The truth of toxic relationships
People often stay in bad relationships because they don’t have a reference point in their lives. It surprises everyone to see people choosing to remain in toxic and abusive relationships. It seems they have a choice, but they don’t. For someone who doesn't have a reference point to measure the good against the bad, it’s impossible to get out of a bad relationship. This makes their minds chaotic, and they are seldom at peace. A person who is not at peace is the hardest to communicate with, and all suggestions fall on deaf ears.
The perennial question is: why do some people get comfortable with chaos and toxicity? Before that, we need to define what a toxic relationship is. Constant fights aren’t toxic; they expose the underlying problems within a relationship, which are more about communication, neuroticism, and low emotional depth. Calling it toxic would be making a mountain out of a molehill.
Emotional manipulation is often categorized as toxic, but it isn’t always so. Manipulation requires using someone’s beliefs and wants against them. If someone values companionship in a desperate attempt to avoid loneliness, that person would be easy to manipulate. Any threat to break the companionship would make the person do anything you want. It can drive someone crazy. It emanates from one person’s insecurities and another person’s selfish motives. The manipulation cannot go on because eventually, the facade breaks.
Toxic relationships are the ones you know are bad for you, yet you remain in them because you feel you have no choice. Or that’s what it feels like. All the participants in toxic relationships have childhood traumas, including the one causing the pain. It is in the early years when you start consuming poison without knowing it is poison. You neither have knowledge of the poison nor a choice to avoid it. Your idea of healthy relationships, a healthy mindset, and a healthy approach never get established. So, you think chaos is the only way forward. You believe that if you don’t embrace chaos, you would be lonely.
For such people, a healthy relationship that includes caring for each other, loving each other, and pleasing each other seems impossible and distant. So, when something breaks down in a relationship they pick their personality apart and place the blame on themselves.
Toxic relationships kill people. They drain someone emotionally to the point where they either kill themselves or get addicted to something worse. The spell is hard to break because to be free of such poison is to be free of your identity. Your identity comprises your knowledge about the world. Your experiences through life have shaped your identity. To let go of that identity means letting go of all the bad experiences and trauma. You are afraid of what you will be without everything you have known and believed in.
There is only one way to let go of everything: forgiveness. But what does forgiving really mean? Why is it so hard?
Your brain has held onto your traumatic identity for a long time. It has kept you afloat, whether it was healthy to do so or not. The brain is an amazingly adaptable organ. It is designed to keep you alive. Intelligence is in knowing how you remain alive. That’s where beliefs and insecurities come into play. Your brain believes that by creating such walls, it is saving you. But we know how it pans out in the end.
When all you have known is trauma and bad behavior, your normalcy meter shifts. Your behavior changes. Soon your new normal ceases to match other people’s normal. This becomes your identity, and now you can only bond with people whose normal is worse than yours.
Forgiveness requires dumping that identity and adjusting your normal to a healthy level. But then, what is considered healthy? Based on what makes people happy, from kids to adults to older people, there is only one thing that keeps anything in the world afloat and healthy: love. Any relationship that has more love and caring is a healthy relationship.
The first relationship you cultivate is with yourself. Forgiveness is, therefore, dumping the identity of trauma and accepting love from yourself. It takes a bit of self-love to collect your broken pieces and nurture them into a strong identity. Your thoughts and your beliefs make your personality.
The only way to dump the trauma is by accepting its existence but rejecting its effect.
Once you acknowledge that you are shaped by your trauma and your unrealistic “normalcy” levels, you start identifying its first- and second-order effects all around you. True forgiveness is acknowledging all of that and choosing to walk away from it. This is when your mind starts discovering love in the world. You will be able to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy relationships.
A person getting out of a toxic relationship can only be cured through self-love. Love from someone else wouldn’t have the same effect unless their normalcy levels match. That’s why people who come out of abusive relationships cannot accept feedback and advice. They still make bad decisions because they have yet to go through the path of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is, therefore, not an act but a journey. You need someone to accompany you, strengthen you and who better than God and faith in Him to lead you? To believe in love is to believe in Godliness.