Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
LA’s #1 avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
The home of Ask a Sadist, Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers, and the First Church of the Satanic Buddha. Levity saves lives.
Regularly scheduled episodes premiere on the first Wednesday of the month on KCHUNG Los Angeles.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
Limerence
It's not love. It's limerence. Which is a lot more exciting.
Update! The Ultimate Guide to Limerence: Everything You Never Wanted to Know
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of KCHUNG. Music by Ohmu Shell. Written, performed, produced, and created by Emerson Dameron, who is solely responsible for its content.
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Emerson Dameron's Sophistication Nation - April 4th - All major music-delivery platforms
It's OUT! Sophistication Nation: Brief Interviews with Women I Pretend to Understand: https://emersondameron.hearnow.com/sophistication-nation
I love you In the most sophisticated grown-up way possible. I see how hard it is and how hard you're trying and I honor that. I love your dualities. I love your multiplicities. I love how tough, tender, brilliant and ridiculous you are. It helps that you're beautiful and hot hot and sexy, I have noticed. I love everything about you and all your infinite possibilities, and there's always a chance. I'll never get to say this again. So I love you personally. Believe that. Believe that I come to you from the future bearing good news, and that's that there is such a thing as purification through grief.
Speaker 1:If you are going through the worst possible pain that you could possibly imagine in your life Humiliating, degrading, annihilating, agonizing, stretching every hellish minute into a hellish decade and a half to torture you the bottom of the bottom of the bottom that kind of pain, the kind of pain that makes you angry. But you're too tired to get really angry because you're in so much pain. That pain you don't want to survive it. You don't want to be the person that you would theoretically be on the other side of it if it were theoretically possible to get to the other side of the worst, absolute, mind-blowing, soul-crushing, heart-breaking, bone-shattering agony. You don't even want to survive it and it takes forever and it turns you into a completely different person every second, with a brand new threshold of pain. If you're in there or you realize that you're headed in there and you're trying to put it off because you don't think you're going to make it, the good news is that it's so much better on the other side. You're not the same person. You are a bigger, braver and much more deeply enriched person. On the other side of that, when you're capable of holding that experience and living in that experience and letting it happen and getting it over with, a whole new world of empathy opens up to you, you will survive grief. It just takes a while.
Speaker 1:I'm Emerson Dameron. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung, Los Angeles, 1630 AM worldwide on the World Wide Web kchungradioorg. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes medicated-minutescom dot com. And I don't say this as much as I should or as much as I would like to, so I'm going to say it now I love you.
Speaker 1:I love you in a very grown up, adult, sophisticated way that I didn't know I was capable of loving someone. I see that you fight a hard battle. You are in it every single day you wonder if it's ever going to get better, and then you think it might and you hope it does and it doesn't and you're right back where you started. It's tough, it hurts so much, it is so hard and you're doing it and I see that and I respect that, that and I love you so much for that. I honor that.
Speaker 1:I love how tough and how tender and how brilliant and ridiculous you are. I love all of your crazy dualities and pluralities and other dimensions. I love all of it and every day I wake up with a little bit more capacity to love you, just a little bit more. It helps that you're beautiful and hot and sexy. Obviously that's a bonus, but it's a significant bonus. That has a lot to do with how you got my attention. It's just another thing that I love about you. It's just another thing that I love about you. The whole thing is sexy. I love everything about you. I love the wise adult that you've become, how powerful and sophisticated and how you keep it real, no matter what. I love everything about you and all of your infinite possibility, no matter what.
Speaker 1:I love everything about you and all of your infinite possibilities. And there's a very slight chance that I won't get to say this again. The big one could hit right now, and all of this would be washed into the Pacific Ocean. I could get hit by a speeding vehicle or a stray bullet or lightning or the fist of God. It's improbable, but it could happen. It could happen and my deepest regret would be that I did not take the opportunity to say to you personally that I love you.
