The Loneliness Trap
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دکتر ترانه موذنی
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Toxic relationship are relationships that harm people’s mental and physical health and cause feelings of insecurity, dissatisfaction, and even depression. In these types of relationships, people constantly feel that they are being abused, humiliated, or ignored.
There are several reasons why people stay in a toxic relationship. Some of these reasons include:
- Fear of being alone: Some people are afraid of being alone and therefore stay in a toxic relationship, even if it is harmful to them.
- Emotional dependence: In some cases, people become dependent on their partner and cannot easily leave them.
- Hope for change: Some people hope that their partner will change and abandon their toxic behavior.
- Social pressure: Sometimes, social and family pressure causes people to stay in a toxic relationship.
- Lack of self-confidence: People who have low self-confidence may think that they do not deserve a better relationship and therefore stay in a toxic relationship.
Leaving a toxic relationship can be difficult, but it is not impossible. Here are some techniques for leaving a toxic relationship:
- Recognize the problem: The first step to leaving a toxic relationship is to recognize the problem and accept the fact that your relationship is toxic.
- Get support: Get help from friends, family, or a professional. Talking to someone who cares about you can help you make decisions and implement them.
- Plan: Have a detailed plan for leaving the toxic relationship. This plan should include things like where to live, financial issues, and how to talk to your partner.
- Cut off communication: After leaving the relationship, try to cut off communication with your partner. This includes deleting their phone number, blocking them on social media, and not meeting with them.
- Take care of yourself: After leaving the relationship, take care of yourself and try to recover. This includes doing activities that you enjoy, exercising, and eating healthy.
Toxic Relationships: Understanding, Identifying, and Escaping
In many relationships, the potential for toxic behaviors exists reciprocally between partners. However, before examining unhealthy relationships, it’s crucial to understand the characteristics of a healthy relationship. This understanding allows us to recognize harmful behaviors and learn how to escape them. In all healthy relationships, specific behavioral areas serve as evaluation criteria. These criteria include:
Mental Wellbeing
The most critical criterion for assessing the health of a relationship is whether it harms the mental and physical well-being of the partners or threatens their overall health. The second criterion is whether individuals are emotionally satisfied and fulfilled within the relationship. The individual’s emotional and psychological needs should be met.
Sense of Security
The third criterion of a healthy relationship is that both individuals feel safe. In other words, they can be under the psychological support of another person. Security is a word with psychological implications that has a unique meaning for each individual. Generally, it refers to the feeling that one can be cared for by a safe person in the relationship. Caring does not mean that individuals are needy and require constant attention. Rather, it conveys the concept of having a support system and a reliable foundation.
Absence of Intellectual Conflict
The fourth criterion of a healthy relationship is that both individuals are aligned in many aspects of life, and there is no deep intellectual conflict. The fifth criterion is that they have a kind of psychological overlap and can rely on each other psychologically. If a relationship has the five aforementioned criteria to an acceptable degree, it is considered a healthy relationship. If any of these criteria are absent in a relationship, it is undoubtedly harmful and, in other words, toxic.
Of course, the degree of harm in relationships is evaluated on a broad spectrum. The more severe the toxicity of the relationship due to the absence of the mentioned criteria, the greater the harm inflicted on the individual, and the greater the need to receive expert help from a specialist. The decision to exit a completely harmful and toxic relationship is necessary and essential. However, the significant problem is that many people know but cannot implement their decision. They are fully aware that being in the current relationship means suffering more harm, but they are unable to implement their decision. By remaining in the unhealthy relationship, they pave the way for their gradual demise.
You can’t make the decision to end the relationship because:
- You are afraid of the unknown that may happen to you after the relationship ends.
- You are not honest with yourself and you doubt the feelings you have.
- You are afraid of failure and being judged by family, friends, and society.
- You are worried about how your partner is going to cope with the separation.
- You feel ashamed and guilty about failing in the relationship.
