How Love Bombing Works

On the beach in Nantucket, the summer I was sixteen, an older man put his towel down next to mine and immediately engaged me in a conversation. I use the word conversation, but it was more like he talked at me. He was adamant to get his point of view across. I politely listened, not sure what to make him. He seemed friendly enough. He talked about eastern philosophy and the law of karma, astrology, and ancient civilizations. At one point, he looked over at my buddies and then back to me, and said, “You know, you’re different than your friends,” which I knew he intended as a compliment in order to convey that he thought I was special. This confused me and made me feel uncomfortable because I didn’t see myself as being different from my friends, but at the same time, it felt good to be singled out as unique.

When I asked him to explain what he meant, he said, “Your destiny is different from theirs.” He leaned in closer. “No one has ever really understood you. Don’t you feel you’re here to do something important? I can see you’re someone who cares about others and wants to be a positive influence in people's lives.”

I was pleased that he saw these noble characteristics in me. But, at the same time something didn’t feel right. I mean, I had just met him.

This is worth repeating. I had just met him.

Love Bombing

The reason love bombing is so effective is that it targets the most vulnerable want and need in all of us. I am aware now, though was not then, that two things were going on simultaneously inside me. And both mattered. Unfortunately, I did not have the maturity to understand it at sixteen-years old.

The first was that what this man said felt good. Better than good. It felt like the answer to a question I had not been able to articulate for myself. Though only a teen, I was a kid without a plan, in a family where excellence was expected. I felt a disconnect between what was expected of me and how I could achieve it. It’s not like I struggled as a youth. I did well in school and sports and I made friends easily. But inside, I felt a void. I felt like I should have a purpose beyond scoring touchdowns, drinking beer, and chasing girls. Some part of me had been waiting, without knowing, for someone to tell me I was already secretly extraordinary in some way that hadn’t shown up yet on a report card or a stat sheet, and that I was going to do something meaningful with my life. And this man was not only telling me exactly that, but he was also laying out a path of how it would unfold.

The second thing happening somewhere within me was that something didn’t add up. Again, he had just met me. We had spent less than an hour talking. Logically, there was no way he could have known anything about me. The compliments were too specific to be guesses and too soon to be observations. Something inside me registered that there was a gap between what he said and what he could actually know. I didn’t trust the second feeling. I trusted the first. And that simple choice was the entry point of a journey that lasted twenty years.

Love bombing is a term that originated in cultic studies and has now entered the broader vocabulary of relationship and workplace dynamics. The term refers to a flood of attention, recognition, affection, and praise, delivered by someone who barely knows the person to whom they are directing it. Yet, it is calibrated specifically to exploit the vulnerabilities the targeted person likely has.

Love bombing is not generic flattery. It is focused manipulation that makes the victim feel like he or she is finally being seen, heard, and understood. It is not an accident. It is by design. They identify responses they are looking for and exploit them, not unlike fortune tellers, tarot card readers, grifters and conmen/women. Bottom line, it is a practiced skillset.

Notably, the accomplished and the successful are not protected from these techniques. In fact, I would argue they are particularly susceptible to it because as high achievers, they learn that their achievements have been earned through performance thereby measuring - and defining - them by external acts rather than simply seeing them for who they are and recognizing that. As a result, a part of them wonders whether the people in their lives love the achievement or love the person underneath the achievement.

Personally, in my family, I feared that if I stopped performing the recognition and "love" would dry up.

Why Love Bombing Works So Well

Master manipulators don’t target weak people; they target seekers. When someone is seeking answers, they are open-minded and curious. That receptivity creates a vulnerability that can be exploited and flipped into something destructive very quickly.

Almost everyone with whom I have spoken who was love-bombed at the beginning of a coercive relationship reports the same dual experience: The recognition was enticing, but also, something felt off. Almost no one trusted the second feeling. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a feature of how well the technique exploits the way human beings process social information. The key to protecting yourself from a love bomb is to take a beat, step back from the warm wash of the words and ask the question about the cold reality of the situation.

Years after I left the cult, I found my mother’s copy of Combating Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan, considered by many to be one of the best books on the subject. She had discovered the book when I was deeply involved with the group and was searching for answers. It’s the same book I read years later that opened my eyes and accurately diagnosed what had happened to me. Obviously, my mother had read it long before I did as she tried to understand how she lost her son to a group of people - total strangers. 

On one page, the book describes love bombing in clinical terms. The love seems to be unconditional and unlimited at first and the new members are swept up by a honeymoon of praise and attention. But after a few months, as the person becomes more enmeshed, the flattery and attention are turned away toward newer recruits. The cult member learns that love is not unconditional after all, but that it depends on performance as defined by the group's leader. In the margin next to that passage, my mother had written a simple note.

Your lordship's flattery.

She had recognized it. She had named it. She had known what was happening to me from the start. She had marked the passage in a book she could not give me because she knew that as long as I was inside the group, anything she shared would be discredited.

What my mother saw is the most valuable insight I can offer here. She didn’t need a degree in psychology or sociology to recognize what was happening. What she had was the ability to see that someone she loved was acting out of character and a description of how love bombing works. Once she had the description, she was able to identify the disconnect between the son she knew and the man I had become. 

The One Question 

With twenty-five years of working with this material and interacting with survivors of abuse, one question emerges that if asked in the right moment can be the difference between falling under the spell of a love bomber, and not. Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that it is worth being aware of.

So, the next time someone you have recently met offers you the kind of specific recognition you most want to hear about your gifts, your destiny, your character, your potential, etc... take a moment to receive the recognition and notice if it feels too good. Then ask yourself: 

How could he or she possibly know?

If the answer is that you have spent enough time together for them to have observed the qualities they are admiring, then you may be in the presence of a person who has accurately seen you. That kind of person is rare. Hold onto them.

If the answer is that they could not possibly know what they are claiming to know and the recognition is too specific to have come from observation, too soon to have come from time spent, and too pointed to have come from anywhere except a guess, then what you are receiving is not recognition. It is likely to be some form of manipulation. They have determined what you most want to hear, and they are threading it right through the hole they know they can fill and then abuse.

What I Wish I'd Known

Looking back, I wish I had this small piece of practical knowledge that flattery from a stranger should be received with curiosity and skepticism rather than with gratitude. I did not need a warning about cults. A cult warning would have been useless to me at sixteen, because I would not have believed I was the kind of person who could ever be involved in a cult.

I wish someone had warned me that if a person claims to know you better than you know yourself, listen to the deeper voice in you that tries to alert you that something is not right. Feeling good too fast around a person you just met is not always wrong, but it is information. Information about the situation, and also, perhaps more importantly, it is information about yourself. 

Love bombing is real. It is studied. It is named. It is one of the most reliable predictors of coercive dynamics in cults, romantic relationships, workplaces and friendships. In other words, in any situation where one person needs another to bond quickly for ill-intended purposes, there is likely to be trouble ahead.

This small bit of skepticism could have been the difference between me living free versus embarking on a journey that took me over two decades to understand what had happened and why.