Speaker 1:I love who you represent, who you've become, who you are, and you are loved here at Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, medicated-minutescom. You are seen and heard and held and profoundly loved. But that is not what this episode of the show is about. This is about comically tragic, tragically comic, absolutely pathetic, nevertheless exciting, utter derangement. It's called limerence. It's here. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:This is the most powerful way to avoid feeling lost, disengaged and alone in the world. Dating and waiting and having healthy relationships with well-defined boundaries, with well-adjusted people is as dead as your grandma. Ouch, at last. A challenge to all those who may think it's impossible to throw your soul into the lava of romantic madness. We need to make this happen. We need to make people fall in love again. Limerence is the secret to that. Our job is to sell it. I'm from Mitch and Murray, I'm from downtown. We're gonna make people fall in love.
Speaker 1:So you've numbed yourself to the pain of the world. Now what? First of all, congratulations on step one. That took some doing, but most will fail or at least stagnate at this point without the proper help, without the necessary program. We know that love can bring us back to life. We also know that the love that will bring us back to life will not just fall into our laps In the way that some purely physical sexual encounters seem to do.
Speaker 1:The most scorching passions are very exciting, are very exciting and they're the result of hours and hours of work and practice and conditioning. And it's normal to want shortcuts, to try hacks. But after we've tried all the tired old tricks and they've failed us or we've failed either in the execution or in not having the proper strategic foundation, that hurts. We get embarrassed, we're scared of wasting more time, paralyzed by the fear of being paralyzed, of being stuck, frozen with fear, and that's what happens to most people and you can can tell they're dead inside and that's not good enough for you. You want real, juicy, crazy, stupid, self-destructive love in your life. You've been trying to create some sense of purpose, a mission, a meaning in your life, or at least trick yourself into thinking that's possible. But you feel overwhelmed and you can't get started.
Speaker 1:That kind of passionate living is not easy. It's not for amateurs. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, because it's intoxicating. And when you're in there and living the dream, you know for a fact that that's what life is all about. But it's not easy. You're busy.
Speaker 1:Your to-do list never ends. You're stuck with the brutal cynicism and nihilism you've been cultivating for years and years. Now it has become a prison. You don't know where to start getting out or even making an escape plan, and you're afraid to put yourself out there. Once you do get out, you could get hurt. That's the reality of this.
Speaker 1:But would it really be worse to experience that kind of excruciating pain than it is to live in this dull, gray, humdrum existence that you created for yourself through fear? You've spent years feeling lonesome, down and disconnected, and now you have to figure out how to throw yourself into an intense and agonizing fire of pure romance. Your shallow friendships are uninspiring and your own company is purely horrific. All of your alienated weaknesses, sadistic inclinations, the rage that you feel deep inside is like a monster Under the bed, in your closet, in your head. You can't lose your mind or break your own heart fast enough. You want out, but you're stuck in the details and the minutiae and the granular tedium of this experience. You know that you want to throw yourself into an intense and agonizing fire of romance, but you don't know how to get started.
Speaker 1:Losing your head and your heart is hard. You have to get out of your head in order to lose it. You have to release the tension in your body in order to feel anything fresh, and it is your prerogative to really connect with other people. That's what pleasure and play are about. But that's not easy. It's hard, it's time-consuming and it's frustrating. But it doesn't have to be, because you can experience all of that in airsots and in a much more condensed and thrilling and dangerous way.
Speaker 1:With Limerence, your all-consuming obsession is just a few clicks away. We'll add obsession, spontaneity and chaos to your life so that you can start gorging yourself on hopeless romance today. Gorging yourself on hopeless romance today. With the Limerence program, you'll get all the compulsive, maladaptive daydreaming you need so that you can start feeling a sense of ecstatic union and getting lost in your own maze of delusions. Right away, you'll be riding the lightning before the sun sets. You'll be able to ignore long odds and significant obstacles, along with your own sense of dignity and decency. With limerence, starting in minutes, without doing the work of getting over yourself or putting yourself out there or having a real adult relationship. With limerence, you'll be ready in minutes and fall in love with the passion of a pro and the skill of a hopeless amateur. Give yourself the advantage, the shortcuts. With limerence, you'll get insider information that thousands have already used to get out of a rut and get amazing results, including. You'll get insatiable, tightly focused horniness that saves you years of failing on your own. You'll get a painful sense of flaming derangement, which is what you need for your new all-consuming, obsessive lifestyle, without having to guess what will get those results. We'll add obsession, spontaneity and chaos to your life so that you can gorge yourself on hopeless romance. Today, you'll be doing 20% of the work and producing 80% of the results.
