04/11/2025
Sometimes we stay in toxic relationships knowing they’re toxic because we’ve been convinced by our partner that the toxicity is all our fault. We’ve been told that we’re too sensitive, too uptight, too reactive, too emotional. As a result, instead of leaving, we try to fix the toxic relationship by “fixing” ourselves — becoming smaller, less feeling, less assertive, and less human.
It’s a slow erosion of the self. You don’t even realize it’s happening at first. You think you’re being understanding, patient, forgiving. You tell yourself that love requires compromise, and maybe this is just what it means to truly care about someone. But over time, that compromise becomes self-sacrifice. You start silencing your voice, burying your feelings, and walking on eggshells to avoid conflict. You begin to believe that peace only exists when you are quiet — when you don’t challenge them, when you accept blame that isn’t yours, when you become invisible just to be loved.
And that’s exactly how toxic relationships work — they condition you to doubt your own reality. Every time you express pain, they twist it until you’re the one apologizing. Every time they hurt you, they flip the script and make it about how *you* made them do it. Slowly, you internalize the narrative that you are the problem. You start wondering if maybe you *are* too much. Maybe your expectations are unrealistic. Maybe if you could just stop caring so deeply, everything would finally be okay.
But it’s not you. It never was. The problem isn’t that you feel too much — it’s that they feel too little. They lack empathy, accountability, and self-awareness. And instead of working on themselves, they make you carry the weight of their dysfunction. They break you, then call you “dramatic” for bleeding.
Leaving a toxic relationship is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, not because you want the pain, but because you remember the moments when it wasn’t like this — the love-bombing, the apologies, the promises. You hold on to the version of them you met in the beginning, hoping that person will return. But they never do, because that version was never real.
Healing begins the moment you stop trying to fix what someone else broke inside you. It begins when you remember who you were before you were convinced that being loved meant being less. You don’t have to keep shrinking to make someone else comfortable. You deserve to take up space, to speak loudly, to feel fully, and to love without fear. Real love will never ask you to be less of yourself just to keep it.
