Understanding & Ending Toxic
Relationships
Articles to help you understand and end toxic relationships
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But if you dare try, it will also be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life too.
When living through dark times, focussing on “hope” may feel like an inauthentic act for some or an obsessive need for others. This competing dualistic perspective is a perfect example of how life exists in opposites: day and night, dark and light, hope and despair.
How to leave someone you love when you know it’s the right thing to do is never easy.
Even when all the signs to leave a relationship are loud and clear, leaving someone you love is well…painful. Perhaps that’s why many write and even sign about this unpleasant choice, because they know that “breaking up is hard to do”.
How to get through a breakup is probably the last piece of advice you ever wanted to search for.
The news probably still stings. The one you love and dreamed of a future with has now told you they have other plans that don’t include you. It’s probably still fresh and raw, and certainly painful.
Perhaps you feel stunned, confused, betrayed, and devastated?In part this is because now you have to learn how to get through a breakup with someone you still love.
Or perhaps you are angry at yourself because you have to learn how to get through a breakup that you may have caused? The relationship you once had is now impossible to fix.
Almost nothing feels more disconcerting and anxiety provoking than when you begin to realize that you are falling out of love with the one you thought was your forever person. Questions such as: what does this mean? Are we over? Can we fall back in love?... can sometimes flood you with lots of uncomfortable feelings, and overwhelm you.
But before you walk out the door and head for the hills, have an affair, vape, or swallow some xanax, just take a moment and breathe. Falling out of love with your partner happens, but it doesn’t necessarily mean all is lost. You can deal with your existential angst over this by dedicating some time to understanding some basic principles on what the psychology of attraction says about the “love drug” and lasting romance.
Helen Keller understood the essence of a true heart connection when she said the following: “ the most beautiful things in the world can not be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
These days it seems that Keler’s wisdom sometimes falls on deaf ears. Those who search for a soulmate in the age of modern love, tend to find that there are so many choices and so many ideas about what an ideal mate should look like, feel like and act like. Many buy into the illusion that their destined partner in crime should meet all their wants, needs, ideals, and expectations.
And if they don’t, then “that perfect person” that they believe they deserve and were meant to have, is only a “smart phone” swipe away.
Most people are familiar with the adage “ you first need to learn how to love yourself, before you can love another”. Knowing this and practicing self love however, are two very different things.
It’s worth stating, that intellectually, almost everyone, kind of sort of understands the heart of this adage. But the idea of self love for most, seems to live and die in the cerebral realm.
With that said, it begs the questions then, do people really know, in a felt sense, what it means to love themselves? What does practicing self love actually entail and most importantly, why is it in one’s best interest to practice self love each and every day?
Audrey Hepburn once said; “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says I’m Possible” Yet, if you are healing from heartbreak and asking yourself will I ever find love again, it’s easy to feel like the opposite is true.
It’s tough putting yourself out there, meeting new people and doing online dating which can get really old, really quick. It’s easy to feel discouraged and hopeless about ever meeting someone new that you can fall in love with. But people do and so can you.
You just need to be a little open to redefining what it means to find love again, whether you are hoping to find love again after a divorce or any kind of break up. Then you need to know how to go about it, when you find yourself perseverating over that question.
Nothing feels more intoxicating than spending time with “the one” who seems to be sent from above. The synergistic connection that people experience when they are with their heart’s desire, feels beyond what words can describe.
It’s why there are so many songs, poems and stories written about soulmates, kindred spirits and twin flames. Yet, when you listen deeply to those songs and stories, there’s often a tragic note to some of them. Shakespeare had it right when he said; “the course of true love never did run smooth”.
The unthinkable has just happened: your spouse has announced they're contemplating divorce. With your whole world turned upside down, what are you supposed to do now?
As a licensed therapist what I can tell you is that the end of your story has not yet been written. There is still hope. I'm not promising it will be easy, but if you're committed to figuring this out, you can.
So let's begin. There’s an old saying: It takes two to tango.
What’s missing from this old saying is that it also takes two to repair.