Speaker 1:Losing yourself is hard.
Speaker 1:You have to get out of your head, release the tension in your body and really connect with other people.
Speaker 1:But now you can remove the time, waste and frustration with the best solution limerence. It's not easy to find all the information you need to get that hot shot of oxytocin that sticks you like cement to your life-ruining crush, who may not even know you exist and certainly doesn't perceive you in the necessary depth to reciprocate this attachment that's going to ruin your life, and ruin it hard and ruin it hot. That's why we put together a full package of potent love, drugs and anxious, preoccupied attachment to get you started on the right foot. You spend hours of your day trying to find something to live for, you're exhausted and you still haven't found one person who's on your level. When you attain and experience limerence, you will fall head over heels, desperate sexting at 3 am, doomed, self-immolating. Limerent love worthy of song stage and screen in just 15 minutes. If you want to take the shortcut that's gonna change your life, you need to take action now. Click here to take advantage of this amazing limited time offer and get with the limerence program.
Speaker 4:I feel like I'm losing my mind and and that's not the way I normally feel I've got a pretty good handle on my mind. All my friends say so and they would know, as they're successful people with punishing standards for excellence. My friend Alexia is one of the most creative artists I've ever known and also an in-demand life coach. She says there's just a certain something about me, something people trust. My friend Mark has the third most popular Vimeo channel of them all by certain metrics, and he always solicits my opinion. He thinks I'm a genius and says he loves being around me just to soak up my demonic energy. I think that's kind of silly, but I'll take it, but only because it's from Mark. And yet it's hard for me to accept that a genius could feel the way I feel today, the way I've felt for the last few months. It's been 90 days. I expected some relief. I just knew I could wrangle this to the ground, the way I attack all my problems. It's been 90 days. I expected some relief. I just knew I could wrangle this to the ground, the way I attack all my problems and everyone else's problems. But this one is different. Mark can't help me. He's too self-absorbed. Even Alexia can't help me. Maybe she's really not that smart after all.
Speaker 4:I've been over and over this and these wild feelings keep driving me back to one person you. You're the only one who really gets it Well, aside from my friend Stuart, who's also probably the greatest living contemporary philosopher and no one has heard of him because he's so humble and he's not on any map they could understand. He gets it. He gets that, you get it, and he wants me to tell you. So I'm telling you I love you. I love everything about you. I'm obsessed. You're the only person who knows how to break me the way I ache to be broken.
Speaker 4:I'm so tired of being so tightly in control of everything in my life. I'm tired of managing other people's lives. I want to be free. I want to be swept away. I want to be owned by someone who's strong enough to hold me in that space and handle that responsibility. I have very good judgment, especially when it comes to people, and I believe you are that person. If you can handle that, I'll be hopelessly devoted to you forever. I'm angry. I'm you forever. I'm angry, I'm tough and I'm tired. I'm tired of hiding my hurt. I hope you can help. I hope you can hurt me in ways that will help me. I want to let go. I want you.
Speaker 3:Hey, sandy, it's Aaron. I haven't been ignoring you. I've been on my magical mystery tour, riding the lightning, doing my thing and making things happen. I've got a lot of cool projects I'm working on. They're not ready yet. I can't wait to share them with you when the time is right and the feeling is right, after I've done a little bit more work. I refuse to get specific about Okay. I admit it, I have been ignoring you, but I haven't been doing it thoughtlessly. I'm ignoring you with intention, because it's fun and it's sexy and I know it gets you worked up. I know your secret. Don't worry, I'm good at keeping secrets, but I know and you know, I know and we both know why you have to protect your little secret.
Speaker 3:You've accomplished so much in your life. Everyone who knows you loves you or at least respects you. Most of them want to be you. But you're not so sure you want to be you anymore. You'd love to have another option, another woman to be.
