How Complex PTSD Fuels Limerence |
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Limerence is not a crush or love—it is a state of involuntary, total preoccupation with another person.
In CPTSD, limerence reactivates early attachment patterns rather than responding to the present relationship.
Limerence runs on uncertainty, not warmth.
The shame of watching ourselves obsess is itself part of the trauma, not evidence of a character flaw.
Maya is not sleeping. She is also, quietly, going mad.
Not at him—or not only at him. At the inadequacy of every word available to her. She has tried crush. She has tried falling in love. Her friends offer both back to her, gently, and she wants to overturn the table. Neither fits. Both feel like being handed a thimble when what she needs is something that can hold an ocean. Because this isn't a feeling she is having. It is a state she is living in.
Everything becomes a tunnel back to him. A song. A word someone says in a meeting. She changes the song. The next one does it too. She is not thinking about him again. She never stopped. And when a single message from him arrives—or doesn't—it reorganises her entire day.
She was right that it was something else. Something that deserved its own name. Psychologists call it limerence—the involuntary, intrusive state of being entirely colonised by another person. Not infatuation, not love, though it can wear their clothes. Something more total, and less chosen. And for those of us who carry complex trauma, it can arrive with a particular ferocity—surviving all rational challenge, making us feel like a stranger to ourselves.
Limerence at this pitch is rarely random. It tends to find the people it finds for a reason—complex PTSD.
Complex PTSD develops not from a single traumatic event but from prolonged, repeated harm—often in childhood, often within the........