Toxic People Will Convince You They’ve Changed — Don’t Believe One Word!

The following is adapted from Win‌ ‌Your‌ ‌Breakup‌ by Natasha Adamo.

Toxic people send you down a path of addictively wondering whether they have changed. When you’re in a relationship with a toxic partner, he’ll tell you that he’s allergic to your dog, will never get married, is a vegetarian, and afraid of heights.

Then a few months after he breaks up with you, he’ll post a photo proposing to his new fiancée on a plane, about to skydive, eating a steak, and holding a dog.

This would make women with even the highest levels of confidence and self-love question why. Why weren’t you “good enough” to be The One that got him to change his ways? She must be everything you’re not. How else could she be getting such a return on everything you invested? All the love you wanted him to reciprocate is given to someone who just came into the picture, and now, you’re left in the dust.

But what you’re forgetting here is not everything that glitters is gold. This man has already proven to be fool’s gold, and that fool hasn’t changed a bit for anyone. Don’t be fooled.

Toxic People Love to Show Off

If your ex was selfish, disrespectful, and toxic enough to mistreat you the way he did, he’s never going to be empathetic enough to see anything from anyone’s perspective other than his own. He’s also not going to meet someone, take no time to evolve, and then just transform into everything he could never consistently be with you. That will never happen.

Toxic people love to show off. Just because he’s supposedly giving this new woman everything that he never gave to you doesn’t mean he’s not giving it to other women on the internet and in real life too. You never know what happens behind unlocked cell phones and closed doors. Do not vilify her or attempt to educate her on what you know. She is a nonentity in your life and doesn’t yet know what you already do.

Be kind to other women and mind your own business. He isn’t with a woman who’s better in every way. He’s with a woman who is more tolerant of his bull because she’s still blind to everything that you now see clearly. There’s nothing to envy or worry about. Your ex did not change. He revealed himself over time as he got more comfortable (and more certain of what you’d forgive and excuse).

Real Change Doesn’t Just Happen

Real and lasting change doesn’t “just happen” because you meet someone new. It only happens when you are ready to replace avoidance with honesty to yourself, and rose-colored glasses with an intuition that is acted on and no longer ignored. Remembering exactly who you are and realizing your worth amid a painful breakup is scary and lonely. It takes time. It will break you in ways that you are convinced you have already broken and cannot break anymore.

But if you allow the unconditional love that you have for your younger self to unbreak your heart, finish your ex’s fragmented explanations, and answer your own questions, you will bounce back an indestructible winner every time — a winner who has healthy boundaries and raised standards guiding the way.

When you make the commitment to change your ways and become the person you needed and never had (instead of the person that your ex wants, for now), you’ll realize he can’t change and you’ll stop concerning yourself with whether or not he does.

Rebuilding Takes Commitment

Genuine change takes an unwavering refusal to be a helpless victim, the empathy to know where you have betrayed others, and the awareness that these betrayals took place because you turned your back on your younger self. It takes the kind of commitment that your ex has already proven to be incapable of.

If it were that easy and quick to change, you would have already changed and realized that the real “win” was losing him, and you’d move on. So why are you giving your ex more credit here, expecting that he can genuinely change in the blink of an eye and you can’t change at all? Maybe one day, he will change. Maybe one day, it’ll snow on the beach in Maui. But by that time, it won’t matter to you anymore. You’ll be indifferent because you changed long ago. And you didn’t waste your life waiting around in a ski mask on the beach. You went where there was snow.

Right now, your ex is only capable of switching up a facade, where you have single-handedly torn down your own facade. You have risen above your own ashes and are now rebuilding — on a foundation that’s more solid than he will ever have the opportunity to stand on.

For more advice on how to get over toxic relationships, you can find Win‌ ‌Your‌ ‌Breakup‌ on Amazon.

Natasha Adamo is a high-performance, self-help, and relationship coach, as well as a speaker and blogger with over two and a half million readers. She currently coaches clients in person and remotely in thirty-one countries around the world. Win Your Breakup is her first book.