Speaker 3:Underneath your tough, successful exterior, you crave submission. You long to be dominated and owned. You want to let go, give in, give up, get lost in your lust, throw yourself into the lava of pure sensation and experience. You're in luck, because I like you A lot. We both know that. Well, now that I think about it, I'm not sure, but admittedly you have your flaws and I don't know if you're ready to get what you really want. You're more screwed up than you like to admit. You're a self-centered, mean-spirited little elitist and you're afraid to let go. It takes a special kind of person to break through that, to coax and seduce you, to release the real you underneath all that static and noise. I want to be that person. I want to own you, to break you, to take you to the place where you really want to be.
Speaker 3:Well, part of me wants that. If I get around to it, you're right about one thing we do fundamentally get each other. We get each other in the ways we've always longed to be gotten. You're one of an infinitesimally small number of people I've encountered in my global travels. Who gets it, who gets me and who gets yourself. Even if you don't see the full scope of that yet, you're so healthy it makes me sick. I want you and I'm starting to enjoy wanting you. I want you and I'm starting to enjoy wanting you. I want you to know that, to feel it, to live it, to release your control. I want you to want me too. I want you to want me to want you. I want you to meet me more than halfway. I want you to beg for it.
Speaker 1:You love it, don't you? It's for your own good. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but sometimes I have to be the bearer of bad news and it's my moral prerogative to share with you information that I know that you need to know to make the right decisions for yourself. So here goes. Three years ago, you died and went to hell. I know I was also shocked when I discovered that, but let's take it a little bit at a time.
Speaker 1:Chronologically, once upon a time. Chronologically, once upon a time, three years ago, you had a nice, boring life, or so it seemed. No-transcript, pulling yourself out of the chaos and the muck. That was your predominant experience for many years prior to that. Your main remaining vice was Del Taco for lunch on Mondays. You've gotten most of the other stuff thoroughly handled. You were doing okay Every day. You went to work, you worked when you didn't have to go into work. You did your own work on the side side hustling. You meditated, you practiced gratitude for the fact that you were still alive and were in fact doing quite well. You were glad to have love and accountability in your life and meaningful support. You were living your best mediocre life and you worked hard for that mediocrity. It was meaningful, it was your gift from you to yourself and you enjoyed it most of the time. And then one day it all fell apart, or you noticed, noticed, received information to the effect of informing you that it had already fallen apart, and you are just now finding out about it.
Speaker 1:As prophesied by the tarot card, the Tower, which tarot readers will insist, is actually good and can be auspicious and indicative of potentially great things on the other side of an episode of extremely painful chaos, as portended by the tower. But they will not say that the tower is good in the same way that the Fool or Death cards are good, because it's not. The tower means that the load-bearing Jenga block in your Jenga tower has or will come loose, loose and the tower will collapse or has already collapsed or is in the process of collapsing. And because of that you went deeply into denial, as one does. You carried on the motorized tasks that were necessary for maintaining your mediocre life. You went through the motions and because of that disconnection you became frightened of everything. You felt bitter, angry, resentful of the apparent success of people you used to be close to, and you weren't letting yourself really experience any of these feelings, so you were feeling them deep down. It was hurting. You didn't know why, you didn't fully acknowledge it, because you could not admit to yourself that the end of your life had begun, and because of that, the pain of the grief of that loss stretched out over years. There were spikes and dips, of course, but it's been like this for the last three years and it's still going strong.
Speaker 1:And now it's time to realize and own the fact that you are a completely different person now from the person you were the last time. You felt good or okay or human, and you don't like the person you've become. You're not even sure that you're a person anymore. You know now that you've been right here in hell this whole time and now it's time to start unpacking the boxes that you moved down here with and bunker down for a nice long stay here in hell.
Speaker 1:The moral of the story is that when you die and go to hell, hold on to denial as long as you can, try to accomplish something in that state. Changes come around real soon that make you a hell-dwelling hell-being, thoroughly and permanently condemned to hell, which is outside of the delivery range of most of the restaurants that do DoorDash, you can still fall in love. Here's how to do it. First, try to love yourself as much as you can and don't stop until you've utterly failed. Get deeply intimate with all of the granular details of your profound sense of inadequacy granular details of your profound sense of inadequacy. Be real, be vulnerable. Don't play games with people's minds and hearts except for your own.
