive, so it puzzles me that my subconscious insists I will be rejected with disgust. My mind believes that as a friend, women see me as great, but the moment things turn romantic a switch flips and they’ll either think I’m not interested or view me as a repulsive creep. Even if something about me made me romantically undesirable, that image brands me like livestock — “not him.” Consciously I know the person with the broken switch is me: once attraction registers, my energy shifts and feels awkward or gross. I’m doing my best to make myself as attractive as possible and my basic personality is fine, but even if I became the most attractive man alive, this pattern would likely remain. Limerence is such a nuisance that I often end up avoiding the person completely, sometimes not even looking in their direction. This has harmed group dynamics and led to drama. I’m too old for this nonsense; it has to stop. It seems women with CPTSD and limerence can sometimes enter relationships because they don’t have to be the confident initiator. I’m not desperate for a relationship, but it hurts that I’ve been unable to pursue women I genuinely liked and see if they might reciprocate; instead I become limerent and ruin the chance. I don’t want to be alone forever. What can I do to make the limerence stop once and for all?
Thanks, Daniel. What an intense story. I said at the start that limerence feels metaphysical — I can’t help sensing that the secrecy and emotional constriction in your parents, their efforts to conceal how bad things were and to present a composed front, somehow infected you. They tried to be good parents but clearly struggled to be themselves and to express who they were, and that disturbance may have been absorbed by you. That’s just a hunch as I read your letter. I’m assuming, since you’ve been hospitalized, that you’ve had professional care and assessment for medication and diagnosis and that this aspect is being managed. You’ve had a very hard youth and I’m sorry for that, but you’ve moved toward independence and stability. At 27 you’re in prime years to find meaningful love; you’ve also come a long way in seven years — from wanting to be off the planet to rebuilding your life. That turnaround is remarkable. You’ve got good friends, satisfying work, and physical health — celebrate that. It’s significant and doesn’t vanish just because romantic things are difficult.
I hear the intense self-critical stories you tell yourself about connecting with someone you’re attracted to and the fear of rejection. Difficulty in relationships is very common for people raised in dysfunctional households. The secrets around business failure, the parents’ obesity and attempts to hide problems, the shame when things collapsed, the bullying you experienced — all of that fed into low self-esteem and created a vulnerability other kids picked up on and exploited. I have a video about how people can tell you have low self-esteem; kids can be especially merciless. Your family’s pain wasn’t your fault — they were coping with adult crises like loss of money and addiction, and they couldn’t support you through that. The fact that your mom went to AA can be a positive sign; many people’s businesses fail early and adults cope in imperfect ways.
You said you turned to drugs and were hospitalized, and then over seven years you gradually healed. You now recognize complex PTSD in yourself, which is important. There are many therapies emerging for complex trauma — some with more evidence than others — and finding what helps takes research and experimentation. Broadly, trauma treatments fall into a few categories: talk therapy (which can lead to medication and is a traditional route but often less effective for complex trauma), and body-based therapies like somatic experiencing. Movement and group-based physical practices — martial arts, dance, yoga, kickboxing — can be tremendously regulating. They help the nervous system by engaging the body and connecting with others through coordinated movement. I don’t know whether you already exercise, but it’s powerful medicine for CPTSD. I personally found kickboxing helpful for regulation and strengthening my core; even simple group activities like marching, singing, or chanting (or, yes, doing the Hokey Pokey) can soothe and reset the nervous system. These kinds of communal rhythms have been used for centuries to reregulate people.
Dissociation often accompanies this picture: a desire to escape from unbearable feelings. Drugs are one form of dissociation, but limerence can also be an escape — instead of relating to a real person in front of you, you relate to an imagined, dissociated version of them. That tends to sabotage face-to-face interactions because the in-person contact is reduced to awkward, guarded communications while your internal fantasy is far more elaborate and immediate. The gap between your imagined narrative and your behavior grows, and shame keeps you small and limited. Limerent people often spend a lot of time trying to craft the “perfect” message that hints at their feelings while staying plausibly deniable — a maddeningly deceptive way to live that undermines you.
Falling for someone is a natural, beautiful part of you; it’s life-giving and not something to be ashamed of. Yet for you it’s been loaded with bullying, rejection, and shame. So the work is to release those shame-filled thoughts and beliefs — not to label yourself a creep — and to do that one thought at a time. There are many ways people approach this. One method that helped me is the daily practice I often mention: a simple, free writing technique where you face your fearful and resentful thoughts, write them down and ask for them to be released or removed according to your beliefs. Then you sit in meditation for about 20 minutes, letting your mind rest and recover. We do this twice daily; the challenge is consistency. The practice gives you distance from self-attacking narratives and allows you to come back into your body and into present reality where relationships actually happen. That course is available in the description under each video on my YouTube channel — you’ll need to click the “more” button in the video description to see all the links. The daily practice is listed right at the top and it’s a free course anyone can try in about an hour. There are FAQs and deeper resources, and I also teach it in my book Re-regulated, which goes into much more detail. The book is on Amazon — if you’ve read it and found it useful, reviews help others find it.
What I’ve learned from studying the neurobiology of trauma is that thoughts and feelings need to be processed, but people who were abused or neglected as children often have trouble completing that processing — things get jammed. That’s what you described: mental clutter, stuck shame, and difficulty letting new, corrective information in. If you can find ways to purge and declutter those jammed feelings through practices that process emotions and regulate the nervous system, you’ll create space for healthier perceptions to arise. When people carry less fear and resentment they naturally become more attractive; calm, centered presence is what others perceive as cool and desirable. You sound like you have a lot going for you, and freeing yourself from these internal blocks will open up possibilities. Give some of these approaches a real try.
To finish, I wanted to give everyone a quick set of signs of limerence so you can gauge how far along the obsession you might be and what steps to take. Also, check the links below for the daily practice course or visit my website, Crappy Childhood Fairy, and go to the free tools page to access the free course. I’ll leave you with that list of limerence signs — and I’ll see you very soon. [Music]