How Do You Heal From A Toxic Relationship?

You can ignore that something is not right in your relationship to avoid the feelings of losing someone that you care about. We can protect ourselves from feeling hurt, so that we don’t move on from the relationship. So, how do you heal from a toxic relationship?

Here are ways you can be preventing yourself from dealing with a toxic relationship.

Perhaps you keep focusing on all the good times and forgetting all the bad times because you don’t want to admit it’s over.

You may be holding on to false hope or looking for the good in them despite their bad behaviour towards you. In this way it may be difficult to know how to heal from a relationship  that is toxic

You can get addicted to the dopamine from the love bombing and ignore your gut telling you that something is wrong when you confuse it for butterflies in your stomach.

We can fall in love with the fantasy of the person by projecting our hopes and unmet needs onto the person, it all falls apart when the person doesn’t become what we built up in our own head.

We see what we want to see in a person and hold onto what we want to believe even though it might not be what is really going on.

Sometimes it’s hard to let go of the person you thought them to be, once you see their true colors.

Perhaps you‘re struggling to acknowledge some home truths about your relationship because you’ve held onto hope that they can change.

When the truth hurts, you don’t want to accept it. What can feel worse is losing the person you thought them to be, when this is not who they are, after all.

It’s easy to bury your head in the sand and refuse to accept what is wrong in your relationship, so you don’t move on from the person who has had hurt you. You don’t want to admit how you feel because you don’t want to accept that the relationship is over.

How do you heal from a toxic relationship to move on with your life?

1. Stop trying to make things work or trying to fix someone if they can’t give you what you need.
2. Accept the truth that will allow you to let go of expecting something that you’re not getting.
3. Be honest with the situation and acknowledge if the relationship is over.
4. Cut all contact in order to break the bond.
5. Get closure by accepting why the relationship has ended without dwelling on it.
6. Processes your feelings so you can feel the pain of letting go.
7. Let go of the fantasy of false hope and expecting things to be the way you want.
8. Whenever you want them back, remind yourself how the relationship impacted your life and what it has cost you.
9. Stop projecting your unmet needs upon them, and heal those parts of yourself.
10. Understand the unhealed part of you that attracted you to this person, and engage in therapy to unlearn patterns of behaviour in order to stop attracting toxic relationships.
11. Focus on rebuilding yourself and giving yourself what you need so that you can become the person you want to attract and eventually attract someone who is aligned with who you are.
12. Learn to set boundaries and stop abandoning yourself in relationships so that you don’t neglect your own needs.

  Learn how to recover and heal from a toxic relationship

 It’s easy to stay stuck in anger, which can prevent you from getting over someone who is bad for you. Therapy can help to heal so you can feel your feelings and release the pain, so you can move on from a relationship that’s bad for you.

 You can learn how to move on from a toxic relationship if you unlearn the patterns of tolerating unwanted behaviour, and thereby stop preventing yourself from getting the love you want. You can heal when you work on the disowned parts of yourself that fear being rejected or that are looking for love in order to feel good enough.

 Nancy Carbone has a M.Soc.Sc (Couns) who is an author and relationship therapist who helps to release relationship blocks.