Why You Sometimes Need To Walk Away From Someone You Love

Emotional abuse can creep up on you, and there is literally nothing you could do to deserve it.

Although it’s sometimes hard to believe, not everyone we bond with is meant to be in our lives forever. It can be challenging, however, to accept that when you still have love in your heart for someone who is causing you harm.

Sometimes, you love someone who isn’t emotionally “safe,” and you know the connection isn’t secure or healthy, but the love in your heart is so great you keep trying, forgiving the same mistakes, and believing them when they say it will be different. It’s amazing what love and hormones can gloss over.

I know you want to believe it will be different. I’ve been there, and so have many others.

The thing you have to realize is that when someone tells you it’s going to be different, they’re telling you, not showing you. Ask yourself: Does this person keep their word generally? Do they live their life with integrity? Do they keep promises and dates? Is their behavior consistent? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, take their fresh promise that things will be different with a hefty grain of salt. Maybe with the Costco sized package of salt.

Things may change for a little while, and sure, maybe people do sometimes change for the better, but if you love someone and it’s not working, and you’ve changed your part of the dance, I beg of you:

Believe patterns and actions, not words.

I’ve had to let go of people I loved due to toxic, abusive behaviors and environments. That’s the thing about abusive relationships: even if you are the victim, you can still very much love your abuser. Abusers are never abusive 100% of the time. If they were, we wouldn’t love them in the first place.

Unfortunately, love is not enough to keep someone in your life, and you cannot heal from abuse while you are actively being abused.

We often rationalize our abusers’ behavior. His mom is sick. He’s going through a major life change. It’s a pandemic. She’s in pain. She had a rough childhood, too. She is stressed out.

The connection, and the good parts of these relationships feel so strong it’s like we become a drug addict, willing to sacrifice money, time, our health, and wellbeing, just to get high again.

Dopamine is actually more rewarding when it is intermittent. This is why toxic, or sometimes abusive, relationships can be so addictive. When we never know when we are going to receive love, when we do receive it, we feel it that much stronger. This is why people get addicted to gambling, social media. We never know when the “jackpot” or flood of likes and heart emojis is going to come pouring in, and when it does, it hits hard.

Unfortunately, we often need things to get dangerously bad before we wake up and let our abusers go. And when we do, we wake up and realize we’d been accepting crumbs, and toxic, emotionally abusive behavior for years.

You’ll Be Blindsided

That’s the thing with emotionally abusive and toxic relationships. It’s really confusing when someone treats you with warmth and love some of the time, and then flips. It’s hard to understand. You see the good in people, and that’s a great quality to have, but don’t forget that you deserve someone who treats you with respect, consistency, and love. You deserve to feel safe in all your relationships, whether that’s with your family, at work, or in your romantic life.

You might find yourself asking what you did wrong, how you might have contributed to this person’s behavior. And while it’s always wise to look at your part in relationships, nothing you did ever warrants abuse- mental, physical, or emotional. Nothing you did or could do would make you deserve that.

Don’t take responsibility for getting burned, or make up a story about how you’re not good enough, how the abuse what somehow your fault.

You’ll Rationalize

You may get the urge to over-analyze the other person, and what went wrong. You may wonder if there were others, or what happened in their childhood that made them the way they are. You can research and talk to your friends and therapist until all of your ears bleed, but eventually, you’ll have to accept that you’ll probably never know why. It’s not our job to figure out why, though. It’s our job to show ourselves and the other person compassion, walk away, take care of ourselves, and move on with our lives.

You’ll Accept it

You can forgive someone without letting them back into your life. Forgiveness is not about the other person. It’s about freeing yourself, and letting go of resentments. When we walk around angry about what has been done to us, it hurts us. It weighs us down. It can cause stress, and manifest itself in physical ailments.

Forgive them to free yourself. And if you can’t forgive, shoot for accepting it. Unfair things happen. Bad things happen. People are hurt, people hurt, we get hurt. Accept it and move on with your life.

Picking Up the Pieces

Let go and build the new. You can’t change the past, but you can focus on building a better future, one choice at a time.

You don’t have room in your life for someone who is cruel to you. Letting go and walking away is acting lovingly to you and them.

When we believe words over actions and patterns, and let the same person hurt us in the same way, even after we’ve communicated our needs, we’re not acting lovingly towards ourselves.

At a certain point, you have to walk away.

It might take a few tries. Be kind to yourself. You’re learning. It’s not your fault. You deserve good things. You are lovable and ok exactly as you are.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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