Toxic Relationships: Surviving a Toxic Relationship & 3 Steps to Healing

Are you ready to peel back the layers of your relationships and bravely face the truth that lies beneath? That's exactly what we're doing today. Together, we're unpacking the disorientating effects of toxic relationships, exploring how our own wounds can unwittingly entrap us in destructive dynamics. The power players in such relationships - narcissists and psychopaths - often exploit our vulnerabilities, yet these same wounds can also be our springboard to success.

Every relationship serves a purpose - or at least, they should. Unfortunately, in our quest to be loved and accepted, we may find ourselves drawn to toxic relationships, often driven by our unconscious traumas. This is a phenomenon we tackle head-on in our discussion, questioning the workings of modern relationships and how our unresolved wounds can prevent us from truly being present in them. But it's not all gloom - we also celebrate the raw power of authenticity, vulnerability, and love as vital elements of thriving relationships. 

Our journey doesn't end there though. We’re also looking at healing, self-love, and the critical role they play in breaking free from the cycle of trauma. In the throes of toxic relationships, it's easy to make excuses and avoid the necessary step of healing. However, by facing our trauma, we can achieve a level of connection and understanding that not only brings us closer to others, but also helps us to reclaim our power. Be prepared to be inspired as we delve into the transformative power of love and compassion, and discover a new path to healthy relationships.

Resources
Are you ready to break free from the pain of trauma?

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Dr Eman Kaur, and each week we will bring you an important message as we explore how to detox toxic relationships. The aim of this podcast is for you to unlock your own inner knowing, your own inner greatness, so you can know how to heal from the impact of a toxic relationship, so you can get your life back on track and live your best life. After all, we are all worthy of loving our life. I'm super excited about today. We're gonna explore relationships and I get these type of questions all the time so if you no longer wanna feel broken, damaged, we can actually start to thrive and step into our greatness. So I'm gonna really look at this over the next few sessions so that and I've broken it down into sections so that we can really look at this moving forward Because actually relationships can inspire us to be the best, our best version of ourself, and we know that when we've been in toxic relationships, it has a huge impact on us. We feel so disorientated, so confused, so broken in so many different ways, as if we can never get back up. But a lot of people are losing the purpose of why this horrible experience has happened and I really want you to feel empowered to get back up over the next few podcasts and videos that I'm doing. You see, we, a lot of people, are driven by love and success and that's all good. You know, we are meant to have love and if you really look at your relationships, all you really wanted was to be loved, to feel empowered so that you can be your best version of yourself. You just wanted someone to believe in you and trust in you so that you could be the best version of yourself.

Speaker 1: 2:16

And a lot of us have been driven to get into relationships because of some type of wound or trauma, of not actually feeling good enough in the first place, where we might not feel lovable and we just wanna prove to ourself that we are. We've got something that's really holding us back and we're trying to prove our worth, trying to prove our self, and that is what happens. Then we meet this narcissist who actually all psychopath that takes advantage of that wound, that vulnerability. But the truth is that wound, that same wound, can actually create a lot of success in our life. It can actually take us to great heights, incredible heights. We can have success in our life and meet a narcissist and because we're trying to prove our worth. So a lot of the time, people who are successful, who are trying to prove their worth and are actually meeting and achieving, are the very people that the narcissist takes advantage of, because there is that wound there that's driving that success. And then that same wound that has driven all our success and allowed us to see so much success is what kills us or breaks us down or burns us out, exhausts us in the actual toxic relationship, that narcissistic or psychopathic relationship. We all want to make this relationship work but deep down the wound is driving all of this because the truth is, a lot of the time it doesn't make sense to be in this relationship. What the narcissist does? They see that there is a wound there where we're trying to prove our worth in the world, and they are making this wound bigger and bigger and bigger so that they can have more and more and more control over us. And inevitably we work so hard we work so hard in all the other areas of our life because we're trying to prove our worth and we're also trying, working in this area of our life because we're trying to prove our worth, that we can make this work, we can fix this relationship and then we go through breakup and hardship because we realize this is killing us, and then we might start building ourself back up through this wound and we go through the same relationship pattern again.

Speaker 1: 5:13

So let's look at relationships in a bit more detail and just take a bit of time. You know why do you think relationships aren't working today, in our culture, in society, in perhaps your culture, in your society? Is it that people are picking toxic relationships, despite having success in other areas of your life, because they're just assuming they will be successful in that area? Is it because relationships don't work? Or is it because you're choosing wrong? Or is it because of the timing that you're getting into relationships? Or is it that you don't know, or people don't know, what healthy relationships are? If we really examine narcissism, narcissism is increasing, but also the awareness of narcissism is increasing. So why is it that we're picking these kind of relationships?

