“I’m Stuck in a Toxic Relationship”

How to Overcome Emotional Trauma and Escape a Toxic Relationship

Cruelty, body-shaming and bad habits—you’ve definitely bumped into them more than once. Whether it’s dealing with abusive parents, jealous lovers, or messy addictions, feeling stuck in a toxic relationship can leave you overthinking everything and second-guessing everyone.

To stay safe, you may stay suspicious. Every thought you have is scrutinized, each look people give you is questioned, and every word you hear is decoded for ulterior meanings.

What is a toxic relationship?

You took back an abusive partner. You relapsed on junk food. Or maybe you spent another afternoon picking your body apart in the mirror. 

Toxic relationships are emotional patterns that keep you spiraling out of control, over and over again. When you hit rock bottom, the voice in your head says “never again.” But in the end, you always come back for more.

You’re inside a crazy rollercoaster you can’t escape.

The ride shoots you up sky-high—only to crash you down to the most brutal lows. And everything keeps twisting and turning too fast for you to jump off.

You keep screaming for help, reaching out to friends, therapists, and self-help books. But when rescuers try to pull you off the ride, you just keep clinging to your seat.

It’s like your heart is pulled in two opposite directions at the same time. Part of you wants to escape, yet another part refuses to let go.

Toxic feels so good

Ever heard of the Death Spiral? It’s when ants become blinded by the scent of pheromones and chase each other around in a never-ending loop. They sacrifice themselves to a toxic intuition, marching in circles until they eventually die from exhaustion.

There’s a twisted satisfaction in self-destruction.

When abuse creeps into our life, we’re told to run away and never look back. But it’s not so easy. Sometimes, what hurts you is also what satisfies you—like Sarah Goldfarb’s tragic addiction to her fantasies of a perfect past in Requiem for a Dream.

In toxic relationships, abuse hides behind love. Predators kiss the wounds they inflict. Drugs save us from the withdrawals they create. Cheaters shower us with love-bombs. It’s like a Pavlovian glitch that blurs the emotional line between pain and pleasure. 

Every time we suffer abuse, our heart starts salivating for love. Because the people who bring us down are also the ones who lift us up. Over time, pain becomes so tangled up with affection that we struggle to feel a difference. 

Late night junk food binges work the same way. They follow a “no pain, no gain” pattern of dysfunctional love. Your out-of-control eating makes you feel ashamed—but each bite helps you transform that shame into a comfortable numbness. The more disgust you feel when chewing, the more euphoric your binge becomes. 

Over time, even feelings of shame can become enjoyable.

Your binging becomes less about the pleasures of eating, and more about the satisfaction you feel from repeating a specific pattern—like a child who rocks themselves back and forth.

When you’re in a toxic relationship with your body, nit-picking every unruly inch in the mirror can become a compulsive reflex. It’s like an itchy wound you love to scratch, but the more you scratch it, the itchier it gets. A voice inside your head is addicted to finding reasons why you’re “too much” of this and “not enough” of that.

When the criticism spirals out of control, you read self-help books, watch motivational videos, or seek help from friends. But the voice never goes away.

Every morning, you wake up intoxicated by a desire to feel perfect, complete, and whole—no matter the cost.

Your heart is torn in two: One part of you enjoys feeling loved, comforted and beautiful—but the other part enjoys making you feel ugly, ashamed, and weak.

What is trauma friction?

Imagine being trapped inside a theater that keeps playing the same horror movie on repeat. And you’re forced to sit there, watching the same scenes over and over again.

On a conscious level, you’ve seen it all before. Every showing repeats the same pattern: a psycho monster chases teenagers, then one of them finally blows it up into a million pieces, but surprise—the monster comes back to life.

On an subconscious level, the jumpscare always shocks you. Even if your conscious mind knows the monster will snap its eye open in the final scene of the movie—because that’s what always happens—your subconscious always hopes the monster is gone for good, like an innocent child who keeps wishing for a happy ending.

Toxic relationships make us lose control in a predictable way. When you slip back into a self-destructive cycle, one half of you feels guilty because it knows “nothing will change“, while the other half always feels hopeful that “this time things will be different“.

One half of you looks for closure, while the other half looks for conflict.

That’s trauma friction. When you’re trapped inside a toxic relationship—by clinging to your cheating ex, binging on junk food, or body-shaming—you’re chasing two different desires at once in opposite directions.

