E100 (layup) - How to Spot Love Bombing Early & Trust Yourself Again After Narcissistic Heartbreak

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[00:00:00] By the end of today's episode, you will know exactly how to spot love bombing before you fall into another narcissistic trap. ​

Speaker: Welcome to Heartbreak to Wholeness, the podcast helping you heal from the mindfuck of narcissistic relationships and move towards the secure, peaceful woman you want to become. I am your host, Bre Wolta, Relationship Clarity Coach and EFT Certified Practitioner. Let's dive in.

Welcome back to Heartbreak to Wholeness. Maybe you have had this experience, you meet someone new and he showers you with attention. You are getting texts all day long. You're getting flowers just because you're having these deep conversations that make you feel truly seen. And it feels like the kind of love that you have been waiting for.

So you get in a relationship with this person, and for a while it's feeling amazing, but then this warmth starts to fade, and the sweetness [00:01:00] suddenly, maybe not even suddenly, the sweetness subtly turns sharp, until you find yourself walking on eggshells more often than you're not wondering what happened to this loving man that desired me so much? Does that sound familiar?

If it does, and if you have found yourself here more than once, you are in good company. As a fellow woman who has been love bombed, bamboozled, played duped, there's a lot of words that we can use for this. I can tell you that you are not broken. You are not stupid.

There is a reason behind this madness, and once you learn how to spot it, you can never fall forward again.

So that's why we're doing this episode, because today I want to really unpack this, this hidden trap of love bombing and explain why this experience feels so defeating while also giving you tools to recognize it next time. So in this episode, you will learn how to [00:02:00] stop confusing intensity for true intimacy.

You are going to know how to actually trust yourself again, because spotting love bombing is such a key in doing that. And you will learn the painful cost of not spotting it early, which you have already felt in your life.

And be sure to stick around to the end of the episode where I will pull an Oracle card to help offer you a message that you can use this week to stay more conscious in your healing.

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Let's start with what love bombing looked like for. Love bombing with my ex. Did not look like these expensive, week long, month long trips around the world, or these surprise diamond earrings or these extravagant gifts. It looked like all day Texting.

It looked like hearing from him that I was his soulmate, his queen, that the universe had finally brought us together and a lot of enthusiasm around how it felt. [00:03:00] So right so fast. It looked like love letters and cards and him describing dreams where I was finally his and we were walking this life together.

A lot of. Picture painting of our future. It looked like him coming to moon circles and yoga and reading Oracle cards and meditation and getting into his spirituality and having not just an interest in what I was doing, but wanting to do everything that I was doing. And you know what it felt like, it felt like I was this flower and someone had finally come into my garden and was, was fertilizing me, was, was watering me with all of this delicious fertilizer that I was like really thirsty. That I was sort of this flower that needed.

Someone to come in and water it, and I was finally getting somebody who was taking the time to come into my garden and [00:04:00] just dousing me in this overp pouring of desire. He wanted me, he was choosing me. He was actively engaging in my life, and it felt fucking good.

I mean, he was telling me that the universe finally conspired to bring us together for God's sakes. Like it, it felt like it was right. It felt like I had finally met my person.

So of course then I was very confused and fought it tooth and nail when this, I can't get enough of you. Overp pouring of desire, skit ended.

I thought that it was just a normal transition out of the honeymoon phase, like everybody talks about. I thought it was just our relationship getting hard, like everyone else's. And what I didn't know was that affection shouldn't turn into criticism.

Sweet words shouldn't turn into the silent treatment, and getting smaller and smaller out of fear of rocking the boat was not part of a healthy [00:05:00] relationship.

It was never a healthy relationship, not even in the love bombing stage, when it felt really, really good and I didn't know that. And that's the thing, because love bombing feels like a fairytale at first, but it's not real connection. It's not real love. It's not actually love at all. It is. It is an illusion and it's a setup for the rest of the stages of the narcissistic cycle.

But I didn't know that at the time, so. Let's just define what love bombing is because it would've been really helpful for me in that period of time.

The best way that I have to describe love bombing is thinking about it like a sugar rush. A sugar rush to me in your body feels like. An explosion of excitement and like energy and passion and desire, right? You eat all the sugar and you're like, I can fucking rule the world.

Let's go. And in these relationships, that's what it feels like in the beginning. We are so jacked up on the desire and the dopamine and the oxytocin, and it's just flooding [00:06:00] us over and over and over again like a short burst of energy. It's the thinking that you can ride off into the sunset.

It's the thinking that they're the perfect person after three dates. It's thinking that you can run hard and fast enough through the I love yous, and the moving in and the getting engaged but then you crash just like a sugar rush.

You can't sustain that high level of energy and excitement. Your body is naturally going to crash. It is unsustainable. Unlike a healthy meal, which is nourishment, a healthy meal gives us energy that's released more slowly and more sustainably in our body. It fuels us instead of jacking us up like a spaceship rocket and then us blasting off and then blowing up in space. That's a lot of metaphors, but why it works, is because we are going so fast that there isn't time for us to like think about what [00:07:00] is actually happening. We're confusing this fast intensity with deep connection.

