Limerence and BPD Limerence: “Why Can’t I Let Them Go?”

BPD limerence is when borderline personality traits (BPD) meet with obsessive romantic attachment. It creates an emotionally intense experience where fear of abandonment meets desperate longing. Limerence itself is a state unlike any other – beyond mere infatuation, it’s an all-consuming experience that hijacks our neuro-circuits and turns everything into a breathless roller coaster ride. However much we try, we may struggle to control and contain ourselves or get off the roller coaster loop of hope and disappointment, longing and devastation. But dealing with limerence does not make you ‘crazy’ or irrational. Behin limerence and BPD limerence are deeper stories about our early experience of love and loss, of creativity and resilience.  

 

Limerence is an experience unlike any other. It is beyond pure infatuation, but an all-consuming experience that can bring us to the highest ecstasy and the lowest depths of despair. It floods our brains with neurons and turns everything into a breathless roller coaster ride. However much we ‘know’ it is irrational, and try to shake it off, we cannot seem to escape the constant loop of hope and disappointment, longing and devastation.  This state of all-consuming romantic obsession is what Dorothy Tennov termed as limerence in her groundbreaking 1979 work.

Limerence is a complex and often painful experience for most people, as few of us would choose to have our whole sense of being taken over by intrusive thoughts and fantasies. But it is never as simple as a conscious choice. Behind these overwhelming feelings lies a deeper story—one that begins in our earliest experiences of love and loss and speaks to the very heart of how we learn to attach and bond with others.

The picture gets even more complex for those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in limerence. When you have BPD, your emotional thermostat is already set at a different level, and with limerence in the mix, it can become truly unbearable chaos.

In this piece, we shall explore the underlying psychological mechanisms of limerence and how these dynamics take on unique dimensions for those with BPD. By understanding these patterns more deeply—from both psychoanalytic and neurobiological perspectives—we can hopefully help you chart a path forward that honors the intensity of your experience and your capacity for healing.

No matter where I am or what I am doing, I am not safe from your spell. At any moment, the image of your face smiling at me, of your voice telling me you care, or of your hand in mine, may suddenly fill my consciousness rudely pushing out all else.

– Dorothy Tennov

Limerence Stages & Psychoanalysis

To explain limerence, psychoanalytic theory may offer the most compelling framework. In psychoanalysis, limerence may find its root in a phenomenon known as ‘melancholia.’ It is when a person cannot properly mourn or let go of a lost object (here, an ‘object’ refers to a person or relationship). In healthy mourning, when we realize a relationship has ended or is not going where we want it to be, we enter into a process of grieving— we detach, reconfigure our sense of self, and move on in our lives. But in melancholia, we get stuck in a loop.

In essence, melancholia is frozen grief. Paradoxical as it may seem, we get stuck and feel unable to move on because the idea of separation or letting go feels more threatening than maintaining the painful attachment. But because we are holding onto something that is not there, we have no choice but to recreate a version of the relationship in our mind and sustain that through our imagination. When our need for attachment looms larger and larger, our identity becomes wrapped up in an internal relationship that exists only in our psyche rather than engaging with present reality, where we create a cycle where we’re unable to move forward with life as it actually is. We become strangers to the present moment, unable to embrace life as it is but instead become locked in a beautiful but torturous fantasy.

We become more prone to getting stuck in melancholia, rather than being able to process healthy grief when we have had early attachment wounds. This may come from having experienced inconsistent caregiving, traumatic losses, or invalidating environments – where healthy mourning was made impossible. When we were a child, our primary caregiver was all that we had, so the dread of facing the truth that our caregivers were abusive or neglectful was more unbearable than the pain of maintaining the toxic bond. Thus, our mind had to develop an ‘internal representation’ of our lost, ideal caregiver. In doing so, we also had to use splitting as a survival mechanism. Our young brain was so creative and resilient that in order to survive, it split off our parents’ ‘badness’ and failures as a parent, and held on desperately to preserve the ‘ good’ image in our minds. After all, we were trapped in a situation where there was no escape.