Haunted by your inner child

Your emotional side is like an inner child. At some point in your early life, you felt neglected, ridiculed, or rejected—and now, part of you feels incomplete.

Today, you keep telling yourself and others that you’ve moved on. After all, since you’re a mature adult, people might think you’re silly for worrying about childhood drama.

But deep down, part of you is still haunted by unresolved emotions.

The inner child is our identification with a victimized image of self.

Your inner child is rooted in the past, but acts in the present. It’s an emotional moment from your childhood that’s frozen in time, and it keeps haunting your adult self for help. It’s desperate to find peace—yet doesn’t know it’s stuck in the past, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. 

Ever get the urge to do something reckless, even though it makes no sense? That’s your inner child pulling you back into the toxic loop. It’s your subconscious obsession with people and things in present reality that trigger traumatic emotions from your past. 

As an adult, if you’re clinging to abusive partners or bad habits—you might not desire these things themselves. Instead, you’re attracted to how they help you re-create emotional patterns that shaped an important turning point in your life.

Toxic relationships help you confront unhealed emotional wounds. 

Since your inner child can’t go back in time and save you from ever being bullied, or stop a parent from leaving you behind in your early life, the inner child tries to re-create these familiar scenes in the present, hoping for a different outcome.

Your inner child believes toxic patterns will eventually lead to closure—but every time it expects a happy ending, the monster keeps coming back to life.

Haunted by your inner critic

Your inner critic is the voice in your head that enjoys picking everything apart, like a helicopter parent who says you’re better than everyone else—yet always finds something wrong with everything you do.

While the inner child desires a happy ending, the inner critic always hopes for a tragic twist.

The inner critic is our identification with childhood bullies, a neglectful parent, or a hyper-critical teacher. 

Your inner critic is shame that was projected onto you by someone or something in the past—where you felt unable to meet expectations set by family, social groups, or pop culture.

To keep itself alive, it makes up stories and explanations that keep you oscillating between two tragic extremes. One second you’re fueled by a toxic sense of superiority, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The next second, you’re like Gatsby and plagued by feelings of inferiority.

Imagine an influencer who speaks out against unrealistic beauty standards, but uses AI filters to enhance her selfies. In public, she wants to help people overcome body-shaming. But in secret, her heart is plagued by feelings of ugliness, and she spirals into daydreams about all the terrible comments people might post about her. 

One second, she indulges in a self-narrative of superiority—checking DMs from fans and refreshing her high follower count. The next second, she’s flooded with negative thoughts about her body, and obsessively seeks out reasons to justify them, such as nit-picking her pictures and fixating on negative comments.

But no matter how fit, curvy, and dolled-up she becomes, the voice in her head always moves the goalpost, finding a million reasons to find ugliness in herself and others.

You can never meet your inner critic’s impossible standards.

The games we play

In a toxic relationship, there’s an interplay between projection (to reject or push outward) and introjection (to accept or pull inward). This creates a toxic blame game, where we subconsciously switch between the role of victim and the role of abuser.

We play victim by projecting our inner critic onto the world, and introjecting our inner child.

For example, if an overbearing parent made you feel helpless as a child, you may find yourself inexplicably attracted to a familiar emotional dynamic, seeking out aggressive lovers who punish you for wanting privacy, jealous flings who try to gatekeep your interactions with others, or submissive partners who cling to your every move.

In all cases, the toxic cycle of control is the same. Your claustrophobic romances sink you into the familiar helplessness of your inner child, forcing you to accept the blame for the overbearing nature of others.

When we play the role of inner child, we do anything to please our abusers, even if those we are subconsciously trying to please—our parents and childhood peers—only exist as fragments of the past.

We play abuser by projecting our inner child onto the world, and introjecting our inner critic.

For example, if you were bullied for your appearance as a teenager, you may escape victimhood by projecting your inner child onto your image in the mirror. This is an egoic reversal, where you reject your identification with victimhood in order to accept the role of bully.

In some twisted way, it feels like finally being accepted by the cool kids. Body-shaming yourself—and others—feels so satisfying because we’re finally placed in a position of power.

Your past abusers may no longer be part of your external reality, but their presence still creeps around in your inner world, keeping you hooked into a pattern of toxic relationships.

But no matter how great you look, how much junk food you eat, how many followers you gain, or how often you forgive that cheating partner, something always goes wrong—and the monster always comes back to life.

