Get out. Go.
Why? But I need the money…
Toxic relationships -
how would you know if you're in one?
What are some warning signs that you should look out for?
That's what we're going to talk about in this video.
Ok.
If you are in a toxic relationship right now, it is imperative that you get yourself out of there, urgently.
Here's why… the longer you stay in a toxic relationship or environment,
and the more you tolerate it, the more you become insensitive to toxicity.
It becomes your norm.
And that isn't good.
Eventually, if we stay there long enough, we become completely unable to recognise
what is healthy and what is not.
And that usually turns into a downward spiral of self loathing, resentment and sadness.
This is especially important for you and I as women, because we naturally meet our needs
differently inside a relationship than men do.
As the bearer of children, relationships mean a lot more to our safety, esteem and sense
of fulfillment.
So in this video, I want to share with you 10 seemingly harmless signs that you might
be in a toxic relationship.
This is especially important if you've grown up in a toxic environment, where you never
got the chance to develop proper boundaries, healthy attachments and high self esteem.
Let's get started.
Toxic sign number 1: You FEEL like the relationship constantly drains you.
Go ahead, ask yourself, do you have that deep seated feeling in your gut
that this relationship drains you.
Forget all of the superficial stuff, ask yourself…
Do you feel drained or stressed around this person?
Or, do they energise you?
And perhaps you have to ask yourself, do you perpetuate the pattern by going back to that
relationship to also take value for yourself?
For any relationship to work long term, It’s important to continually add value to the
relationship basket, rather than always taking from the relationship basket.
Your intimate relationship is supposed to be a sacred place of mutual vulnerability,
sharing, and support.
It is supposed to deeply connect you to what matters in life: which is connection and relationship.
Your healthiest relationships should remind you of why you’re here on this earth: to connect.
To make art together.
To love each other.
What makes us women truly strong and truly successful is the health and quality of the
relationships that we have in our lives.
In order for us to shine as feminine women, we need to have strong, loving and supportive
relationships that allow us to feel safe.
Otherwise we as women, actually become more masculine in order to cope and deal with the
trauma and lack of safety.
If we don't get out of a relationship that constantly drains us, then we will eventually
get to a place some months, years, decades down the track where we physically, mentally
and spiritually cannot take it anymore.
And as I’m sure you can imagine, the consequence of that kind of meltdown is catastrophic.
Sign number 2: You feel like he intentionally magnifies your fears, rather than helping
you overcome your fears.
And as you can probably imagine, by exposing your fears, it's really a way to gain some
level of control over your thoughts, feelings and actions.
It also doesn't have to be this huge act of exposing your fears and insecurities…
It could be a small snarky remark that pinpoints an area that you are already sensitive about.
In an ultimately healthy relationship, there is no need to magnify anyone's fears.
In a healthy relationship, you actually get your perception of control from the value
that you add, rather than the value that you take.
So If there’s somebody in your life right now who seems to bring up your fears, in whatever way,
I’d like to ask you...how much more can they strip from you, until you turn into
a puddle of nothingness?
How long would it take to repair the damage this is created upon your self esteem?
And what are you gaining from this situation that makes you want to stay, allowing yourself
to feel smaller, and become smaller each and every time you spend moments with them?
Sign number 3: He seems to always have an underlying energy of resentment.
You see, any type of resentment that lives inside of you affects everything else in your life,
especially your relationships.
If someone has underlying resentment, then it has probably been brewing for years,
if not, decades.
And the only way forward, the only way to grow beyond that, is for them to express and
release all the old trash in their system.
Because that’s exactly what it is - old trash.
Old anger, sadness and hurt that they have pushed down repeatedly
and never cleansed from their system.
And that resentment eats away at them and negatively affects everything else in their lives.
See, I'm not against having anger.
I think anger for the most part can be very healthy.
True spontaneous anger can be valuable in a relationship when it's expressed with total
connection to each other’s heart.
But resentment is a different beast altogether.
Sign number 4: It feels like he always has to be right and you never feel heard.
I'm sure we can all relate to having someone in our lives who never gives you a chance to feel heard.
It's like you're talking to a wall.
You can't bring anything new to them, you can’t go deeper, you can't discuss ideas,
thoughts and feelings.
It's not that they don't respond to what you say, it’s that they have their usual reaction
before you even finish what you have to say.
They make sure that they never, ever feel the slightest bit vulnerable or exposed.
The common pattern, would be someone who criticises you as their first reaction to anything you say,
and never actually spends time thinking about what you said.
It's like a way to dominate you in the conversation.
And that is a very toxic pattern to get into.
I can hardly even call that a relationship.
Sign number 5: You feel like he’s physically there, but never emotionally there for you.
Some people, even if they enter in to a relationship, will physically be there in the room
or in the house with you, but they will never fully embrace connection and engagement with you.