Speaker 1: 6:17

Let's look at what are relationships designed to be. What's the purpose of a relationship in the first place? The truth is, we are all meant to be in relationships. We're meant to interact with each other in life. So if you're listening and you're finding yourself, you've been so hurt in this narcissistic relationship. You never want to be in another relationship again and you are hiding and avoiding people because you don't want to be triggered. It will cause you anxiety, even more anxiety, and there's no room for healing then, because there's no room for allowing yourself to love again. Let's break this down a bit further. A common response to toxic relationships is living with trauma, and if you're living with trauma, it's okay to have some time and space where you're allowing yourself to heal.

Speaker 1: 7:25

But know that you do need connection, you do need to be heard, you do need to be seen, you do need to be loved because you crave love. We all crave love. It's actually innate, it's part of us. We want to love someone else as well. This is very important. We want to experience being loved, but we want to love somebody else as well, even if it is the first time in your life. The narcissist doesn't have that need, but most people that have empathy have that need to love someone and to be loved, to have that connection, to be your true, authentic self with someone. To be loved means to be loved for you, not for what you're doing, because that's conditional. You want to be loved for you, your true, authentic self, for your goofiness, for your bubbliness, for your intellect, whatever it is that is truly you, that true, authentic, innate you. You want someone to see your brilliance, your greatness, your authentic self. That's how we want to live life. That's how we want to feel alive. That's how we do feel alive when we're being our true self and giving somebody love.

Speaker 1: 9:04

But when we've been hurt by someone or by an experience, we don't want to open up, we don't want to be real with the next person, we don't want to feel pain, we don't want to be vulnerable. But the only problem is, if we're not vulnerable, we can't love, and the problem is that's. The problem is that once we've been hurt, we find it harder to love in the next relationship, and relationships get more and more difficult over time. So each wound makes us not want to love more. So let's look at this why does that happen? Number one we can't really truly bring our full self to the next relationship, and this is particularly true in toxic relationships. Because, if you think about it, everything was an illusion with the narcissist, so we're now worried that the next person is going to be an illusion. What's real, what's not real? So we're starting a relationship and the intention will be that we'll really be true, we'll be our true version of our self. But we're not really giving our true self to the next relationship.

Speaker 1: 10:18

Let me explain this. You've got relationships right now, and maybe you're in relationships where you've been married and they're not the narcissist. Or you've got a relationship with a boss and they're not the narcissist. Or you've got children or you've got friends. What your find is, after being in a toxic relationship, is that you don't really know these people. You might be in this relationship, but if you can't be your true self, that means you don't know who they are either. Because if you're living with a low level of depression and anxiety, you're not able to be you, and that means you can't be present to see who they are either. You're not present to be with someone, to truly be with someone, and that means if you're on high alert, you're not able to be you. So let me explain this a bit further.

Speaker 1: 11:27

So number two is is that you're living with trauma. Trauma has revealed that every single experience so this particular experience is going to change how your brain functions. Every time you listen to someone or something, it changes how your brain functions. It changes your brain. Yeah, so the version that you are. If you've got trauma, you're not really being who you truly are. You're actually.

Speaker 1: 11:58

So, say, if you've had trauma in the last relationship, you're not really truly yourself in the next relationship because you've got another layer of trauma, the trauma. What the trauma does is it actually starts to consume you. You start to become the trauma. So it's like you're and it's understandable that you've got this level of more high alert yeah, these wounds. So it's like the wounds are playing out in relationships to a certain degree.

Speaker 1: 12:38

So you're there, say, 50% of the time, but each time you get a wound you're less and less there, you're less and less in the actual relationship because you don't have the same level of trust that you used to. You don't trust people as much as you used to and you don't trust yourself as much as you used to in relationships. So there's a certain level of like I can't really be myself because I don't really truly trust myself. I don't want to be fooled or like that. Again, you know, and you don't really trust yourself in relationships. If you can't truly trust yourself, if you've got your guard up, even to a certain degree, that means that you can't be vulnerable. The level that you can be vulnerable is the level that you can be loved.

