Have you ever dated someone who showered you with lavish gifts within days of meeting you? Maybe they spent the following week constantly texting you, giving you compliments, or making plans for your joint future—only to suddenly disappear, just when you’d grown reliant on them. If this sounds familiar, you may have experienced what’s often referred to as “love bombing.”
While love bombing is not a clinical term, it’s gained recent popularity on social media, and dates back to the 1970s—when followers of the Unification Church of the United States used the phrase to describe how church members would latch onto potential recruits. Love bombing typically refers to a form of emotional abuse that utilizes excessive displays of affection to gain control over another person. Love bombing can sometimes look similar to the initial phase of a blossoming healthy relationship, but is characterized by calculated deception and a desire to assert control.
Read on to learn more about what love bombing typically looks like, how to distinguish it from genuine love, and strategies for healing from emotional abuse.
What is love bombing?
Love bombing is a form of emotional abuse, in which a person uses grandiose displays of affection to gain control over someone else. This manipulation tactic often employs love languages, such as words of affirmation or gift giving, to foster a sense of dependence and trust—making it difficult to leave the relationship.
While love bombing can happen at any stage of a relationship, it is more common at the start. Someone who is love bombing will often make themselves initially endlessly available. They may also try to rush certain aspects of the relationship—referring to you as their soulmate, or discussing serious future plans, such as marriage or children.
Common signs of love bombing:
- They give excessive gifts
- They constantly flatter and praise you
- They lack boundaries, and don’t respect yours
- They attempt to isolate you from loved ones
- They demand all of your attention
- They are irrationally jealous
- They attempt to speed up your relationship
Many people think love bombing only occurs in romantic relationships, but it can happen in friendships and family dynamics, too. This might look like using gratuitous praise to try to become your best friend (or favorite family member) in order to cut you off from the rest of your support system.
The three phases of love bombing
If you’ve ever been love bombed, you may wonder how your relationship suddenly transitioned from near bliss to total abandonment. Love bombing often shows up in three distinct phases:
- Idealization: You meet someone new, and they suddenly give you all of their time and attention. You receive an abundance of gifts, compliments, or other displays of affection. Things may seem too good to be true.
- Devaluation: You try to establish boundaries, but find they are rejected. When you object, you are told nothing is wrong.
- Discard: You take further measures to confront the person love bombing you, and they either refuse to take accountability, ghost you, or initiate a break up.
While these stages are typically linear, they can repeat. It can be difficult to extricate yourself from this cycle, since praise and gifts may feel good in the moment—and someone who is love bombing will typically do whatever they can to keep you within their control. However, there are ways to disrupt the cycle.
How do you know if it’s love bombing?
A first step to removing yourself from an abusive dynamic is knowing how to identify the abuse. This can be difficult with love bombing, since it can look similar to the “honeymoon period” many people experience after connecting with someone new. While healthy relationships can start with strong infatuation, praise, and a desire for intimacy, there are some key distinctions to keep in mind.
Love bombing is done with the intention to control another person, while healthy relationships leave space for individuals’ boundaries. While it may take some time to negotiate boundaries that work for both parties in a new relationship, these discussions should never be met with all-out refusal to cooperate. If you feel uncomfortable with the way that a new relationship is developing, you should feel comfortable addressing it.
Love bombing and OCD
Love bombing can be especially hard to identify if you’re navigating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is a complex mental health condition characterized by intrusive thoughts, feelings, urges, images, and sensations (also known as obsessions). In response, people with OCD perform repetitive behaviors or rituals (known as compulsions) in an effort to mitigate distress. Relationship OCD (ROCD), a subtype of the condition characterized by ongoing intrusive thoughts and feelings regarding close personal relationships, often causes people to question feelings of love. If you have ROCD, you may find yourself fixating on whether or not you’re receiving real love, or experiencing love bombing.
