Healing from Toxic Relationships

This article is part of a series on Toxicity. You can find the last two articles here.

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You were groomed and idealized, you were conditioned to ignore your intuition, and you were tricked into falling in love. Love is the strongest of all bonds and McToxic used it to manipulate your feelings.

To heal, we must look within and focus on our own feelings. And remember the simple truth: good people make you feel good and bad people make you feel bad. Everything else falls into place. To build your intuition, keep in mind both vultures (who make you feel bad) and constants (who make you feel good). Read on to learn more.

Vultures

At the end, you may feel devastated, miserable, angry, and vulnerable, and confused. You may out seek out someone to help you make sense sense of what you went through. You share your experiences to the most sympathetic ear who claims to understand you. But it’s in these moments of vulnerability and insecurity that you attract “vultures”. They seem kind as they want to fix and absorb your problems. They are willing to listen to your toxic experience for hours and days. But real friends won’t be acting as your therapist, and they won’t ramble on about their ability to empathize. In fact, vultures are not invested in your recovery. They are fascinated by your struggles as they feed off drama and have an endless need to be appreciated. They will drown you in unsolicited advice. They will lash out if you disagree with them, seek help elsewhere, or you become happier because they see your progress as a threat to their control. They want you always be dependent on them.

So at first, avoid making new friends or relationships until you no longer need or want to talk about McToxic. It’s tempting to go out and meet new people as you start to rebuild your life with kinder and more genuine individuals whose actions speak louder than their words. And you will. But it takes time to build healthier relationships, replace old habits with healthier ones, develop your intuition, and understand what you want from this world.

So in the meantime, when you need help, go to a professional therapist who know what you went through and are willing to help with no strings attached, unlike the vultures.

In Those Months Alone: Let go, let be, let in

In those months that you are not seeking new friendships or relationships, learn to be yourself again and regain the identity you lost in that toxic relationship.

1. Let Go

Many times in toxic relationships, McToxics manipulate us to take over their responsibilities. And if we’re such relationships long enough, we develop controlling behaviors and obsessive thoughts. But it’s those things that we seek to control the most that control us. When we try to control people and things that we have no business controlling, we are being controlled by them. So in your journey of healing, remember that the only person you can control is yourself. Yes, you know what’s best for others and you want to help them see what you see, but detach from the problems you aren’t in control over. Let it go. Move your attention on others to yourself; focus on those circumstances that are within your control.

We can drive ourselves nuts getting involved in other people’s business. But the quickest way to be happy is to attend to our own affairs.

When you accept that you can control only yourself, it requires that you also accept that you are powerless over others’ behaviors. And that may seem scary and frustrating. But, this acceptance doesn’t mean that you have be okay with the way things are. Acceptance isn’t settling. Rather, with acceptance, you see where you truly are at this time and assess what it will truly take to change. This may require you to move through the stages of grief, and you may need to meet a therapist to move through from grief to acceptance. But remember, practicing acceptance is not for the other person; it is for you so you can experience peace.

2. Let Be

When we focus on others’ problems, we often don’t know what’s triggering our anger, depression, and emotion. So understand your own emotions and the different emotional experience you have. Then you can learn ways of adapting and coping that work best for you. Your emotions are not bad. It’s how you react to them that can yield negative consequences. The goal is to respond, not react. Don’t react to your emotions immediately. Instead respond to an emotion by:

• seeing it as an indicator that something isn’t right, may it be someone breaking your boundaries or someone bullying you.
• learning to name and feel those that are a result of a past trauma. Ask yourself: are you responding from your healed self or your hurt self?

Take note when you’re feeling like a victim or like your needs aren’t being met. Explore that feeling further:

• What’s making you feel that way?
• How might you be acting that reinforces victim mentality? Could it be rescuing or enabling.
• What are your needs?
• Can you meet your needs on your own or do you need help?

As you explore your emotions and past traumas, you may view yourself as a victim of circumstances or that McToxic was justified in someway for their inappropriate behavior. This kind of thinking however keeps you trapped in feeling hopeless and paralyzed as you think you don’t feel the power to make decisions and care for yourself. Instead focus on getting your needs met by communicating what you want and need, and setting boundaries, and make the best choices for yourself. Move from victim to victorious.

Identify the source of your codependent thoughts and behaviors. Are they intensified by feelings of shame? It could be that you learned as a child that you were only valuable when you served others, denying your own needs and caregiving. Maybe as a child you were given attention when you denied your own needs and took care of others. Identify messages of shame that drive your penchant to care for others more than yourself. They may stemmed from your family relationships or your faith background. How are they influencing you today? And then affirm again and again the true reality: your value extends outside of what you can help others.

