Love Bombing is a common romantic ploy used by anti-social predators in order to secure themselves ample narcissistic supply. Consider it the art of manipulative trolling, only it is designed to catch big fish rather than to intimidate or frighten. It’s a major red flag of Love Fraud con artists — you know… the people with a healthy mix of narcissistic tendencies and Anti-Social Personality Disorder that are compelled to romantically use and abuse other men and women.
“Love bombing is so-called because of the constant bombardment of communication from the Sociopath. This can take many forms…” claim the writers of Dating a Sociopath, a support page for Love Fraud victims.” Excessive texting, constant comments on your social network page, emails, telephone calls, or just literally bombarding you verbally in face to face communication. He might overwhelm you with gifts and will constantly flatter you. It feels overwhelming, you are swept off your feet.”
At first, most victims of extreme Narcissistic Abuse by romantic con have absolutely no earthly idea they have even been targeted. Typically during the first six (6) months or so of a relationship, the Sociopathic or Psychopathic predator will pretend to be everything you have ever wanted.
In most cases, victims are led to believe that they have met their soulmate or twin flame (rather than realizing they have been marked and targeted for manipulative bombardment). As the fine folks at Dating a Sociopath say, “You will initially be flattered that he is paying so much attention to you. He will leave you small love notes, send you sweet texts, it is like something from a movie. That’s because it is like that, it’s more fiction than reality.”
“Already he has assessed you, and he is now mirroring you, so he is reflecting back to you exactly what you want to hear. But he wants control over you. He wouldn’t have your full attention or control if you were busy doing other things…” claims the source, properly noting that when a person with ASPD sizes up prospective love interests they are most likely to pick those who are the most loving, caring, compassionate, and interested.
Since Empaths tend to feel physically connected to people they meet and interact with on an energetic level and tend to be people-pleasers in general, meeting a person with ASPD who acts mysterious yet simultaneously enthralled with you can be a rather intoxicating feeling. Empaths are people who have highly sensitive emotional natures — not meaning flighty, but rather having a highly developed sense of empathy.
When meeting a Sociopath (as opposed to an erratic and violent Psychopath), most of their victims tend to report the person has or had a strong core sense of stability to their nature. Sociopaths tend to be incredibly predictable, noting that because they tend to flatline emotionally speaking all the time, that boredom is their Achilles heel.
A bored Sociopath commonly will do things like love bomb then reject, to show support then stage a rapid withdrawal, shower a target with affection and act clingy then magically pull disappearing acts for no apparent reason, and will oftentimes pick irrational and poorly timed fights with a mate simply to have an excuse to walk out. Why? Because of the constant heightened sense of “push-pull” drama helps them alleviate boredom.
True Sociopaths care very little about whether or not they are getting positive or negative attention just so long as the status quo never changes. Their goal is to have complete and utter emotional, psychological, physical, professional, personal, and spiritual control over their preferred scapegoats, abuse targets, and narcissistic supply sources.
Love Bombing, as the first step in creating and establishing a healthy sense of Cognitive Dissonance about the Abuser in the mind of the targeted Love Fraud victim, is one of the key ways Abusers help line their abuse victims up with a life path destined for enabling and Stockholm Syndrome style devotion. “It is an important manipulation tool for a sociopath, love bombing does the following things, long term,” says Dating a Sociopath, noting the following reasons why it works to secure new supply sources so effectively:
- It doesn’t give you time to think about what is really happening
- It doesn’t give you time to spend with others
- It isolates you
- It gives a false impression of the Sociopath, within a short space of time
- It moves the relationship forward very quickly (often before you are ready)
To anyone who has experienced Love Bombing, this all makes perfect sense in retrospect. A man or woman swoops in out of the blue, mirroring a Love Fraud target’s actions, habits, motivations, beliefs, life goals, lifestyle, food preferences, sense of style, love for pets, hobbies, whatever. Then, the minute the person who they have targeted starts to believe the “too good to be true” persona is the actual person, look out.
Once a targeted Love Fraud victim falls for the con, it’s all over. The victim will constantly remind themselves each and every time the Abuser abuses or disappoints them in real life what life with them was like during those first few magical months.
Victims of Love Fraud will oftentimes say things like the happiest they ever saw their partner was during the first few months of dating them. The more inclined they are to act like co-dependents or to enable abuse outright, the more likely they are to spend a lifetime striving to please or indulge their controlling and calculating Love Fraud partner.
For some victims, this means surrendering the victimhood title and claiming a co-Narcissist status. Doing all the victim can to feel good about themselves, they will overlook and hide abuse while bragging wildly about the charm, looks, charisma, money, career, family of origin, or whatever makes them feel a sense of pride in having made the cut not to be actively discarded by their abusive and self-entitled partner.
