Mine Own Person: Limerence and the Desire to be Owned
I am my own person.
I say. Rather shook. Rather frail. The mirror stares at me, bemused, in its shock-still belief. Of course. Whose else would you be, and ever hidden behind that faux reassurance, the rider, who else would want you?
I am my own person.
Came as revelation. For the longest time, I teetered precariously on the edge of losing my self to a larger, all-encompassing identity. I never would’ve thought personalities worked in their own, skewed hierarchy. Not all selves are created equal, and when one has the power to swallow another, shouldn’t it?
Should you allow the object of affection to thrive without incorporating it? Without bringing it into your folds, and making it whole? We see this mechanic in empires across millennia — when one grows large enough, it’s only natural it’ll swallow its smaller, less fortified neighbors.
And just so, in our interpersonal relationships, we tend to appoint ourselves vassals to those around us whose selves glow, whose personalities, whether inflated or genuine, can withstand the takeover.
Oh, you try to swim against the tide, holding on to crumbs of who you believe you are, but we all end up, eventually, inside the belly of the beast. It’s comforting there, though terribly dark, and there’s voices you no longer recognize. At first, you try to call your name into the darkness, out loud, to reaffirm it; but gradually, you come to understand, like all before you, that who you were is matterless. You are become swallowed. You are become object.
Inanimate? One can hope, because the more you survive inside its belly, the darker and more terrifying your world becomes.
Overnight, you are no longer you. You are the object of affection, swallowed, integrated, made another’s. And all your whispers of who you once were, what you thought, those which you wanted, it all becomes meaningless in the face of the one that swallowed you. Until you learn to comply.
You are what they are.
You think what they think.
You want solely what they want.
And people look at you, then turn to tell them what a brave little soldier you are. See, they recognize your belonging to this other person, thus certifying it.
Psychotherapists call it loss of self, and it’s a scary term, only for a little while. Eventually, you’ll grow so detached from what you once were, you won’t remember what you’re supposed to have lost.
So what happens when you’re spat back out?
Not all of us get spat out. Some will have to claw their way, fight tooth and nail, withstand bile and horrid smells, gut-churns and bellyaches, just to see sunlight, again. And they’ll write in blood their names on their forearms, so that when forgetting comes, when they no longer remember what it was they were fighting for, they’ll know to keep going.
So you make it out, either ’cause you’ve lost your vitality and are no longer of interest, or fought your way, and find yourself once more tasting the fresh sea air. Gradually remembering who you are. Which can be very hard. You come, like me, to stand in your empty mirror, and say,
I am my own person. I belong solely to me. And nothing and no one can dictate my likes, my wants, my thoughts.
For only a moment, the thought elates you like nothing else. You’re free. You’ve escaped. You can be your own person again. Gradually, you start to believe yourself, and gradually, you start to forget.
Loss of self is a subject beautifully captured, in recent years, in Netflix’s Dear Child (Liebes Kind, in original). The series follows a young woman who escapes from captivity, yet who can’t seem to shake her allegiance, her loyalty to her tormentor.
Installed in her own apartment again, she becomes obsessed by the thought that he sees her. Watches her. Speaks to her. Inevitably, controls her.
As if to defy her captor, a petulant child that she is, one of her first actions freed is to dye her hair black, her natural color that her captor had stripped to a platinum blonde. Yet not a week later, like a child, she grows frightened of having disobeyed. Obsessed by his observation, even as he is on the run, incapable of controlling anything, much less her own mind, the woman dyes her hair back to blonde.
It’s a beautiful, poignant encapsulation of what loss of self looks like. When she dyes her hair and re-becomes her old self, Jasmin fails to recognize herself. Because the “correct” her has dyed hair and obeys her captor. Defines herself not by what she’d choose to be, but by the attributes he’s saddled her with. Enmeshment. Incorporation of the object.
She is now a fragment of he.
So what happens when fragment is torn from whole? Limerence?
In psychology, the term limerence refers to a tendency to idealize the object of affection, splitting that person’s good traits from the bad, so as to create a “perfect” image. A perfect mother. A perfect partner.
It’s not always the result of trauma bonds, it’s not always an immediate successor to loss of self, though I believe the two to be inter-linked. For even as you swallow my identity, convince me thus that your identity must be the correct one, how am I to survive in absentia?
