When Walking Away Is Best
It can be hard to know when it’s best to move on from a bad situation.
Leaving a relationship is very difficult. We don’t necessarily want to leave a relationship that we have been committed to and have worked hard at for many months, years, or even decades. We love the person we are with and, simultaneously, sometimes love is really not enough, especially when the wounds get deeper and deeper as time and fighting goes on. Leaving someone we love affects us, our partner, our children, our families, and our friends. We have built an entire life with this person that extends to many and can affect them directly or indirectly in some way. There is uncertainty about how we will function on our own once we make the choice to leave. We feel fear about being alone, never finding love again, and about supporting ourselves in this big, bad world. We were part of a coupledom and that ensured some level of security, even if the majority of the time was spent feeling anxious and insecure about ourselves and the relationship itself.
Your Body Can’t Heal In a State of Unease
When you are in a toxic loop with your partner, however, life becomes unhappy and unbearable. Your nervous system is hypervigilant, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is easily activated into fight or flight, or you might fall into a fawning position or even freeze when in confrontation with your partner. All of these reactions are not healing and not calming for your body. Your nervous system needs to be calm in order to function well. Your body needs to be at ease in order to be healthy. Constantly arguing about the little and big things in your relationship is slowly killing you—in your body, in your mind, and in your soul. You are in a prison and you are not free.
Feeling High or Low Is Not a Sign of True Love
The trauma bonding you experience in this kind of tumultuous relating is addicting. When you are low, all you want to be is high again. You may often ask yourself or your partner, “Where did our love go?” When you make up, or shove the issues under the rug in order to just feel calm and loved again, you feel high. You get along well for a little while and feel so happy and “in love” again. This is not love at all and I know that might strike fear or even anger in your heart. “Of course it’s love, Kristen! I can’t live without him and he can’t live without me!” Still, that is not love. That is codependency. Needing someone in order to feel good enough, whole, and strong is not healthy and it is not love. Wanting to be in a relationship that flows, is free, feels peaceful and harmonious, and is based on two independent people who love and fully accept and respect themselves, their pasts, and all their flaws is love. This is called interdependency and this is what you probably really want in your relationship.
When you can stand on your own two feet, hold your own boundaries without worrying about who you will disappoint, feel unafraid of being alone, can make your own decisions about your home, your work, your parenting choices, and your body, you are independent. You are sovereign. This doesn’t mean that you won’t want companionship. This is the point though: You will WANT companionship and not NEED it. When we are feeling desperate for love and we need someone else to make us feel okay, we settle for less than we deserve simply because we are afraid to be alone and unsupported in some way. When we love and trust ourselves and know that we can support and take care of ourselves, we are more selective. We don’t just settle on the first warm body that shows interest in us. This is when we choose someone simply because we don’t want to end up all alone. And that can sometimes, and often will, cause problems in the long run. Love is a sense of peace and peace is a neutral feeling. It’s not based on the high of being validated or the low of being criticized or abused in order to “make you a better person.” You are enough right now. That brings on a sense of calm and peace. See? It’s neutral, not emotionally charged. True love just IS. It’s not something we gain or lose. It’s who we are. We need to remember that and stand in that truth. If someone tells us we are the best or the worst, it does not matter. Once we know we are LOVE, no one’s opinions of us matter anymore, not even our closest love’s.
The excitement of the infatuation with a new love can create a false sense of security and a false feeling of love for someone. When the claws start to come out, which happens in any relationship at some point (arguments are part of a relationship, of course), we might start to realize that maybe we aren’t as compatible with this person as we thought we were. After all, the infatuation or honeymoon period is intoxicating and euphoric and we are convinced that this person is our “one” during that time. The arguing itself does not signal that the relationship is over. It is the opportunity to work through the bumps that are inevitable in a relationship. Resolution and healthy communication are the components of this secret relationship sauce, however. Without these two things, you are likely to repeat the same arguments again and again for eons, which causes a lot of damage to the relationship and to each person in the relationship. Lack of confidence, lowered self-esteem, and a feeling of failure overtakes you and your partner when you can’t seem to iron out the most basic and obvious concerns and issues. Neither one of you feels heard, seen, or understood. It’s like you are speaking different languages. You can’t understand how another adult can’t understand reason or see things from your perspective. You don’t get how this person who loves you can’t understand you or want to make things better for you both.
