Letting go of someone who isnt good for you

That once fiery romance that seems to go wrong until that one little flicker of hope and happiness keeps us from letting go. Usually, you will discover it has nothing to do with your lover at all.

Afraid of dying alone, no one else will accept [blank] about me—these are all fear-based notions and not at all realistic. Waiting and hoping for things to stay as good as they once were is NO way to experience a relationship. Addiction, passion, and obsession with a person equal intensity, but they do not equal love.

But the regret of staying with the wrong person is an unforgivable amount of time lost. If you jump right back into another one, you may carry over the bad habits and low expectations from your damaged one. Everything they do is to keep people small and manageable. This will play out through criticism, judgement, oppression — whatever it takes to keep someone in their place.

It is likely that toxic people learned their behaviour during their own childhood, either by being exposed to the toxic behaviour of others or by being overpraised without being taught the key quality of empathy. They come with a critical failure to see past their own needs and wants. Toxic people have a way of choosing open, kind people with beautiful, lavish hearts because these are the ones who will be more likely to fight for the relationship and less likely to abandon.

Even the strongest people can find themselves in a toxic relationship but the longer they stay, the more they are likely to evolve into someone who is a smaller, less confident, more wounded version of the person they used to be. Non-toxic people who stay in a toxic relationship will never stop trying to make the relationship better, and toxic people know this.

They count on it. Non-toxic people will strive to make the relationship work and when they do, the toxic person has exactly what he or she wants — control. Families are a witness to our lives — our best, our worst, our catastrophes, our frailties and flaws.

All families come with lessons that we need to learn along the way to being a decent, thriving human. Sometimes the lessons they teach are deeply painful ones that shudder against our core. Rather than being lessons on how to love and safely open up to the world, the lessons some families teach are about closing down, staying small and burying needs — but for every disempowering lesson, there is one of empowerment, strength and growth that exists with it.

In toxic families, these are around how to walk away from the ones we love, how to let go with strength and love, and how to let go of guilt and any fantasy that things could ever be different.

Love has a fierce way of keeping us tied to people who wound us. The problem with family is that we grow up in the fold, believing that the way they do things is the way the world works.

We trust them, listen to them and absorb what they say. There would have been a time for all of us that regardless of how mind-blowingly destructive the messages from our family were, we would have received them all with a beautiful, wide-eyed innocence, grabbing every detail and letting them shape who we were growing up to be. Our survival would have once depended on believing in everything they said and did, and resisting the need to challenge or question that we might deserve better.

The things we believe when we are young are powerful. They fix themselves upon us and they stay, at least until we realise one day how wrong and small-hearted those messages have been. We stop depending on our family for survival but we hang on to the belief that we have to stay connected and loyal, even though being with them hurts.

Loyalty can be a confusing, loaded term and is often the reason that people stay stuck in toxic relationships. In any healthy relationship, love is circular — when you give love, it comes back. When what comes back is scrappy, stingy intent under the guise of love, it will eventually leave you small and depleted, which falls wildly, terrifyingly short of where anyone is meant to be.

Healthy people welcome the support and growth of the people they love, even if it means having to change a little to accommodate. We are all vulnerable to feeling the very normal, messy emotions that come with being human. The difference is that healthy families and relationships will work through the tough stuff. Reasonable people, however strong and independently minded they are, can easily be drawn into thinking that if they could find the switch, do less, do more, manage it, tweak it, that the relationship will be okay.

The cold truth is that if anything was going to be different it would have happened by now. What is certain is that nothing anyone else does can change them. There will be no remorse, regret or insight. What is more likely is that any broken relationship will amplify their toxic behaviour. If you try to leave a toxic person, things might get worse before they get better — but they will always get better.

Few things will ramp up feelings of insecurity or a need for control more than when someone questions familiar, old behaviour, or tries to break away from old, established patterns in a relationship. Breaking away from a toxic relationship can feel like tearing at barbed wire with bare hands. Think of it like this. Imagine that all relationships and families occupy a space.

In healthy ones, the shape of that space will be fluid and open to change, with a lot of space for people to grow. People will move to accommodate the growth and flight of each other. For a toxic family or a toxic relationship, that shape is rigid and unyielding. There is no flexibility, no bending, and no room for growth.

Everyone has a clearly defined space and for some, that space will be small and heavily boxed. When one person starts to break out of the shape, the whole family feels their own individual sections change. The shape might wobble and things might feel vulnerable, weakened or scary. This is normal, but toxic people will do whatever it takes to restore the space to the way it was. Often, that will mean crumpling the ones who are changing so they fit their space again. Sometimes out of a sense of love and terribly misplaced loyalty, people caught in a toxic relationship might sacrifice growth and change and step back into the rigid tiny space a toxic person manipulates them towards.

It will be clear when this has happened because of the soul-sucking grief at being back there in the mess with people or person who feel so bad to be with. You will have heard the word plenty of times before.

Love never holds people back from growing. Being in love makes even idiot noise sound good. You know what it sounds like. One person has you in their grip. You become in awe of them, and then suddenly everything that comes out of their mouth is gold. And for the first time your whole damn life, you feel special. In the beginning, I ventured cautiously into his eyes for a quick swim, but now I am drowning in them.

I want to savor everything. I want to fall into him. I always hold his gaze, I always look back when he looks at me in that way. And how are you supposed to do that? Use this time to look at your relationship and ask yourself what are the positive learnings out of this.

The dissolvement of a relationship can take a huge toll on your mental health. From writing gratitude lists to watching motivational TED Talks, here are dozens of super-simple ways to practice self-care. What made you angry? Why are you still angry? Spell out what it will take for you to care less? Writing a letter is an act of letting go. A Queens College study found that people who rebounded reported higher self-esteem and confidence, plus were not as hung up on their ex.

A bit New Agey, maybe, but sound advice nonetheless. Some relationships are easier to leave than others, and romantic relationships are one of the tougher ones. Depending on the severity of your situation, you can also call the National Abuse Hotline at for urgent help. Weber, Ph. When you and your friend or partner go out together, you should feel like your confident, gorgeous and carefree self, not jealous, insecure or ignored. Though it can take many different forms, at its core, gaslighting is a communication technique in which someone causes you to question your own version of past events.

In its milder forms, gaslighting creates an unequal power dynamic in a relationship. But at its worst, gaslighting can actually be considered a form of mind-control and psychological abuse. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline , there are five distinct gaslighting techniques:. This Will Be the Amazon Coat of Does Hand Sanitizer Work? We Ask