The term “love bombing” has become a part of our everyday vernacular and is often used to describe the beginning of what will ultimately become a toxic or emotionally abusive relationship.

Moving too fast in a relationship has always been regarded as a potential “red flag,” but love bombing takes that idea to a whole new level. Love bombing is a form of control and abuse. It turns love into a weapon, and the grand gestures are, in reality — manipulations.

What is love bombing?

The action or practice of lavishing someone with attention or affection, especially to influence or manipulate them.

I had an experience with love bombing. It did lead to an emotionally abusive “relationship,” but I had never heard the term until after being love-bombed. I found an article three months into our “relationship” about love bombing, and to my embarrassment now, I sent it to him. I challenged him and told him that was exactly what he had been doing to me. He lied his way out, blamed me, and, well wait . . . I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me take you back to the very beginning of my experience of love bombing and what I learned from it.

At the beginning of our relationship, meaning within days, he was buying me gifts, sending me flowers at work, and asking if I wanted to go with him to visit his family down South. He was proclaiming I was the woman he had been looking for his whole life. He told me I was the most beautiful woman he had seen in real life, and he was going to give me his name. He was talking about marriage and children and even suggested I stop taking birth control.

It all felt very rushed. He was very attentive and responded quickly to texts, and he would frequently message and call me. In truth, the texting was incessant and would later become obsessive. This is important to remember, because a love-bomber will eventually retract all their attention and leave you wondering what you did wrong. (Let me assure you — you did nothing wrong.) It will leave you craving that attention, and you will be left in a cycle of abuse.

The gifts were making me uncomfortable, and I felt they were too much and unnecessary. I remember feeling odd about the flowers he sent to my office as they did not feel genuine to me; it felt as though I was being claimed. I thought I would be okay by simply being aware, keeping my eyes open, and controlling the pace, but deep down, I felt unsettled by the whole situation. Little did I know at that time that I would become dependent on the love bombing.

Instinctively I knew something was off about him. You see, that was one of my fatal flaws in my experience — I saw something coming — I just didn’t get out of the way. I wanted to be loved just like anyone else does. I wanted to believe that the compliments were genuine. After spending two years alone following my divorce, I wanted to know that there was still a chance for me to be loved again.

Fast forward a year. I was rummaging through my desk drawer, and I happened upon a set of note cards. Notecards that I shoved in my drawer and wanted to forget about moments after receiving them. I want you to know that while rummaging, I was feeling bad about myself. I had recently caught him in yet another one of his lies. In typical fashion, it was my fault that the lie had been discovered. His “love” and attention were being pulled away from me.

Within those very early days, he made a video of himself with a song playing in the background, and in the video, he was going through the note cards and holding them up to the camera for me to read. In those cards, he again told me how much he cared for me and used several adjectives, each written in a different color, to describe me and how he felt about me. Things he couldn’t possibly yet know, let alone feel.

Again, I feel the need to tell you that I didn’t even know the man more than a moon cycle, and he was making this video for me because I was “hypnotic, sassy, and industrious,” to list off a few of those adjectives.

Toward the end of the video, he asked me to go to the mirror and repeat the last nine cards to myself. I was to read each aloud as I looked at myself in the mirror. I encourage you to read now if you haven’t already; in fact, you should even go to a mirror.

I am worthy of respect. I am worthy of a good man. I am a good woman. I am a capable woman. I am different than the rest. I am special. I am unique. I am cared for.

When I found those cards and read the last nine, I felt I was experiencing a moment of true irony. I laid them out and sent that very picture to a friend who knew my experience and knew I was feeling low at the time. She said, “Well . . . there are nine things he didn’t lie about.”

You see, he gave me the tools to escape. Or is it that I had the tools to escape all along? Maybe, if I had genuinely believed I was “worthy” and “special,” the year that followed would not have happened. Maybe, I would have trusted my instincts and insisted on a permanent “goodbye” after the video.

Are those the tools? Believing in yourself and trusting your instincts? Does it really come down to two simple ideas? Life isn’t always as simple, though, is it? There is a fine line that we walk between trusting another person’s intentions and being manipulated for sport.

It is up to you to know your worth, believe in yourself and your intuition. Maybe it doesn’t hurt to look at yourself in the mirror and remind yourself of who you are, what you are capable of, and what you deserve. Maybe a little self-love and self-care will go a long way.
Let’s start now. Repeat after me, “I am worthy . . . ”

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