Love Is Sometimes Not Enough; Compatibility is Also Important
It’s not that you are a failure or that this person can’t really understand you. They understand your words. They just don’t really agree with your position. For whatever reason, it just does not work for them. People have all kinds of reasons for thinking the exact opposite of you, even when they love you. Sometimes they are one hundred percent wrong and they apparently did not fact check before coming to the fighting ring that day. You know they are wrong but they believe to their core that they are right. That is frustrating enough. Having the argument then about who is wrong and who is right about one minor detail is now the focus of the problem, which is not the actual problem at all. The actual problem never gets resolved. For example, you might be arguing about your partner’s insensitivity to your need for having daily hugs. You use a recent situation to demonstrate when they have been insensitive to this hugging need, and you choose to use a word that isn’t really appropriate to use in the explanation. You could have used a more appropriate word, but who cares? It’s just the two of you and they get what you mean, right? They know you well enough to understand when you use the wrong wording in conversation. Well, apparently not, because the next thing you know, they are criticizing your choice of wording rather than understanding the actual example of how they are insensitive to your needs. Now, you are in some kind of word salad that veers you off into a no-man’s land and your GPS has died. As you can likely see, this is only a deflection from the real issue. If they had just owned up to what you need instead of avoiding it by making the issue something else, you could have reached a solution to the real problem. You were being vulnerable by opening up about what you need while they were not accepting their insensitivity to your needs. They were unwilling to admit they were “wrong,” which was not actually what you were likely aiming for. You simply wanted to be more emotionally or physically close to your partner, not to make them the bad guy.
When two people are not lined up in values, communication style, don’t understand one another’s love language, or have opposite beliefs about life, relationships, religion, sex, or money, they are not compatible. If you can step into one another’s shoes, understand that you are not the same people, respect the other as their own person, truly listen to the other’s complaints about you sometimes, be accountable for your part, work to make a compromise that works for the both of you, accept your differences, and work at resolving conflicts, you can certainly make it. Lots of people do it all the time. If you cannot do these things and your arguments go around in circles continuously and you cannot accept that she likes rom-coms or that he eats with his mouth wide open or that she is cold and distant while he needs a lot of communication and affection, your relationship may not survive. The compatibility factor is not lined up.
This going in circles and never really resolving the issues between you is the part that creates the toxicity and dis-ease in your relationship and your health. Additionally, when no resolution is achieved and, yet, you really want the love and peace back and you decide to just end the pretend argument about your poor word choice, you will often become high on the love again. Once there is a “winner” and a “loser” in the argument, the false honeymoon can start over. It’s especially good for the “winner” of the argument who never had to own their part in the problem and was able to convince you that you are the problem for making such poor word choice. After you have swept your problem under the rug (to come back again another day, of course), your nervous system wants to feel calm again. So, you fawn (please) or flee from yourself (abandon yourself) to get in good with your partner so the tension goes away. Or, you find other ways to cope and feel calm. You escape into sex, food, TV, drugs, or shopping. After all, if they won’t see your side, at least you don’t want any more tension, right? The high you feel from the trauma bonding chemicals dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin combined with the possible make-up sex creates that false sense of security once again and you are back on that roller coaster of toxic relating once more. The ride (pattern) just keeps starting over.
When To Walk
So, when do you walk away from the relationship? You leave it when you realize that it is hurting you more than it is making you happy. Period. The end. When you have fought the good fight long enough, when your boundaries are gone, when there is never a resolution to the problems, when you feel unloved, unworthy, not good enough, disrespected, unacceptable, like a failure, ignored, and have no confidence or self-respect left in you, you walk out the door because it is what is BEST for you and for everyone involved. I am not advocating breaking up marriages or relationships. I am simply a person who deeply believes that self-love is the most important part of a person’s life. It helps you find peace and calm in your body and entire being. It creates health and abundance in many areas of your life. It places you onto a more positive neural pathway in your brain and, by extension, your body (where you manifest from) and your life. It gives you freedom to be your authentic self and it gives permission to others to be their authentic selves, too, which is granting them the truest version of love. True love asks nothing of another. True love witnesses without condition and allows the other to be who they are. However, when who or what they are being is abusive toward you, when no resolution can be made, when you are giving and the other is not reciprocating, or when you feel like you are being rejected and abandoned continually, it is wise for the part of you that knows what true love should feel like to step in and protect you by walking away from the pain and dysfunction. This is when your own self-love needs to take the forefront and choose not to abandon yourself for your partner and their mistreatment of you.
