Letting go of toxic relationships is an essential step towards building a healthier, happier life. Toxic relationships can cause immense emotional pain and can hinder personal growth and progress.
Whether it’s a romantic relationship, a friendship, or a family dynamic, it’s important to recognize when a relationship is toxic and to take steps towards ending it.
Overall, to heal from toxic relationships, it is important to follow these three steps: become aware of your patterns, recognize your areas of weakness, and develop a plan to address them. These steps are critical in your journey towards healing and becoming ready for a healthy relationship.
How to Let Go of a Toxic Relationship
1. Self-Reflect: Reflecting and healing from a cycle of bad relationships will help you explore relationship patterns. Often times, we tend to date the same person with different faces and histories. Exploring your attachment to similar partners will help you detach from the toxic connection.
2. Release the Relationship: You’re not crazy and you didn’t make up their behaviors. They really did harm you. In this step, you will need to acknowledge that the person was not healthy for you. And you will need to accept that you deserve to be surround by people that will love you in a manner that causes you to grow, not wilt like a dying flower.
Create boundaries around your heart, time, body, home, and finances. Don’t allow them access back into your space because you don’t deserve confusion and games.
3. Heal From the Inside: Take a moment to recognize that there is a reason that has contributed to you staying in relationships with unhealthy partners. While this may be painful, it is important to acknowledge in order to move forward.
4. Create an Action Plan for Growth: Create an action plan for growth. You can do this by Identifying the weak areas in your life that make you vulnerable to emotionally unhealthy people, and develop a plan to strengthen them.
5. Let Go of Guilt & Shame: You didn’t cause the relationship to go sour. You did everything you could. Remember, it takes two to make it work, not one person doing all the work.
Also, love is never something to regret. Life is about learning, growing, and love. You’re doing an excellent job at that.
6. Surround Yourself with Love: You deserve to feel loved. During your healing, immerse yourself in the love of family and friends.
Explore outside support that is unbiased, confidential, and compassionate by reaching out to a therapist. Or, feel free to schedule a free one-one-one with me! Need help healing? Try 20minutes of free coaching!
7. Forgive Yourself & Them: You did the best you could with the knowledge that you had. You can’t judge your past self, you didn’t know.
So give yourself the gift of forgiveness. Forgive them for hurting you and forgive yourself for feeling like you allowed them to hurt you. Remember, you’re not forgiving them because they deserve it. You’re forgiving because it’ll help you release emotional baggage.
8. Correct the Story You Believe: The story you believe about the relationship will play a major factor in your healing process. Often times, dysfunctional relationships cause us to see ourselves incorrectly and take on false/negative beliefs.
To heal it’s important to release false responsibility for their actions, shame, feelings of unworthiness, and feelings of powerlessness.
Read more: Journal Prompts for Correcting The Story
9. Find Yourself Again: After experiencing such excruciating pain, it is common to feel lost, broken, and like a foreigner in your own body. Sadly, pain changes the way survivors speak, trust, understand, love, hope, and give advice.
Finding your way back to innocence, trust, patience, wholeness, joy, and confidence is necessary to remove the damage of a toxic relationship.
10. Practice Self-Care & Self-Love: Enjoy your life my beautiful friend. Healing is important, but it shouldn’t take up all of your time and focus. You deserve to experience life in the way that makes you thrive. Read yourself affirmations and hype yourself up. You’re amazing and you deserve to hear that daily!
Additional Tips to End the Relationship:
- Heal: The healthier you become the more you’ll be able to see what is really going on. It will always help you to set boundaries and leave if no changes are being made.
- Create Boundaries: Distance yourself emotional or physically. Here are 5 Ways Toxic People Violate your Boundaries. And, then you can set 10 Boundaries to ensure they don’t hurt your emotions or physical body.
- Completely Cut Communication: If the problem is so severe you may need to completely cut off communication. Perhaps moving, changing your number, and removing yourself from their grasp. Speak with a mental health provider to help you navigate their situation. However, here are 10 Grace Mistakes to Avoid When Going No Contact.
How to Heal from a Toxic Relationship:
Ultimately, the quickest way to recover from a toxic relationship is to embark on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. Although the relationship may have left you feeling broken and shattered, you have the potential to become an even more powerful and resilient woman as you learn to bounce back from pain.
