Toxic Love

You can be in a toxic relationship and still struggle to “prove” it, even to yourself. We’re talking about the kind that doesn’t always look dramatic on the outside, but slowly makes you smaller on the inside: covert narcissism, subtle manipulation, and the quiet loss of self trust that can happen over months or years.

We unpack how low self esteem and old relationship patterns can push us towards what feels safe instead of what’s genuinely healthy. I share my own experience of realising I’d been choosing comfort over growth, confusing attachment with love, and carrying an old “am I enough?” wound into a dynamic that reinforced it. We also name the behaviours that can keep you stuck, like walking on eggshells, second guessing your reactions, and feeling punished for having needs.

Then we get practical and compassionate: the better question than “why didn’t you leave?”, the signs that you’re becoming more yourself or disappearing, and what boundaries and self validation actually look like in real life. We also break down trauma bonding, including how love bombing and devaluing can hook you through intermittent affection, and why that cycle can feel so hard to break.

If this resonates, you’re not alone, and you’re allowed to take your unhappiness seriously. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more women can find support and language for what they’re living through.

Contact Meg: 

Website: https://www.meganwebb.com.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61579436511475
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/meganwebbcoaching/

Link to FREE discovery call with Meg:  

https://calendly.com/glassfulfilled

Email Meg here: 

meganwebbcoaching@gmail.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Hi guys and welcome to the podcast. Today I want to talk about something that I think a lot of women can relate to, but perhaps don't always have the words for toxic relationships. And I want to talk about my own experience of being in what I now understand to have been a covert narcissistic relationship. And I am going to talk about narcissism in much more depth in future episodes because there is so much to unpack there. But today I don't want this to be a podcast episode about diagnosing narcissism or explaining every characteristic. I want to talk about how my own low self-esteem and relationship patterns played a part in the relationships I chose and how different my life became when I found myself in a relationship that wasn't the kind of relationship I had experienced before.

Choosing Safety Over Real Growth

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Because when I look back now, I can see something really clearly. Before this relationship, I had a pattern. I tended to choose relationships where I felt safe. And at the time, I thought that was a good thing. I thought, of course, I want to feel safe in a relationship. But what I really mean is that I chose relationships where I didn't feel particularly challenged. I wasn't putting myself too far outside my comfort zone. I wasn't constantly worried about being rejected. And in hindsight, I was probably experiencing attachment where I thought love was. And I think that had a lot to do with my self-esteem. When you don't have a particularly strong sense of your own worth, you can become very focused on whether someone else wants you. You can choose relationships where you don't have to risk too much because rejection hurts. Being vulnerable is scary. And if somewhere deep inside you believe that you're not quite enough, then being with someone who makes you feel secure can feel incredibly comforting. You don't necessarily realize you're choosing safety over growth. I certainly didn't. You just think you finally found someone who makes you feel okay. And that was my pattern until it wasn't. I found myself in a relationship that was completely different. And I can see now that it was actually a natural progression for me. My marriage had been two people who I believe were attached rather than in love. I'm not saying there wasn't love there, but I think we were both needing each other to heal our wounds, and neither of us was capable of doing that for each other. This is only something I've realized on the other side, but I do believe we weren't the person each other needed. And how could we be? We were both coming from our wounds. We were two wounded individuals trying to heal with each other's validation, and that's no one's fault. But more on that another time.

Inside A Covert Narcissistic Dynamic

SPEAKER_00 3:13

And then in my mid-40s, I ended up meeting a covert narcissist. And the thing about a covert narcissistic relationship is that it isn't necessarily obvious from the outside. There may not be the stereotypical big dramatic displays that we associate with narcissistic abuse. It can be much more subtle. So most people know a narcissist as an overt narcissist. So covert narcissism was nothing I'd experienced before. It was the manipulation, the criticism, the subtle put-downs, the shifting of blame, the way you start questioning your own perception of things, the way you find yourself constantly trying to keep the peace, the way you start wondering whether you're actually the problem. And perhaps most importantly, the way your confidence slowly begins to disappear. And that's what's happened to me. It wasn't like I woke up one morning and thought, I'm in a toxic relationship. It was much more gradual than that. And I think that's important to understand. Because when we're talking about toxic relationships, particularly narcissistic abuse, people often ask, why didn't you just leave? And I understand why people ask that question, but it completely misses what happens inside the person who is experiencing it. Because by the time you're asking yourself whether you should leave, you may already have spent years having your confidence chipped away. You may not trust your own judgment anymore. You may be constantly second-guessing yourself. You may have become so accustomed to making someone else happy that you've completely lost touch with what you want. And that's where I found myself. I had always struggled with low self-esteem, but this relationship took that to another level. I became smaller. I questioned myself. I questioned my reactions. I questioned whether I was being too sensitive. I questioned whether I was asking for too much. And I spent a lot of energy trying to work out what I needed to do differently. How could I make things better? How could I make the relationship work? How could I avoid conflict? How could I be good enough? And there's the word, enough. Because underneath so much of this is that question, am I enough? And when you already carry that wound into a relationship, someone who repeatedly reinforces that insecurity can have an enormous amount of power over you. Looking