When the templates of frozen grief and splitting become ingrained in our psychological architecture, it sets itself up for limerence— melancholia keeps us attached to what’s lost while splitting helps maintain the attachment by preserving an idealized image. In limerence, you find yourself splitting off any awareness of your limerent object’s flaws and limitations while maintaining and reinforcing the idea that they hold the promise of unconditional love you so crave and deserve. You might find yourself unconsciously filtering out information that doesn’t fit your idealized image – you start to overlook red flags, ignore signs that someone is behaving like your abusive parents, or fill in gaps with the perfect traits and qualities you look for in a soulmate. Essentially, the limerent object becomes the canvas that your inner child uses to paint the picture they need, and where your adult self projects your deepest hopes and unmet needs.

Getting stuck in melancholia is not a reason to beat yourself up. In fact, you are replaying this painful dynamic in your adult life out of a noble desire to heal— it is actually your will to live in action.  Being human, however much you try to suppress or deny the yearning to find that person who can finally, perhaps for the first time in your life, be in sync with you, hear and see you, it remains salient. Whenever there seems to be a gleam of hope for you finding that perfect someone, as your limerent object might show, the floodgate of yearning opens up, and you fall instantly and uncontrollably into limerence. In other words, the limerent object activates your attachment system so vigorously because it represents a healing opportunity for your lifelong wounds.

Limerence perpetuates itself through a cycle of fleeting rewards and deep disappointments. You experience ‘highs’ when your affection seems reciprocated, but are simultaneously traumatized by the gap between reality and the ideal love you crave. Unable to integrate the complexity of real relationships with your inner image, you oscillate between hope and devastation, never finding the stable middle ground where healthy attachments could flourish. Each reenactment is, in essence, an unconscious attempt to repeat and master earlier trauma, yet paradoxically deepens the wound. The more painful reality becomes, the more intensely you cling to your limerent object, creating a self-reinforcing cycle: your rejection of present reality in favor of idealized fantasy leads to an ever-growing disparity between your internal representations and reality. This in turn strengthens your need to retreat further into fantasy rather than dealing with reality’s complexities and limitations.

You find yourself trapped in tumultuous cycles of idealization and devaluation, with each swing between hopes and despair etching the deep loneliness more permanently into your heart. Limerence feels both compelling and familiar because it’s not just similar to your childhood dynamics – it’s the same psychological mechanism being unconsciously re-enacted through adult relationships.

BPD Limerence: The Perfect Storm

Limerence is a complex and oftentimes painful experience for most people, as few of us choose to have our normal lives taken over by intrusive thoughts and fantasies that feel out of control. For those who already struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), this experience takes on an even more intense dimension.

If you have BPD, your emotional world already runs deeper than most. You feel love with an intensity that others might struggle to comprehend. Each interaction carries profound weight, each gesture holds a deeper meaning. When limerence enters this landscape, it’s like adding fuel to an already burning flame.

This is not about being “sensitive” or “too emotional.” With BPD, your brain is likely wired to process emotional experiences more intensely, particularly when it comes to relationships. Your reactions are the effect of an over-reactive attachment system that you have out of no fault of your own.

They called it storybook-like, unreal, romantic, the product of artistic imagination, poetic hyperbole, or vagueness. Sometimes the writing better fit the non-limerent perspective, sometimes they described limerence. It is not hard to see why a taboo has surrounded the study and analysis of love.

– Dorothy Tennov

The Neurobiological Dance When BPD Meets Limerence

Here is one way of explaining the mechanism behind BPD Limerence from a neurobiological-attachment perspective. For all of us, when we were infants, our brains needed to seek and maintain a deep sense of connection and resonance with our primary caregivers. Like two hearts beating in the same rhythm, it is a unique, non-verbal connection that is essential for our brains to learn to build connections, for our nervous systems to learn to regulate emotions, and for us to have a sense of self. Brain scientists and attachment scholars (Shore, 2012) call such essential synchronization”right-brain to right-brain resonance.” When this vital connection is disrupted — usually by having an inconsistent, overly cold, unavailable, or narcissistic parent— it, unfortunately, disrupts the healthy development of your brain’s neural regulatory circuits. This then leads to a wide array of symptoms that are now categorized as mental health challenges including borderline personality disorder: difficulties with emotional regulation, black-and-white thinking, difficulties with impulse control, and identity confusion. 