Before the relationship, you may have struggled with insecurity and uncertainty about your place in the world. Following the breakup, you may have felt angry and bitter, wanting to lash out at the world. The pain may have been so intense that you felt like the person you were angry with. However, you can overcome that pain and use your experience to help others heal.
You can embark on your own healing journey, attract someone who has also been on a healing journey, and pass on healing to your children and support your friends. Instead of dwelling on heartache, you can focus on your goals and limitless possibilities, now that you have become stronger.
Related Article: Find Your Inner Power After A Toxic Relationship!
1. Low Self-Esteem: when we are not in love with ourselves we go around trying to find someone that will love us. We try to find people to compliment us and tell us nice things. But, we won’t need that if we are confident in ourself. Take the Self-Esteem Quiz: Do You Love Yourself? And, get results and tips to help you improve your ability to practice self-love.
2. Lack of Boundaries: if you give people your time, body, energy, and money and you never say no… Or, if you demand others time, body, energy, and money and feel upset when they say no… You probably have no boundaries. Boundaries are extremely important in EVERY relationship because we are entitled to our own thoughts, feelings, and decisions. Read more about setting and keeping healthy boundaries here: Ultimate Guide To Set Christian Dating Boundaries!
3. Co-Dependence: in codependent relationships we learn to make our selves feel better by being with another human. Or, we learn to make the other person better with our love. However, we can never make people feel complete nor can they make us feel complete. Any pain or brokenness that isn’t address in a relationship will eventually come back up and cause trauma. Take the QUIZ: Are you codependent? Determine if you are and get results to heal.
4. Unhealthy Coping Patterns: when we don’t learn how to deal with pain well we end up learning toxic patterns to heal. Are you actively working out healthy strategies? Or, are you avoiding the pain and ignoring the issues? Take the QUIZ: What is your coping style? The quiz will reveal how you deal with pain.
5. You may also lack boundaries, awareness, emotional maturity, and the ability to vocalize your needs. In the article, 4 Reasons You Are Dating The Wrong Men, I explain these issues further.
Ultimately, we need to heal to avoid toxic relationships. You may be asking “Why do we stay in toxic relationships?” The truth is, we can only pick healthy partners when we are healed. When we are broken, we might sabotage a healthy relationship. Or, if we struggle with insecurity, codependence, and bad coping skills we will date people that make us feel good beautiful, loved, and supported.
Finding Peace After A Toxic Relationship
Finding peace after a toxic relationship is hard work. You have to learn new strategies to live and stick to it. You won’t be able to just give into pain and allow your life to be directed by your feelings.
The first step is cleaning out your emotional closet and releasing the emotions when they broke your heart. Most likely, you will have a lot of forgiveness to do. Then, you’ll need to open up for love and you can do that by finding The Source Of Happiness & Love!
Need help healing? Try 20minutes of free coaching!
Am I In A Toxic Relationship?
Toxic relationships often leave you confused, frustrated, hopeless, and insecure. When walking away from a toxic relationship, you should inquire to see if you are in such a relationship and speak with someone to make your next action steps immediately.
Also, you should check to see which of your behaviors contributed to the unhealthy relationship. Do you wonder: Am I The Toxic one in the relationship? Or, why am I dating toxic men continuously? Well, here are more resources to help you navigate this process:
- 4 Reasons You Are Dating The Wrong Men
- 6 Toxic Traits in a Relationship!
- What Is A Toxic Relationship? What Causes Toxic Relationships?
- Empaths Attract Narcissists in Relationship: 3 Keys To End Cycle!
- Am I Toxic? Quiz + 11 Healing Tips!
- How To Avoid Toxic Relationships When You’re Drunk In Love
Can toxic relationships be healed?
Yes, it is possible for toxic relationships to be healed. However, both people must decide to go through the healing process. And, once they make that decision they must stick to the HARD work of healing and becoming a better person. One person cannot be doing all the work (which is what usually happens).
Healing from a toxic relationship can be compared to cleaning a cluttered, dirty house. You have to search through boxes and under the bed, sort through items, discard what’s no longer needed, clean everything up, and find a place for the things that truly matter.
Fixing a toxic relationship involves a similar process of decluttering and cleaning. The journey will uncover past issues with parents, past friendships, previous relationships, hurtful comments from teachers, and more. It may take years to fully unpack and heal from these experiences, so it’s important to seek the guidance of a counselor or relationship mentor to help you through the difficult process.