That’s problematic, as oftentimes such people elect to stay in bad marriages or long-term relationships with people who have no loyalty to them. Once the Abuser’s needs for Narcissistic Supply change, they tend to drop even the most loving and caretaking of partners like hot rocks.
Examples of Love Bombing to form trauma bonds as well as to create a false impression that a target relates to as an imagined love interest’s personality type include monopolizing a targeted victim’s time, always calling and texting and refusing to allow a person to spend time alone with other friends or family, acting jealous in order to socially isolate and manipulate a target, and making sure no other man or woman has a chance to speak alone with a victim for any substantial length of time or period.
By pretending to be the person of a Love Fraud victim’s dreams, by faking they have a soul complete with sad tall tales of human frailty and faked humility, and outright lying about who they are as people, the con artist with no conscience is able to net gain themselves ample faith and loyalty from their victims.
People who fall in love with the manufactured image of a person and have children by them tend to be the most abused; however, those who do things like sacrifice careers, childbearing years, trust funds, and spend their life savings trying to help make their con artist happy are also seriously devastated when and if they find out the simple, honest fact that they have been pervasively conned into allowing themselves to be willingly used.
The more a person believes the false image is real, the more likely they are to feel sorry for the Abuser and bend over backward making efforts to help that loser of a person heal. No con artist wants to go to marriage counseling or therapy — let alone a “Behavioral Specialist” — in order to help their mate feel happier. The only time they agree to do such things is as a last-ditch hoovering gesture made not to make things better with a mate but to alleviate boredom by lying to therapists.
After all, good con artists can lie to friends and family and get away with it. Great con artists make the ultimate used car salesmen for a reason. But grandiose con artists? They are a different breed entirely. To them, the biggest coup on earth is to dupe a trained psychologist, minister, pastor, or psychotherapist into truly believing they are honest and have a conscience.
Since Cluster B people tend to have little to no ability to process complex emotions, they tend to have a conscience feature that solely measures the success or failure of social interaction according to their own self-serving measures. When they bombard a prospective love interest with horse pockey, they tend to feel a sense of elation (rather than guilt) when and if they get away with conning, convincing, or lying to them.
What that means is while a target is feeling over the moon with delight at the thought someone not only likes them, but also recognizes their inner nature, sees them as an attractive or “sexy” and stimulating figure, and is just starting to think all their dreams about finding the perfect mate are coming true that the con artist is secretly getting off on lying to and manipulating that same person for social use and abuse.
In the case of Love Bombing Sociopaths (as opposed to Love Bombing Narcissists), expect them to make very intense points in regular conversations. The more time they have to ask you questions and gauge your personal responses by studying your every move the same way a method actor would, the more likely they are to perceive targets like open books.
While the Love Bombing Narcissist wants you to know and remember everything about them, the Love Bombing Sociopath wants to know everything about YOU. They have very little to share about themselves, typically, noting that by keeping details vague or coming up with a complicated by entirely false yet unprovable backstories tends to keep them from getting caught lying most days.
Love Bombing is common in Love Fraud cases where a victim is targeted for use and abuse by a Machiavellian romantic predator. Don’t fall for their nonsense — the right thing to do is forgive yourself for falling in love with a fictional character if and when you already were duped… then as soon as is humanly possible, extricate yourself from their social, physical, and emotional influence.
Because they study what pleases you, motivates you, manipulates your emotions, and they strive to make you feel toxic shame, don’t be too hard on yourself. Realizing they never truly loved you is step one of ripping off the emotional band-aid. Step two is learning that it’s absolutely stupid to feel stupid for having fallen for a con. After all, Love Fraud artists tend to pick mates who have the most social clout, power, and moxie — and/or those who are the most physically useful at caretaking.
If you spend twenty years washing their dirty skivvies and scrubbing toilets, scrambling to have their house clean and their children (without their comprehensive help) well mannered and well raised, consider it a wash of your proverbial fate. They are likely to leave quite suddenly or unexpectedly no matter how much you do for them or how many abuse incidents you cover up or hide in order to keep their deep, dark situational abuse secrets safe.
If you are lucky, someday your children might forgive you for staying. If you are really lucky, you will forgive yourself for playing the part of a fool, believing a Cluster B person without a conscience was ever capable of doing anything but pretending to love or like you in any real way.
That Princess Jasmine chick lucked out, in that her Love Bombing predator was a misguided C-PTSD victim. Had she been wooed by a more handsome or charismatic Jafar, dollars to donuts the odds would have left her severely emotionally damaged and permanently socially scarred in a most embarrassing and personally humiliating of ways.