Speaker 1: 13:31

This is a real dilemma. It's a real dilemma for someone that's been in toxic relationships. How can we be vulnerable when there's potential to be hurt again? How can we love when you've got this repeating pattern of being in toxic relationships? On one hand you want love, but you know you can't fully love. So what do you do in this scenario? You know, and sometimes people think, okay, I'm not going to get in relationships ever again. And sometimes we don't want to move forward from a toxic relationships because of this factor, because we start believing is better the devil. We know, because the next relationship is going to be the same and we try and mitigate the hurt. We think, oh, I know this person, I'm going to know how they work, I can handle it. So you kind of mitigate the amount of love that you can experience and you're willing to live without love to avoid the pain of being vulnerable again.

Speaker 1: 14:36

The truth is you can't experience life or the good stuff Joy, relationships, happiness, love if you can't allow yourself to be vulnerable in relationships. So when we bring what we do in the next relationships, we have to ask ourselves what are you going to bring to these relationships? Are you bringing all these wounds, the wounded version of yourself, to the next relationship? Are you bringing the wounded version of yourself into your relationships with your children? Are you just existing in relationships after this toxic relationship? And you might be saying I need to start over? You know, this is a brand new person, I can be myself and you need to go and heal. And the thing is, you need to heal so you can learn from it, so you can take wisdom into the next relationship, rather than your wound, and increase the quality of your life. You see, if you could increase the amount, the quality of healing, you can increase the quality of your life.

Speaker 1: 15:53

So many people say that they have healed, but all they're doing is talking about their pain. You need to take the time to actually heal the wound, not just talk about it. Everything we do, we need to allow ourselves to heal. You see, when you go to the gym, yeah, you need to take some time out. Why, so your body can heal? You need you work hard, you need to rest. You know, even sports have a season. Why do children go to school and then have holidays? They have rest time, because your brain needs to assimilate the learnings. You allow your body to assimilate the changes so you can grow more. We need to give our time self-time to heal, so that you can take everything the goodness out of that relationship, so you can heal, so that you can be the best version of yourself moving forward. You need to allow your body, your emotions, your spirit, you need time to heal.

Speaker 1: 17:04

There's a lot of people that jump into relationship to relationship, especially if you've been in narcissistic relationships or they, you know, don't heal. You need to give yourself that time to fully be connected to your authentic self, and if you don't heal, you're never going to reach your greatest purpose, because your greatest potential can only be done when you can heal. Sometimes we take the wound from our childhood and we just haven't had the quality of healing that was needed, and that's the reason why we're not getting into the loving relationships because we've not tended to ourself, we're not bringing our full self to the next relationship, we're not choosing someone that is worthy of us and then we're not intimate, whether it's in friendships, business. We're allowing these traumas to guard us and we're allowing these traumas to actually attract these people to us because we're not allowing ourself to recover and take the goodness from whatever's happened and heal from it. The third thing is we're not would be that we're not giving ourself to ourselves, we're not tending to ourself. So what happens is we can only love someone at the level we can love ourself. So say, if you love yourself, two out of 10, that's the maximum you can give love to somebody else. And this is really important.

Speaker 1: 18:47

If we've been with a narcissist, what they've taught us is self-hate, because what they do is they hate themselves on a subconscious level. And what they're putting into us on a subconscious level not on a conscious level, sometimes we might become conscious of it, but on a subconscious level is they want us to learn to hate ourselves, and there is a part of us now that hates ourselves for getting into the relationship in the first place. So again, if you can't deal with you, if you can't look in the mirror and love who you are, if you can't look in the mirror and forgive yourself for this relationship, you can't give yourself a chance for actually even attracting someone to love you. Moving forward, there's going to be blocks and barriers about moving into a loving relationship and you won't know why. You won't know why you keep doing this.

Speaker 1: 19:44

It's very difficult to love someone else once we've been through this on a very deep level, because deep down, what we're really craving is self-love. We want to look at ourselves and go. You know what. I love you, I'm okay with you, and there's a lot of times our relationships are actually a reflection of what's going on inside of us, and what's happening is the trauma that divide within ourselves is becoming greater and greater and the reason that we're struggling. We can't ever divorce ourselves. We can't get rid of what's going on inside of us and if you've got trauma inside of you and you don't like what you're getting from you and the way you're reacting, maybe you're judging yourself and you've stopped liking yourself.

