Limerence As A Doorway To The Shadow

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here on this channel for the past couple of weeks we have been talking about Shadow work so if you don't know what I mean when I say the term Shadow work I will link a video in the description of this one that goes over what that term is as well as how you can start recognizing and working with your own psychological Shadow but for those of you who have been around for a while we are going to cross

over the term Shadow work with one of the other terms we talk about very frequently on this channel which is limerence so again there's a link in the description of this video if you don't know what the term limerence means but for those of you who do what I'm going to be talking about today specifically is how we can work with our experience of limerence to get at which positive traits we may have repressed into our shadow when we hear the term Shadow work what most people think of is all of the kind of negative

or unpleasant emotions that they might have shoved into their Shadow so emotions like anger or fear or uncertainty or vulnerability or pain but depending on what was adaptive for you in your early environment what might be in your Shadow is actually a lot of positive traits so you could have joy in your Shadow you could have self-reliance and Independence in your Shadow you could have creativity or positive energy in your Shadow the only kind of rule about what ends up in your Shadow is whatever was non-adaptive for you to feel into and Express at a

young age and I just want to be clear that when I say terms like good or bad or positive or negative emotion States I'm not talking about moral judgments of those emotional states so I'm not saying that it's good to feel Joy and bad to feel pain we need all of our emotions the entire range of them is very important but I'm just describing the kind of felt sense that most people apply to certain emotional states so most of us do not enjoy the experience for example of being in pain most of us do enjoy

the experience of feeling hopeful or joyful so when I say positive and negative or good or bad feelings again I'm not assigning a moral judgment I'm just talking about what it feels like to subjectively experience those States so there is not any literature or any research that has been done at least that I could find on the intersection between limerence and Shadow work so today's video is going to be a largely Theory based speculative and just kind of an overview of what I found to be useful and what kind of gold I've been able to

mine out of my past experiences of limerence in order to get at what's being repressed in my shadow so if you think of the experience of having limerence or being limerent about someone it's very different than the experience of love love and connection are present moment experiences that are tied to the actual experience that we're having of another person so let's say I have a real relationship with someone named Jack maybe Jack is a friend maybe he's someone I'm getting to know as a potential romantic partner maybe he's already a romantic partner or a lover

but there's a lot of inconsistency in our connection there is a real relationship that I have with that person that real relationship consists of the times that we spend together the words that we exchange with each other the commitments we have or haven't made to each other right there's the relationship that exists in reality but then there is also our internal representation of a person and this is true of every relationship so there's the actual person who exists outside of the South and then there's the representation we have of that person inside of our heads

so if I have this real life relationship with Jack I also have a little mini jack that lives in my brain that I think about and interact with and the more limerent we are about someone generally the more time we're spending interacting with that internal representation of them so we might be so afraid of rejection from the real life version of this person that we actually severely limit our interactions with them and kind of give ourselves just enough fodder for the internal representations to go wild and my theory here around limerence is that a lot

of the time what we're doing when we're experiencing limits when we are having obsessive thoughts about wanting to be accepted or loved by another person is we are putting an internal representation of a real person in between ourselves and an emotion that we need to give ourselves external permission to feel so the first thing that's kind of important to understand here is that another person cannot make you feel an emotion if it were true then another person could make you feel an emotion that person would elicit the exact same emotion every time they said or

did a certain sequence of words or events to absolutely anyone so if I am so enamored with Jack and I think it's just because Jack is so wonderful and I think that that has nothing to do with me it would mean that in theory everyone who meets Jack would be madly in love with him as well but that's not the case think of your internal emotional world like a high-rise building with thousands of rooms in it and each room is a different emotional experience you could have now imagine that every single room has a key

that it can be unlocked with and the rooms that are in our conscious awareness are the rooms that we have the key to now the emotions that are in our shadow can kind of be thought of as the rooms that we don't have the keys to because in our very very early life we learned that those rooms were dangerous to go into we just took those keys and threw them somewhere where we knew that we would never find them again and now there are these certain parts of ourselves that we don't necessarily know how to

easily access and so when someone else walks into our life and opens that door and we allow ourselves to walk through it for the first time because someone else has provided the key it feels like magic and we might start looking at that other person who had the key to that door and go how did you do that you created this absolute Act of God when in reality all that's happening is that through another person we are allowing ourselves permission to feel something that we don't normally allow ourselves to feel so I'll give an example