Our nervous system gets addicted to the highs, right? Like I said in my story, it felt really good to have all of that fertilizer finally pouring down on me. All of that desire that I had been longing and searching and wanting for, from a man to feel. That felt really good. And we override our gut instincts because we're going so fast, there's so much excitement, and we feel like it's the one, or we're literally being told that he's the one, or that we're soulmates, or that we're twin flames and it's fine, and we finally found each other

and then we get sucked into this narcissistic cycle. The love bombing is just the first stage. So then we start to feel the devaluing and the discarding, and we're left confused as to what the fuck happened and why we feel so unlovable yet again.

We hit the sugar high, and then we had the sugar crash, and then we're at the bottom feeling worthless and [00:08:00] unlovable. And when we don't understand or don't see love bombing for what it is, we get stuck in the cycle, right? But it's not just another breakup, it is years of lost trust in ourself. It is feeling like you have lost yourself completely and have to start over from scratch every single time a relationship ends.

It is a shame spiral that starts to solidify as truth. Starting to tell yourself something is wrong with me. I am not enough. I will always choose the wrong people.

It is emotional exhaustion that makes you want to hide and armor up and give up, not just on love, but on your ability to even feel like joy again.

It is horrible. It's horrible to experience love bombing and the narcissistic cycle. But here's what I know and here's the good news in all of this, is that there are signs that you can look for.

And you can [00:09:00] get more skilled at looking for those signs before it traps you.

Because when you can see this clearly, when you can see love bombing for what it is, when you can spot it a mile away, you're not just avoiding another narcissistic relationship. You are rebuilding trust in yourself. You stop questioning your intuition. You feel safe opening your heart again because you know that you can recognize manipulation from the start and you can hold yourself through that situation.

You feel confident and equipped with the self-respect and self-love to be able to not fall for that, too good to be true or really grip onto the potential that he can change and get back to where he was. When things start to crumble.

I want you to imagine like actually walking away at the first red flag, because I know when you look back at your relationship, you're like, I fucking saw it. I saw that red flag, and I did not walk away from it. So imagine being [00:10:00] able to walk away from that red flag and the beginning.

And then imagine being able to enter a new relationship, feeling calm instead of anxious all the time. Like what would a baseline of peace feel like in a relationship and not a baseline of eggshells Where in that, that dating or that courting period, you could stay interested, but unattached,

curious, precautious.

It's like giving you the ability to be able to recognize what is the potential for real love and what is that fake intensity.

So it's really, I believe a invaluable skill.

Okay, so what do you do? Because there are specific patterns three in particular that really give away love bombing early on, so I want to empower women with the knowledge, which is why

I I put together a simple and powerful resource called the Three Ways to Recognize Love Bombing.

It breaks down the signs that most women miss and I lay out actually what it would feel like in the [00:11:00] healthy part of a normal beginning to a relationship. So you get the red flag and then you get the, the green flag, I guess, of what to look for in a healthy dynamic.

So that you can stop second guessing yourself and you can feel confident spotting, manipulation before it costs you years of your life so you can actually go on a fucking date and enjoy yourself with your eyes wide open.

Knowing that you'd be able to spot something that doesn't feel right or sound right or look right and be able to just trust yourself in that situation.

So if you keep finding yourself falling into the trap of the narcissistic cycle because of love bombing, and it's leaving you feeling exhausted and afraid that you're never gonna trust yourself again, but you really wanna feel secure knowing that you're never gonna fall into it again, this guide is for you.

It is free. It's for you. The link is in the show notes, or you can go to Bre Wolta dot com and get the love bombing guide on my website.

And before we go for today, let's pull an Oracle card that [00:12:00] will offer you a message that you can use this week. Untangle is the card that just came out I barely even had to shuffle. So let me find untangle in the book here. And I will read to you what it says, untangle a situation has you twisted and entwined with another, and it's time to untangle yourself.

Seek clarity, know what is yours to own, and let go of the rope that has tied you up in this mess. You need not always be concerned with what everyone else does or thinks or wants from you. Loosen the threads so that you can find your own string. Follow the yarn that begins in your heart and weave your own tapestry for others to admire.

No more twisting yourself up in the knots of other people's expectations, rules, or control. Untangle yourself. Ah, I mean, untangle. Hello. I use that word all the time. It's in the title of this podcast because that's really what it feels like. We have to untangle ourself from this knot of experience, of [00:13:00] narcissistic relationships, and it can feel daunting.

It can feel like the biggest knot you've ever seen in your life. It can feel like you're never gonna figure out what even string to start pulling first, but it's possible. I'm walking proof that you can untangle the mind fuck and learn how to spot it in the future so that you're not wasting your time with any more narcissistic people or otherwise, emotionally unavailable people. You deserve someone to show up consciously in a relationship, putting in the effort that you're putting in, and like thriving and love, you deserve to thrive, not just survive in relationships.

So go to the show notes and download your guide. You are going to love it. And until I see you in the next episode, please, please, please remember that you are not alone. [00:14:00]