Speaker 1:This will make you easy to seduce and manipulate, and you'll fall in love before you know what's happening. Don't be afraid of rejection. Get in there, lose your mind, break your own heart, get badly hurt. It's all good, for better or worse. You'll probably survive, and then, before you know it, you'll be ready to fall in love all over again.
Speaker 1:Good luck out there. Now that you're in love, the next thing you want to do is get out of it. Good luck out there. Now that you're in love, the next thing you want to do is get out of it. The best way to get out of love is to get into a serious relationship. Allow yourself to be exposed and brutally disappointed. If that's not an offer, you can detox, starve the beast, wash that love right out of your hair. It's up to you. So take some responsibility for your own happiness, or just get really into table tennis. You can't think your way out of heartache. The best you can do right now is probably numbness and distraction.
Speaker 1:Or you could fall in love with someone else instead. Limerence, that crazy, stupid anxious love that you're feeling only works with one other person at a time. Whatever you do, it'll probably take a while, so hunker down. I believe in you. You got this.
Speaker 4:Well, that was disappointing. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Alexia warned me I was wasting my time on maladaptive daydreams about you. Mark threw me a party and I met lots of cool people there, including two celebrities I've had crushes on since I was in middle school, and all of them were a lot more successful and a lot cooler than you'll ever be. I'm not sure why I'm even bothering with this, except that I want you to know how much I hate you and why I hate you and how disappointed I am.
Speaker 4:I don't like it when I trust people and they let me down. I don't like it when someone promises to sweep me off my feet and then refuses to do any of the work. I don't like it when people aren't honest with me about how badly broken they really are. It happens to me all the time. People lie to me by omission and think it's okay. People try to take advantage of my strength and it's manipulative and it's wrong and I hate it. I hate weakness, I hate losers and I hate you, aaron. You're not going to drag me into your lonely and decrepit little swamp of a world. I showed you a side of me that no one else ever gets to see, I made myself vulnerable for you and you weren't ready for that. You didn't know how to handle it. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. No one ever knows how to handle me. I want to connect with people, and people can't handle my strength. Maybe I can't handle it either. I should know better by now. Oh well, I want you to know one thing, aaron I'm a lot happier and stronger and more popular and more successful than you'll ever be, and I'm more lonely than you could ever understand. You could ever understand.
Speaker 4:I'm not really sorry. I hurt you. It wasn't my intention. I'm not sure what I even did wrong, but I hit some weak spot in your heart or in your psyche that you neglected to tell me about before we got into it and that hurt you, and I don't want to hurt you. It scares me how much I can hurt people, especially when it's the last thing I want to do.
Speaker 4:Alexa warned me about this. I should have paid more attention. Alexia is pretty smart. Anyway, I like you. I'll always like you. I think you're a pretty cool person, but I don't have a whole lot of time right now. There's a dinner party at Mark's tonight and he's going to screen his new film for us before anyone else gets to see it, and it's going to be awesome. I hate making fake apologies when I'm not really sorry, so I'll say good luck. I wish you the best. I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for. I hope you figure out how to stop hurting yourself and embarrassing yourself. It's gross and it's unbecoming, and you know you can do better. Goodbye, sandy.
Speaker 3:I know you feel great about yourself. I'm sure you'll enjoy adding me to the list of people you've hurt and driven half-mad through the sheer force of your awesomeness. Have fun bragging to your high-status friends about that. I know they'll be duly impressed. You never apologize for anything because you've never done anything wrong for the rest of us. And it's so lonely and difficult for you and yet somehow you get through the day. You're truly a hero for our troubled times. I think you are lonely and I think you intentionally inflicted that on me. You're not stupid. You know how to hurt people. When people hurt you, you hurt them back. You could sense I was distracted. You could tell I wasn't making room for you in my heart, that I wasn't allowing myself the same depth of emotion you were feeling. You wanted to punish me for that and you did.
