#93 Why Are "Toxic" Relationships So Hard to Recover From
Ever wondered why it is so challenging to recover from toxic relationships? Why the chaos and unpredictability leave you feeling disoriented and overwhelmed? I'm here to guide you through this complex terrain. In a candid conversation, we'll unravel the dynamics of such relationships and expose the confusion, grief, and shame that often accompany them. Just remember, the difficulty isn't only in letting go, but also in the aftermath that can leave you feeling lost.
As we journey together towards healing, we'll tackle the isolation, embarrassment, and the elusive closure that often seems unattainable. It's a hard road, no doubt about it, but I'm here to help you navigate through it. We'll dig into practical tools to assist you in the recovery process, and learn how to move on healthily. No more futile pursuit of validation and connection, no more shame for not leaving sooner; we're focusing on healing and growth. Brace yourself, we're about to strip away the layers and reveal the true dynamics of toxic relationships.
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Join the waitlist for Healing Anxious Attachment
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
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You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship coach Stephanie Rigg and I'm really glad you're here. You. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment.
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In today's episode, we're going to be talking all about why toxic or dysfunctional unhealthy relationships are so hard to recover from. So this is one of those areas where it's really counterintuitive. You would think that a relationship that's been a bit of a train wreck, a bit of a shit show, is something that you're going to leave and feel this big sigh of relief, put it behind you and suddenly you're free of all of that drama and you can move on with your life and be better for it. While that is what it feels like it should be on paper, the reality of it is often much messier than that. And as I said, counterintuitively.
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I think that we can struggle a lot more to detach from and make sense of these really dysfunctional dynamics compared with if we were moving on from a breakup of a relationship that was broadly healthy and stable, you'd think that those ones would be the ones that we'd really struggle to let go of. But that's generally not the case. So I'm going to be unpacking why that is why it's such a common experience to really struggle to not only leave and let go of these dysfunctional relationships, as in getting to the point of breaking up, but why the aftermath can feel so confusing and disorienting. And I'm hoping that in doing that it will not only normalise that experience. If you've been in that or maybe you're in it at the moment and you're wondering, what's wrong with me?
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I know rationally that that relationship was really unhealthy for me. And yet I feel so consumed by thinking about it and playing out all of the what ifs and all of those scenarios. But also that it'll give you some tools to really give yourself the acceptance and the closure that you're seeking in a way that allows you to move on with your life in a healthy way. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before I dive into that, a couple of quick announcements.
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The first being you will have heard me mention in the past couple of episodes that Healing Anxious Attachment, my signature course, is reopening for enrollment very soon. In one week, I think from the date that this comes out, there are already well over a thousand of you who have signed up to the waitlist, which ensures you get early bird pricing and first access when the course comes out. And you can join that waitlist via the link in the show notes. I'm also very excited, although slightly hesitant to announce, and I say hesitant because announcing it on here makes it real and forces me to actually follow through on this. But here we go.
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For the first time ever, I'm going to be offering a VIP version of Healing Anxious Attachment, which is more of a group coaching programme than an online course. So Healing Anxious Attachment, in its original form is an online course, so it's eight modules that are self paced and you have lifetime access to those. So it's really comprehensive and has heaps of information and resources, workbooks, meditations, the whole bit. It's a really wonderful course, but I know that for some people, having that additional face to face component and individual support from me is really helpful. But obviously I'm constrained in how many people I'm able to offer that to.
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The last couple of rounds of Healing Anxious Attachment had about 350 people. So obviously, I'm not in a position to give individual coaching and feedback to 350 people. It's just way beyond capacity. So something that I'm trialling for this next round is a capped small group coaching VIP option, and that will be 690 minutes group coaching calls with me over that eight week period. We're also going to have a pop up online community, so there's that support and community connection and a few bonus resources as well.
