Your amazing brain... Love Lust Attraction and an irresistible cocktail of chemicals! When did you know you fancied your partner? What did that meeting do to your brain chemicals? Did you just fall in love? I Love Helen Fisher! She is an Anthropologist, not a psychologist, and simply describes what she and her colleagues discover in their research - love lust attraction. Helen teaches us about the feelings of "chemistry" we have with someone we feel connected to.  And she is right! Our bodies surge with chemicals of attraction, and surge even more if our "love" is requited. Oh the wonderful experience of those attraction chemicals, we swoon with the … [Read more...]

Can limerence turn into love? What's behind Love or Limerence? Some call limerence infatuation, love sickness, or romantic love, while others relate it to love addiction - Is limerence real? Are your feelings love or limerence? Limerence (also infatuated love) is an involuntary state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one's feelings reciprocated. David certainly emphasizes the chemical contribution to the feelings of limerence (he likens it to taking drugs!), but also realistically mentions the "dampened down" good feelings that come with loving someone. He speaks … [Read more...]

Are you torn between love and limerence? Limerence is something that is your passion and you can't do without it. Love and limerence can be difficult to distinguish. In 1997 Dr Dorothy Tennov coined the word 'limerence' to identify the occurrence of a particular state of mind in the early stages of attraction and infatuation, during which we see no faults in the object of our desire. Limerence is sometimes referred to as 'being in love' as distinct from 'loving someone'. Sometimes it is called infatuation. A limerent is a person who experiences limerence. The limerent object (LO) is the object the limerent desires. The swirling chemical high of limerence … [Read more...]

Love does make us warm inside. I have written at length on this website about the physiology of emotions - how your body changes according to what you are feeling. We call all negative emotion, stress. Accumulated stress can lead to severe physical effects felt in your body and ultimately depression. In my anger and anxiety scales, which my clients complete, we get you to learn to recognize where in your body you feel the various intensities of your emotions as a first step in identifying the causes of your emotions.A study has found that different emotions affect the body in different ways yet these effects are the same across cultures. Love does make us warm inside - it is felt right down … [Read more...]

Is your understanding of your emotional brain affecting your relationship? Do you feel a racing heart, clammy hands, a tightening in our abdomen, and an urge to use our bowels when things are going wrong? To perceive emotion is to receive and interpret information from both external (world) and internal (body) environments and is the starting point to understand your emotional brain. Your senses – sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing – connect you to the world around you, through your physical brain. Perception is the process by which information (events) about the outside world impinges on the sensory organs and is then decoded and interpreted by the brain – resulting in a … [Read more...]