Tag Archives: unrequited love

Mar7

Pan and Limerence-Unrequited Love

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Pan was a harlot and whore. He ran after anything that brought his own pleasure without returning it. That being said in the excerpt from the tender countenance of Elizabeth Barrette Browning about Pan speaks of her very own passionate unrequited love.


Unreturned love is a painful, long lasting, shame invoking and obsessive thinking, cringe worthy, uncomfortable psychological state that can last for weeks, many years, or a lifetime. Many a murder and permanent destruction of lives has occurred because of unrequited love. Fortunately, and thankfully in our modern times there is a word and definition for it.


Limerence: coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979 is the involuntary obsession of a person. Many people experience this unexpected state of persistent desire for another. Healthy people move through the infatuation, crystallization, destruction phases and go back to normal. Emotionally challenged individuals take longer to recover. Those on the OCD, autism and schizophrenic scale have a much harder time to let things go.


The difference between limerence and love is that love is caring about the wellbeing of the person and limerence is about the uncertainty of the situation.


Limerence is tied to trauma and abandonment and neglect from childhood. Those who experience extreme limerence don’t realize they are trying to rectify unstable childhood family experiences through reenacting them in the present. This repeated reenactment is the minds way of saying hey you better look at this because it is getting in the way of healthy relationships.


How does one overcome Limerence?


Be aware of what you are feeling. Limit contact with the obsession. Prioritize your own self-care. Challenge the obsessive thoughts. Redirect your energy. Avoid replacing one obsession with another. Have a strict no contact rule. Write in a journal. Talk to a therapist. Join support groups. Research limerence and understand how it is playing out in your life.


Note that time will eliminate limerence.


I am not sure if Syrinx in this encounter with Pan ever got the chance to escape the water nymphs turning her into cattail reeds, but Pan got his comeuppance in the sense that he had his own case of limerence. At least for a while until his next desire came along.

Dec5

Thoughtful Thursday #282 – Shame

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There are many ways we feel shame, in Psychotherapist’s Joseph Burgo book there are 4 subtypes of shame and I will list them here:

  1. Unrequited Love-this is not only the type of unreciprocated love between adults, the author explains that it happens in infancy and childhood when a parent is not able to respond to the child in a healthy way. In my opinion this explains those nasty situations where we run after unavailable people. This makes a lot of sense to me.
  2. Unwanted exposure-maybe you were called out on something and humiliated about it.
  3. Disappointed exception-perhaps you set out to do something and fail.
  4. Being left out-it happens everywhere, home, work, school. No one wants to feel alone and rejected.

Shame can be so mentally excruciating that we are stopped in our tracks or run away from the pain. And that is normal.

How to heal shame: very difficult without mindfulness. But certainly achievable by doing the important work of examining your mental health. There is Mr. Burgo’s book plus the classic book on shame by John Bradshaw. There are thousands of articles and books available plus it’s really helpful to have a therapist so you can work through the core emotion of shame.

Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self Esteem by Mr. Joseph Burgo
Healing the Shame That Binds You – John Bradshaw.
Both books are a good starting point for examining shame.
Carry on. You can do this.