Speaker 1: 20:39

Take some time to reflect. You've got to learn to really remember to be and find the real you and to find that real, learn to love who you are again and so you can retall and you can renew and you can create the new version of you moving forward. And that's how you can get out of this relationship, no matter how painful. That's how you can stop yourself from getting into toxic relationships again Is to learn to love and have compassion for yourself so you can be more vibrant, you can be more intentional of what you are willing to tolerate moving forward, you can learn to have a sense of worth within you and you will not want anyone to harm you once you have that worth. Because once you have felt the kind of pain you have felt, once you have understood the impact is had, the anger, the bitterness, the cost it has had on you, and you know how much it's cost you and it is too much to bear, because you want joy in your relationships, Because you've done enough work on you that you actually know now what you're looking for.

Speaker 1: 22:06

The idea is healing something is you're learning to really love yourself, because it makes you better, it creates a level of peace and harmony inside that you've never experienced in your life. Then you can see clearly. Okay, I can see who's in front of me. I can see I can give more awareness to what's going on around me. Then you won't ignore the red flags in the toxic relationship, because you know who you are fully. You didn't know that there was this part of you that was telling you no, no, no, no, no, don't go there. You didn't listen. Instead, you're conditioning your past trauma maybe told you you were wrong, you're too picky. You need to be more open. You need to see the good in people, even if your intuition is saying no, and sometimes it's really scary, taking time to heal.

Speaker 1: 23:14

It can feel or it can seem it's going to be really scary to face the trauma, to face the shame or guilt that the narcissist made you feel or whatever it is that's holding you back from the past. Maybe you did something bad. It's okay, but there's sadness, it's scary. Maybe you wanted intimacy and connection with someone and you just don't want to feel alone. So alone, maybe you don't want to feel like anyone can relate to you. You want to feel that people get you, understand you and know you for who you are, so people can really see who you are. And it feels lonely, it feels scary.

Speaker 1: 24:01

This is trauma. This is trauma and maybe you don't want to think about it because you think, oh, my trauma is too dark. I don't want to go there. I don't want to feel the emotional pain. I want to avoid it as much as possible. It's too hard for me to focus on this. I don't want to feel it. It's too much time to do this work. Why do people say that? Yet they're really struggling, every day they're struggling. They really want love, they want intimacy and connection, they want deep compassion with somebody else, but they're afraid to do the healing work because their trauma is so scary and they're making excuses and saying you know what, I don't have time, that just feels so bad. But they feel the exact same thing every day.

Speaker 1: 24:50

What we need to do is we need to examine the pattern. You've got to see the pattern. Are you continually getting hurt? Because if you don't heal, you have to look at things for the long term rather than the short term. It's the short term. It's like no, no, no, I don't want to heal this right now because it hurts, but if you've got a cycle, you can see it hang on. I'm hurting for how many years? Because I can't do this for an hour. You don't want to heal this for one hour. The only way to cut the cycle is actually to look at the repeating pattern and what it's costing you. Is it worth you healing the trauma or is it worth you continuing the way it happens?

Speaker 1: 25:40

What happens to artists and athletes is that if they don't heal, if they only look at their short-term gain and they don't fully heal. They have a long-term suffering. They can't give their 100% in what they do anymore. That is what you're cutting yourself from, from becoming the best version of yourself, from actually stopping yourself from being great. If you don't take the time to heal, what you're saying is you can fool everybody else. But you might be able to put on social media that you know we're happy and show your best self to the world.

Speaker 1: 26:20

But when you have been in a toxic relationship, that's what the narcissist is trained us to do. It's to show the world everything's okay, but we're not okay inside, that we don't matter. And deep down in your soul, in your mind, in your will, in your emotions, you know you're hurting. So what happens is you end up climbing a mountain, living a life with a broken leg because you haven't healed, pretending to be okay. Who for who are you pretending? For Everybody else. And then you're limping in. You're limping into life. You're limping into love, you're limping into your next relationships, you're limping into work instead of leaping out of bed every day, because you're ready for the day, because you're motivated. Why? Because you're being you. You're not being the parent that you really want to be, because you're limping into life. You're not being the boss you really want to be, because you're limping into life because of your pain, you're still deep down aware that you need to be healed.

Speaker 1: 27:25

If this is a pattern and maybe it's the same thing, right, you've been in relationships, maybe it's. You know this person, this person it was John, then it was Sarah, then it was your Michael, your boss, or you know Emily. You know whoever it is, it's the same thing, different clothing. It's like you need to take them a step back and think, oh, let me get a new perspective. If this is a pattern, then you have to give yourself a season of disciplined healing, because it can give you a lifetime of freedom when working with people, when they realize that the very thing that they want to avoid, the thing that they're scared of, is the very thing they need to do.