In BPD limerence, your brain is caught in a dilemma known as “fright without solution” in psychology (Main and Hesse, 1990, 2000, 2006). This is a complex neurobiological paradox where the person you feel so drawn to is also the source of your deepest fear, and it is a replica of your childhood situation.  BPD limerence is a tug of war: your attachment system desperately reaches out to your limerent object for love and reciprocation, but everything in your history tells you that the person who holds your dearest dream for love also holds the power to trigger your deepest attachment wounds.

This dilemma is so fundamentally perplexing that it overwhelms your brain’s capacity to process and integrate the experience, leaving you caught in an exhausting cycle of hyperactivation and shutdown. Your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems enter into a perfect storm, and you find yourself rapidly shifting between states of overwhelming activation (feeling intense anxiety, panic, and a desperate need to reach out) and emotional shutdown (feeling numb and disconnected).   

In a BPD limerent state, this person becomes larger than life because every minor move they make feels that way. Every small, even imagined interaction becomes charged with both the highest promise and the biggest threat— the possibility of love and the risk of another betrayal. When you connect with someone, your heart gets elevated to an almost transcendental level; your attachment system becomes hyper-activated, and your heart becomes unduly moved by the fact that finally, someone sees and hears you. These precious moments of connection feel like coming home after you have a whole lifetime of sailing the ship on your own.  But when there’s uncertainty or perceived rejection, the pain can feel unbearable.   Thus, your nervous system remains caught in this exhausting dance between approach and retreat, between desperate longing and paralyzing fear.   The conflict becomes such an overpowering force that it consumes your every feeling and thought, controlling your actions.  

Amid limerent attraction, you might even feel an overwhelming urge to merge your identity with theirs – a tendency that’s intensified by BPD’s characteristic struggles with maintaining a stable sense of self. Their interests become your passion, their joy becomes ecstasy, and their pain becomes your agony. You may also find yourself swinging between feeling completely whole in their presence to feeling achingly empty, like you do not even exist, in their absence. A simple message from them can elevate you to heights of joy, while their absence can trigger waves of emptiness that feel bottomless.This is why BPD limerence can feel so much more intense and destabilizing than typical limerent experiences. 

BPD Limerence and Rejection Sensitivity

Having BPD likely means that more than the average person, you are more sensitive to signs of abandonment and separation.

Being trained by your childhood experience to be hyper-vigilant and not just highly, but hyper-reactive to what is happening around you means you also notice emotional signals that might escape other people’s radar. Children who grew up with abusive, emotionally volatile, or unstable parents have been conditioned to become hyper-aware of their surroundings, as their safety and emotional well-being depend on their ability to anticipate their parents’ shifting moods. The environment has altered your neurobiological system, changing how your nervous system operates. Your amygdala, the emotional center, might have become hyper-sensitive,  constantly on alert, and become highly sensitive to even minor changes in facial expression, tone of voice, or body language of those around you. It becomes an embedded protective mechanism in your neural pathway.

As you become a grown-up and enter the social world, your hypervigilance turns into an extreme form of interpersonal sensitivity (Bertsch et al., 2017; Foxhall et al., 2019). You are constantly, anxiously scanning for signs of waning interest, or that someone doesn’t like you, and is about to attack, reject, or criticize you. Indeed, research has found that interpersonal sensitivity is a demonstrable difference in how the brain of someone with BPD processes social information (Hooley & Hoffman, 2000)— they are more acutely aware of all social cues around them, especially the subtle, almost invisible microexpressions (Lynch et al., 2006).

To make matters worse, research has shown that someone with BPD is not just more aware of subtle social cues, but also tends to interpret them more negatively than someone who is neurotypical (Lynch et al., 2006; Schulze et al., 2016). This means you’re more likely to notice, focus on, and remember negative interactions. Despite what someone who doesn’t understand may say, for you this bias is not a choice. It is not something you can ‘think positively’ out of. It is so automatic that it escapes your conscious, rational radar.

When interpersonal sensitivity and the negative bias in BPD are combined with limerence, you get the ‘perfect storm’ of BPD limerence. You become uncontrollably, obsessively focused on your limerent object. Your brain constantly screens for negative signals and sees threats even from neutral cues from your limerent object—you might find yourself analyzing their words for hidden meanings, searching their expressions for signs of pulling away. You find yourself analyzing every interaction, replaying conversations in your mind until each word takes on new significance.  A delayed text, a perceived change in tone, or a lack of enthusiasm can trigger the feeling that you are completely alone in a precarious world and that you may never have the hope of finding the connection you need and desire.  What kept you alive as a child now makes every moment of uncertain love feel like another abandonment.

