The term “toxic relationships” has become trendy.
I’ve read articles where writers have touted that everyone is doing it — as in jumping off the toxic relationship bridge and into the waters of healthy relationships. Somewhere in cyberland, someone once asked, “Is everyone suddenly toxic?!”
What people might be missing in the rid your life of toxic people trend is understanding that your toxic may look different from your neighbors’ toxic. Before you banish the poison, you have to define what poison is to you.
How do you define a toxic relationship?
You can read all the psychology and self-help literature out there and still not know what a toxic relationship is. How come? Because you haven’t defined what toxic is to you. To define toxic, you must first define what a healthy relationship looks and feels like.
You must ask yourself the biggest question of your spiritual journey:
What is a healthy relationship to me?
First, you define a healthy relationship.
I will get raw and honest with you, dear reader. You can’t trust me if you don’t know a bit of my story. I practice what I preach. I don’t think I could define what a healthy relationship looked and felt like until I understood that I had only experienced mostly toxic ones. I had to hit an emotional wall and breaking point where I put my hands up and said,
“Universe, enough! I can’t handle any more abuse or discord. How do I attract something different?!”
We’ve all hit emotional walls from time to time. They are uncomfortable. Ugly. And downright mean. They are meant to be. Without their harshness, we wouldn’t surrender our hands and open our hearts to something higher, better, and golden.
I have often cursed myself for getting to the point where I feel so wounded and broken from a relationship that I must walk away. But without those wounds, I wouldn’t know what my needs are and what my spirit needs to feel whole, loved, and nourished by another human being.
Learning what your definition of healthy is can take time.
Be patient and kind to yourself in the process.
Hitting that emotional wall and being forced by some greater internal force to ask for help is an act of self-compassion.
My Story:
As a late bloomer, my first long-term relationship didn’t enter my life until I turned 21. By then, I’d read many self-help books on love and relationship. Mentally, I felt like an expert. I thought I had it all figured out and that I would master this thing called romantic love. Two months in, and reality hit. My boyfriend and I got into our first fight, and I learned neither handled conflict well. I started seeing his shadows revealed: he drank too much at times and started to get jealous when I chose to go out for a girls’ night once in a while. His shadows revealed mine: I enabled his drinking, and I started to let his jealousy control my outings with friends. Instead of speaking up for my needs and addressing his emotional wounds with open conversation, I started to get quiet and submissive to keep the peace, and in so doing, I became resentful. My resentment eventually led me to seek out a friendship with a male that filled the spiritual and emotional void I felt in my relationship. I started to get sneaky about my connection with this other man. I would talk on the phone with him when my boyfriend was sleeping or out with friends. Instead of directing my concerns about my relationship to my partner, I vented about them to this other man. This only pulled me further apart from my partner and eventually broke the foundation of trust that ended our relationship.
I loved my boyfriend so much, and I thought that if I expressed that I had unmet needs, it would crush him. Instead, I crushed him even more by emotionally cheating on him with a man that offered me what I was craving in my relationship.
We learn what is healthy from our past wounds.
Just as there is no light without darkness, healthy relationships wouldn’t exist without toxic ones. The break up with my first boyfriend was the most painful relationship ending of my life. Cat Stevens sang it right when he wrote, “The First Cut is the Deepest.”
“When it comes to loving me, she’s worst
But when it comes to being loved, she’s first
That’s how I know
The first cut is the deepest
Baby, I know the first cut is the deepest…”
I think without having been loved the worst by someone, many of us wouldn’t know what the best love feels like.
While grieving the loss of my first love, I started fantasizing about what was missing in that connection. I didn’t want two men to fill the gaps anymore. Deep down, despite my hopelessness and desperation, I knew that one partner could be enough. What I didn’t know was how to get there. I felt like I had to jump over a huge crevasse of pain, doubt, longing, and uncertainty. To trust again felt like a huge leap of faith.
To find healthy, get healthy.
On my healing journey, I’ve gone to therapy, read self-help books, taken yoga and energy healing training, had coaching, even gone to school to become a therapist myself, and in the process, dated many of the wrong partners.
But truly, there is no wrong partner.
After I broke up with my first love, a therapist recommended I try and date myself for a while. I had no idea what that entailed other than treating myself with kindness, compassion, and passion I’d want a partner to treat me with. During that time, I found yoga and meditation — or maybe yoga and meditation found me.
Every day that I unrolled my mat became another act of self-love. Slowly, one breath at a time, I learned to give myself what I needed. I started to eat more mindfully and party less. What I put into my body mattered. I started to be choosy with my friends. Who I surrounded myself with matters. I started to be intentional and discerning about every aspect of my life. I was in an unfulfilling job then, and the more I dated myself, the more inspired I was to envision the work-life I wanted.
Date yourself one thought at a time.
I realized dating myself was an inside job. It wasn’t about taking myself out for nice meals — although I did enjoy doing that from time to time as long as my bank account was healthy and happy.
Dating myself was more about watching how I talked to myself. I realized I could be extremely self-critical. When I was stressed, tired, or angry, I would beat myself up. I was always at fault for all that seemed to go wrong in my life. After realizing my pattern of internalizing frustrations, I had a lightbulb moment. I was talking to myself like my worst enemy — no wonder I attracted toxic partners.
Deep down, I wanted someone to shower me with compliments and compassion. I wanted someone to say, “Sarah, you are perfect as you are, so stop beating yourself up all the time. Lighten up on yourself. Be the love you wish to have.”