there was a period of my life where I was exceptionally limerent because I was in a state of deep grief and I remember having the experience of meeting someone who was unbelievably positive they just had this outlook on life that was so enthusiastic and gung-ho and they had these kind of bold daring even kind of brash qualities that I just found absolutely irresistible and when I look back at that period of my life what I notice is how much those traits that that person was embodying were in contrast to the way that I was feeling

as well as what I had internalized about what it means to be a positive person so in my early life I had learned that to be positive meant to be ignoring reality and the reason I learned that was because there were early conditions in which that was true there was a lot going on for me where had I looked at it realistically and through an undistorted lens the result would have been kind of depressing on a lot of counts and so I had this inborn association between positivity and having one's head in the sand and

then I met someone who was wildly intelligent and also very positive and it was like I walked through this room inside of myself for the first time where I allowed myself to believe that there was real positivity in the world that it was possible to actually look at the facts see things clearly laid out and still believe that there was hope and excitement and joy in the world and that door inside of myself that very specific room that was realistic positivity was a room that I don't think I'd ever accessed before and I didn't know

how to get back in there without this other person being around and so I became very fixated on needing that person to be close to me and needing to have them in my life and more than anything else I wanted them to want me because if they wanted me that meant that they were mirroring something inside of me that I had no idea how to otherwise access and so my internal reps presentation of this person became the permission that I gave myself to go inside of that room and the kind of moral here is that

with limerence I think what often happens is we experience it and it gets quickly covered up by either shame or fixation so we either run away with these thoughts and we really tell ourselves all I need to be happy and fulfilled is this other person's love and adoration and attention or we go oh my God I'm being crazy and we write the whole thing off and just try to get ourselves to stop feeling that way but I think there can actually be a lot of value in just being sober with ourselves about the experience so

if I'm feeling limerent about somebody the first thing I want to do is separate out who is the real life person because that is very important to not lose track of if we start confusing the real life person for our internal representation of the person we can start acting really weird and in some cases really disrespectfully towards the other person because putting someone on a pedestal is absolutely erasing their humanity and it's not a kind thing to do but if we can learn to separate out the real person and the actual relationship that we have

with them from the internal representation that we have of the person who we might be having limerent thoughts about now we can acknowledge to ourselves I am having this limits I'm experiencing these thoughts because there is something that my unconscious mind is desperate for me to integrate into my own self-concept but it finds it too threatening for me to look directly at it so I'm using the internal representation of this person as kind of an archetype inside of my own mind for what it would be like for it to be okay for me to allow

myself to feel that so in the example I just gave my brain was desperate to believe that there was some sort of Hope in the world that was not delusional some part of me believe that to be true or else I would not have gotten so fixated on it inside of this other person so then the work becomes how do I source that hope for myself how do I start giving myself permission to believe those things without having to get the other person's approval in order to enter that room that's inside of me there's another

period of my life where I was feeling extraordinarily nihilistic like I had had a large collapse in my systems of meaning and I became limerent about someone who I viewed as very intelligent and spiritually explorative and I noticed that I really started following this person intellectually into a lot of their more spiritual Pursuits and I'm not huge generally on DreamWork or on Vision work but young was a big proponent of using dreams and Visions we have as doorways to the unconscious mind and I remember at one point having a dream of this person that was

so vivid where we were sitting together in a dark room and they were holding a flashlight and I remember having this feeling like as long as I'm following this person who has this ability to kind of shed light on the darkness I'm going to be safe and okay and I woke up and wrote that dream down and I recognized so clearly that this feeling of being lost and in the dark was so prevalent for me at that point in my life and what I needed to do to get rid of these limerent thought patterns which

were not serving me was to get to the place where unconsciously I believed that I was the one holding a flashlight and Shining Light on the areas of my life that felt scary or uncertain and for about six months I had this journal where every morning it prompted you to write an affirmation for the day I wrote down I am holding my own flashlight in the dark and I would do a quick visualization where I would literally picture myself in that room that had appeared in My Dreams by myself holding the flashlight that in the