Speaker 3:One of my most scary fears since I was a little kid has been failing to fit in. I hate not being part of the club, and the worst feeling in the world for me is when I let myself believe I've made it, I've achieved platinum status, and then I get it revoked through my own awkward stupidity. You kick me out of your exclusive little world and that hurts. I hate you for doing that and I hate myself for letting you do it and for not being able to hang with you and for still carrying you the way. I'm sorry. I played games with your head and your heart and for not knowing when enough was enough and it was time to get honest. I'm sorry. I wasn't more forthcoming about how much I was hurting and how broken I was and I I let you down. I didn't give you the attention or the strength I implied that I could or that you deserved, and I'm truly sorry. You're deeply flawed and insecure and I love that. I love the beautiful, intimidating genius you are and I love your vulnerability and sadness most of all. You trusted me to hold that. I didn't. I failed. I let you down. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:I'm afraid that no one else is ever going to get it. I'm afraid that I really am fated to only meaningfully connect with an infinitesimally small number of people and that when I screw it up I'll be punished and alone for a very long time. I'm afraid that I'm not really special, just weird Another pretentious jerk-off who's too hopelessly stuck in his own head, his own ensign and his own self-pity to ever connect with anyone. I'm afraid I'm going to be stuck here alone with my delusions and adverbs. I'm sorry. Please forgive me and thank you. I love you. You will be happy, you will be healthy, you will be safe and protected. You will live with an open heart. I'm going to buzz off and stop bugging you now. I won't bother you anymore, not unless you really want it. You really have to beg for it this time. Just kidding, maybe. Goodbye. I wish you the best because you are the best.
Speaker 1:You're in love, I'm in love, they're in love. Everybody is in love all the time. There is plenty of love to go around, it's abundant, and there are enough different kinds of love that we're all always in love all the time. It's part and parcel of the human condition. But you're here because you need help and you need help because you're experiencing a very particular kind of love, the symptoms of which include wanting to die, but also feeling as though you are truly alive for the first time, feeling at once ecstatic and miserable, behaving erratically, experiencing physical symptoms such as nausea, loss of appetite, butterflies in the gut.
Speaker 1:Butterflies love to play and seek pleasure. If you watch butterflies at play in their natural environment, it becomes self-evident that life in its essence is seeking pleasure. That is not a brutal Darwinian struggle for survival. There may be a brutal Darwinian struggle for survival going on in the background, but that is only to facilitate the seeking of and indulgence in pleasure, as expressed at its best by butterflies at play. But butterflies are not an appropriate metaphor for what we're describing here, although it is often employed, because this is not play, this is serious business and you're not having fun because the kind of love you're experiencing is something called limerence, and it's easy that you might think that's the only kind of love or the proper kind of love, because it is indeed the one that a lot of the songs and movies and TV shows address, because it's exciting, it has stakes, it's the best and worst of what life has to offer when viewed from a certain perspective, and what's really humiliating about it is that some people don't ever experience limerence, and if you're the kind of person who does, you will discover that when you fall in love with someone who does not experience limerence and is, in fact, confused by what the hell is wrong with you.
Speaker 1:The neuroscience behind limerence is currently unconclusive. It is thought to be related to the release of certain big shot chemicals in the brain, some of the major players, including oxytocin, norepinephrine, dopamine. These chemicals are thought to be involved in the experience of pleasure and desire and also the desperation and ache that is associated with limerence. Limerence can be a positive experience. I can provide intense feelings of love and admiration, spikes in those intoxicating brain chemicals, and it can create a platform for self-discovery and increased feelings of self-esteem. It can open compartments of the heart that we were not aware were there. There we can discover things about ourselves if we can experience limerence as a container for that kind of self-discovery. But that is not always easy to do because when it's in full effect, limerence can feel like barking madness and it could exacerbate the death drive. It can open our attachment wounds. It can be very dangerous and very serious and it can go on for months or even years.
