Reflection
The Toxic Relationship: Recognising It, Understanding Why You Stay, and the Way Out
If you want to understand toxic relationships, you can open a psychology textbook. You can also open Greek mythology, and everything is already there.
Zeus and Hera: the ultimate toxic marriage. Chronic infidelity, gaslighting, revenge cycles, the imbalance of power. The couple stays together, and the relationship is emotionally corrosive. The modern version sits in every consulting room: the serial cheater, the jealousy, the control, the push-and-pull dynamic without end. Jason and Medea: betrayal, and the explosive revenge it breeds. Narcissus and Echo: the one who sees only himself, and the one who exists only by repeating the other, codependency in two characters. Hades and Persephone: abduction, power, and their romanticisation. These stories are three thousand years old, and they are the blueprint of all our toxic relationships. Which means two things: you have invented nothing, and what is a pattern can be named, and undone.
What a toxic relationship is
The core of a toxic relationship is an unhealthy pattern that repeats, over and over: an ongoing cycle in which people are emotionally harmed. We also speak of the trauma bond: an attachment built around pain. The cement of the relationship is no longer love, nor a shared project, nor tenderness: the cement of the relationship is the pain itself. That is why these relationships hold so strangely well, and so badly.
The signs
They are often more ordinary than people imagine. One partner putting the other down, or comparing them to other people. The underlying message: nothing is ever good enough. The manipulation that dictates, quite simply, your clothes, what you may or may not eat. The guilt-tripping. The mechanism of possession: why a woman, or a man, cannot go out alone to see their friends. The emotional roller coaster: you never know where you stand. The lack of genuine respect, of trust, of safety; the lack of compassion for one another.
And there is the one-sided effort, which I see so often in couples work: the wife who makes every effort, and the man who makes none, because he is a banker, because he is busy, and who treats his wife like his secretary. But the reverse exists too: the woman who cheats on her husband and believes it acceptable. I have seen both in my practice. And almost always, to one degree or another, the isolation: the relationship that cuts you off, little by little, from the rest of your life.
It must be said fairly: toxic relationships are not always abusive in the extreme sense. But they are damaging. It is not what you want to be involved in for the rest of your life.
The self-check: five questions
Ask yourself these questions, honestly, on a calm evening.
Do I feel better, or worse, about myself since I have been in this relationship? Does this relationship bring out the best in me, and the best in my partner? Do I feel safe to express my emotions, my needs, my desires, my thoughts? And when I do, am I heard, or laughed at? And this question, which says almost everything: does this relationship energise me, give me strength, or does it drain me?
A living relationship can pass through conflict, crises, winters. But on balance, it gives energy. The toxic relationship takes it.
Toxic, or a hold?
An important distinction, because words have consequences. A difficult, selfish, hurtful partner makes you angry. A hold makes you doubt your own mind. If you no longer know whether the problem is you or the other person, if your very perception of reality is under attack, you may no longer be in ordinary toxic territory: read Narcissistic Abuse, and the free book The Hold, which treats that ground in depth, including the question of safety.
The work: naming, repairing, or leaving
In toxic relationships the work usually runs on two fronts: individual therapy, to understand what this pattern repeats from your own history, and very often couples therapy. What happens there is simpler and more powerful than people imagine: the therapist puts a name on the different interactions, the different types of communication, that the couple cannot see from inside. The named pattern stops being the weather; it becomes an object the two of you can look at together.
And then, two honest roads. Sometimes, when both partners truly commit, the pattern comes undone and the relationship repairs: I have seen couples leave the cycle and find each other again. Sometimes, understanding leads elsewhere: to a separation made with less violence and more clarity, and the work then is to leave without taking the pattern with you, because a pattern not understood reinstalls itself in the next relationship. On the fear that makes leaving so hard: The Fear of Abandonment.
I see individuals and couples, in English and in French, at Harley Street in London, in Paris, and by secure video.
See also narcissistic abuse, the fear of abandonment, couples therapy, and the free book The Hold. Book a consultation.
