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When Someone You

Love is Toxic – How to
Let Go, Without Guilt
Posted by Karen Young Like 87K 0 views

If toxic people were an ingestible substance, they

would come with a high-powered warning and
secure packaging to prevent any chance of
accidental contact. Sadly, families are not immune
to the poisonous lashings of a toxic relationship.

Though families and relationships can feel

impossibly tough at times, they were never meant
to ruin. All relationships have their flaws and none of
them come packaged with the permanent glow of
sunlight and goodness and beautiful things. In any
normal relationship there will be fights from time to
time. Things will be said and done and forgiven,
and occasionally rehashed at strategic moments.
For the most part though, they will feel nurturing
and life-giving to be in. At the very least, they won’t
hurt.

Why do toxic people

do toxic things?
Toxic people thrive on control. Not the loving,
healthy control that tries to keep everyone safe and
happy – buckle your seatbelt, be kind, wear
sunscreen – but the type that keeps people small
and diminished.

Everything they do is to keep people small

and manageable. This will play out through
criticism, judgement, oppression – whatever
it takes to keep someone in their place. The
more you try to step out of ‘your place’, the
more a toxic person will call on toxic
behaviour to bring you back and squash you
into the tiny box they believe you belong in.

It is likely that toxic people learned their behaviour

during their own childhood, either by being
exposed to the toxic behaviour of others or by
being overpraised without being taught the key
quality of empathy. In any toxic relationship there
will be other qualities missing too, such as respect,
kindness and compassion, but at the heart of a toxic
person’s behaviour is the lack of concern around
their impact on others. They come with a critical
failure to see past their own needs and wants.

Toxic people have a way of choosing open, kind

people with beautiful, lavish hearts because these
are the ones who will be more likely to fight for the
relationship and less likely to abandon.

Even the strongest people can find themselves in a

toxic relationship but the longer they stay, the more
they are likely to evolve into someone who is a
smaller, less confident, more wounded version of
the person they used to be.

Non-toxic people who stay in a toxic relationship

will never stop trying to make the relationship
better, and toxic people know this. They count on it.
Non-toxic people will strive to make the relationship
work and when they do, the toxic person has exactly
what he or she wants – control.

Toxic Families – A
Special Kind of
Toxic
Families are a witness to our lives – our best, our
worst, our catastrophes, our frailties and flaws. All
families come with lessons that we need to learn
along the way to being a decent, thriving human.
The lessons begin early and they don’t stop, but not
everything a family teaches will come with an
afterglow. Sometimes the lessons they teach are
deeply painful ones that shudder against our core.

Rather than being lessons on how to love and safely

open up to the world, the lessons some families
teach are about closing down, staying small and
burying needs – but for every disempowering
lesson, there is one of empowerment, strength and
growth that exists with it. In toxic families, these are
around how to walk away from the ones we love,
how to let go with strength and love, and how to let
go of guilt and any fantasy that things could ever be
different. And here’s the rub – the pain of a toxic
relationship won’t soften until the lesson has been
learned.

Love and loyalty

don’t
always exist together.
Love has a fierce way of keeping us tied to people
who wound us. The problem with family is that we
grow up in the fold, believing that the way they do
things is the way the world works. We trust them,
listen to them and absorb what they say. There
would have been a time for all of us that regardless
of how mind-blowingly destructive the messages
from our family were, we would have received them
all with a beautiful, wide-eyed innocence, grabbing
every detail and letting them shape who we were
growing up to be.

Our survival would have once depended on

believing in everything they said and did, and
resisting the need to challenge or question that we
might deserve better. The things we believe when
we are young are powerful. They fix themselves
upon us and they stay, at least until we realise one
day how wrong and small-hearted those messages
have been.

At some point, the environment changes – we grow

up – but our beliefs don’t always change with it. We
stop depending on our family for survival but we
hang on to the belief that we have to stay
connected and loyal, even though being with them
hurts.

