Being stuck in a toxic relationship can feel incredibly confusing and soul-sucking. You might feel like you can’t live without the person, even though they cause you constant pain and stress. Despite all the trauma and dread they bring into your life, a part of you feels deeply connected to them, almost like you’re trapped in their gravitational pull.

Even when you try to gather the courage to leave for good, intrusive thoughts start spinning in your mind: “But how will I survive alone?” “They’re all I know — who am I without them?” “I can’t bear the loneliness and change.” This kind of anxious dependency can feel impossible to escape, trapping you indefinitely in that painful environment where someone exploits you for their own selfish needs.

You might even have the best support network and, on a physical level, in terms of money, friends, and family support, you don’t really need them. But the thought of not being able to survive without them still persists. So, why does it feel that way?

The Comfortable Broken Chair Analogy

The answer lies in the comfort we get when we get used to something. However toxic it is, that relationship has become more like that comfortable broken chair. It might be uncomfortable and even hurt you when you sit on it, and you logically know that you need to throw it away and replace it.

But that’s the hardest thing you can do, as you feel the wobbly chair has been an important part of your life. You’ve been through a lot together, and you cannot just replace it like that. The idea of selling that chair and getting another one seems like too much work, as you’d have to shop around, move out, and look for something better, and all those activities before you get another one.

Strangely, the broken chair has its own kind of comfort and convenience, even though it’s causing you a lot of pain. It’s less tedious to just persevere with it for ‘another year,’ and that’s how a toxic relationship feels.

You really get to the point where you feel you’ve gotten used to it and believe that you can’t manage to survive without it. When your beliefs have adapted to a place where you’re constantly invalidated, they will feed you all sorts of rationalizations and excuses to keep you stuck there.

After all, they’ve become part of your identity, and that identity will do whatever it takes to survive. It will look for ways to survive in a hurtful environment instead of looking for ways to escape it. You start to anticipate the familiar psychological and mental pain of the broken chair and even convince yourself that you can handle it.

Even when the pain becomes unbearable, our mind stills tricks us to sticking to it because it’s a narrative that has been deeply ingrained in our psyche ever since you were young.

https://biiedwin.gumroad.com/l/BreakingChains

The only way to break free is to become very aware of the unconscious attachments keeping us stuck in that toxic situation. It’s about really asking ourselves questions about those negative beliefs and outrightly calling them out as false beliefs. Your true essence is that of joy and bliss. Those beliefs are just preventing you from seeing that you weren’t really born that way or that you come from a ‘cursed generation’; those are just beliefs bred from other beliefs.

Question their legitimacy, and slowly but surely, you will be removing the dirt from your eyes so that you can see that you can survive without them and even go beyond surviving to thriving. Those beliefs limit your possibilities and the options you have once you leave the relationship. But once you see beyond them, you will realize that there are a lot of options for you and that even a healthy relationship is within reach. You can definitely survive without them; you just have to keep going.

Note from the Author

If you’re ready and you’d like my help with healing, finding peace in life and breaking free from these toxic patterns, then you can book a FREE BREAKTHROUGH CALL with me HERE. Happy healing 💙💙. Feel free to share and comment! Use this information with caution, it comes from my own thoughts & bias, experiences and research😊.