The events culminating with a love bombing can leave one wondering.
Why did I disregard my suspicions?
Was there a way to stop it from happening?
Maybe, maybe not. However, it’s just one reason to up your game regarding dream interpretation and spirituality.
Friends and family are a blessing. They add enjoyment and richness to life in so many ways.
People who love bomb, however, are not friends. You’ll hear the word “narcissist” bandied about when people talk about them. Don’t get too hung up on phrases or labeling. Applying the label isn’t as useful as realizing that they’re not good people. They’re not good to be around and definitely not good in their actions.
Why is it called a love bomb?
If you’ve ever seen the effects of one, the answer will be obvious.
In a love bombing, someone tries to curry favor with a target and the people in their circle.
When the emotions, the lies, and the manipulations (also known as “the bomb”) come to the surface, it doesn’t just injure one person. It affects the whole group.
Some group members are affected more than others, like in a regular bombing.
The love bomber leaves a disaster in their wake.
Love bombing attempts to influence a single person through demonstrations of overwhelming attention and affection. The actions are aimed at one person, but others are also affected. As a dysfunctional tactic favored by sociopaths and narcissists when in a family, worksite, or group of friends, the sociopath’s actions don’t affect only one person. They affect the entire group.
The sociopath or narcissist takes careers, relationships, happiness, and the emotional stability of others down. In the process, they destroy or damage them. The amount of damage they can inflict on the lives of others is breathtaking. Motives can be hard to understand. Some speculate these sociopaths are empty spiritually inside, like they have no soul.
You can spend a lot of time wondering why they do what they do. All that time may be fruitless in the end.
It’s essential to remember sociopaths and narcissists can be male or female. Pop psychology usually focuses on male love bombers. You’ll never succeed in picking them out in a crowd. There’s no “one look” to them.
In recent years, the terms sociopath and narcissist were abandoned by the mental health profession. The new preferred term is antisocial personality disorder. These people are described as having a bundle of dark personality traits. An umbrella term may be preferred because long lists of terms can characterize both types of personalities. An individual will have some but not all of the characteristics on the list.
No matter what you call them, their effect on others ends up being destructive.
The effect is what you need to focus on. That’s most helpful.
One sociopath and his girlfriend
Matt met Terri in Virginia. At the time, she had recently broken up with her long-time boyfriend. “I’ve never met anyone like her before,” he said to her and her friends.
She was the smartest, most wonderful, incredible woman in the world, he said.
First came all the teddy bears. When he found out she collected unicorns, he bought her those too. She was better than him, but she had to be his. Had to.
With his demonstrations of affection, Matt worked on Terri’s mom too. He told her mom she was responsible for turning him around for making him into a better man. Yes, he had some run-ins with the law, but that was going to be behind him now that Terri was going to be with him.
Matt emotionally worked on her father and her girlfriends as well.
In the beginning, Matt’s behavior was perfect and plausible. There’s nothing wrong with someone thinking you’re lovely.
The problem happens partly because the whole relationship moves along so fast the sociopath doesn’t have time to reveal him or herself.
I heard the story after Matt had gone through her entire unicorn collection. He threw the ceramic ones out of their second-floor apartment window. The figurines shattered on the asphalt below, the stuffed ones Matt ripped apart or cut with a knife. At the end of the relationship, Matt’s behavior was designed to physically and mentally hurt Terri to destroy her.
To help Terri was to risk crossing Matt, but Terri’s friends did anyway. You do that when your friend gets threatened and someone is ruthless. The perpetrator crosses a line.
When Terri finally did leave, Matt played psychological games with her to get her to turn on the people who had helped her get out of there.
She turned around and accused others who had helped her of trying to ruin Matt, taking it up with their bosses.
If the bosses had been the type who meddle in the affairs of their employees, there would have been firings and all kinds of fallout.
Matt had told Terri what she wanted to hear in the beginning. Terri, you’re special.
The previous boyfriend had been uncertain of so many things. Could they stay together with him going away to school? Did he still want to be with Terri after being together with her since high school?
Matt, Terri, and the former boyfriend were all in their early 20s. Matt was confident, had a plan, and was so loving. She followed him into the Army, where he swore he’d make something of himself. His violence, however, wasn’t routine. His psychological cruelty toward her wasn’t typical.
It surely was visible before she left Virginia. It surely was evident in how he spoke about people they knew, old girlfriends, and the way he treated waiters and waitresses at restaurants. You only have to realize the signs were signs when you see them.
Standards are key to repelling or defeating love bombers
The boss believed work was work, and home was home. He thought they needed to be kept separate. As long as home didn’t affect work – and the work was done – employees were free to conduct their personal lives as they saw fit.
Only that belief saved the jobs of the people who tried to help Terri get away.
While there are problems with that outlook sometimes, that was how it was with this particular leader.
Terri could have had the standard where she would only get married after a period of dating.
Terri’s friends could have had the standards where they didn’t suffer fools and gave Matt and Terri a wide berth.