How to Escape Toxic Relationships

1. Know who you are

Toxic relationships can feel impossible to escape, especially when your mind is trapped inside an endless loop of blame games and toxic explanations. 

Your inner child and inner critic are ego structures.

The ego holds together your fabric of reality. It’s made up of thinking habits and emotional patterns that keep your identity stable from one day to the next.

When you try to let your thoughts and emotions float away, the world can start to feel disorienting—like a rollercoaster going off the rails.

That’s why some people would rather stay locked inside the self-destructive loop they know, than ever risk stepping out beyond the limits of their ego.

To escape your toxic cycle, you must stop fearing your higher self.

You are not your inner critic. You are not the voice that blames, attacks, and humiliates yourself and others. Toxic thoughts reflect your inner critic—it echoes words from people and situations that made you feel ashamed.

You are not your inner child. You are not the intrusive impulses that pull you into day-to-day drama. Fear, anger, and helplessness do not express your true self. They express your clinging to unresolved emotions from the past.

You are a conscious awareness in the now. Thoughts and emotions happen inside you, as waves happen when the ocean breaks its calm. Yet there’s a gap between you and these happenings. While your ego identifies with the waves, always rising and crashing, your higher self is the calm center of gravity where the stream of ideas, fantasies, and impulses flow—much like water swirling around a drain.

Growing up, you started to identify with the words, images and feelings that swirl around you, losing track of your true self, similar to a method actor who forgets they’re just playing a role.

2. Forgive your inner child

Escaping toxic relationships begins with forgiveness in the now. As a child, you may have felt scared, confused, or lost—emotions that were difficult to understand at the time.

Now, as someone with more life experience, you have the opportunity to nurture a deeper self-awareness that wasn’t accessible to you in the past. With enough love and patience, you can become the hero your inner child needs.

Your inner child wants to fulfill an impossible wish.

Deep down, we have the desire to fix something that can’t be undone—to love someone who is no longer here, to have never been rejected by anyone, or reunite parents who have already moved on with their lives.

Since you can’t rewind reality and change the past, your inner child makes your adult self repeat similar patterns in the now, hoping to somehow fix yesterday. In short, it tries to escape shame by running towards it.

Forgiveness is the absence of shame.

When we are hurt, we are often told to “forgive for yourself.” But over time, we may find ourselves having to forgive the same mistakes and betrayals, over and over again.

In truth, forgiveness isn’t about being strong enough to swallow the pain and move on—it’s about letting go of shame. Often, shame lurks in the gap between childhood expectations and present reality. And our ego manages that shame by transforming it into anger, projecting it outward or introjecting it inward, which fuels blame games.

Shame is our clinging to fantasies about an imperfect self.

Shame is the primary source of all toxic relationships. It appears when we feel like we’re too little or too much of something, and empowers our dark fantasies about others and ourselves. Your anguish over not being lovable enough to deserve better. Your resentment over not having the perfect body. Your bitterness over having a troubled past.

When you cling to impossible wishes about what could have been or what should be, you create inescapable shame.

The tighter you cling to your inner child’s impossible wish for perfection, the deeper into shame you sink when reality ultimately betrays your expectations. And in the end, shame always leads to anger.

To forgive your inner child, you must let go of shame.

3. Overcome your inner critic

While your inner child sets off emotional reactions that make you act without thinking, your inner critic fills your head with judgements and excuses the second you start feeling ashamed.

It gives you reasons to be disgusted by your body. It feeds you stories about why you deserve to be hurt. And it whispers hateful thoughts about others when you feel lesser than them.

Craving perfection is a toxic ego trip. It’s nostalgia for an imaginary past and unattainable future. Like a platonic form, the moment it comes into contact with reality, the inner critic finds a way to create new imperfections, moving the goalpost for “true” love and “real” beauty further out of reach.

Every time you fail to make these fantasies into reality, the inner critic starts creating toxic explanations to rationalize the shame you feel—pointing fingers at both yourself and others.

When you stop playing blame games, your inner critic gets weaker.

Blame games, while rooted in shame, are provoked by the dramatic stories we make up about ourselves and others, whether they make us feel better than everyone else or like the worst human ever.

All day long, our inner critic fixates on beliefs about who we are—and it’s often by comparing ourselves to the world around us.

The most powerful beliefs are often created early on in life. When you were young, your brain was a sponge. It soaked up everything around you, and created connections between ideas and emotions. Since they got stronger as you grew older, they’re now the go-to routes your brain takes when you think.

