LOVE BOMBING, or the art of winning someone over

24 Dec LOVE BOMBING, or the art of winning someone over

I recently was asked to give a speech at schools (high schools and middle schools) on November 25, the day against gender violence. 

I didn’t have a program, so I decided to talk about the lesser-known and perhaps more subtle forms of violence: love bombing and gaslighting. 

I focused on love bombing because at first glance it seems nice: they care about me, they give me attention, they love me. How can I say no? 

It is a form of manipulation because it builds a kind of web around the person receiving it (and also around the person doing it, as we will see). 

The net, as mentioned, is made up of attention, gifts, commitment, and presence. The difficulty is saying no, and in this way we get more and more into a routine where it feels like being in a prison of molasses. The goal of manipulation is, as with all manipulation, to gain control and power over the other person. The effect that this creates is one of strong emotional dependence. 

What happens to those who carry out love bombing? 

I think it is also important to note that this manipulation is also self-manipulation (not in cases where there is a deliberate and conscious desire to have control), and that there is also a degree of unawareness. 

Why? Because we are once again talking about the difficulty of managing the (physiological) uncertainty of human relationships. When I relate to someone, I can only do my 50%, and then wait for the other person to do theirs. 

 How much will it cost? When? How? This space of uncertainty is a space that creates anxiety, or rather the fear that the other person will not arrive, and so we take control (or believe we are taking control) through manipulation: I shower you with love, attention, etc. And I feel a little more at ease.

At the same time, with this flood, I also numb myself, that is, I become less lucid in seeing certain signals or behaviors of the other person, thus protecting myself from choosing and depriving myself of that precious momentary relief.

And it is precisely a toxic attitude in the sense of addiction, we are looking for the dose.

Momentary relief followed by a violent fall. I believe that this is also why there are relationships that are carried on without being truly nourishing. So far, everything has been attributed to a narcissistic partner, but perhaps we can also integrate this form of psychological manipulation, which complicates the picture a little without having to pigeonhole it as simply the other person being bad, but also a match of needs:

on the one hand, feeling loved, on the other, feeling and knowing that you love. The point around which everything revolves is the need for love.

One last thing I noticed is the use of the word accattivarsi in Italian. There is no translation in english that can give the idea. Looking up its etymology, I found that it comes from ad and captivo. In fact, it means to imprison oneself. I find this very interesting because there are two prisoners in this case: the one who captivates and the one who is captivated. But they remain bound, so it is a kind of dependency.

You captivate attention, sympathy, in short, good stuff. It seems to me that we can consider this term a bit of an ancestor of love bombing.

With this writing, I would like to raise awareness on the subject and on the method. Please don’t hold it against me if I don’t talk about victims and perpetrators.

One important point remains: how do we distinguish between pathology and “normality”? I deliberately put normality in quotation marks because, in my opinion, it is only a theoretical concept; normality does not exist.

Having said that, I believe that the measure of sanity vs. pathology in displays of affection and attention (which amount to love bombing) is the feeling of entrapment, how free I feel, and how the other person reacts to my displays of independence and freedom. “Does he/she let me” (the use of this term is already indicative) go out? Does he/she control me financially? Does he/she use the silent treatment or other forms of implicit control?

I will briefly describe the case of a patient, A.

She is a good-looking thirty-year-old woman, separated, with two children. A. tells a story of conditional affection: her mother loved her if she did or gave her what she wanted. All this in a context that was very abusive from a psychological and emotional point of view, and culturally impoverished.

A. learned that she could only have crumbs, and even those came at a price.

To appease her anxiety about neglect, A. gives herself even before the other person asks: she gives herself emotionally, physically, in every way possible.

The first session I had with her was so intense that it left me feeling out of tune. I was the best: man, therapist, everything.

This is a case of love bombing, where the traumatic matrix and outcomes are clearly visible. The work on awareness is long but will bear fruit.

Another case is P., who never did well as a child: you’re too little, too much, too heavy, too goofy, etc. Again, to calm his anxiety, P. always tries to make himself indispensable, to anticipate needs, to know what others feel even before they feel it themselves. In this way, however, P. prevents himself from feeling, because he is too busy not feeling the fear that the other person will leave and reject him.

Love bombing is a relational phenomenon, in which there is a basis of insecure attachment in both parties, to which each responds in their own way. If I am a savior, I will find victims; if I look for crumbs, I will hardly find a whole cake, metaphorically speaking. This is also the mechanism of matching in couples. It does not encompass everything, but it does encompass part of the mechanism of falling in love.

It is a form of violence because psychological manipulation is. It is up to us to be present to ourselves so as not to fall victim to it, and not to practice it. Of all forms of violence, I find it insidious because, in my opinion, we are both perpetrators and victims.

In conclusion, the message I want to send to those who have read this far is this: beware of those who shower you with attention, of love at first sight, of ‘fittonate’, and also beware when you are the one who wants to shower the other person with attention.

For the various forms of love bombing, I recommend Roberta Lippi’s brilliant podcast https://storielibere.fm/love-bombing/