The obligation to love and stay loyal to a family

member can be immense, but love and loyalty are
two separate things and they don’t always belong
together.

Loyalty can be a confusing, loaded term and

is often the reason that people stay stuck in
toxic relationships. What you need to know
is this: When loyalty comes with a
diminishing of the self, it’s not loyalty,
it’s submission.

We stop having to answer to family when we

become adults and capable of our own minds.

Why are toxic

relationships so
destructive?
In any healthy relationship, love is circular – when
you give love, it comes back. When what
comes back is scrappy, stingy intent under the guise
of love, it will eventually leave you small and
depleted, which falls wildly, terrifyingly short of
where anyone is meant to be.

Healthy people welcome the support and growth of

the people they love, even if it means having to
change a little to accommodate. When one person
in a system changes, whether it’s a relationship of
two or a family of many, it can be challenging. Even
the strongest and most loving relationships can be
touched by feelings of jealousy, inadequacy and
insecurity at times in response to somebody’s
growth or happiness. We are all vulnerable to
feeling the very normal, messy emotions that come
with being human.

The difference is that healthy families and

relationships will work through the tough stuff.
Unhealthy ones will blame, manipulate and lie –
whatever they have to do to return things to the
way they’ve always been, with the toxic person in
control.

Why a Toxic
Relationship Will
never change.
Reasonable people, however strong and
independently minded they are, can easily be drawn
into thinking that if they could find the switch, do
less, do more, manage it, tweak it, that
the relationship will be okay. The cold truth is that if
anything was going to be different it would have
happened by now.

Toxic people can change, but it’s highly unlikely.

What is certain is that nothing anyone else does can
change them. It is likely there will be broken people,
broken hearts and broken relationships around them
– but the carnage will always be explained away as
someone else’s fault. There will be no remorse,
regret or insight. What is more likely is that any
broken relationship will amplify their toxic
behaviour.

Why are toxic

people so hard to
leave?
If you try to leave a toxic person, things might get
worse before they get better – but they will always
get better. Always.

Few things will ramp up feelings of insecurity or a

need for control more than when someone
questions familiar, old behaviour, or tries to break
away from old, established patterns in a
relationship. For a person whose signature moves
involve manipulation, lies, criticism or any other
toxic behaviour, when something feels as though it’s
changing, they will use even more of their typical
toxic behaviour to bring the relationship (or the
person) back to a state that feels acceptable.

When things don’t seem to be working, people will

always do more of what used to work, even if that
behaviour is at the heart of the problem. It’s what
we all do. If you are someone who is naturally open
and giving, when things don’t feel right in a
relationship you will likely give more of yourself,
offer more support, be more loving, to get things
back on track.

Breaking away from a toxic relationship can

feel like tearing at barbed wire with bare
hands. The more you do it, the more it hurts,
so for a while, you stop tearing, until you
realise that it’s not the tearing that hurts, it’s
the barbed wire – the relationship – and
whether you tear at it or not, it won’t stop
cutting into you.

Think of it like this. Imagine that all relationships and

families occupy a space. In healthy ones, the shape
of that space will be fluid and open to change, with
a lot of space for people to grow. People will move
to accommodate the growth and flight of each
other.

For a toxic family or a toxic relationship, that shape

is rigid and unyielding. There is no flexibility, no
bending, and no room for growth. Everyone has a
clearly defined space and for some, that space will
be small and heavily boxed. When one person starts
to break out of the shape, the whole family feels
their own individual sections change. The shape
might wobble and things might feel vulnerable,
weakened or scary. This is normal, but toxic people
will do whatever it takes to restore the space to the
way it was. Often, that will mean crumpling the ones
who are changing so they fit their space again.

Sometimes out of a sense of love and terribly

misplaced loyalty, people caught in a toxic
relationship might sacrifice growth and change and
step back into the rigid tiny space a toxic person
manipulates them towards. It will be clear when this
has happened because of the soul-sucking grief at
being back there in the mess with people (or
person) who feel so bad to be with.