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So that's going to be capped, I think, at 30 spots. So if that's something that interests you, maybe you've been interested in working with me more closely, maybe you've looked at my Mastermind but not wanted to commit to a full six months. This could be a really great way to get that extra support along with the course itself, in a way that allows you to get that feedback and interaction with me and with your peers that goes beyond just the self paced learning of a course. So, again, if you're interested in that, just join the regular waitlist and that will be a first come, first served when doors open next week for the VIP option. So I hope that people are excited by that.
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And as I said, it's a bit of an experiment, so we'll see how it goes. The second quick announcement is just to share the featured review, which is the kindness, sincerity and compassion that she shares her knowledge with is wonderful. I've already gained so much insight regarding past relationships, current relationships and definitely communication. Thank you for the beautiful way that all of this is given. Thank you so much for that beautiful review.
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I really appreciate it. If that was yours, please send an email to podcast@stephanierigg.com and my team will set you up with free access to one of my Masterclasses. Okay, all of that out of the way. Thank you for your patience. I know that when it's launching time, when I'm in course launch mode, the introduction tends to be a little lengthier, so I appreciate you sticking with me.
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Let's talk about toxic relationships and why they're so hard to recover from. As I said in the introduction, oftentimes when we've been in a toxic relationship, when we eventually get to the point where that relationship ends, for whatever reason, you would think that we would be really relieved. And I think on some level, we can be the part of us that knows that that was costing us a lot emotionally, physically, potentially, mentally. The part of us that's exhausted and drained might feel a sense of relief that we're through the other side of that. But at the same time, I think for many people, the overwhelming feeling is one of confusion and grief and maybe shame.
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I think that we can have a lot of shame around what we put up with and for how long. I know that I've experienced that myself. But a lot of these relationships end in a way that is not satisfying, it's not tied up nicely in a way where we can make sense of what happened and why. And I think that we talk so much about closure and the need for closure at the end of a relationship, and it's rare that a really toxic, dysfunctional dynamic is going to leave you with a sense of closure. Because if we really unpack, what do we mean by closure?
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It's a sense of acceptance, a sense of understanding what happened and why and the very nature of dysfunctional toxic dynamics is that there's not a lot of sense to it. It might have been very chaotic and unpredictable and confusing and inconsistent. Probably not great communication, probably high conflict, maybe turbulence. You probably never felt terribly validated or understood by this person in a way that really allowed you to feel emotionally safe with them. And so it's almost like you've spent whatever period of time it might have been months, it might have been years, you've spent that time banging up against a wall, trying to make it work, only to then slump down in defeat and just feel totally spent, but also really defeated by the fact that you weren't able to get there.
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And that sort of brings me to part of why I think it's so hard, particularly if you are someone who leans more towards anxious attachment, your baseline tendency in relationships is to just try everything and try it again and again and again, right? It's really, really hard to walk away from a relationship, no matter how dysfunctional it is, because your blueprint is to keep pushing, right, to keep trying to get over the line, to get someone to show up in a certain way, to get them to give you the comfort, the validation, the connection that you're craving from them. And in a weird sort of way, the more erratic they are, the more inconsistent they are, the more your anxiety flares up and really drives you to do that over functioning backbending thing of just trying to get someone to be there for you. Striving proving people pleasing, fawning, whatever it might look like, your efforts tend to ramp up commensurate with their chaos and that's not meant to abrogate responsibility. On one side, I think that these dynamics are almost always co created and we tend to trigger each other into increasing levels of chaos and dysfunction.
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But on the anxious side, and I speak to that experience because I know that so many of my community fall into that camp. On the anxious side, it's likely that you expended a lot of emotional energy and effort into trying to make the relationship work, dysfunction notwithstanding, that you were just trying and trying and trying, and that as that got increasingly challenging over the course of the relationship, your efforts only increased. Right. And you might find yourself isolated from friends and family. You might have really been so consumed by trying to make the relationship work that your world got very small.
