
DONT SAY NO SKIN
(‘You seemed to enjoy talking to your boss tonight.’) The relationship is a jungle and somewhere along the way you’ve turned into a hunted thing in a skin suit. (‘Well would you rather go out with your friends or stay home with me?’) Statements become traps. Sometimes you wouldn’t see it if it was lit with stadium floodlights. You’re constantly braced for the ‘gotcha’.Leaving a relationship is never easy, but staying for too long in a toxic relationship will make sure any strength, courage and confidence in you are eroded down to nothing. Why couldn’t that sort of love happen for you? It can, but first you have to clear the path for it to find you. You look at other couples doing their happy couple thing and you feel the sting. You fall asleep hollow and you wake up just as bad. A toxic relationship is defined by the consistency, the intensity and the damage. All people and all relationships do some of these things some of the time – but that doesn’t make them toxic. Not all toxic relationships are easy to leave, but being aware of the signs will make it easier to claim back your power and draw a bold heavy line around what’s allowed into your life and what gets closed out. To stay in a toxic relationship is to keep your hand hovering over the self-destruct button. What are the signs that I’m in a toxic relationship?īeing aware that the relationship is toxic is vital in protecting yourself from breakage. Sometimes the only thing left to do is to let go with grace and love and move on. Even worse, if your relationship is toxic, you will be more and more damaged by staying in it.įighting to hold on to something that is not fighting to hold on to you will ruin you. Perhaps they were never really there in the first place, or not in the way you needed them to be anyway. If the relationship is toxic, it is highly likely that all the fight in the world won’t change anything because one or both people have emotionally moved on.



Some relationships are all shades of wrong from the outset (‘Darlin’ you’re so pretty. We never know how things will look when each other’s less adorable, kind of awful habits start to show themselves publicly, or under the influence of alcohol or in-laws. Similarly, relationships that seem to begin strong because ‘omg we’re soooo in love you guys,’ can dissolve into nothing but ash and legal fees that could have bought a castle on the river Seine, if they weren’t being used to divide half your assets more ‘half-ly’. Strong, healthy, independent people can find themselves in the white-knuckled grip of a toxic relationship. Toxic relationships will cause monumental breakage to people, families and workplaces, but they aren’t necessarily the territory of the weak, downtrodden or insecure.