Speaker 1: 28:12

And the thing is, unfortunately, a lot of people want to avoid healing. Because this is how you can really discover the real you. This is how you can get your true freedom to find out who you were meant to be, find out your purpose, find your confidence, so you can attract who you really want to be. Because you know your worth, you really feel worthy of loving yourself, so you can attract success in all areas of your life. This is what happens when we have a wound. When we are attracting people, we attract people who will expose the wound to us even more. Unfortunately, the narcissist have done that, so we have attracted people based on our trauma, so that we can see the wound. Unfortunately, the narcissist has made it bigger. This is so that we can learn to heal ourselves, so it's not going to be a problem then. Right, you know, unfortunately, what's happened is Disney and all the other things that have told us that somebody can heal us and take all our troubles away.

Speaker 1: 29:22

It's not possible. It's not. It's actually not possible. Even if you've tried before, it's not possible for somebody else to heal your trauma. You have to find and heal and love yourself back to life again. You have to because you have to go deep down and heal yourself. So you know, you know you're deserving of love, of who you are, and then you can attract someone who can identify with you, because perhaps you're trying to attract someone who doesn't want to face their trauma either. Yeah, and you feel like you want them to release the bad stuff. The thing is you're. Even if you've got trauma, you're not damaged. Yeah, you might be hurt, you might have wounds, but you can heal them. And the other thing with trauma is it can actually be a fuel where you can get success in ways that you didn't think possible. But if you heal the wounds and you love yourself and you learn to value you value what is in you, what is you then you know you are worth it. Then the reflection of what the narcissist says to you is that you can be worthy. You can see, you can give your value to other people. You can add value to other people. You will be expressing your worth into the world.

Speaker 1: 31:03

Because you know it that we all have traumas and struggles and we take these into relationships. But we wanna be able to heal those. We wanna use relationships to allow us to heal the trauma, to face our trauma and heal them, rather than being blamed for everything. We need to work on relationship goals. You know and this is something that's really important If you've got two people in a relationship, we wanna be moving forward and making attempts to heal. You see, the thing here is we've got a mixed up idea of what a relationship is. Relationships are about allowing ourself to forgive the mistakes in a relationship which enables growth in a relationship. Now hear me out.

Speaker 1: 31:56

The problem with narcissistic relationships is there is no attempts to actually heal and grow on their part. They are expecting you to change. This is not a relationship for evolving and growing and stepping into your greatness. It's toxic. It's killing you because the narcissist isn't doing what is needed in a relationship. They are doing nothing. That relationship is dead, it's over. They're not trying to heal. They're telling you that you need to heal.

Speaker 1: 32:35

You see, every time you allow them to continue and you forgive them and you say, okay, I'm gonna work on me, but they don't work on themselves, the relationship is broken. You see, what happens is in relationships is that every single time we make a mistake, we heal, we change our behavior. The grace in the relationship goes up significantly. The problem in a narcissistic relationship is you're doing all of that, but they're not doing it, and all that's happening is is that you're seeing and that they're not changing, and all that happens is we become more and more bitter and hurt. Two people have to work on a relationship towards the goals. In the relationships, everyone makes mistakes. We do hurt each other, but what should be noted is that people are changing in the relationship. It's not what they're saying is what they're doing. If someone intentionally wants to change so they don't repeat that behavior, that changes the dynamic of the relationship and our life changes. This is why this is so important to note in relationships.

Speaker 1: 33:55

So if there's something you want, if there's something you wanna change in 2024, and if you want relationships to be different and you wanna heal your trauma and you want different types of relationships moving forward and you wanna learn how to be in relationships moving forward so that you can have relationship goals, then do look in the resources section and you can get access to my new program called Reclaim your Power, and this is fantastic. If you're in a trauma bond in particular, you can start your healing journey today. Just download, you know there's a click in the link and you can access Reclaim your Power and start your healing journey today. And it's super. It's a fantastic program and I'm getting so much fantastic feedback about it. Some of the people that are doing the program are super grateful for the changes that have happened in their relationships already. So I really want that to be the same for yourself. Look, whatever happens, keep loving yourself, keep being compassionate, because love truly is one of the greatest healing modalities out there. So be loving, be kind to yourself Until next time.