Ever felt like you were losing your fucking mind in a relationship?

Like you tried everything to keep the peace, but it was never good enough? Like the other person never took responsibility for themselves and always found a way to blame you? Like you were always giving and the other person was always taking? Like you were crazy or horrible for feeling hurt, frustrated, uncertain, or angry?

If so, you’ve experienced a toxic relationship.

If you’ve lived through this kind of situation, I want to help you understand a) what the hell happened, and b) what you can do about it. Since this is a pretty complicated issue, I’ll be releasing a series of blog posts to answer the following questions:

What is a toxic relationship?
How do toxic relationships impact you?
How can you deal with them?
Why do you keep ending up in this situation, and how can you end the pattern?
Why is your partner doing what they’re doing?

As a therapist who specializes in trauma and its impact on relationships, I can tell you that if you’ve experienced a toxic relationship, you’re not alone. What you’re experiencing is a well-researched phenomenon, and there is a way out of your suffering.

Let’s get started today by defining what a toxic relationship is so you know how to spot one.

WHAT IS A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP?

In order to figure out how to spot a toxic relationship, let's start by defining what a healthy relationship looks like. And in order to understand what a healthy relationship looks like, we have to know that there are two fundamentally important relationship needs that we’ve developed over the course of human evolution: the need for attachment and the need for authenticity.

Attachment is connection, and it shows up as both comfort and protection. It’s knowing that you've got someone there for you in your corner, that they love you, and that they'll help you wade through the shit storms of life.

It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of a good morning text, the coziness of being curled up next to each other on the couch watching Netflix, and the comfort of making dinner together. It’s knowing that someone will bail you out of trouble or give some dude the finger in traffic if he was a dick to you.

Authenticity, on the other hand, is about honesty and freedom. Authenticity means being honest about what you think, how you feel, or what you need. In a relationship, it’s having someone truly see and accept you as you are, with all your imperfections, thoughts, feelings, and needs.

It’s having someone say “I totally hear what you’re saying, and it makes sense.” Or “I’m so glad you were honest with me about how you were feeling, because now I can show you my love in an even better way.” Or “I’m glad you’re listening to your gut on that one. Hearing you say no is hard, but I want you to be true to yourself.”

So what’s a healthy relationship? Now that we know what attachment and authenticity are, it’s actually pretty easy to define:

A healthy relationship is a relationship in which both your need for attachment AND your need for authenticity are met.

SO WHAT’S A TOXIC RELATIONSHIP?

Now that we know what a healthy relationship looks like, as well as what I mean by attachment and authenticity, we can come up with a working definition of a toxic relationship:

A toxic relationship is a relationship where you are forced to choose between attachment and authenticity.

When you’re in a toxic relationship, if you’re authentic — that is, if you’re honest about what you think, how you feel, what you need, or what you want — the other person will lose their shit, and you’ll lose the safety of attachment. Or, if you opt to maintain the safety of attachment, they won’t lose their shit, but you’ll have to sacrifice your thoughts, feelings, and needs and become an anxious shell of a person.

There are so many different ways this can show up with your partner:

having sex when you don’t want to so your partner doesn’t throw a tantrum
walking on eggshells because you don’t want your partner to freak out
keeping your thoughts to yourself because you know expressing your opinion will start a fight

It can also show up in other relationships in your life:

working yourself into the ground because your boss gets pissy when you express your needs
becoming a lawyer even though you hate law so your parents won’t lay a guilt trip on you
having sex with women when you desire men (or vice versa) because otherwise God will send you to hell forever and/or members of your faith community will be assholes

I could list 10,000 other examples, but you get the point.

In a toxic relationship, if you choose the safety of attachment, you have to suppress your authentic self, and if you choose the freedom of authenticity, you have to sacrifice the safety of attachment.

If you’ve ever lived this, you know that it really sucks. But being able to recognize something is always the first step to being able to change it, and now you know exactly what to look for when it comes to healthy versus toxic relationships.

In the next article in this series, I’ll break down exactly why sacrificing authenticity for attachment is so damaging. Spoiler alert: it’s by causing profound anxiety and sucking the joy out of life. Tune in next time for an exploration of exactly how it happens.