- You have a sense of duty, loyalty, or an excessive sense of responsibility towards your partner, and only your partner’s happiness and satisfaction are very important to you.
- You are very dependent on your partner. In fact, you have moved from healthy attachment to unhealthy dependence and ultimately emotional attachment.
- Fear of the future, fear of being alone has caused you separation anxiety.
- You are worried that you may not have other opportunities to experience a relationship.
- You have spent a lot of time and energy on this relationship, so you want to continue at any cost.
- You continue the relationship because you doubt your worthiness to have a healthy relationship. You tolerate insults, humiliation, etc. because you have low self-esteem and you do not consider yourself worthy, desirable, and acceptable.
- You feel that staying in this relationship will eventually benefit you someday.
- Finally, because you do not trust yourself to make decisions and you are afraid that you may make a mistake, you prefer to stay in the relationship despite the existing harms.
In this article, our effort is to answer this question: “How to get out of the wrong relationship?”. By knowing the headings, you can reflect on your relationship and evaluate which stage you are in and consider a plan and roadmap for the future of your relationship.
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Steps to Exit a Wrong Relationship
Step 1:
To make the right decision about relationships that are crucial, you must act responsibly. We are not talking about friendships or simple social relationships that you have no specific plans for the future. We mean relationships that require a lot of time and energy and are decisive in your destiny. You do not need to explain or justify your decisions in these crucial relationships to anyone, or try to prove your decisions to others.
Most people who are trapped in toxic relationships and are unable to make the right decisions do not believe in themselves. For this reason, they suffer from erosion and ultimately chronic depression or various obsessive-compulsive disorders in an inefficient relationship. The main problem with these people is that they are trying to stay in the relationship to prove to others that the time spent in the relationship was correct and to justify their mistakes with a bigger mistake. What you need to prove to yourself is the existence of all the harmful behaviors as signs and guide signs in the relationship, not proving them to others and family. The view of staying in a relationship to prove your rightness will not help you except to increase more problems for you.
What is important in such a situation is to see a psychologist to lighten your burden of anger and revenge. An expert who can be by your side during the separation process and provide you with professional help. If, for any reason, after talking to a specialist or a psychologist, you come to the conclusion that you must end your inefficient relationship, get out of the relationship as soon as possible, without wasting time and introductions, and in a correct and mature way.
Step 2:
Examine the meaning and concept of the word “worthiness.” What does this word mean to you? What rights do you have? What do you consider yourself worthy of? Of course, the issue of merit and worthiness is not related to the level of education, but the level of awareness and self-knowledge of the individual is very important in this regard. Regardless of the level of education or degree, due to the lack of awareness and self-knowledge, they remain in a place where people’s worthiness is not answered. In a place where the personality, spiritual, psychological and emotional needs of individuals are not met, love is not only not enough, but it does not work at all. Therefore, in such circumstances, they use love and affection as a deterrent lever and an excuse for not leaving.
Step 3:
Accept that the other party will not change. After consulting with psychologists who specialize in this field and implementing the necessary treatment strategies, if you come to the conclusion that no change is taking place, do not make excuses for staying in the relationship and do not go any further. If you have not witnessed any change or improvement in the course of time and during the relationship, on what basis do you believe that you will witness fundamental and fundamental changes in the days, months and years to come? The more you move forward with false hope for the future, the more likely you are to become disappointed and frustrated. Be sure to consider a limit of loss for yourself and consider it as the end point of the work that is not negotiable.
Step 4:
Do not avoid accepting the current unpleasant conditions. Accept that denial and blaming do not help you. Certainly, in a relationship, both parties are to blame. Everything happens in between with a known tolerance. Of course, this tolerance also has variables that show which side the graph is drawn to. Therefore, first you must see your role in creating the current inappropriate conditions and accept your mistakes. Second, you have tried to correct your mistakes. Of course, there is also a time when, despite your acceptance and efforts to improve the relationship, the other party has no acceptance and no effort. These conditions are the prelude to the death of a relationship. In fact, the end point of the relationship is where the parties or one of them claims that they do not need to change themselves.
