How Childhood Wires Limerence
The connection between emotionally immature parents and limerence that most people never make
I got my first real job when I was 12. Every morning at five, before school, I would be shoveling out horse stalls at the barn down the road. I did not think of it as unusual. I needed money and that was how I could get it, by working. It made sense to me since my mom had told me if I wanted things like clothes or records I would need to buy them myself. And when I say clothes, I mean a new-to-me t-shirt, as opposed to one of my moms or one from goodwill.
In reality, the money went mostly to food. My mom was not home much since she worked at night but when she was home, the question of dinner was not really on her radar. She would sometimes leave me a dollar to walk to the convenience store to get something to eat there. They had pierogis in a little heated case by the register, or I could get a frozen burrito. I usually had to use at least some of my own money to buy something to eat.
Many years later as a young adult when I studying at the local community college, I rented a room from a friend’s mom, Mary. Mary was incredibly kind to me and treated me like a second daughter. She shopped at Costco and one night she brought home a case of mangoes and placed them on the counter. A whole entire case of mangos! I stood there and looked at it and thought, wow, there was so much food. It seemed so exotic and so extravagant and so completely outside my frame of reference that I still remember exactly where I was standing when I saw it.
But this story isn’t really about the mangoes. I understood that later, it was really about a mother who planned ahead. Mary thought about what her family might want to eat next week. She bought things in abundance because abundance was something she believed her children deserved.
I did not grow up with that belief in the air. What I grew up with was the opposite, the constant low level experience of not quite enough. Not enough food. Not enough planning. Not enough of someone thinking about what I might need before I had to figure it out myself.
I did not connect any of this to the men I chose for a very long time, actually, until very recently. I knew my childhood had been lean in ways that went beyond the pantry. But lots of people have difficult childhoods and most of them seem to navigate relationships without the specific pattern I kept running. So I could not quite close the gap between what happened then and what kept happening now.
A few months ago I read a book about emotionally immature parents. What I found in that book was a description of something I had been living inside my entire life, and it had finally been given a name. Things finally started to make so much more sense.
The child who learned that her basic needs were not the priority becomes the woman who does not expect her needs to be the priority. The child who got up at five in the morning to solve her own hunger problem becomes the woman who works very hard to solve problems that are not hers to solve. The child who stood in her friend’s kitchen looking at a case of mangoes like it was a miracle becomes the woman who does not know, not really, what it feels like to be provided for.
The Template You Didn’t Know You Were Given
Before we talk about emotionally immature parents, I want to say something about the “it could have been worse” thought, because if you are anything like me, it is already running in the background.
It is true. It could have been worse. There are childhoods that involve violence, serious neglect, documented trauma. If yours did not look like that, it is reasonable to wonder whether you are overstating it. Whether you are using your history as an excuse. Whether other people had it harder and turned out fine.
Here is what I want to say to that. Your body and subconscious does not compare your experience to someone else’s before deciding how to respond to it. It just responds. And a child who grows up without consistent emotional attunement, without a parent who reliably sees her and asks how she is and means it, develops adaptations. Those adaptations are intelligent. They are the right response to the environment. And they do not stop running just because the environment eventually changes.
You do not need to have had a terrible childhood for your nervous system to have learned the wrong things about love. You just need to have had a parent who was not quite there in the ways that counted.
Emotionally immature parents, a term developed by psychologist Lindsay Gibson, are not necessarily cruel or abusive in the ways we typically recognize. They may love their children. They may be doing the best they know how. But they are limited in specific ways that have real consequences for the children in their care.
They are self-focused. Not always dramatically, not always obviously, but the attention flows in one direction. Their needs, their feelings, their stories. The child learns early that there is not much room for her own inner life in this relationship. So she stops bringing it.
Sometimes these EIP’s are physically present, but they are emotionally unavailable. The lights are on but the connection is not there. The child knocks and the door does not open. After enough times, she stops knocking.