I had trouble allowing myself to receive loving compliments for decades after that breakup. I could easily dish them out but couldn’t take them in. It was a rather toxic state of internal affairs.
We attract what we believe we are.
Relationships are the best teachers for self-growth and expansion. The yogis call them the highest form of yoga. There is a reason for that. They show us who we think we are. And sometimes, that truth can be ugly and disconcerting. It gets ugly and stinky until we start to thank it. Each time we see a shadow of ourselves is an opportunity to heal and transform.
Fast forward to my life now. I’m 44, and I’ve done a lot of inner digging. I’ve noticed the relationships I attract — be they romantic or friend-like, keep getting healthier and healthier. My relationships are a testament that I’m doing the inner work to clear the toxins out of my life by clearing them out of my psyche.
A small dose of toxins is good for us.
What many miss on the journey to rid themselves of toxic people is understanding that the toxins keep us doing the work. Without toxins, there would be no need for purification. Without purification — we’d have no purpose; this human life would be a hum-drum bore.
Even in my healthiest of relationships, there are moments of discord and disconnection. Those are what keep me wanting to relate more. I feel like we humans thrive off of drama. And I’m talking about the good kind. The stories we create from our life make this existence so meaningful. If we didn’t have a hint of conflict here and there, the story would be such a drag. I guarantee that even a monk in a cave will experience internal drama. There is a reason expert meditators say the mind is like a bunch of horses running wild. If thoughts create our reality, we must learn how to tame them and train them to run the way we want them to. That takes work. And a relationship is the most accelerated way to train our wild horse mind.
Reframe the way you look at toxicity.
The biggest tool I have gained on my spiritual journey has been learning to reframe how I view everything in my relationships — the good, the bad, and everything in between. A reframe is a simple shift in perception; it’s about viewing the bad or the toxic as a blessing, not a curse. It is about seeing conflict and discord as an opportunity to go within and ask myself these questions:
- What am I seeking here?
- What is missing?
- What do I need more of? Or less of?
- What am I allowing that doesn’t serve me?
- And, what will serve me instead?
The work doesn’t stop, and healthy is constantly being refined.
The good news about being a soul and having a human experience: as long as you are in your body temple, you will be doing the self-love work.
What I defined as a healthy relationship last year might look completely different to me this year.
We are constantly evolving, and in so doing, old connections fall away. New ones fall in. Or that might mean the people in our lives have to work to keep up with us — and if they love us enough to keep living and playing with us on this Earth playground, they will do what they need to do within themselves to keep up.
Old souls keep up.
Maybe you feel like you’re an old soul. Maybe you’ve been called one. To me, an old soul is someone that has done this human dance time and time again and gets it. They are willing to put forth the effort to live their best life and manifest the highest version of themselves. If you are in a relationship with one and continue to work as hard as they do — your relationship is bound to get healthier and healthier. Old souls often know when the going gets too harsh and aren’t afraid to jump out when they need to. But they also know when to put in the work to see something through until the end.
Ultimately, soul labels don’t matter because we are all in this together, and really, we are all one human whole struggling and pushing and thriving to make this the best life we can.
Sometimes it’s tiring to go it alone. Sometimes we want to give up. That’s exactly when our external relationships matter most. To have people to lean on in times of need is one of the greatest gifts this human existence can offer.
It’s important to remember that this human walk is not a solo journey. It takes a village to make it. It takes knowing that we are not a single, solitary amoeba floating in a sea of change. We are endlessly connected to a greater whole. And each time we choose healthily — that sea reflects a sense of wholeness and belonging back to us.
How do we know we are making a healthy choice?
Simply put: we feel good.
Our relationships feel life-giving and supportive. They nourish us and energize us. In the past, I was used to feeling depleted by my relationships. I would feel exhausted after I left a partner or friend, as if my gas tank was empty. The more I started to learn to feed myself with the thoughts, experiences, and people that filled my tank, the better I started to feel.
Ultimately, relationships are a choice. Sometimes walking away, as hard as it might be in the moment, is the most nurturing choice we can make. Sometimes walking away from someone means saying I Love You to ourselves. I have learned to trust that life always fills the gap. When we close the door to a toxic relationship, the Universe will open a window or another door to a more life-giving connection. Sometimes that opening is immediate; other times, there is a waiting period.
Any way you look at it, the relationships we choose to have in the external world mirror our relationship with life. Do we trust it or curse it? Do we co-create and dance with it harmoniously or try to control it and fight its gifts?
Every person, place, or thing in your life is ultimately a choice you have made somewhere down the line. You can clean up your nouns whenever you want. Or thank life for them.
Thank life, and it will thank you in return.
Every day I wake up and make my coffee, I look at a post-it on my kitchen wall that reminds me to have gratitude for the abundance in my life. I have several post-its that I rotate as I see fit. They say things like:
Yeah, they are ratty looking, coffee-stained, and sloppily written. But they speak to me. They represent my messy mind seeking health, one thought, and coffee sip at a time.
No matter how much you tame it, the mind still loves its wild horses. If you feel called, I dare you to make a post-it or even a poster if you’re artsy and creative, with a simple word or phrase to remind you to find the blessings in the here and now. Every time you remember to thank life, it thanks you in return. This is the quickest path to having a healthy relationship that I’ve found.
“The best advice I can give for attracting and maintaining spiritual partnerships is to be what it is that you are seeking.” ~Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
The abundance of relationships, experiences, material things, and just the gift of being a soul in a human body, getting to experience another adventuresome day on this planet.
Be what you seek, and let healthy adventures follow.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Tim Marshall on Unsplash