It’s also possible to become obsessed with whether or not you, yourself, are love bombing someone else—especially if you struggle with intrusive thoughts about accidentally hurting others. However, it’s important to remember that love bombing is a form of emotional abuse, which requires calculated effort. Because OCD obsessions are typically ego-dystonic, meaning they are incompatible with a person’s real morals and values, people with OCD are highly unlikely to act on their intrusive thoughts.
Obsessions related to love bombing may trigger compulsions, such as leading you to ruminate, check, or ask for reassurance about the authenticity of your relationship. In some cases, you may find yourself avoiding commitment altogether. If your partner or partners aren’t aware of your OCD diagnosis (or don’t completely understand it), it’s possible they may misinterpret some of your compulsions as love bombing—especially if you rely on compulsions like repeatedly asking if a partner loves you. Talking more openly about your OCD with loved ones can help mitigate some of these misunderstandings.
Healing from love bombing
The emotional whiplash of going through love bombing can be jarring. It’s common to experience depression, trust issues, low self-esteem and self-blame. Love bombing can also trigger anxiety about future relationships.
Dealing with love bombing is difficult for anyone, but if you’re already navigating a mental health condition, the experience may exacerbate your symptoms. Those living with depression, anxiety, and OCD may find their symptoms elevated after experiencing emotional abuse.
It’s important to give yourself plenty of time to heal, and reflect on what you want from future relationships. It can also be tremendously beneficial to seek support from a trained therapist.
ERP therapy
If you’re navigating anxiety or OCD, exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy can be a very helpful tool for healing. This evidence-based treatment works by gradually exposing you to whatever triggers your anxieties and obsessions, while helping you resist the urge to immediately react with compulsions.
If you have OCD or ROCD and are healing from love bombing, you may find yourself performing compulsions to try to manage intrusive thoughts. But, Tracie Ibrahim, LMFT, CST, and Chief Compliance Officer, says these behaviors only create more distress: “That’s why it’s important to get treatment as soon as possible and learn how to stop intentionally feeding in the compulsion.”
If your anxieties or obsessions are causing you to avoid forming close relationships out of fear of encountering emotional abuse again, a trained ERP therapist might have you slowly begin to connect with people in lower-stakes environments—like an online book club, gardening group, or run club. If intense emotions about your new relationships emerge, your therapist might have you write down your feelings, and resist the urge to immediately react.
It’s about being able to sit with that uncertainty,”
Tracie Ibrahim
In time, you can learn to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing exactly how a relationship will progress, and begin navigating your social life with more ease.
Find the right OCD therapist for you
All our therapists are licensed and trained in exposure and response prevention therapy (ERP), the gold standard treatment for OCD.
Practice communicating boundaries
It’s easy to lose track of your own needs and desires after experiencing love bombing. But, understanding what you want out of future relationships is an important step for healing. Try writing out a list of your important relationship boundaries. Think about how you’ll go about communicating these boundaries to future partners, friends, and family. Consider how you’ll react if they cross your limits, and create a plan that you feel confident in.
Create a safety plan
In some cases, it may feel dangerous to leave a relationship where you think love bombing is occurring. If you fear for your safety, spend some time identifying safe places to go, and trusted friends or family you can rely on. If you need help with planning, the National Domestic Violence Hotline can connect you with confidential advice, shelter, legal assistance and more.
Bottom Line
Love bombing can be a difficult form of emotional abuse to identify, but it’s possible to note the signs, remove yourself and eventually heal. A therapist can help you find confidence and ease in future relationships. Know that you’re not to blame for what you’ve experienced, and that you can come out the other side with a better grasp on what true love looks like.
Key Takeaways
- Love bombing is not a genuine display of affection; it is a form of emotional abuse.
- It can be hard to tell the difference between love bombing and real love—especially if you are living with OCD—but there are key differences and ways to get clarity.
- Love bombing is a manipulation tactic that can significantly affect your mental health, but there are ways to cope and heal.
