When my last toxic relationship ended, I didn’t go home. I stayed at a friend’s house because I simply couldn’t face being alone.

That night, I lay in bed sobbing. Not crying in the way people often imagine after a breakup, but the kind of grief that feels like it’s tearing through your body. I remember struggling to catch my breath. I genuinely believed I wasn’t going to survive the pain.

Trying to help, my friend put on a podcast about getting over a breakup. I remember listening, but feeling completely disconnected from what was being said. Nothing about it felt big enough for what I was experiencing.

At the time, I thought I was “just heartbroken.”

Now, with everything I know as a therapist, I understand it was so much more than that.

It wasn’t just the relationship ending

When a healthy relationship ends, there is grief. There is sadness, disappointment and loss.

But when a toxic relationship ends, especially one involving trauma bonding, emotional abuse or codependency, your nervous system often experiences it as a threat to survival.

The relationship may have become the place where you desperately searched for love, safety, validation or acceptance. Even if it rarely gave you those things consistently, your brain had become wired to keep seeking them.

So when that relationship disappears, it isn’t only your present-day self grieving.

Your younger self is grieving too.

The child who felt abandoned.

The child who felt rejected.

The child who never felt enough.

The child who learned that love could disappear without warning.

Suddenly, all of those old wounds are activated at once.

“Why does it hurt this much?”

This is one of the questions I hear most often from clients.

They’ll say:

“It feels like I’m dying.”

“I can’t breathe.”

“I know they’re bad for me, so why do I want them back?”

“I’ve never felt pain like this.”

The intensity often frightens people. They assume it must mean they have lost the love of their life.

But the intensity isn’t always evidence of healthy love.

Very often, it’s evidence of an activated attachment system.

Your brain isn’t simply mourning the person.

It’s mourning the hope that this time someone would finally give you the love you had been searching for since childhood.

Why we often go back

When childhood wounds are activated, our logical brain struggles to stay online.

Instead, our survival system takes over.

It tells us that reconnecting with the person will make the pain stop.

And temporarily, it usually does.

Not because the relationship has become healthy.

But because the nervous system mistakes familiarity for safety.

This is one of the reasons leaving toxic relationships can feel so impossible.

People often judge themselves for going back, believing they’re weak.

In reality, they’re often responding to a nervous system that has learned to equate connection—even painful connection—with survival.

Healing means treating more than the breakup

For me, healing didn’t come from simply trying to “move on.”

It came from understanding what had actually happened.

I wasn’t just grieving the end of a relationship.

I was grieving years of unmet emotional needs.

I was grieving every time I had felt abandoned.

Every time I had believed I wasn’t enough.

Every time I had learned to earn love instead of simply receiving it.

Once I understood that, everything changed.

The work was no longer about getting over one person.

It became about healing the parts of me that had believed my worth depended on being chosen.

If this is where you are right now…

I want you to know something I wish someone had told me that night.

The intensity of your pain does not mean you are meant to be together.

It doesn’t mean you’ve lost your soulmate.

It doesn’t mean you’ll never recover.

It means your nervous system is overwhelmed, your attachment wounds have been activated, and your younger self is hurting alongside your adult self.

That pain is real.

It deserves compassion, not judgement.

And while it may not feel like it today, you can heal.

I know because I genuinely believed I wouldn’t survive that night.

Yet here I am—not just surviving, but helping others understand that what feels like “just a breakup” is often the reopening of wounds that were never yours to carry in the first place.

Healing isn’t about forgetting the person.

It’s about remembering yourself.

Andrea, x