Toxic thoughts are often supported by these early connections. So when our inner critic rises up, it can be difficult to escape.

Don’t try to silence it—fighting back can often make everything worse. It’s like a meme, where the more someone tries to shut it down, the more viral it becomes.

To escape blame games, choose your new meta direction.

When you sense toxic thoughts rise up from your subconscious, your conscious mind will start thinking about them. In other words, you will have meta-thoughts, or thoughts about thoughts.

In toxic relationships, our inner critic tries to keep our thoughts moving in a direction so the toxic cycle can repeat. And that’s what keeps us stuck in harmful patterns.

By increasing your conscious awareness of how you think about intrusive thoughts the second they arise, you can catch yourself before falling into a toxic cycle—like an ant in a death spiral—and start to break free from the emotional attachments that nurture hatred.

To do this, it helps to tap into the present moment.

4. Tap into the now

When you look at yourself in a mirror, confront an abusive partner, or feel like splurging on junk food—your conscious awareness will be pulled in two opposite directions at once.

Emotional impulses will push you to act without thinking—like welcoming your partner’s cruelty or fixating on your body’s fat rolls—while your thoughts will propose reasons to explain why being abused or hating your body is okay.

To stop repeating your toxic cycle, you must identify as a conscious awareness separate from all thought and emotion.

As you tap into the now, sense the stream of emotions and thoughts rise up, but don’t try to control or suppress them.

The more you push them away, the more your ego will push back. Your inner critic might start clinging to tragic stories about your past, or justify harmful behaviors happening today by making dreamy promises about the future.

As a trigger response, your inner child will flood your mind with bursts of frustration, worry, and temptation—all to keep you enslaved to the toxic cycle.

Stay in the now. Become aware of your breath – the rise, the fall, and the rhythm.

With each inhale and exhale, let yourself sink deeper into the present moment. Can you sense the air entering through your nose, filling your lungs, and gently escaping back into the world?

Feel the weight of your body as it makes contact with the surface beneath you, whether it’s the softness of a cushion or the firmness of the ground. Pay attention to the areas of your body that feel the most pressure—maybe your hips, thighs, or the soles of your feet.

Observe any impulses to shift your weight or adjust your position, but don’t try to resist them. The more you try to keep still, the itchier, more fidgety, and restless you’re likely to feel.

The more you fight against something, the more it sticks to you.

Instead of trying to control your thoughts and emotions—and getting caught up in the past and future—visualize them as colorful, delicate bubbles floating around you. Cooler colors may symbolize sadness or fear, while warmer tones might represent arousal or anger.

As the seconds pass by, allow these gentle orbs to be as they are. Bring your attention back to the sensations of your body—the textures, pressures, sounds, and scents—and eventually, you will sense your thoughts and emotions begin to float up and away.

5. Trust the path

Trust is the belief that future outcomes will match our present expectations.

When we struggle to let go of anger, we often become even angrier. It’s like a meta-spiral, where we become angry about being angry. And once we realize we’re stuck in another toxic loop, we sink back into shame.

Expectations are created by the ego, and open the door to betrayal, anger, and shame.

Both your inner child and inner critic are desperate to control your life. They create nostalgic fantasies about the past and set impossible expectations about the future.

By clinging onto egoic expectations and hoping for instant change, you’re actually regressing back into your toxic cycle.

The path for letting go of negative thoughts and impulsive emotions is simple—but it’s not easy.

Don’t expect a perfect path. You will experience highs and lows, steps forward and steps back. But it’s not like a toxic rollercoaster that always ends up where it started.

Even with the ups and downs, trust that you’re still moving forward.

As long as you keep practicing forgiveness and learn to identify with your conscious awareness on a daily basis, rather than the stream of thoughts and emotions floating around you, then you are making progress.

Closure

Healing begins when you focus on the present moment and embrace forgiveness.

Do not blame yourself or others. It’s not an easy task. But to escape a toxic relationship—with yourself or others—you must learn to act out of love rather than out of fear.

When your intrusive thoughts and impulsive emotions arise, allow them to exist as they are without trying to cling, control, or suppress them. Just because they enter conscious awareness doesn’t mean they must be yours to keep. So, let them go.

With enough daily practice, you can progressively uncover the path to your higher self, where the toxicity of fear, abuse, and hatred cannot reach you.