Speaker 1:The circumstances in which Lerence occurs are unpredictable. It could happen in a snap, or it could happen over the course of becoming familiar with someone enough to fall in love with that person, but not enough to achieve real intimacy. Limerence and intimacy don't typically coexist. Limerence can result from social starvation, solitary confinement, especially being alone in a crowd and we're surrounded by people and we don't feel like they're on our level and we're waiting for that rare spirit, that exquisite specimen of a person, that earthy, sexy soul really gets us and brings out the best in us. When we encounter that person, we're unlikely to bond in an effective way. If we've been socialized to believe that in order to win the affections of people we have to hide certain aspects of ourselves, we'll hide everything to impress that person. When it feels like it's important and the stakes are really high, we'll end up awkwardly monologuing or not saying anything, sitting there in agonizing silence because we found the person who could really get it. But we don't want to risk inviting them in and letting them actually get it and jeopardizing that sense of ecstatic union, religious ecstasy, that defines the experience of limerence. It doesn't work with more than one person at a time. At a time when you're stuck on someone and sold on that idea of a person, you're stuck there and you might be for some time. It's intensified by adversity. If there are obstacles in the way of consummating that affection. It's just going to make it feel more intense. Sexual attraction is an essential component of women's. It doesn't usually happen without the horny part of it, because that is something that is so loaded with significance in our world that it's where most of the real explosions happen.
Speaker 1:In our interpretation of our human experience, limerence involves obsessive thoughts, daydreams, fantasies concerning the limerent object. It's essential component is uncertainty. When you know that it's going to happen or you know that it isn't going to happen, that is the beginning of the end for that limerent experience, part of it. And if you really want to stop it, that's not going to help and is in fact likely to make it worse, you can't think your way out of an ache in your heart. And if you have this particular ache in your heart, it's likely that that comes from factors such as low self-esteem, insecurity, loneliness things that are epidemic in our society but that it's hard to do anything about in an emergency triage capacity. And it does feel like that's what you need right now, because you feel like you're losing it, like you're falling apart, like the composure that allows you to get through a world of isolation and reduced expectations that all feels untenable.
Speaker 1:Because this is it, this is what matters, and there are three ways out. You can actually get down and dirty with the limerent object. You can consummate this aching desire and have a real relationship with that person, which could be intense and fleeting, and flame out and open up all other new channels of pain that you weren't even aware were possible. You can also starve the beast. Just stop stimulating the parts of your brain that are having and prolonging this experience.
Speaker 1:Stop checking the person's social media, stop texting, stop imagining that things are going to be different. Accept that they're not that into you. Hold the line, you'll get through this. It will be painful. It will probably take longer than you want it to, but those feelings will die, because we all die. Everything dies, everything is impermanent. Feelings die too. You could also fall in love with someone else and transfer those feelings onto someone else that you can then be obsessed with, and Limerence releases a capacity for creativity and imaginative flights of fancy that might make that easier to do, and that is another way to get out of this, which I absolutely believe you can do. You've survived much worse.
Speaker 4:My friend Stuart made a brilliant joke yesterday and I thought of you because you're the only person I know who would get it besides me and Stuart. Anyway, you're pretty cool. I miss you. I hope you're having fun.
Speaker 1:There's an anecdote involving a man. Could be anyone, but just for the sake of simplification let's say it's a man and he's driving around out in the boonies in the sticks, around out in the boonies in the sticks, in the middle of nowhere, for work, and there are a lot of hills, long stretches of road between the gas stations, not a lot of homes the ones that he does see are forbidding, with fences and beware of dog signs and he's lonely, feeling kind of resentful. He gets a flat tire, he pulls over the car, he prepares to change the tire himself because he's self-sufficient, independent, a grown-ass adult capable of handling his own business. He discovers that although he does have the donut spare tire in the trunk, he does not have a jack. He's not sure why. He probably lent it to someone else because that's the kind of thing he does. It's so fundamental to his nature, that generosity, that good Samaritan ship, that it's entirely possible that he would do that and not even remember doing it, for whatever reason. He finds himself jackless and so he starts walking, walking down the road, looking for a house so he can ask somebody else if he can borrow a jack to change his flat tire.