Why “Manipulative” Behaviors Are Not What They Seem

Unfortunately, when you are caught on the roller coaster of BPD limerence, you may think, feel, and act in ways you feel out of control. For example,  You may text constantly, demand excessive reassurance, make accusations, and say things you didn’t mean to. It is not that you are not aware of how these may yield the opposite results of what you want, you simply feel out of control. Unfortunately, people who do not understand it may misinterpret your behavior as manipulative, controlling, or unreasonably aggressive as though you don’t care.

The truth is, you are not intentionally trying to manipulate anyone. You may be painfully aware of the consequences and often regret what you did at the moment, but during moments of desperation, you simply need to regulate your emotions. They are a cry for help and the only way you know to alleviate the pain you feel in those times.

Your brain processes emotional rejection in the same regions that process physical pain, making these moments of perceived abandonment hurt to a life-or-death level. What others might label as ‘manipulation’ – the multiple texts, the urgent need for reassurance, the moments of intense accusation – these are never calculated tactics. They’re your nervous system’s desperate attempt to regulate overwhelming emotions. When an unanswered message feels like physical pain, sending multiple texts is not about controlling others, it is about surviving the next moment.   

“But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

Limerence Through The Clinical Lens: Parallel Diagnoses

While perspectives vary among clinicians, my position is that limerence should not be automatically pathologized. However, looking at its potential links with established clinical conditions may help illuminate its underlying mechanisms. 

Recent research has found notable parallels with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) (Wyant, 2021), addiction, and ADHD.

Limerence resembles OCD in that the person finds themselves losing control over their thoughts and behaviors, even when it contradicts some of their values, deeper beliefs, and life goals. While OCD sufferers like mysophobes or hoarders include germs or all belongings in their obsessive patterns, limerence is about the limerent object, usually a specific person (Sutherland 2022).

Other research finds a parallel between limerence and addiction, holding that intense romantic feelings activate the same mesolimbic (reward center) brain regions as behavioral and substance addictions (Fisher et al. 2016; Wyant 2021). This neurological similarity explains both the euphoric highs from positive interactions and the severe emotional crashes following rejection or perceived rejection (Wolf 2017). The attachment becomes so intense that separation produces not just emotional pain but physical withdrawal symptoms, including chest pain, sleep disturbances, and irritability (Wyant 2021). On top of that, despite recognizing these destructive patterns, people may still compulsively maintain contact — both physically and mentally — with their limerent object, even when it leads to further symptoms such as depression (Willmott & Bentley, 2015) and self-harming (Tennov, 1998).

Both in academic circles and on online forums, there has been a lot of interest in the relationship between ADHD and limerence (Bradbury et al., 2024). With ADHD affecting approximately 506 million adults globally, the ADHD-limerence link is perhaps the dimension that deserves more research. The ADHD limerence connection centers on executive function – the brain region governing decision-making, risk assessment, and empathy. ADHD’s altered functioning in executive function, particularly affecting reward-seeking behaviors and impulse regulation, creates patterns strikingly similar to limerence. Some say those with ADHD typically seek constant stimulation due to decreased dopamine production, leading to both challenges and advantages, including the ability to hyperfocus – a characteristic that strongly parallels limerent fixation. Thus, it is suggested that ADHD characteristics may turn into intensified sexual and romantic interests, sudden intense feelings, and excessive attention-giving (love-bombing) in limerence.

These different diagnostic perspectives complement rather than contradict psychoanalytic understanding, as they may shed light on how psychological mechanisms manifest in observable neurological patterns.  Rather than seeing these as separate ‘disorders,’ we might view them as different manifestations of our brain’s attempt to cope with deep emotional needs. This integrated perspective invites us to develop treatment approaches that honor both our neurological wiring and our psychological wounds, potentially opening doors to more compassionate and effective ways of working with limerence and BPD limerence. 

“I have to admit, an unrequited love is so much better than a real one. I mean, it’s perfect… As long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endless potential.”
― Sarah Dessen

Limerence Treatment That Works For You

Now that we see limerence is not just purely a ‘clinical pathology’ but your body and mind’s creative response to early attachment trauma, I hope that you can at least begin to free yourself from the shame, guilt, and self-blame attached to this already painful and confusing experience. It is difficult enough to be misunderstood as being immature or irrational; thus, rather than adding more self-blame, it is time to stand up for your inner child, summon the courage and nurturing nature in you to find the right kind of support and path forward for yourself out of this confusing maze.

