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FYI: If you are unfamiliar with "love bombing", there's a helpful article on Wikipedia.
I may have been the victim of love bombing. For 5 years, it had never crossed my mind that what I experienced wasn't intense true love and affection from someone I really deeply loved. It just didn't occur to me. Not denial. The only mental frameworks I was aware of to choose from were ones where she loved me. It was a core belief I only just realized I had.
I'm not saying I know for sure that she love bombed me. In the sense of it not being sincere -- because it was practically continuous and yet mostly words, and all over the place. It's just that the idea that this might have been what she did with me only recently became something I knew to think of at all.
I still love her. She hasn't been in my life for about 4 years now. She said she didn't want to hear from me, and she made it really clear, so I never try to contact her for most of that time. I can't deny still harboring a hope that when I pull myself together more properly, I could some day maybe cross paths with her and things could be different. I can't even imagine trying to reach out to her unless I was doing well, feeling well, and fully back on my feet in every sense. I'd be scared. The wrong word from her probably could still make me feel like my heart was put in a blender. So, in a way, she's become to me practically more of an abstract ideal and motivational muse than the actual person with whom I have no contact.
Just to be clear, we didn't date. We were friends. In her words, best friends. We met and attended a mental health day program together. She would often say she was the luckiest girl in the world to have me in her life. She told me she loved me all the time, and she did it first, then prompting me to say whether I loved her too. Said she would take a bullet for me. That we were "like twins," so similar, like we shared the same soul. All of this talk emerged very rapidly, practically overnight. To say that she was the most frequent initiator of contact would be an understatement. If I hadn't felt the way I had, I might have felt bombarded by her texts, messages, and calls. Instead I loved it. I barely ever had the chance to initiate. And the few times I did, to talk, she seldom had time. She said she valued loyalty. I'm not totally sure she meant valued being loyal herself, or rather that she valued loyalty to her in others.
When she suddenly decided our friendship was over, she didn't want to talk to me or be my friend anymore. After a phone call where I told her how I felt, that it was a lot more than friendship for me. It was like night and day. And we still went to the same mental health clinic and were there for hours a day multiple days a week. She would actively ignore me. I meekly accepted that, and didn't try to talk to her. I knew it would not be great for me. I once gave her a letter I wrote her, but she never showed any interest in anything at all to do with me ever again.
I really don't know how to feel. Has anyone here been love bombed? And like, didn't even realize it for a long while? I've felt very numb about it, and still do.
I'm not totally sure how to process this. I feel like I have to consider things like that (1) it was all real; (2) she didn't love bomb me consciously or with any malice; or (3) she did it willfully. I can't and won't ask her.
I just kind of need to know how to think about what happened. The most likely scenario, at least. And how to feel about it. How do I stop loving her, even when recognizing that everything she ever did may have been a manipulation, doesn't seem to matter or change anything in how I feel? What does it say about me that I'm not sure that would be a deal breaker if that were true, even now?
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