Much like Jasmin, those who suffer from loss of self experience dissonance when looking at themselves in the mirror. They are no longer good-looking brunettes when their tormentor identifies them as blonde, because now, they identify as such, also. And the more time you spend defining yourself by someone else’s terms, by someone else’s notions, the higher the likelihood will be that, when you’re parted from them, you’ll continue to think their judgments “correct”, and yours wrong. You begin idolizing them and may become limerent.
Limerence can arise from something as “simple” as unrequited love. It can also follow, an unofficial eight step for trauma bonding survivors, because cutting ties with a tormentor is seldom as easy as just closing a door.
After all, you can’t rewrite your whole identity, your whole understanding of what you are, of what the world is and should look like, in solely one day.
You become scared.
Like a cat locked outside.
The world has become alien. Frightful. You’d do anything to be let back in. Even if it means drowning your own re-emergent sense of self. Even if it means denying your reality, and idolizing the perpetrator. This can lead to obsessive, consuming thoughts about the person that once enveloped you. Because you lived there for a while, inside their personality, inside their soul. So it’s natural to feel cold now that you’re without.
But feeling cold doesn’t equate wrong.
Limerence or just the toll of brainwashing?
I’m no expert, nor do I claim to be. I merely come equipped with a question, based on my own research, experience, and findings — is it possible that the survivor of a traumatic relationship develop limerence, once out of that? Or is it merely the after-effects of an intense bond taking their toll? After all, it stands to reason that exiting a consuming relationship, one where the boundaries of self were significantly blurred, can’t come easy.
Limerence is characterized by overwhelming, intrusive thoughts about a person, and a tendency to idealize.
In theory, it’s quite common for the survivor of a trauma bond to become obsessed (to the point where it creates a disturbance in their day-to-day existence) by this other person. It’s also common for a victim to idealize their abuser (excusing or minimizing bad behavior, or glossing over the traumatizing aspects of the relationship, particularly as they recede into the past). Much like a limerent, a survivor will experience periods of profound concern for their object of limerence (especially since, usually, the narcissist engaging in a trauma bond relationship will find ways to reel them back in, thus creating a vicious cycle).
So really, this is as much an informative post, as it is an open question — if you are a therapist, or some other kind of professional in the field, or if you have experience with this topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Confronting limerent behavior on the path to freedom
Regardless if the technical term applies or not, it’s important to hold one’s self accountable, and recognize where it’s you making the decisions, and where it’s just the frantic cat trying to claw its way back in to warmth and “safety”.
Are you passing a particular route because it reminds you of a (perhaps toxic) bond? Using certain phrases that hearken the person to mind? Only listening to certain songs?
What about a deeper sense of self? It’s common in toxic bonds for one partner to skew the other’s sense of self, convince them they’re wrong, ill, inappropriate…the list goes on. And if that was your partner (first, I’m really sorry.), do you still see yourself in those terms because they were inscribed in you?
It seems to me quite likely that we’d hold on to other people’s skewed perception of ourselves, as a way of keeping them near, and recreating for ourselves a familiar, if damaging environment.
In other words, we return to the toxic relationship, even in absentia of the toxic partner, by maintaining the same thought patterns, customs, and beliefs that once kept us chained.
It’s vital to stare down those tendencies to idealize and fawn over the past. Immediately. Aggressively. Otherwise, we’ve just become in lieu captors while the person who first traumatized us is away.
Merely placeholders for damaging, damaged individuals.
And we deserve to be more. Our own persons. :)
Again, I can’t stress this enough. I am not an expert, these are merely theories, hunches, and ideas, drawn from a personal interest in psychology, and personal observations. I would love input from other people with experience (either clinical or just personal) who wanna talk about these things, as they are a point of endless fascination for me.
Thank you for reading! I’m fairly scatterbrained, and this was one of the many random subjects that pique my interest.
I recently put out my first book (the first in a fantasy trilogy), and am working on the next two. So there’s a chance I’ll be talking about that, sometimes, as well as many other random topics.
So if you’re someone who enjoys that kinda writing, well, why not subscribe? It’s free. And I’m desperate. So there, honesty.