Speaker 1:As he's walking, he's thinking about how much he hates his job. He hates his job, the sense of resentment that comes from the unspoken contracts that he makes with other people that they, of course, violate, possibly because they're bad, negative people that want to take advantage of him, almost certainly in part because they don't know that they are subject to these agreements that they have not agreed to, because they only exist in his head, being covert contracts. So he's resentful of that. He's resentful of not getting the support and the love that he wants, needs and feels rightly that he deserves, and feeling that he doesn't really know how to express, as if, a sense of inadequacy, a fear of being known for who he really is and what he really needs. He hides a lot of that and that seems to help him get more affection and love and respect in the short term, while impoverishing him in the long term, running him into debt. That's many, many times the principle he thinks about those strained relationships in his life, how people don't recognize how hard he's trying, how hard he's working, how much he does. That's unseen, because he's too dignified to brag about it. He's walking along thinking about all of this, thinking about how undignified, how humiliating and shameful it is that he, someone who's worked this hard to get this far in life, is stuck out here doing this drudgery, driving around in the middle of nowhere, and now he has to ask someone for help. That's an affront to his dignity. He's fuming about it and grumbling and kicking the dirt, which just makes his shoes dirty, which is even more embarrassing. After about an hour he happens upon a farmhouse. There's a truck parked in front, there are people at home, obviously, and he sees this as it is, as a source of help, a resource for him in the context of his current struggles. So he goes up, knocks on the door, hears some rustling and bumping around inside. After about 60 seconds, a man answers the door. He's dressed in overalls, he's wearing a straw hat, with another piece of straw hanging out of his mouth that he's casually chewing on. And before he can say hello, the traveling man looks at him straight in the eye and says you know what? Just keep your damn jack. Keep your damn jack.
Speaker 1:Most of us love much as we hate. While hatred is a process of alienating aspects of ourselves that we're uncomfortable with and projecting them onto other people where it's easier for us to hate them without feeling conflicted Love is a process of alienating aspects of ourselves that we treasure but that we find undesirable in some way or incompatible with our fundamental self images, and projecting those onto other people where it is easier for us to love those things, to treasure them, and thus we end up wanting them Because we want to reunite with the alienated aspects of ourselves. We want to devour our own shadows and become whole and love ourselves for who we really are in that nearly infinite complexity, and to rest in our real power, which is so far beyond what we could normally conceive of. That it's terrifying. In the moments that we really experience that in its fullness and robustness, it is scary and our first inclination is to shut that off and shut it down and give that power to someone else, where then we can appreciate it and we can fantasize about achieving an ecstatic union with that person and reclaiming all of that and using it.
Speaker 1:But there always has to be that layer of remove, and that is tough, that is painful. That is limerence, that is pain. It's easy to get stuck there. Once you are, it's hard to get out. You're likely to do things that exacerbate the pain of it and prolong the suffering, the obsessive thoughts, self-destructive behavior is making a fool of yourself. Because you want to become that holy fool, go on the fool's journey and live in the pleasure and play that we were born to experience.
Speaker 1:But because you can't have that right away, remembrance can feel like the best option. Recognizing the problem is the first step towards solving it and addressing it, accepting it towards solving it and addressing it. Accepting it, recognizing it, admitting it Into your octagon when you can Live it on its own terms, recognizing and allowing All of that is the work of a lifetime, and in that work I can only wish you the best, because it looks different for you than it does for me, but we have more in common than not. This is K-Chung, los Angeles, 1630 AM, worldwide on the World Wide Web kchungradioorg. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Breathe into the experience of being here and ask yourself what am I so afraid of? Maybe you're afraid of missing some essential life experience. You're afraid you already have, or that it doesn't matter because nothing does. Maybe it's nothing, maybe you're just a regular nerves McGee. Or maybe you're afraid of your own glorious cataclysmic power, the riotous multitudes you contain. You are smart enough to know how nearly infinitely ignorant you are. But you're not too smart to be hot, and you may already be a satanic Buddhist. Nothing is good or bad in isolation, only in context. The Buddha and the Beastmaster are a good team. This right here is all you get. Life is for living up down across diagonally sideways, because nothing matters. You may already be a Satanic Buddhist.
