So you’re in a relationship that is draining you in every way. You spend more time worrying about your relationship than you do, enjoying it, yet still you can’t find the strength to just cut loose. Your story is not strange. In fact, you’d be surprised how many people are in relationships that are slowly draining them mentally, physically and emotionally, yet they remain in the situation.
There are people who are simply toxic in their relationships with others. These are people to be avoided. Do not be afraid to ask the hard questions when you meet someone who is interested in you. What’s their relationship history? Go out on dates and observe how they treat others and how they relate to their friends, family, and the people they claim to love. How they treat those they love is a good indicator of their interpretation of love and what you are likely to experience.
If you’re serious about being able to avoid or getting out of a toxic relationship, you might find the following pointers useful.
· Be honest with yourself about what you are seeing: Being in a relationship that you’re struggling to make work, is sometimes like trying to squeeze toothpaste from an empty tube. You know it’s a humongous task to get the toothpaste out. Sometimes you squeeze until you can hear the air coming out the tube but you’re so steadfast in your belief that some where inside that tube, there’s some toothpaste that you keep squeezing the tube anyway, twisting it various ways in the hope that the toothpaste will eventually come out. Relationships can be very exciting but walk in with your eyes open and don’t see something that isn’t there simply because you so badly want it to work.
· Establish boundaries in your relationships: We tell people how to treat us by how we treat ourselves. If someone sees that you are willing to accept bad treatment, they have no reason to treat you well. In a relationship, there are two imperfect people trying to somehow have a ‘perfect’ life so things will not always be great. However, relationships must have boundaries and when you fail to impress upon your partner, from early in the relationship what your boundaries are, you leave yourself open to anything he/she might feel like subjecting you to.
· Know your worth and act like it: If you go around feeling that you are not worthy of good treatment, you don’t even need to open your mouth and say it…people will pick up that you have low self esteem simply by looking at you, your behaviour when you’re in the company of others, your entire demeanor will give you away. If you walk into a room, have confidence in yourself and tell yourself that you deserve the best man or woman in that room or you will attract the worse.
· The longer you stay in a bad situation, the more difficult it becomes to break free: The sad truth is that many people refuse to see the signs of a bad relationship from early, so like the frog in the water which is slowly being heated beneath him, they allow themselves to become aclimatized to the mess. The longer you take to walk away from something unhealthy, the more adjusted you become to that negative situation. You can lose yourself so much in a toxic relationship that you forget what a normal relationship is supposed to feel like. Many persons who’ve been in toxic relationships have deep regrets because one day they wake up and realize that they’ve probably spent the best years of their life, fighting a battle that wasn’t worth it.
· Pull back and assess where you are: If you find that you keep having the same type of relationships, the same kinds of people keep crossing your path, with the same kind of drama and stress, it is perhaps time to look inward…step back and take a long, hard look at yourself. What is it about you that is attracting these kinds of people to you? What similar characteristics have you noticed with these people you are attracting and what do you have in common with them? What many people fail to realize is that like spirits attract, For instance, people with low self esteem often attract people who also have low self esteem. The saying “show me your friends and I will tell you who you are,” shouldn’t be taken lightly. People gravitate to people who they believe are similar to themselves. If you’ve been in a string of toxic relationships, it is very possible that there is something about you that toxic people are attracted to. You need to identify and deal with it to break that cycle.
Marie Berbick is a motivational speaker and founder of the women’s ministry Sisters United for Prayer, Healing, Empowerment & Restoration. (SUPHER). Follow her on twitter @thePR Girl. Email marieberbick@gmail.com
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