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And again, I can relate to this, that you become really insular and maybe you don't want to tell people how bad it is because you're ashamed and you still want to salvage it and so you don't want to taint the relationship and your partner in the eyes of the people in your life. And so you just get very small and you get very private and you don't really have the energy or bandwidth to deal with anything outside of this very important mission to try and salvage this shit show of a relationship, right? And that's really, really hard to not only go through, but then to come out of it's. Kind of like the metaphor or the analogy that I always use is like a bomb's just gone off. You're in this war zone and then you sort of come to and you're just walking around amongst the rubble trying to make sense of it and figuring out, where do I even begin to pick up the pieces from this?
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Because I really lost a lot of myself in those efforts to make this dysfunctional relationship become some semblance of stability and to realise that you just couldn't get there and that you've now got to deal with the aftermath of that in terms of your own sense of self, self esteem, self worth, all of those things. That's a really, really destabilising and disorienting place to be. So I really just want to validate how very understandable it is if that has been your experience, if you've recently gone through that, if you're in it at the moment, or maybe you've gone through it in the past and you've just maybe been hard on yourself for the fact that you haven't been able to let go. I think that in many cases, as much as we can know rationally, that the relationship ending was the right thing, again, it runs counter to everything in your being to give up, right? And just because the relationship was unhealthy, very few relationships are bad 100% of the time.
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And so when all of that stress is alleviated, all of the day to day dysfunction is gone because the relationships ended and you're not having to deal with that oftentimes, you'll be left with this really warped, skewed perception. Of what the relationship was because you're now no longer dealing with the bad stuff, but you have all the memories of the good stuff and you're dealing with the lack of whatever good things were there. So the comfort, the company, maybe there was still intimacy of some sort, all of those things. You're suddenly feeling this gaping void and you really have all of this urge to reattach and reconnect because those things feel so good and to not have them feel so painful. But you have this very selective memory around what the relationship was like.
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And again, I think that's part of our brain and our being just trying to make sense of it and trying to make it hurt less is by convincing ourselves that it wasn't that bad or that maybe it's still salvageable. Or maybe we should have one more conversation just to try and make it all make sense, to bring it all into some sense of harmony or rationality or something that we can tie up neatly with a bow and go, okay, I can accept that now because I can tell the story in a way that feels cohesive. Because I think in many cases we don't have answers. And to tell the story as it happened, we can really struggle to make sense of why we stayed and what about that was appealing to us and why we didn't leave sooner or set boundaries, or why we forgave someone a million times for hurting us. All of those things can be really hard to just look at in the light of day and make sense of.
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And so we do want to find other justifications and other explanations and other ways to spin the story or to salvage that wreckage. So, as I said, I just want to really normalise that. If you have been through it and you've been hard on yourself for that, I think that that's really common, more so than you'd realise. Obviously, I am kind of privy to this because it's my job and I speak to so many people about this, but I think most of us do feel a level of shame and embarrassment. And so we tend not to be very honest with our friends and family when we've been through something like this because we don't want to admit how bad it was.
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And we might judge ourselves for not being stronger, all sorts of things. So just validating how normal that is. And you're very much not alone in that experience. Now, pivoting to how can we help ourselves when we're in this space? I think that the whole closure piece is one of those tricky ones where oftentimes we tell ourselves that we need to get closure from this person in order to be able to move on.
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And as I've said before, the great irony around closure is the relationships that leave you reaching for closure, needing closure, desperate for closure, are probably the relationships where you're never going to get it. Because the person who leaves you in that sense of disarray, going back to that visual of standing amongst the rubble, desperately seeking an explanation and a way to make meaning of it, the person who leaves you feeling like that is probably not the person who has the capacity to give you the closure that you're seeking. Right? We tell ourselves that just one more conversation and then I'll feel better. But remember, this person that you're wanting to have one more conversation with is the same person who hurt you or who was unable to emotionally support you or who you had really dysfunctional conflict cycles with.
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It's the same person. And they probably haven't magically developed emotional capacity and emotional maturity such that they're going to be able to show up to that conversation in a way that will give you the relief that you're looking for. So if that's one of the stories you're telling yourself, I just need to talk to them. I just need to get closure from them, please trust me when I say that your closure comes from within. It comes from finding a level of acceptance.