But they do it
because they love
me. They said so.
Sometimes toxic people will hide behind the
defence that they are doing what they do because
they love you, or that what they do is ‘no big
deal’ and that you’re the one causing the trouble
because you’re just too sensitive, too serious, too –
weak, stupid, useless, needy, insecure, jealous – too
‘whatever’ to get it. You will have heard the word
plenty of times before.

The only truth you need to know is this: If it hurts,

it’s hurtful. Fullstop.

Love never holds people back from growing. It

doesn’t diminish, and it doesn’t contaminate. If
someone loves you, it feels like love. It feels
supportive and nurturing and life-giving. If it doesn’t
do this, it’s not love. It’s self-serving crap designed
to keep you tethered and bound to someone else’s
idea of how you should be.

There is no such thing as a perfect relationship, but

a healthy one is a tolerant, loving, accepting,
responsive one.

The one truth that

matters.
If it feels like growth or something that will nourish
you, follow that. It might mean walking away from
people you care about – parents, sisters, brothers,
friends – but this can be done with love and the
door left open for when they are able to meet you
closer to your terms – ones that don’t break you.

Set the boundaries with grace and love and leave it

to the toxic person to decide which side of that
boundary they want to stand on. Boundaries aren’t
about spite or manipulation and they don’t have to
be about ending the relationship. They are
something drawn in strength and courage to let
people see with great clarity where the doorway is
to you. If the relationship ends, it’s not because of
your lack of love or loyalty, but because the toxic
person chose not to treat you in the way you
deserve. Their choice.

Though it is up to you to decide

the conditions on which you will let
someone close to you, whether or not
somebody wants to be close to you enough to
respect those conditions is up to them. The
choice to trample over what you need means
they are choosing not to be with you. It
doesn’t mean you are excluding them from
your life.

Toxic people also have their conditions of

relationship and though they might not be explicit,
they are likely to include an expectation that you will
tolerate ridicule, judgement, criticism, oppression,
lying, manipulation – whatever they do. No
relationship is worth that and it is always okay to say
‘no’ to anything that diminishes you.

The world and those who genuinely love you want

you to be as whole as you can be. Sometimes
choosing health and wholeness means stepping
bravely away from that which would see your spirit
broken and malnourished.

When you were young and vulnerable and

dependent for survival on the adults in your life, you
had no say in the conditions on which you let
people close to you. But your life isn’t like that now.
You get to say. You get to choose the terms of your
relationships and the people you get close to.

There is absolutely no obligation to choose people

who are toxic just because they are family. If they
are toxic, the simple truth is that they have not
chosen you. The version of you that they have
chosen is the one that is less than the person you
would be without them.

The growth.
Walking away from a toxic relationship isn’t easy, but
it is always brave and always strong. It is always
okay. And it is always – always – worth it. This is the
learning and the growth that is hidden in the toxic
mess.

Letting go will likely come with guilt, anger and

grief for the family or person you thought you
had. They might fight harder for you to stay. They
will probably be crueller, more manipulative and
more toxic than ever. They will do what they’ve
always done because it has always worked. Keep
moving forward and let every hurtful, small-hearted
thing they say or do fuel your step.

You can’t pretend toxic behaviour away or love it

away or eat it, drink it, smoke it, depress it or
gamble it away. You can’t avoid the impact by being
smaller, by crouching or bending or flexing around
it. But you can walk away from it – so far away that
the most guided toxic fuelled missile that’s thrown
at you won’t find you.

One day they might catch up to you – not catch

you, catch up to you – with their growth and their
healing but until then, choose your own health and
happiness over their need to control you.

You can love people, let go of them and keep

the door open on your terms, for whenever
they are ready to treat you with love, respect
and kindness. This is one of the hardest
lessons but one of the most life-giving and
courageous ones.