Conversely, they could have had a robust anti-psychological abuse stance and shown up with some gang members and sent Matt packing after they beat the hell out of them.
That would have ended up with a trip to the police station and jail.
Love bombings never give you good choices. They’re situations contrived by these sociopathic individuals to inflict mental torture.
Nevertheless, standards guide you toward some kind of resolution, imperfect as the resolution and the standards themselves may be. They also seem to keep you out of involvement with these sociopaths and narcissists.
Call them what they are: evil people. Having standards repels them like nothing else once they’re done trying to get you to go against what you know to be right.
How to spot a potential love bomber
Once you’ve encountered one antisocial person, you can often spot others. There’s a pattern. You see the antisocial individuals working their way through the lives of others in a circle, flattering, offering overwhelming attention, getting favors, being unreliable, backbiting, and sowing chaos and discord.
While you’re on to them pretty early on in the process, others won’t necessarily be. If you try to warn others, at best, you’re going to be seen as an alarmist. At worst, you’re someone persecuting this poor, innocent, charming person.
They probably have more charisma than you do. Sorry. That’s the way evil works. It tempts. Warn too stridently, and you’ll make yourself into their target, then the rest of the crowd will make you their target.
Flattery is always more agreeable to listen to than the truth and your suspicions. You might even go over an article like this one about how to spot a psychopath.
“It says they have a poor sense of smell. I have a poor sense of smell!”
“Oh, that’s pop psychology!”
“He doesn’t say ‘um’ any more than the rest of us. That’s stupid.”
There’s not a certain number of signs before they are or aren’t considered a psychopath, sociopath, or whatever you want to call them. It doesn’t matter. People get hung up on definitions. The lying should be enough, so should the amoral behavior. However, lists like the one above are a way to trigger reflection to help you realize when there’s something not quite right with the individual.
Being a good person won’t repel a potential love bomber the way standards will.
Here are some examples of standards you can have:
“I’m sorry. I don’t believe in loaning friends money. That can ruin friendships.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t believe in going out drinking the night before I have to go to work. I only party on the weekends.”
“You get one round; I’ll get the other.”
“I don’t believe in cheating on my boyfriend/girlfriend. It makes life too complicated.”
These sociopaths are primarily interested in screwing up other peoples’ life. Standards repel them.
Can you shield friends from a love bomber?
Keeping yourself out of the mire is easier than it is trying to keep other people out of the swamp.
Others can be too worried about being “nice” rather than fair or whatever.
When it came to friends, my grandmother had a little saying she must have gotten from a song she heard as a girl: “Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold.”
When one of these individuals moves into your life, they come in with a lot of flare, flash, and excitement. However, remember that just because someone is charismatic, is fun, and has style, it doesn’t make them a sociopath or antisocial.
The key to remember is that the sociopath’s colors get revealed over time. Antisocial individuals have been with us forever. Grandma’s wisdom is to treat older friendships with more value than newer ones because they’ve had time to prove themselves. That was as true 100 years ago as it is today.
If you’re the one being targeted by the antisocial individual (or suspected antisocial individual), keep your head. Watch how they speak of and treat others. If anything is excessive or not particularly charitable in their dealings with others, realize you could be on the other end of that wrath. They tend to move on to easier targets. It’s easier for them to target weaker individuals than stronger ones for their games.
A good time to put their words and actions together to sort them all out is when you’re falling asleep and in your dreams.
Being firm and friendly seems to be the best defense.
Keep and maintain a dream journal. While your conscious mind can be going along with what the potential antisocial individual can be saying and doing, your subconscious mind can have its reservations. The subconscious will often tip you off in dreams as to what those reservations are. There’s nothing better than remembering and writing your dreams down in a dream diary to get a general feeling for the overall themes of this period in your life. The incongruities of the love-bombing sociopath can stand out in dreams, especially if you notice a theme.
Not everyone is a sociopath, so there’s no reason to have a lot of anxiety about meeting others. If you find yourself becoming anxious, try this anti-anxiety hack. Learn from experiences, good and bad.
Remember, the reciprocity instinct is strong. It would help if you told yourself you don’t need to repay anything right away. There’s time for that later. Acknowledge the compliments and move on for the time being.
You hear about a relationship that started with a bang from time to time and continues forty, fifty years later. Realize whether or not it started quickly isn’t important. If the couple was meant to be together, it could have proceeded after a period of courting. A couple of weeks like Matt and Terri had isn’t enough time to know much about any dark personality traits someone has. A period of getting to know the other is the best way to shield yourself and others from the effects of a love bombing. There is no other.
Antisocial people always reveal their true nature sooner or later. It’s better not to be around when they do.
For further reading:
Morning affirmations are mental medicine
Understanding a dream about quitting
Learn anatomy and physiology before you need it
Science tries to understand if there’s a link between sleep and ED
James Cobb RN, MSN, is an emergency department nurse and the founder of the Dream Recovery System. His goal is to provide his readers with simple, actionable ways to improve their health and maximize their quality of life.
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Updated June 24, 2021