Step 5:
Cut off all communication channels and intermediary bridges with the person and the relationship. I emphasize all communication channels, including phone numbers, IDs of all domestic and foreign messengers such as Instagram, Telegram, etc.
You cannot forget a toxic relationship as long as you have a level of access for yourself. Constant reminders of photos, videos, and shared memories increase the likelihood of you re-entering this relationship.
Just one photo can negate the difficult path of separation and self-building that you have taken so far and bring you back to the starting point. Leave no way of communication for yourself or for the other party. Leaving only one way of communication means returning to the swamp of the relationship again.
People sometimes make promises to compensate or fear of losing or any other factor that revive a dead relationship, but due to not solving the root and fundamental problems, after 48 hours or at most a week, everything returns to the original settings of the relationship and even worse than before. Therefore, cutting off all communication channels and bridges is essential.
Step 6:
To get out of a toxic relationship, you need to find your weaknesses that have caused the current damage. Why and how did you enter such a relationship and attract such a person? You must identify the amount of damage and existing injuries. Identifying and measuring the existing damages is a kind of reverse engineering for having a better life in the future so that you can use your opportunities ahead. But if you do not examine the existing damages meticulously and do not recover the reasons, your weaknesses in future relationships will turn into more terrible events and more losses.
Step 7:
Know that at any age, in any situation and in any circumstances, there is an opportunity for everyone to love and be loved. Cognitive errors such as “It’s over for me…” or “Who else will come to me…?” are among the cognitive errors that condemn you to stay and burn and build. There is always an opportunity for everyone if they have a balanced and reasonable behavior.
Step 8:
To get out of the current unpleasant situation, do not look for an immediate painkiller or morphine. People quickly enter another relationship in order to cope more easily with the grief of separation and separation. In fact, it is a kind of forced emotional asylum to another person so that they can experience less pain. In this way, they create two major harms to themselves.
- In the current situation where the person is تحملing heavy pain, they cannot make the right choice and again the second choice is also wrong.
- If you choose an ideal and suitable person, due to the untreated injuries, you will not be able to understand the merits of this person and you will make mistakes again that you will lose this chance and your next chances one after another.
Therefore, allocate time for your treatment. Be sure to seek help from a psychologist to address your personality weaknesses.
Step 9:
Consider that you can never control any person for any reason. So stop controlling thinking to reduce your anxiety. The only thing you can control in the best way is your own behavior and manners, not the other person. Always ask yourself this question: How can I behave in the face of different situations in a way that is beneficial to myself, the people around me and the society?
Step 10:
Leaving has always been a difficult task. No one is going to promise you that you are facing a simple event. Toxic relationships are not necessarily about bloodying and injuring each other, fighting and conflict. A toxic relationship can be very romantic and at the same time harmful. Remembering shared memories can be very painful. For this reason, it was emphasized in the previous steps that you should not immediately enter the next relationship. Perhaps you are in a situation where you need professional help to treat the existing injury. Part of the help can be the professional help of a psychologist and part of it can be medication help. You must use all kinds of treatment methods to be able to calm yourself and your mind. Therefore, consider that it is the nature and essence of separation that it has pain, so do not avoid it. Accept it and get professional help in time.
The ten steps mentioned in this article can help you, like a guide sign, to go through the separation path with minimal damage. The valuable emotional capital of each person is a valuable opportunity called life, which should not be lost with hardship, suffering, insults, betrayal and other unpleasant stories. If, for any justifiable and acceptable reason, you realize that the damages of the relationship are irreparable, give yourself and the other party the opportunity to be able to get out of the inefficient relationship. In fact, if two people have reached the necessary intellectual maturity, they can maturely decide that the relationship will no longer have a positive function for them after this and provide the opportunity to leave with minimal damage for each other.