When we choose to stay simply because the other person will feel betrayed, crushed, and devastated, we betray, crush and devastate ourselves instead. Perhaps we have been conditioned to betray ourselves for others, especially for our parents if we come from a traumatic childhood home. It feels natural to our bodies and minds to simply “do the right thing” and “stick it out” for the sake of the other person. However, this ignites and activates our nervous systems on repeat, creates anxiety, and wears down the body. We cannot be calm. We are on edge. We lash out at our partner and others as an instinctual reaction to feeling constant anxiety. This is because we are going against our own truth and our own needs and desires. Our bodies know what we need and want. When we choose to be with someone just to make them happy and so that we can avoid being hated by others or seen as selfish, we are abandoning and rejecting the most important person in our lives—ourselves. This has so many consequences. Your life is about YOU—not anyone else. Your life is about YOUR path and YOUR happiness and joy. It is not to say we should not be considerate of others or be kind to others. It just means that having compassion for ourselves and loving our own emotions and values and beliefs first helps us create the right boundaries and the right ability to love others better and in a healthier way. Others along the way are our partners toward our own evolution in consciousness. They stay for a little or a long while, but once any abuse of any kind starts, the contract (relationship) is over, folks. That’s the gist of it. Once the abuse starts, the happiness and joy pretty much end, except for when the “winner” of the arguments decides to be nice to you since they “won” for the umpteenth time. The abuse (toward self and other) comes from being on that same roller coaster ride again and again without any kind of real end. Both people are involved in creating that abuse at that point. Happiness and joy are the point of your life, not struggle, fighting, self-hatred, and needing to prove to your partner that you really are good enough. Your partner should know this because they love you for you. Your essence. Not what you do or don’t do right or wrong.
Realize that the less we resolve our issues with our partner, the more we are constantly triggered. We feel a build-up of anger and resentment, sadness, rejection, abandonment, and hopelessness and helplessness about the status of our relationship. We believe negative things about ourselves and our partner. As the saying goes: Hurt people hurt people. And you, when you are hurting yourself by subjecting yourself to continual pain and discord with your partner, are a hurt people. Leaving the person you feel love for, have history with, or have children or a home with is the hardest thing you will ever do. Staying because you are loyal and committed to them and because you promised to love them no matter what is an outdated template and comes from a time when women needed to be taken care of for survival. This is no longer the case. We don’t have to stay with someone who we are figuratively (and possibly literally) slicing and dicing and who is doing the same to us. We feel a kind of love for this person. In fact, we believe that this is what true love IS and we are chemically and psychologically addicted to them. We are obsessed and codependent with them as well, so why would we want to break their hearts? It seems so unfair and not right to hurt them more.
It hurts both people to leave, but your health and happiness are much more important than sticking it out when it’s dead in the water. It also shows your children a false sense of what love is as well, which allows for more generational trauma. After all, you are likely fighting from your inner children anyway and if you look closely, you are probably also fighting like your parents did. Showing your children that fighting all the time without resolution is unhealthy for them. Also, never arguing and pretending “all is well” just to avoid confrontation at all is also unhealthy and creates loneliness and emptiness in the relationship. Your children see and feel all of this. Seeing their parents abusing each other is detrimental to their happiness and sense of well-being. It sets them up to attract the same kind of abusive ”love” they have been witnessing and soaking up their entire childhoods. It is traumatizing them as well. Arguing and showing them that you can make up and love each other is normal and healthy. This shows them that arguments happen but the love and respect remain. When there is no resolution and the arguing is more like just “the thing my parents do,” it is toxic and based on trauma bonding chemical addiction, not love. Remember that if you could stop the looping arguments with your partner and just love one another in peace and be able to resolve the conflicts, you would already be doing it. Sometimes and with some people, our unhealed childhood wounds are triggered and until we individually heal them, we will be on autopilot and won’t be able to stop the fight once the triggering has started. This triggering is hitting pain from your original (anchor) trauma from when you were very young, so all you can do is heal it and then see how your relationship goes.
In order to be able to stop the toxic dance you and your partner are doing, at least one of you needs to step out of the dance and get help. Once one of you is healed more and loves yourself more, you will be able to see exactly where the relationship is going. After healing, are you growing together or apart? You won’t really know until you have healed and recovered from what allows you to be in the trauma bond and doing the looping toxic fighting so much.
Keep in mind that following our own lead allows us to naturally make space for others to be themselves. Love is freedom after all. My goal for myself, my family, my clients, and for you is for all of us to live in and from our truths. If you are truly happy most of the time and feeling loved, supported, wanted, desired, and uplifted and you can be you to your absolute fullest, then YES! That is your wonderful, amazing life and keep at it. Celebrate this if this is your reality. For many, it is not. The world is built upon codependency in relationships. We are trying to break this now in order for love based in truth and freedom to be the new blueprint. This is how we create the new world.
Helping you heal your anchor trauma and all the limiting beliefs, self-rejection, and self-abandonment that creates hardship in your relationships and life is what I do in my coaching. Please schedule a Discovery call with me for help with this.
