If you currently find yourself in a relationship where conflict has become the norm, moments of peace are short-lived, and anxiety feels like your baseline, chances are you’re exhausted. But you are not alone.
Over the years, I’ve worked with many clients who come to therapy feeling trapped in a toxic relationship pattern, hoping to find a way off the roller coaster of emotions.
“Things will be great for a while,” someone will say. “I’ll start thinking everything is okay. But then, boom! Something happens. We have a huge fight, things get heated, and I’ll tell myself I’m really ‘done.’ But after a few days of silence, I start feeling like my whole life is falling apart and that they’ve really left me. I’m sick to my stomach, like I can’t breathe. Then we make up, and the relief is so intense that I almost forget how awful it was… until it happens again. What is wrong with me?”
I’ve heard so many versions of this cycle. Frustrated and confused, these clients seek therapy ready to work on themselves in the hopes of feeling better and, eventually, leaving the relationship. And even though many want an overnight “aha” moment, we spend a good amount of time first exploring why they stay, as opposed to why they don’t leave.
Why Can’t I Just Walk Away?
Not understanding why you feel so powerless to leave can take a tremendous toll on your mental health because it means you’re constantly judging yourself for staying despite the harm. That’s why answering this question is so important and a crucial part of the healing process.
It’s familiar. As painful as the relationship may be, it’s a pain you know. You know what to expect. Walking away means facing the unknown: the grief, the loneliness, the uncertainty, and the fear that you may never find another relationship. As strange as it sounds, staying often feels like the safer option.
You feel responsible for them. Maybe they’ve struggled with their own mental health, or they carry wounds of their own, and something about leaving can feel cruel, like you’re abandoning someone who needs you.
You’re holding onto hope. Some part of you still believes they’ll eventually hear you and understand you, that they’ll acknowledge how much they’ve hurt you and change. You may even believe that if you can just heal yourself enough, maybe you can heal them too.
None of these reasons make you weak. They make you human.
With clients, we agree that understanding why they stay is only the beginning. Eventually, we have to dig beneath the relationship itself to understand how they got there.
But so often, we rarely get the chance to dig because nearly every session is spent processing the latest fight, betrayal, or threat of the relationship ending. Instead of exploring those deeper layers, we focus on regaining some sense of stability, on reminding them that judging themselves for staying only makes everything worse.
After months of therapy sessions, many become discouraged because they don’t feel much different and nothing in the relationship has changed.
When Survival Gets in the Way
“Is it even possible to work on yourself and heal while you’re in a toxic relationship?” someone once asked me.
It’s a fair question.
Technically, yes. You can always work on yourself, regardless of your circumstances. But it’s not really about whether you can do the work. It’s about understanding what, exactly, you’re trying to heal. That distinction is fundamental.
If you experienced ongoing abandonment as a child, emotional neglect, unpredictability, or instability, you may remember those experiences as painful and frightening, because they were.
Relationships Essential Reads
But the wounds you carried into your relationship aren’t the things that happened to you. They may be the beliefs you developed about yourself because of the things that happened. Somewhere along the way, perhaps you stopped believing you mattered. Maybe you began believing you weren’t enough, you weren’t lovable, or that you would always be abandoned.
If so, the relationship that needs the most healing isn’t the one you have with your partner. It’s the one you have with yourself.
Trouble is, when you’re in a toxic pattern, repairing your inner relationship is incredibly difficult because every argument validates what you already fear is true. Every betrayal seems to confirm it. Every silent treatment reminds you that you’re unimportant. Each intense conflict triggers a deep fear of abandonment because some part of you already believes you’re not worth much anyway.
By the time the reconciliation comes, the relief is so overwhelming that you’re no longer thinking about the deeper issues at play. You’re simply wondering, How do I get back to okay again? How do I get back to that place where I haven’t been abandoned?
In order to fully heal your relationship with yourself, your nervous system eventually needs enough safety to stop scanning for the next fight, disappointment, or betrayal. But perhaps you’re not ready for that step yet. And that’s okay. Healing is less about choosing the “right” path and more about understanding what each path asks of you.
The Choice
When someone is on the fence about whether to stay or leave, they often ask themselves the same question: Which option will hurt less? The truth is, if you’re trying to find the least painful option, you may spend years waiting for one that doesn’t exist.
The reality is that neither path is easy, and neither path is wrong. They simply involve different kinds of pain, and both can be part of your healing.
Choosing to stay often means living with ongoing pain. It means living with a nervous system that’s constantly waiting for the next fight, disappointment, or betrayal. Berating yourself for staying only creates another wound on top of the ones you already have. Sometimes the most healing thing you can do is simply tell yourself the truth: I’m not ready yet. That’s not giving up. It’s being honest.
And this honesty paves a whole new road, one on which you stop judging yourself. You start setting boundaries regardless of the outcome, make time for yourself, or simply acknowledge that it’s not okay to be treated the way you’ve been treated.
When you do these tiny things, you’re sending a different message to yourself: Hey, you do matter. For someone who has spent a lifetime looking for that message from someone else, learning to give it to yourself is healing in and of itself.
Choosing to walk away is painful too. In many ways, it’s the harder choice because all the grief, fear, loneliness, and uncertainty you’ve been trying to avoid show up at once. But walking through that pain is also an act of choosing yourself. It’s not a completely different decision; it’s the continuation of one you already started making when you stopped judging yourself: that no matter how difficult it gets, you won’t give up.
So, can you work on yourself and heal while you’re in a toxic relationship? Yes, absolutely. Because healing doesn’t begin the day you leave. It begins the day you stop leaving yourself behind.
