Lovebombing

You only just met him and he’s charming, attentive, thoughtful.  He asks you questions, listens with a patience you’ve never known.  You have so much in common.  You love long walks along the beach?  He does too!   You dream of working for yourself?  He just quit his (very good) job to do the same.  You need to find a new apartment?  He’ll help you do it or knows someone who will.  Your first date goes so well that you definitely want to see him again.

And so you will.  And he’ll phone you.  Several times a day.  He’ll send you messages all throughout the day to tell you how much he misses you, how he’s thinking of you.  He’ll bring you to your favourite restaurant where he’s reserved a special table just for the two of you.  You love flowers?  He’ll send you a bunch.  At your workplace.  So everyone can see how much you mean to him.

Everything is perfect.  He is blown away by your beauty, finds you magnificent, intelligent, funny.  He knows how to read you, see your vulnerabilities, your wounds, and how to take care of them.  He shares his with you.  He finally feels understood and so incredibly happy to at last be able to open up and be vulnerable with a woman.  You are the woman he’s been looking for his entire life, the one he could never find.  It was because the universe was preparing you for this, this meeting of souls.  You are made for each other.  

Little by little, you get used to his little gestures: his phone calls, his daily messages, his capacity to listen to you.  His compliments make you feel special.

On top of it, you were in a difficult place when you met.  Maybe you’d just come out of a relationship and were hurting or you just left a job or lost a person close to you.  The manipulator senses it and comes to your rescue.  It feels so amazing to be loved and admired.  It’s a breath of fresh air that becomes your drug. 

It’s not only that you want to be with him.  You need to be with him.  He’s become indispensable. 

You’re in a whirlwind of love and emotions.  You’re losing your footing.  And soon, too soon, your heart. 

But as we say, if it seems too good to be true…

In reality, you are the latest victim of “love bombing” but you don’t yet know it.

What is love bombing?  Simply put, it’s a manipulation technique used by emotional vampires, such as malignant narcissists and psychopaths, to lure their intended victims and create an emotional and even physical dependence on them.  Love bombing makes victims easy to manipulate so that the manipulator can play with them and achieve his goals. 

During the love bombing period, the victim doesn’t realise that the words and behaviour of the manipulator are not sincere.  She takes them in as truth and as any person falling in love would do.  And she returns the favour with compliments and attentiveness to her future torturer.  In doing so, she gives him his required dose of recognition and positive reinforcement that he needs in order to maintain his fragile ego. 

Love bombing is intrinsic in the manipulators first phase of destruction, the stages being Idealisation, Devaluation, Discard.  This stage can last as long as necessary for the manipulator.  Often, it lasts until he feels that the victim has fallen into his lair and is in love with him or that she is “acquired” in one way or another.  And it’s at this moment that things change suddenly and abruptly.

What are the signs that a victim is “acquired” and what happens after this?  I’ll write more in a future article.