Relationships Trauma is part of every human’s life. Don’t think you are the only person in this world who had a tough time with love and relationships. Every one of us, at some point in life, felt like breaking into pieces because of this love. It’s okay when you have feelings for someone; you tend to surrender to pain, but sometimes, it’s not the same for the other person. The other person doesn’t feel what you feel. That’s when every beautiful feeling turns into a trauma. Heartbreaks kill your soul. A toxic relationship doesn’t just affect you but also every other aspect of your life. Therefore, you need to take a step toward healing, as it may kill the beauty of your current relationship as well. It is imperative to lead a better life. In this blog, we will discuss 5 Effective Strategies for Healing From a Toxic Relationship.
Healing From a Toxic Relationship
It’s an unsaid fact that healing hurts even more than the injury itself. So, what you feel at once may be felt repeatedly- yes, in flashbacks. Until you overcome each and every bit of it, you will not fully heal from trauma. Do not run away from hurt; no one can escape; learn to fight your fear. Here are the strategies that will help with healing from a toxic relationship.
1. Understand and Manage Your Emotions
You can control a lot of your problems if you begin to understand and manage your emotions. Controlling your nervous system may not be easy, but certainly not impossible. It requires you to manage your inner space. You can always find ways to calm yourself and manage intense emotions that overwhelm you because your nervous system is on high alert as a result of harrowing experiences from the past.
2. Dealing with Negative Thoughts
The healing journey starts with gaining control over your negative thoughts. It’s normal for everyone to overthink the situations and brain-wrack all the positive and negative scenarios, but we have to control them. We need to control our minds to preserve our peace. Although traumatic experiences make us more susceptible to misinterpret even unharmful behaviors as a threat, we need to control our minds and let our reality win, not our assumptions.
3. Allow Time to Heal
Remember, you are human, and if you cannot withstand the grief, don’t force yourself to be okay with that. Accept that you are hurt, and show compassion. Allow time to heal you; times heal even the deepest wound. Give yourself time, and you will see how things that could break you into pieces wouldn’t affect you even a bit. Just make things easy for you by controlling your thoughts, emotions, and triggers until time eventually heals you. Time is the best remedy to let go of past trauma and healing from a toxic relationship.
4. Exercise and Movement
Be cautious of how you spend your time; if you keep lying in bed and let the flashbacks dwell in your mind, you will only suffer from pain. Instead, get up and spend time doing activities that put your body at ease. Go to the park for exercise, yoga, and meditation; movement of body and mind distraction is the best strategy for healing from a toxic relationship.
5. Cut Off Contact Completely
If you stay connected to the person who gave you the trauma, you will never heal from it, no matter how much time has passed. Because memories will keep humming every time you interact with them, which may make you never get over it. If you truly want healing from a toxic relationship, cut off the contact completely.
6. Consider PTSD Therapies
People who experience extreme trauma and toxicity in relationships or married life, such as death and bloody violence, often don’t heal by themselves. They are advised to take professional PTSD Therapies. Go and talk to a therapist. They will prescribe you medicine and therapies to help you overcome the aftereffects of trauma. You can also join support groups for trauma survivors. Sharing your experience and talking it out with someone who has been through a similar experience is the best strategy. Someone who can understand your pain and validate your feelings helps in healing from a toxic relationship. Therefore, PTSD Therapies can help in healing from a toxic relationship.
How Toxic Relationship Mess with Your Personality & your current relationship
Enduring toxic relations leaves side effects on your personality in several ways. Even if it was a previous relationship, it makes things complicated in your current life and relationship. It takes a huge effort to take a step towards finding peace after a toxic relationship. What you show is a trauma response. Even if your loved ones show empathy, they fail at connecting with you because you build the coping mechanism to aggressively detach yourself.
Primitive Fights Response
Primitive flight response of fight response is one of the ways we tend to react after we have been in a traumatic relationship. Primitive flight response is an automatic response we make in harmful situations. One of the aftereffects of a past toxic relationship is that you become more sensitive to your surroundings because you fear the previous situation will occur again. Even though the current situation is not that harmful, your response always becomes a turn-off because you face trauma. It’s the most common problem people face while healing from a traumatic event.
Excessive Non-Accepting Stage
A person experiencing the aftereffects of a toxic relationship may begin to dissociate with people. They remain in an excessive emotional state all the time, making it difficult for their loved ones to share a healthy bond. Healthy conversations that lighten your heart are important. Even future connections can be ruined because of the toxicity of your past relationship.
Paranoid Behavior
Paranoid behavior is another way unhealed trauma results from a past toxic relationship. Paranoid behavior is a coping mechanism that develops in you after you go through a life-altering bad experience. Paranoid behavior not only keeps you unhappy but also makes it difficult for you to connect with people.
Distrust
People’s unresolved trauma from previous toxic often becomes problematic for their partners, even though they are not intrinsically like that. They are so much fixated on their past trauma that they show distrust when something actually good happens, and they feel it intensely. Even though they eagerly want assurance, and they end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. This can make your partner feel helpless, even if they genuinely love you.
Conclusion
Healing requires conscious efforts because healing hurts, and it is also one of the signs you’re healing from a toxic relationship. How unhealed trauma shows in relationships varies as per the intensity of your experience. Some people are unable to identify toxic relationships. A person dealing with violence in the name of love, over possessiveness, is often unaware that he is in a toxic relationship. Similarly, emotional blackmailing and manipulation play their part. This blog shares strategies that help you identify and heal from a toxic relationship.
If you want to understand more about toxic marriages, trauma bond relationships, and coping strategies to overcome it, author Mark Sahenkman has a complete guide to recovery process.
Learn more: healing from a toxic relationship book