3. Let in

Self-care is more than just a trend of lighting candles and soaking in a bubble bath. It is an attitude, a perspective to yourself and your life that you are responsible for yourself and your wellbeing, you can’t depend on another person to care for you perfectly. From within, you are letting in the love you may have sought externally from someone or something else. You achieve this by:

• treating yourself with kindness, grace, and loving actions
• practicing self-acceptance
• reminding yourself that you are okay right now
• identifying your needs
• setting goals for self-care (you’ll realize that you’re able to care for yourself)
• including fun and play to reacquaint yourself with your inner child, who may have hurt by past trauma.
• exercising and caring for your physical health, which in turn benefits your mental health

The Constant

After you released some of the toxicity and co-dependency in the initial stage, replace it with something positive. In fact, after your experience with McToxic, you may want to avoid all toxic people so you never experience this anxiety and confusion again. But you’ve become hypervigilant and distrustful of others. You need something beyond your intuition.

This is where your Constant will be helpful. A Constant is someone who:

• you love
• consistently inspires and never disappoints
• brings peace to your heart
• is colorful, glowing, and full of life

Your Constant can be anyone, a parent, friend, child, pet, deceased relative. If you think you don’t have one, dream one up or imagine a higher power or a spirit who will always keep you safe, is colorful/glowing, is full of life, and embodies all of the qualities you admire most: empathy, compassion, and kindness.

Now think:

• Does your Constant make you feel crazy, anxious, or jealous?
• Do you feel anxiety when they speak to you?
• When you’re away from your Constant, do you spend a long time analyzing their behavior and defending yourself from hypothetical arguments?

Of course not. So why is that? Why can one dismissive person make you doubt everything good going on in your life? What’s the difference between your Constant and the people who make you feel like garbage? Remember the simple truth: good people make you feel good and bad people make you feel bad. Everything else falls into place.

So in those months that you’re not seeking new friendships (see the Vultures section above), your Constant is a reminder that you are not crazy. In fact, with a Constant who brings out the best in you, you will realize that you don’t need put up with negativity, so you will start to separate from the people who make you feel bad because you should feel this same kind of peace with everyone in your life.

Heal: Take time and get positive

When you overcome a toxic relationship, you will feel confident, take pride in their own empathy, compassion, kindness. You will gain self respect and boundaries and practices introspection of your own demon. You will be free of self doubt and manufactured anxiety.

And you will no longer:

• censor your spirit b/c youre afraid of losing the “perfect” relationship
• told to stop overanalyzing something that urgently needs analysis
• a pawn in their mind games

The world is mostly full of good people, and you don’t want to miss out on that because you’ve been hurt. Spend some time getting in touch with your feelings so you find a comfortable balance between awareness and trust. Understand why you felt the way you did when you were with your abusive partner and how you felt before you met them. As you begin to abandon toxic patterns, healthier ones will inevitably appear in their place. You will stop asking “Do they like me?” and start asking “Do I like them?”

Call to action

Your life will be better and much healthier without McToxic and Karl, Karen, and anyone else who chooses to join the McToxic clan.

You are amazing, and you deserve better than to be a pawn in someone else’s self-destruction. Cut poisonous people from your life and build a better future that promises positivity and support.

Sources & Resources

If your physical or emotional safety are at risk in a relationship, make sure you check out these resources that you can read and learn of ways out.

• Codependent No More, a book by Melody Beattie, 1986. https://amzn.to/3qjZvBy
• Moving Beyond Betrayal, Vicki Tidwell Palmer, 2016. https://amzn.to/2N47wMD
• Psychopath Free, a book by Jackson MacKenzie, 2015. https://amzn.to/2XFPL8p
• “10 Toxic People You Should Avoid At All Costs” by Travis Bradberry at Forbes, 2015. https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2015/11/10/10-toxic-people-you-should-avoid-at-all-costs/?sh=33df3a2561db
• “22 Standout Groups Stopping Domestic Violence”by Laura Newcomer at Greatist, 2019, https://greatist.com/happiness/stop-domestic-violence-organizations
• “3 Signs a Person with Toxic Qualities Is Manipulating You (and What to Do About It)” by Kari Langslet at Greatist, 2020. https://greatist.com/live/dealing-with-a-toxic-person#So,-what-exactly-makes-a-person-toxic

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