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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
At the time, I thought I was “just heartbroken.”<\/p>\n
Now, with everything I know as a therapist, I understand it was so much more than that.<\/p>\n
When a healthy relationship ends, there is grief. There is sadness, disappointment and loss.<\/p>\n
But when a toxic relationship ends, especially one involving trauma bonding<\/a>, emotional abuse or codependency<\/a>, your nervous system<\/a> often experiences it as a threat to survival.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So when that relationship disappears, it isn’t only your present-day self grieving.<\/p>\n Your younger self is grieving too.<\/p>\n The child who felt abandoned.<\/p>\n The child who felt rejected.<\/p>\n The child who never felt enough.<\/p>\n The child who learned that love could disappear without warning.<\/p>\n Suddenly, all of those old wounds are activated at once.<\/p>\n This is one of the questions I hear most often from clients.<\/p>\n They’ll say:<\/p>\n “It feels like I’m dying.”<\/em><\/p>\n “I can’t breathe.”<\/em><\/p>\n “I know they’re bad for me, so why do I want them back?”<\/em><\/p>\n “I’ve never felt pain like this.”<\/em><\/p>\n The intensity often frightens people. They assume it must mean they have lost the love of their life.<\/p>\n But the intensity isn’t always evidence of healthy love.<\/p>\n Very often, it’s evidence of an activated attachment system.<\/p>\n Your brain isn’t simply mourning the person.<\/p>\n It’s mourning the hope that this time<\/em> someone would finally give you the love you had been searching for since childhood.<\/p>\n When childhood wounds are activated, our logical brain struggles to stay online.<\/p>\n Instead, our survival system takes over.<\/p>\n It tells us that reconnecting with the person will make the pain stop.<\/p>\n And temporarily, it usually does.<\/p>\n Not because the relationship has become healthy.<\/p>\n But because the nervous system mistakes familiarity for safety.<\/p>\n This is one of the reasons leaving toxic relationships can feel so impossible.<\/p>\n People often judge themselves for going back, believing they’re weak.<\/p>\n In reality, they’re often responding to a nervous system that has learned to equate connection\u2014even painful connection\u2014with survival.<\/p>\n For me, healing didn’t come from simply trying to “move on.”<\/p>\n It came from understanding what had actually happened.<\/p>\n I wasn’t just grieving the end of a relationship.<\/p>\n I was grieving years of unmet emotional needs.<\/p>\n I was grieving every time I had felt abandoned.<\/p>\n Every time I had believed I wasn’t enough.<\/p>\n Every time I had learned to earn love instead of simply receiving it.<\/p>\n Once I understood that, everything changed.<\/p>\n The work was no longer about getting over one person.<\/p>\n It became about healing the parts of me that had believed my worth depended on being chosen.<\/p>\n I want you to know something I wish someone had told me that night.<\/p>\n The intensity of your pain does not mean you are meant to be together.<\/p>\n It doesn’t mean you’ve lost your soulmate.<\/p>\n It doesn’t mean you’ll never recover.<\/p>\n“Why does it hurt this much?”<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Why we often go back<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Healing means treating more than the breakup<\/strong><\/h2>\n
If this is where you are right now…<\/strong><\/h2>\n