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Chasing people to heal old wounds
Why people chase
The thought underneath is: if I can get you to like me, then my dad was wrong, and I'm not too much. The person gets placed on a pedestal far above who they actually are. Seeing them clearly would mean making a choice, and for someone who feels like a little kid who is never good enough, choosing feels threatening.
Limerence and hope
The obsession has a name, limerence. The fantasy releases dopamine, and every wait for a text brings hope. Hope is a dangerous drug because it keeps a person stuck.
Validating the hurt
When that person is rejected and starts attacking themselves with thoughts like what is wrong with me and why did I do this again, they replay what happened in childhood. Validating the hurt works differently: this really hurts, I feel dismissed and small, I really liked them, and I respect their honesty. That tells the younger self it's okay to be sad without making it mean anything about worth.
Where does the word limerence come from?
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined limerence in her 1979 book Love and Limerence, after interviewing hundreds of people about the experience of being in love. She described it as an involuntary state of intense longing, marked by intrusive thoughts about one person and a strong dependence on signs that the feeling is returned. Tennov was a psychology professor at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.
Why does uncertain hope hook the brain?
In a 2003 study in Science, Christopher Fiorillo, Philippe Tobler, and Wolfram Schultz recorded dopamine neurons in monkeys. The cells showed their strongest sustained signal in the wait before an outcome when the odds of a reward were 50-50. A sure reward and a sure miss produced much less of that signal. Schultz's lab at the University of Cambridge had earlier shown that these neurons track the difference between expected and received rewards.
Why does rejection hurt so physically?
In a 2011 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ethan Kross and colleagues scanned people who had recently been rejected by a partner. Looking at a photo of the ex activated regions that also respond to physical pain, including the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula. The researchers compared this with the same people feeling heat on their forearm.
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