Childhood neglect and abuse can have significant consequences on a child’s physical, emotional, and psychological well-being.
Sometimes we remain attracted to the same kinds of people who were the first people we met in our lives – for better or for worse.
A narcissistic mother, an absent father or vice versa – anyone?
And if you really compare your previous toxic “partners” with your parents, how much do they have in common?
What did you find attractive about them? What got you hooked?
What made you suffer?
Regarding betrayal traumas – did you have a parent who chose their own temporary benefit over your long-term benefit? (A form of neglect?)
If we’re really honest with ourselves, the similarities are always there. Sometimes we keep dating another version of our toxic/absent parents for years and decades, losing many years of our lives to lessons we shouldn’t have to learn.
Yes, it’s unfair. But becoming aware of what’s happening is the most crucial step to break the pattern!
Instead of wasting years of energy, love, anger, tears on another person’s behavior, there is another option:
Acknowledging that they don’t deserve ANY of your emotions
What exactly has a person done to deserve your love, care or even just your anger and sadness?
Are they worth your TIME?
What’s in it FOR YOU?
Journal about this!
People who do not deserve any emotional response or reactivity (in my opinion as an experiencer) are:
- people who love-bomb you
- people who devalue you
- people who discard you
- people who ignore your boundaries and, as a result, mistreat or exploit you
- people who manipulate you
- and parents who have neglected or mistreated you repeatedly or regularly
When you think about it, most of us spend way too much energy on trying to make these people see and hear and understand us.
We basically want to TALK compassion into them.
But a person is not a car – you can’t put missing brakes in and suddenly it’s not a threatening situation anymore, it’s fixed, it’s safe.
You can’t fix another person. They can only fix themselves – IF THEY WANT TO.
And everyone is on their own journey. Maybe they need to change for themselves and not for you. And maybe expecting anything else from them is nothing but your own self-sabotage (apart from the situations where you’re being manipulated, gaslit, lied to, betrayed — but even in these situations, you can’t make another person behave correctly towards you.)
“LET THEM”
This goes along with the “let them” philosophy.
Meaning you just don’t care anymore when someone disappoints you.
You practice radical allowance towards the behavior of others, even being GRATEFUL for the fact that they have revealed their true character to you.
Ultimately, once you have figured out that a person is wasting your time, instead of fighting with them over how to treat you right, you can save yourself tons of time by just believing them the first time and letting go immediately.
Why do we hold on to toxic people and try to make them love us the right way?
Of course, this usually goes back to childhood and the relationships we had with our parents. Often we weren’t really loved, but had to PERFORM in order to be tolerated.
Our needs were met with scorn, neglect and worse.
Out of repetition compulsion, you may be holding on to a toxic person, trying to recreate your childhood experiences and “do better this time”.
We’re in it to win it!
We’re not giving up! We want to make it!
I can hear my inner child saying: Well, now that I’m an adult and can finally articulate my needs, I’m finally going to talk to those people and make them understand me and that has got to be enough, right?
Well that’s how things SHOULD work, but with toxic people, the ones we are usually attracted to, things do NOT work this way.
…
You’re not getting out of hell by being reborn into it.
If you believe in re-incarnation, what kind of relationship dynamics would you like to be reborn into INSTEAD? What kind of family, friends, partnership?
What kind of friend do YOU want to be? To yourself? To others?
Journal about this!
Ask your inner child / core identity every day: How do you feel about this? What do you need right now? – and create a real, solid relationship with yourself.
Sometimes accepting that a situation with a toxic person IS INDEED hopeless frees up all the energy you ever needed to create the new, that which you always needed!
And if we’ve never had what we need, we need to learn to imagine it and deeply, truly believe that we deserve it, so we can manifest it into our lives.
Journal about all of this – or any aspect you find interesting – and discuss this with your therapist.