When it comes to the treatment approach, what is needed is a deep understanding that goes beyond surface-level symptom management to address the core attachment wounds, relational patterns, and neural pathways at play. Once we have come to understand the BPD-limerence phenomenon through an attachment and neurobiological perspective, we can see why simply calling out your thoughts and feelings as ‘irrational’ may not work. For one, challenging your cognitive beliefs alone would probably not reach the deep right-brain systems where your attachment and emotional patterns are stored. You already know that the feelings are not ‘rational,’ but fighting them probably had not yielded much results, and even strategies such as distraction may have limited use. In fact, they may cause you to feel more detached reinforce the tendency to dissociate from current reality, and hinder the progress towards your ultimate goal— a better, more intimate relationship with your emotional self.

The most powerful treatment approach would ideally multi-dimensional. Your goals could include things like: developing your ability to maintain a stable image of others even when they disappoint you (‘object constancy’— more on this in a separate article), improving your capacity to understand your own and others’ mental states (mentalization), developing mindset and skills to tolerate uncertainties (technical approaches like DBT could work, but in my experience so would spiritual and existential approaches),  and integrate the extreme “all good” or “all bad” views of yourself and others into more nuanced, realistic perspectives.

Your intense reactions come from your brain adapting to an environment where consistent emotional attunement is not available. When limerence triggers these ancient patterns, you’re re-experiencing your trauma. Instead of trying to ‘get rid’ of your body’s natural fight-flight protective responses that were meant to help you survive, you might find it more helpful to focus on expanding your window of emotional tolerance, working with, rather than against your body’s inherent wisdom.  Thus, sometimes body-based soothing and regulation techniques can be helpful too. When limerent feelings trigger sympathetic arousal (racing heart, churning stomach), the practice isn’t to fight these sensations but to gently attend to them while supporting parasympathetic activation. This is not just about “calming down” but about expanding your nervous system’s capacity to hold intense experience.

When looking for professional help with limerence, and especially BPD limerence, it’s essential to find someone who truly understands that intense emotions aren’t something to be fixed or eliminated.  This process can be challenging because intense feelings from past relationships often get transferred to the therapist, and there’s a risk of repeating unhealthy attachment patterns within the therapeutic relationship itself. However, the right person would be lucidly aware of this have enough self-awareness to not counter-project or retaliate, and weather your emotional storm with steadfast maturity and presence, as a good enough parent would.  A therapeutic relationship should be where you receive a ‘corrective experience’ that counters any inconsistent or neglectful parenting you experienced before. The right therapist will recognize that your feelings make complete sense given your history, and they’ll remain steady and present even during your most turbulent pushes and pulls, even with them.The ideal scenario would be that together, you can work through any dysfunctional relational patterns in therapy, and through this experience gain templates for relating to other people in your life.

Trust your instincts when meeting potential therapists. The right match will be the person who keeps you in an optimal flow state—where it feels both challenging and manageable, safe but not overly coddling. Even this suggestion, however, is not universal. Only you know what you need at this very point in time. Regardless of what you have read online or heard from anyone, it is best to tune into yourself and diligently reflect on your specific needs and emotional reactions.

In the end, remember: your struggle with limerence or  BPD limerence does not mean you are ‘mad’, immature, or any of those self-blaming stories you might have internalized. It has been a manifestation of your life energies, your creativity, your resilience, and how your inner child has tried to adapt and survive. If you need a shift in perspective, consider what worse coping mechanisms you could have chosen – this, at least, is a manifestation of your intense passion for life.

Your deep capacity for feeling, though sometimes overwhelming, is also what would save you, as they are what would bring you an authentic deep connection with humanity.  The path forward is not about eliminating these intense experiences, but channeling them into creative energies and reclaiming whatever qualities that you also have, but have imagined they belonged to your limerent object.  You are not broken, and with your heart’s capacity for profound love, you can surely channel what you have invested in limerence into something truly life-giving. In time, you will come to see that whatever you have projected onto others as what you desired has been within you all along.