dream my limerent object had been holding and the more I did that visualization the more I allowed myself permission to feel into what that would be like what could it be like to feel in my body like I'm the one leading the way like I'm the one venturing out into these scary unknowns and finding the answers that I've been searching for and the more I did this visualization and identified that as the direction that my unconscious mind was begging me to develop in the more my limerence naturally fell away and all that was left was

my actual relationship with this person and my renewed relationship with my own Spiritual Development and growth which was the real thing that my mind had been desperately trying to integrate the idea here is to just take cues from what it is about your limerent object or the way that you feel around your limerent object that might indicate what you are desperately trying to integrate into your overall self-concept so at this point in my life if I ever have limerent thought patterns pop up the question I try to zero in on and ask myself is what

am I allowing myself to feel when I'm having a limerent fantasy that I don't usually allow myself to feel in real life or what do I think it would mean about me if this person were to consistently love me and why is it that I can't seem to think of that thing as true about myself without their love or without the returning of their affection and what that gives you the potential opportunity to do is to chart a course for where your body and unconscious mind are already wanting you to go next and we can

use both positive and negative experiences of limerence to inform this work so when I say positive and negative experiences Dorothy tenov who is the person who coined limerence and wrote extensively about it talks about how limerence is both a positive and negative experience so when we are feeling like the object of our affection is potentially returning our adoration we can feel on top of the world and like nothing bad is ever going to happen again but when we are fearful that they are not returning our affections or that they're not interested in us we can

feel absolutely lower than low and I implore us all to think about those lows as you useful information as well so if my limerent object doesn't love me back what do I think that means about me as a person versus what would it mean about me as a person if they did love me back chances are this is indicating a humongous polarity that exists within us so what it can be helpful to pay attention to is what do we want our limerent objects to be thinking about us so let's say I have a limerent fantasy

where in my fantasy my limerent object is looking at me and thinking that is the most eloquent and graceful person I have ever seen in my life and in the negative form of that fantasy when I'm freaking out that I think they don't like me back maybe I'm going oh my God I knew it all along I have no class and this person would never be interested in someone like me now what my psyche is begging me to integrate is my desire to move more in the direction of eloquence and Grace maybe those are traits

that I didn't feel like I was able to develop at a young age because maybe it worked better for me to be the kind of chill person who lets everything roll off their back when in reality there's a part of me that is really attracted to the idea of a more refined experience of myself in relationships I just need to give myself permission to allow that part of myself to emerge in the world and I can thank the internal representation of Jack for allowing me to feel that and allowing me to realize that about myself

and then I can start taking intentional steps in that direction of allowing myself to grow into the type of person that I think Jack would love which really has nothing to do with Jack though I might have a real relationship with him as well and it has everything to do with the parts of me that my own psychology is begging me to finally allow myself to love and accept and again at the end of the day all of us have access to all of these rooms inside of ourselves and they all have a Time in

a place so all of us are graceful and eloquent in some circumstances and really chill and laid back or even a little crass in other situations and so doing this type of work does not mean that we are erasing who we were and stepping into who we think someone else wants us to be all it means is that we are taking these obsessive fixated thoughts more at face value than we normally do and go okay what is my unconscious mind begging me to integrate right now maybe it's easier for me to see that quality in

another person than in my cell so how do I give myself permission to access it in my cell so that I no longer have to project it outwards and feel desperate to get access to it through someone else's approval I'm going to leave that there for today I hope what I'm saying makes sense to some of you you can let me know in the comments if it resonates with your experience or if it doesn't and again I want to be clear that this isn't necessarily the only expression of limerence or the only only thing behind

it but it's one way that I've found it can be effective to work with it rather than just trying to endlessly distance ourselves from it because again the moment we name a fantasy a fantasy we're back in reality so if we can recognize this limerence this obsessiveness this fixated thought pattern doesn't have all that much to do with the real person it's this internal representation of them that I'm fixated on which tells me much more about myself and my own psychology now we're getting clear on what's reality what's fantasy and what parts of ourselves we're

needing to do work on so that we can show up as more whole people in the world and when we're able to show up as more whole and integrated versions of ourselves it's actually a lot easier to Foster those real Connections in a relaxed non-neurotic and genuinely open and loving way so in theory it's a win all around it just requires us to get honest with ourselves about what's actually going on all right now I'm actually gonna leave it at that let me know what's coming up for you guys as always I love you I

hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children and all of the various things they are begging you to integrate and I will see you back here again really soon foreign