Does Love and Toxic Relationships Go Together?

In this month where the whole world seems to be in love, I am getting real about where toxic relationships and love meet along with practical solutions for navigating toxic relationships

I had a revelation this past week.

I realized how I express what I do as a coach was mystifying to most people. This is how I was expressing what I do: I help women exhausted from being all things to all people master boundaries so they can create time and financial freedom for who and what they love with zero guilt.

Confusing, right?

It’s confusing because I am really talking about what happens after you work with me and most women don’t know exactly what I mean when I saw they are exhausted from being all things to all people. They know they are exhausted, but what things are they being and to whom.

And then it hit me…

I help women safely navigate toxic relationships so that they are able to maintain connection with a loved one or co-parent because without that connection, chaos would explode and others would be hurt in the chaos.

I do this because this is what I have chosen to do in my own life.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I have let many people go in my circles of relationship because their toxic behavior was draining me. I have chosen to keep a couple of people because of very specific reasons and with very specific boundaries of steel in place.

I will return to that in a second…

If I had a ton of writing space and didn’t need to have a tagline, I might write something like this:

I help women safely navigate toxic relationships that keep them exhausted from trying to be all things to the people using toxic behaviors because they believe completely cutting off their parent or sibling or co-parent would have a disasterous ripple effect into the lives of their other family members and their children. I support these women is seeing the default patterns of people pleasing those toxic relationships have created in them so they can cope and how they bring those default patterns into every other relationship in their lives which further exhausts them. The women who work with me develop the skills and tools to master boundaries in all areas of their lives which leads to time and financial freedom for who and what they love with zero guilt because they have broken the cycle of default patterns and have learned to safely navigate the toxic relationships in their lives.

Do you see how I got lost in articulating my own mission? It’s all woven together. And, when women find me they almost always say this, “I have an unhealthy relationship with my mom/my son/my sibling/my children’s father and I don’t feel like the answer is to cut them off.”

This is where I pick up the discussion from above. Why not cut them off?

Photo by Pro Church Media on Unsplash

There are two categories of toxic relationships and I am helping you with one of those categories and the difference is NIGHT and DAY.

There are toxic relationships you did NOT choose

and

There are toxic relationships you did choose and then discovered

Hopefully, in working with me, you will choose better in the future. For now, let’s focus on the first category.

When the toxic relationship is with a parent, your child, or your sibling, or really any other family member who you are close with, you were born into that dynamic. Or, that child was born to you and you don’t pick the child who is born to you, even if they are adopted as you don’t know who they will grow into.

My point is, you love this person because the love happened BEFORE the toxic behaviors became evident to you.

I realize you also love or care for a romantic partner before all the toxic becomes evident, but that is very very different. You can leave that more easily because there isn’t a sense of “but that’s my mom or my dad”, someone who had a significant role in getting you to and establishing you on this planet.

I think this is why people are still responding to and interacting with a couple of posts I put on Facebook this past week. They resonate with this because it seems like every coach specializing in toxic relationships only has one answer—LEAVE!

That may be the answer if you CHOSE the relationship initially. It’s not necessarily the answer if you did NOT CHOOSE the relationship.

This brings me to the complexity of co-parents. Yes, you did choose your co-parent at some point and you loved them enough to bring children into the world with them. However, you do not choose them now and that means unless you really want to explode chaos onto your kids, you need to figure out how to safely navigate a relationship with them toxic behaviors and all. This might also include a new romantic partner and well, that just makes it all that more complex.

I have three things I want you to do if you plan to stay connected within a relationship where you are choosing to heal and they are choosing to remain in their own toxic patterns.

1. Heal! You need to understand how this toxic relationship shaped you and continues to shape you. If you don’t understand that, you will be pulled back into toxic dynamics over and over again because they are familiar to you and they are what you understand.

2. Know what you are willing to do and not do. This relationship has a huge impact upon your life in many ways and one of the biggest ways it impacts you is it took away your autonomy and your ability to choose. You exist to serve them. If you are going to safely navigate a relationship with your parent, sibling, or co-parent and not get tangled up in their toxicity, you have to be crystal clear on where the edges of your willingness are.

3. Get really good at honoring your own boundaries. People who use toxic behaviors have no interest in your boundaries except to use them to manipulate you futher. They will not honor your boundaries. They will poke at them. They will look directly at you and violate them with a sneer on their face. They have ZERO INTEREST in meeting you in a safe space. You must create your own safe space.

Let me tell you from personal experience, you will need support for this. This is where I come in. The YOU Aligned Academy is where you will find all the tools you need to complete and go beyond these three steps plus find a community of women who are on a similar journey. Click here for all the details and to apply now.

I have a HUGE bonus for you in the Upleveled area this month and that is my bonus training Boundaries and Toxic Relationships, complete with a video and reflection guide. Click that Uplevel button to access the training.