Sometimes there are not two sides. There is only

one. Toxic people will have you believing that the
one truthful side is theirs. It’s not. It never was. Don’t
believe their highly diseased, stingy version of love.
It’s been drawing your breath, suffocating you and it
will slowly kill you if you let it, and the way you ‘let
it’ is by standing still while it spirals around you,
takes aim and shoots.

If you want to stay, that’s completely okay, but see

their toxic behaviour for what it is – a desperate
attempt to keep you little and controlled. Be bigger,
stronger, braver than anything that would lessen
you. Be authentic and real and give yourself
whatever you need to let that be. Be her. Be him. Be
whoever you can be if the small minds and tiny
hearts of others couldn’t stop you.

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Filed under: Dealing With Difficult People,

Emotional Intelligence, Intimate Relationships &
Marriage, Social Relationships, When A Relationship
Breaks
Tags: boundaries, family relationships, toxic
behaviour, toxic people, toxic relationship

914 Comments

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… 17 Next ›

Lynn
April 1st, 2018

Crying so hard while reading this. This article

describes the “love” of my fiance towards
me. It is always me, I am the one that is
always wrong. A fight is me disagreeing with
him, him screaming and yelling, making fun
of me, telling me everything that is wrong
with me, then me apologizing and promising
to be/do better. 4 years into his recovery and
not much has changed. I need to leave but
am terrified, I love him, and it hurts, but I
can’t live like this anymore.

Reply

Jeff
October 25th, 2019

I’m in this situation right now. My name is

Jeff and it hurts,however I can’t live like
this anymore. It’s killing me. I’m So lost.
What to do. I came in this full throttle and
now she’s no longer interested in me,my
feelings etc etc. I def need some serious
advice. Please help.

Reply

Moeww
November 26th, 2019

I just walked out of this type of

relationship. Its been 16 months since i
felt belittled, disrespected, and
everything about me is wrong and I’m
the worst kind of person in his life.
Everything I did never made him happy
or even put his mind in it. When I
talked to him about things that made
me uncomfortable and unacceptable,
he yelled, scolded, cursed me and
pointed his finger back at me. He
always complained about me, and
compared me to his ex…. There were
so many things I couldn’t endure any
longer. So I broke up with him. And I
felt like a bag full of boulders just fell
out of my shoulders.

Reply

Stephanie
December 21st, 2019

This is so crazy! I asked Google why

does he say he lives me yet despise’s
me?
Why??? The fact of the matter is that
this hurts so them and my love over the
past 6 years is now a sick crazy lonley
,hurt ,scared, mentally and verbally
abused! “You really are DUMB arnt
you..” That’s his famous line to me, or
make throw up nouses when I walk by
cheating, my heart is so broken.. my
mind is unstabel n I have No self
Esteem..
I’m homeless n he’s at his
grandparents. We where to be married
years ago! I have a dress n shoes!! I feel
physically sick without him…
I need help!!! Truth is.. I go back
I Always go back.. I have to change I’m
worthy of love and so are you, every
single one of us going through this.. we
deserve Loved.

Reply

Beena gautam
March 22nd, 2018

Please Advise.
I’m 19 years old and my Boyfriend is 31 years
old and is a divorcee.
His wife left him due to his anger and
physical abusive behavior. He told me it was
just 1 time but everyone else says it was
regular. After 4 months he beated me up on
road on the basis of doubt he had on me
which turned out to be wrong. I tried to leave
him him but he threatened me with pictures.
He brought this issue to my family which was
really shameful for me.
He told me he was graduated but he’s not.
He keeps a doubt on all my friends and
keeps checking all my texts and hacks my
accounts.
I want to leave him but he manipulates me in
a way that I end up thinking maybe I am
wrong and overthinking but he repeats same
things after a week.
I’m sure I want him to go but he makes me
realize that I am being selfish and leaving him
for no reason.