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And sometimes that acceptance is accepting that you will never fully understand what happened there, accepting that you will never fully know what was going on for them. You'll never know the full truth. You'll never know how they were feeling. You'll never know why they behaved the way they did. All of those things.
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There's this level of, can I just accept that I will never fully understand or that I might never know how they're feeling? And coming to terms with that, making peace with that, and really just letting go and trusting that that's where your closure comes from. It's really an inner peace, rather than finding some sort of outer relational story that finally feels cohesive, because sometimes that cohesiveness just doesn't exist, right? There isn't a nice explanation for what happened that makes us feel better. So we just actually need to self source that level of acceptance and peace.
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The other thing that I'd say is, in the same vein, people often say, like, I can't move on until I can't let go, yet I can't move on. I'm not over them, therefore I can't move on with my life. And again, I understand the sentiment, we've all been there. But I think the really important thing to understand is that your acceptance, your letting go emotionally comes from taking action. So rather than waiting until you magically feel better to move on with your life, to start rebuilding and taking steps towards whatever the next chapter looks like, I think you need to take those steps and trust that the feelings will follow.
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You need to take those steps to create the space in your life for a new version of you to emerge. Because if you just stay kind of static and stuck in this old version where your life looks exactly the same, except now there's this gaping hole where the relationship used to be, then you're going to be feeling that gaping hole every day. And I don't think that it's wise to just expect that to go away. So my suggestion to you is turn over the page and start writing out a new story and trust that you will grow through it and you'll be stronger for it. But there's much more personal power and freedom and liberation in taking that action before you feel ready.
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It's like all of those quotes that you'll see on Instagram. It's like you don't wait until you're motivated to go to the gym. You go to the gym and you find your motivation once you get going. And I think it's a similar principle here. Let's not let our feelings be in the driver's seat of our choices that we need to make to really support our well being.
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The final thing that I'll say here is I alluded to it earlier how common it is for us to isolate when we've been in unhealthy dysfunctional relationships and when we come out of them again, I think that's a combination of not having the bandwidth. If we're just so swept up in a very all consuming relationship where we're pouring all of our emotional and mental energy into trying to make the relationship work and there's a lot of conflict and dysfunction that's really exhausting and it's easy to just kind of organically become more isolated when you're in that. And then I think the other part, which is maybe more deliberate, is we aren't very honest or forthcoming with the people in our lives because we feel a lot of shame and maybe even embarrassment or humiliation about how bad things are and what we've accepted from this person. So if that's you and that's kind of an aspect of what you've been experiencing, I know that it's really hard. I know that your shame will tell you to hide, but the people in your life probably really care about you and really want to support you.
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So I think that opening up to trusted people and saying the honest truth, I don't know how I got here. It was really bad. I was just trying to make it work. I feel so much grief. I feel so lonely.
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Whatever it is that you're feeling, trust that the people who care about you care about that experience and want to support you through it. So try not to isolate yourself. Try to reach out to people. That's going to be a really important part of the healing process for you and really deeply reminding your system that you are loved and you are cared for and that you have lots going on in your life. Because again, it can feel very dark and lonely when we've lost that attachment figure in the form of our romantic partner.
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So supplementing that with lots of other beautiful, loving, nourishing supportive relationships is really, really good. Okay? I really hope that that has been helpful. I know that if you're in this at the moment, it's so tough and it's so disorienting, but I do hope that this has given you a feel for there being a light at the end of the tunnel. If you are going through a breakup and you're wanting some additional resources and tools for that.
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I do have a breakup course on my website called Higher Love. That's a really good one, and it really kind of holds your hand and walks you through the whole breakup process and beyond. So you can go cheque that out via my website and we might link it in the show notes as well. Otherwise, guys, as always, grateful for you. Grateful for your support.
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If you like this episode, please leave a rating or a review or a little comment on Spotify if you're listening there, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks, guys. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram at @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating.
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It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again sooner.