The Better Question Than Why Stay

SPEAKER_00 5:42

back now, I don't blame myself. And I really want to emphasize that because there is a tendency when we talk about toxic relationships to turn it into a story about why someone was stupid for staying. Why didn't she see it? Why did she put up with that? Why didn't she leave sooner? But I don't think that's helpful. I think a much more compassionate question is what happened to her sense of self that got her to this relationship in the first place? Because that's a very different question. And that's the question I eventually had to ask myself. Who was I? What did I believe about myself? Why was I so willing to abandon myself and my values to keep someone else happy? Why did their opinion of me matter more than my own opinion of me? And I think this is where my earlier relationship history became really important because I didn't suddenly develop low self-esteem inside that relationship. I brought it with me. It was already there. The difference was that previously I had chosen relationships where those wounds weren't necessarily being pushed so hard. This relationship exposed them and eventually I could not ignore them anymore. I had to look at myself, not in a blaming way, not in a what's wrong with me way, but in a really honest way. I had to start understanding where my beliefs about myself came from, why I struggled to trust myself, why I was so afraid of rejection, why I believed I had to work so hard to be loved. And I had to learn that being loved isn't supposed to require you to abandon yourself. That's probably one of the biggest things I've learned. A healthy relationship shouldn't require you to become smaller so someone else can feel bigger. You shouldn't have to constantly monitor somebody else's mood. You shouldn't have to walk on eggshells. You shouldn't have to question your reality, and you shouldn't have to lose yourself in order to keep a relationship. Now I want to be really clear that I'm not saying every difficult relationship is a narcissistic relationship. Relationships are complicated, people make mistakes, people communicate badly, people have their own wounds. And narcissism is a much bigger topic than I can possibly cover in this episode. I will talk about that more in future episodes. But what I do want women to start noticing is how they feel in their relationships. Do you feel like you can be yourself? Can you disagree? Can you have an opinion? Can you say no? Can you express your needs without being punished for them? Do you trust yourself? Do you feel respected? Do you feel like you are becoming more yourself in the relationship or less? Because I think that's a really powerful question. Are you becoming more yourself or are you disappearing? And I know that for me, I had disappeared. I had spent so much time trying to be what somebody else needed me to be that I had lost touch with who I actually was. And rebuilding that was a huge part of my healing journey. It wasn't just about leaving a relationship, it was about coming back to myself. Even in my early relationships, I was trying to be the person that cared for everyone. I can see I started losing touch with who I actually was quite early on. And that's something I talk about a lot now in my coaching. Because whether we're talking about alcohol, toxic relationships, low self-esteem, or the patterns we repeat, I don't believe in looking back at ourselves and saying, how could you have been so stupid? I believe in curiosity. Why did I make the choices I made? What was I trying to protect myself from? What did I believe about myself? What did I learn about love? What did I learn about rejection? What did I learn about my own worth? Because once you understand those things, you can start changing them. And that's where real freedom begins. For me, healing wasn't about becoming someone completely different. It was about finding the woman underneath all the fear, the shame, the self-doubt, and the years of trying to be enough. It was about learning to trust myself again, learning to listen to my own voice, learning that my needs mattered, learning that boundaries weren't cruel, and learning that saying no didn't make me selfish. And I had to learn that I didn't need somebody else to validate my worth. The last thing I had to learn was how to forgive myself.

Trauma Bonds And The Love Bomb Cycle

SPEAKER_00 10:17

I was really angry at myself for letting myself be treated so badly. But what I didn't know at the time was that I was in a trauma bond. Now, a trauma bond in narcissism is a powerful, unhealthy emotional attachment that develops between an abused person and a narcissistic abuser through a repeating cycle of abuse and intermittent affection. Let me give you one example of how a trauma bond in a toxic relationship can start. This was my very first experience. It was the first time I'd spent time with this covert narcissist. We just we got together and chatted for about two hours. As I left, I was on a high. This man had just told me how amazing I was, how special I was, and how he'd never met someone like me. And I I had really low self-esteem. So hearing this from someone really, really just made me feel so different than I'd been feeling for so long. You're telling me that you think I'm beautiful and I'm worthy and I'm enough. Oh, you got me. So the dopamine had kicked in. I left, and then about three hours later, I texted him to say thank you, and I felt so good. And his reply was something along the lines of, Well, I'm not feeling good because when you left, you didn't even turn around and wave. What the actual I could not believe it. My heart dropped, and I replied straight away saying, Oh my gosh, no, I didn't know you wanted me to do that. I'm so sorry. And I think I spent about a month trying to get him to give me that initial validation again. And that was the hook. That was the trauma bond. There, my friends started a few years of that exact cycle. Love bomb me and then devalue me for about a month until intermittent love bombing would start the cycle again. Even talking about this makes me feel so incredibly sad for myself and anyone else in a relationship like this. Traumatizing is an understatement.

Coming Back To Yourself

SPEAKER_00 12:30

And if you're listening to this and something is resonating with you, I want you to know something. You don't have to wait until your relationship becomes a dramatic, obvious disaster before you take your own unhappiness seriously. You don't need someone else to tell you that your experience is bad enough. You are allowed to listen to yourself. You are allowed to be curious about your relationship. You are allowed to ask whether this is actually the life you want. And most importantly, you are allowed to come back to yourself. Because sometimes the biggest relationship we need to repair isn't the one we have with somebody else. It's the one we have with ourselves. And that's really where my story begins. I'll talk much more about this in another episode about narcissism, covert narcissism, and the dynamics of narcissistic abuse. But for today, I wanted to share the beginning of my story because I know now that my low self-esteem didn't just affect how I felt about myself. It affected what I believed I deserved. It affected what I tolerated. It affected what felt familiar. It affected everyone around me. And ultimately, it affected the relationships I chose. And understanding that changed everything. Because when you change the relationship you have with yourself, you start making very different choices about who gets access to you. And that for me was the beginning of coming home to myself. So

Free Discovery Call And Goodbye

SPEAKER_00 13:56

I am a narcissistic abuse recovery coach. And if you want to talk to me about where you're at, you can book a free discovery call with me through my website, MeganWebb.com.au. And just know you are not alone. See you guys.