why you’re obsessed with people who can’t love you back
back from the borderline
mollie adler
4.8 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode examines limerence not as a personality flaw or a trendy attachment term, but as a learned psychological strategy that begins in childhood. Rather than treating obsession as irrational, we explore how it develops as a way to survive inconsistent, misattuned, or emotionally absent parenting, and how that same strategy later shows up in adult relationships.
This phenomenon explains why so many of us become fixated on emotionally unavailable partners and why the end of even a short relationship (or even a situationship) can feel devastating in a way that doesn’t match the actual reality of the situation. It’s why obsession often gets mislabeled as “love” or “passion.” We look at how the mind uses fantasy and idealization to stabilize itself and why emotionally unavailable people reliably trigger these patterns.
What This Episode Covers
- What limerence actually is (and what it isn’t)
- Why obsession often forms around people you barely know
- How childhood coping strategies turn into adult romantic fixation
- The role of emotional unavailability and intermittent reinforcement
- Why intensity gets confused with intimacy and “fate”
- How fantasy and projection stabilize the nervous system
- The overlooked spiritual dimension of limerence and devotion
- What it means to finally step out of the pattern without self-blame
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Long-term listeners of this podcast know that I've spent the last five years talking about the dark. |
| 0:06.5 | Now I've built a flashlight, and it's called Moods. |
| 0:10.4 | It's an instrument for serious, private inner work designed to dismantle your excuses and never |
| 0:15.7 | inflate your ego or assume the role of a sycophantic companion. |
| 0:19.6 | And the wait list is finally live. |
| 0:21.7 | Access is granted in the exact order you sign up. |
| 0:24.9 | Lock in your spot now at moods.world. |
| 0:28.8 | Welcome to the new era of inner work. |
| 0:35.6 | Welcome to Back from the Borderline. |
| 0:37.9 | I'm your host, Molly, and I don't want to talk to your personality. |
| 0:42.1 | I want to talk to your soul. |
| 0:44.0 | This podcast is where we unravel toxic programming from dysfunctional family systems, societal scripts, and the mental health labels that have kept you small. |
| 0:53.1 | We talk about sovereignty, shadow work, |
| 0:56.0 | emotional alchemy, culture, AI, and everything that lives at the intersection of the soul and the |
| 1:01.8 | system. Back from the borderline means back from the edge, from the abyss, from the illusion that |
| 1:08.1 | you're too broken to heal. If that sounds like the kind of journey you're |
| 1:11.9 | ready to take, follow the podcast on the player you're listening to right now. I drop new |
| 1:16.8 | episodes every Tuesday. All right, let's get into it. My 14-month-old daughter's face is red and contorted in rage. For a completely unknown reason, |
| 1:37.3 | she is in a full-scale toddler meltdown. She screams almost like, I've betrayed her. Her tiny little hands are |
| 1:48.4 | bald into fists and one of those fists smashes against my jaw and it hurts really, really bad. |
| 2:01.1 | And I feel this hot spike of very human frustration in my own chest. |
| 2:07.6 | And immediately I have this instinct to just put her down and walk away. |
... |
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