The difference between healthy and toxic love isn’t always obvious, but Thomas Fiffer makes it clear.
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You turn on the shower.
Ahhhh … the hot water feels wonderful.
You crank the hot a little more, for a little more of that wonderful feeling.
Mmmm … it’s warming, soothing, relaxing, healing.
Until it isn’t.
Until it’s too hot – burning, scalding, injuring and damaging your skin.
Until you’re forced to step out of the water’s flow and adjust the temperature down again.
Thaaaat’s better.
The shower offers a literal example of difference in degree.
A certain amount or level of something is tolerable, pleasant, or enjoyable, while even a bit more of that same something is harmful, unacceptable, and cause for immediate change.
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A certain amount or level of something is tolerable, pleasant, or enjoyable, while even a bit more of that same something is harmful, unacceptable, and cause for immediate change.
What I will call toxic love affects us in degrees.
It may start as worship or idolization from a partner—which we find appealing—continue with endless praise of our wit and beauty—which we find validating—and morph into unhealthy attachment and dependence—which we find suffocating—and then become obsession with controlling us, clipping our wings, locking the cage, and beating us down to prevent us from flying away to freedom—which we find … intolerable.
The other kind of difference—the difference that distinguishes toxic love from healthy love—is difference in kind.
When we’re not dealing with more of the same thing but something entirely other.
The difference between teasing and abusing.
The difference between a playful tap or push and an intentionally hurtful blow.
The difference between the silence of peace and the silence of judgment.
The difference between consensual sex and rape, between loving someone and using their body for release.
The difference between an exchange of healing love and consuming your partner as medication.
In the beginning, it is hard to recognize toxic love for what it is.
It seems no different from healthy love and masquerades as an abundance of it as we absorb the poison degree by degree.
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It seems no different from healthy love and masquerades as an abundance of it as we absorb the poison degree by degree.
Toxic love can seem like healthy love, until it isn’t.
Until we choke on it, gasping for air.
Until we feel nauseated and the world starts to go dark.
Until we fall to our knees.
And once we realize toxic love isn’t healthy love, the second, more shocking realization hits.
It not only isn’t, but it also never was.
And this epiphany knocks us fully to the ground.
We claw the dust, desperate to disbelieve what we now know.
We thump the earth until our fists are sore and bloodied.
We kick and scream and thrash.
And then a strange thing happens.
We let it go.
The clean river of God’s love washes over us.
We get up, come to our knees again, then rise and stand.
And we complete the miraculous transformation from diminished to empowered.
And we walk through life with confidence, knowing we have always been loved, always deserved to be loved.
And never again forgetting the difference.
Originally published on Tom Aplomb.
Photo—David Sim/Flickr