They are inconsistent. Warm sometimes, distant others, with no reliable pattern the child can learn to predict. So the child stays alert. She learns to read the room before she learns to read anything else. She becomes very good at anticipating other people’s moods and adjusting herself accordingly.
And here is where it connects to limerence.
The child who grew up waiting for inconsistent warmth becomes the woman whose nervous system lights up around inconsistent warmth because that is what her nervous system learned to recognize as love. The familiar feeling of hoping someone will show up, of waiting for the moment when they finally see her, of working hard to be the version of herself that gets through, that is not a new experience for her. She has been here before. It feels, in the specific way that familiar things feel, like home.
The man who is sometimes warm and sometimes distant, who suggests something real between you and then goes quiet, who makes you feel seen in moments and invisible in others — he is not introducing her to a new experience. He is rhyming with the oldest one she has.
That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern.
The work of understanding this is not about blame. Parents who are emotionally immature are usually that way because of their own histories, their own wounds, their own parents who were not there in the ways that counted. The chain goes back further than any of us can fully see. Understanding it is not about assigning fault. It is about being able to look clearly at what got wired in, so that you can finally understand why the pattern keeps running, and what it is actually going to take to change it.
The pattern shows up in who you choose and what you accept and what feels like love and what feels like nothing. Understanding where it came from is the beginning of being able to choose differently.
Signs Your Limerence Was Shaped By an Emotionally Immature Parent
These are not meant to diagnose anyone. They are meant to help you see the connection between what you learned early and what your nervous system keeps reaching for now.
1. Your parent’s emotional needs consistently came before yours, and you learned to make yourself smaller to manage that. In limerence this shows up as organizing yourself entirely around your LO’s emotional state. His mood becomes your weather. His needs become the priority. Your own feelings go somewhere else, the way they always did.
2. Warmth was inconsistent and unpredictable. Good moments existed but could not be counted on. In limerence this is exactly the dynamic that activates the cycle. Inconsistent warmth is not a red flag your nervous system recognizes as dangerous. It is a pattern it recognizes as familiar. The uncertainty does not repel you. It pulls you in.
3. You became very good at reading the room, at sensing moods and adjusting yourself before anything was said. In limerence this becomes hypervigilance. Analyzing his response times, his word choices, the energy of a text. You developed this skill young because you needed it. You are still using it in situations where it is costing you more than it is giving you.
4. Love was demonstrated through presence and logistics, not through emotional attunement. Someone was there, but not really there. In limerence this means that when someone is consistently emotionally present and available, something feels off. The nervous system does not recognize it as the real thing because the real thing never looked like that.
5. You learned that if you were useful enough, easy enough, good enough, you could earn more warmth than you would otherwise receive. In limerence this is the engine of the whole pattern. The belief that if you explain it right, behave right, need less, give more, something will finally open up. The trying is the template running exactly as it was installed.
6. Emotional conversations went nowhere. Bringing your real feelings to the relationship did not result in being heard. In limerence you already know, on some level, that bringing your real feelings to your LO will not result in being heard. You do it anyway, or you don’t do it at all, or you draft the email for three hours and delete it. Either way the outcome is the same one you learned to expect a long time ago.
7. You spent more energy trying to understand your parent than they ever spent trying to understand you. In limerence the investigation is entirely outward. What is he thinking. What does he need. What did that mean. The same asymmetry you grew up inside. All the effort flowing in one direction, toward someone who is not tracking any of it.
8. The relationship felt like almost. Almost close, almost enough, almost what you needed. Almost is the word limerence runs on. And if you grew up in an almost relationship with a parent, your nervous system does not experience almost as a warning. It experiences it as the texture of love. The gap feels familiar. The gap feels like where you live.
If you recognized yourself in most of these, then it is a map. And maps are only useful if they help you understand where you are so you can figure out where you want to go.
The template was built a long time ago by a child who was doing the best she could with what she had. It made sense then. It does not have to keep running now.
Take good care,
Love, Leslie
Nothing in this newsletter constitutes mental health treatment. Please work with a qualified professional for clinical support. Trust yourself first.
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