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Breakups are never easy, but the breakup that comes after a rather toxic and truly unhealthy relationship can be particularly painful. If you think about your breakups in your life, they probably haven’t all felt the same. Some felt you leaving as if the ground had been pulled out beneath you and you couldn’t breathe, while others were…not so bad. Perhaps some were surprisingly eventless and emotionless, like when you pull off a Band-Aid, expecting it to sting, and, instead, it’s one of those nice Band-Aids that come off with ease. No breakup feels the same because no relationship that caused it is the same.
There are, however, similarities you’ll always finds when leaving a toxic relationship. That breakup is its own brand of hurt. And that’s because toxic, manipulative, unhealthy relationships mess you up. They change you. They almost feel like they change the chemistry of your brain. They get their claws in you, and so ending those relationships feels like ripping claws out of you. You probably cringed just thinking about that. If you want to get over a toxic relationship, you have to be prepared for the fact that the breakup will feel like the worst one of your life.
Don’t see the absolutely devastating pain that comes from the breakup as evidence you should have stayed in the relationship. Nuh-uh. That’s not what’s going on. That can’t-breathe, nauseating pain you feel when leaving a toxic relationship is evidence you needed to get out. All of those symptoms—that’s what that relationship did to you. It’s like detoxing from a drug: all of the terrible symptoms that come from getting clean are just proof of how absolutely nasty that substance was for your body. Now, your body is cleansing itself. Here is why leaving a toxic relationship is very much like detoxing from a drug.
You’ll feel unparalleled depression
Just the way someone feels after quitting a drug, you can feel depression like you didn’t know was possible after leaving a toxic relationship. You can feel so down and so dark, that you may believe you’ll never be happy again. That’s because that relationship triggered certain reactions in your brain that made it feel…not exactly happy, because you weren’t happy in that relationship, but…ultra alive. That was mostly anxiety. Now those are gone.