It’s hard to get through their barriers or go deep with them.
For some reason, they are shut off to it.
Maybe they were a survivor of abuse themselves.
Maybe they are too fearful, perhaps they have adopted bad patterns of intimacy.
Or maybe they have too much pent up resentment, anger and sadness that they know if they truly
engage with you, they will have to take some kind of responsibility or god forbid,
maybe even feel exposed.
So what is left is this feeling of coldness, even if the relationship looks perfect on the outside.
In fact, this happens a lot more than you think, especially in this day and age of social media.
People who are very image focused and not very present in their real life relationships
like to project how good their lives are publicly, but it is almost always at a cost to their private lives.
And an intimate relationship will always be private.
If it wasn't, then it isn't an intimate relationship.
So to end this toxic pattern, think about what patterns you are encouraging with your
actions or inactions.
If you keep tolerating this year after year, decade after decade, then can you imagine
how emotionally dead you'd be, and how much soul destroying loneliness you'd feel?
Sign number 6: He has a million rules for you, but none for himself.
This isn't just about double standards, it's about the pattern of being controlling.
Ultimately, anything that seems or feels controlling is a value taking behaviour in a relationship.
The more value taking it FEELS to your heart, to your gut and to your feminine intuition,
the more toxic it is to your soul.
Perhaps he has these rules for you because he prefers to make you his pet rather than
making you his lover.
It could be a tactic of “concealment” where he expects you to limit your exposure
to other people (and therefore not risk cheating on him with other men).
In fact, the whole setup isn't about love, it's about power and control.
And a relationship that is based upon power and control, is a toxic relationship in my books.
Sign number 7: You find yourself always seeking his approval and validation.
Or, he seems to always seek your approval and validation.
Ok, so some level of approval seeking is normal.
Especially in a growing relationship, where you're getting to know each other.
But when your only real method of trying to connect is perpetual approval seeking because
the other person doesn’t really care about you, then you have toxicity rather than healthy.
Whenever anyone perpetually seeks approval, this becomes a massive weight
upon the shoulders of that relationship.
With this weight, it becomes difficult to truly connect.
It becomes harder to express love freely.
I've noticed that the reason why women seek approval is often because there never was
an actual relationship in the first place, but we just desperately wanted there to be
a relationship of some sort.
Let me tell you that if there was never a real relationship in the first place,
seeking approval will never magically bring a relationship to life.
Not to mention that the act of seeking approval can make a woman seem low value and the
kill attraction and therefore perpetuate a pattern of dependency in a relationship,
rather than a pattern of real love and connection.
Sign number 8: Every time a conflict comes up, small or big, he seems to avoid it.
In other words, it's the pattern of being stonewalled.
It's the pattern in the relationship where the other person would never have the courage
to face conflict and instead, they’d rather preserve their own sense of peace and certainty.
In fact, studies have shown over and over that stonewalling is one of the worst and
most damaging patterns of a relationship, because in order to stonewall someone,
you have to value your own certainty and significance more than love and connection.
Of course, if you've followed my work, you'd know that we always talk about how conflict
in intimate relationships, believe it or not, is the instigator of deeper love.
You can't have a deeply loving and passionate relationship without having to experience
a boatload of conflict.
As long as you're running away from conflict, you are saying “hey, I don’t value the
relationship at all.”
And if you stay in that kind of relationship long enough, those feelings and unresolved
issues will just build up in your system.
Ultimately that breeds alienation, resentment and contempt.
Sign number 9: He gives you money and pays for things,
but it’s just a way to create leverage to manipulate you.
Who the hell uses money to manipulate another human?!
Well, as it turns out, a lot of people do.
And us women are especially vulnerable to being manipulated this way.
Because we as women, collectively, are a lot more sensitive to the emotion of guilt than men will ever be.
So, in a toxic relationship, the act of giving you money or other resources, isn't always
an act of generosity, but instead, it is actually a calculated effort to guilt you into
giving them what they want - to them, the money is leverage.
This is a very different experience to having a man give you resources out of love, generosity and care.
Ultimately, a truly healthy relationship isn't about horse trading.
It's not about calculating how much you give versus how much you get.
Sign number 10: He often blame shifts you.
Why is this one a seemingly harmless sign?
Because the person being blame shifted can genuinely start to see themselves as the problem,
rather than feeling safe and connected.
For example, if he says: “Oh, well if you didn’t get so upset, then I wouldn’t need to lie so much!”
then as a woman, it can be easy to feel like we are fundamentally wrong and bad.
It’s also seemingly harmless because often, those of us who have grown up with abuse tend
to not see the real harm in being blame shifted.
Sometimes we can assume that we were the “bad person that did “the wrong thing” and
should be a better person.
Blame always goes in circles and never inspires anyone to want to trust more,
connect more and love more.
Any type of blame is toxic.
Blame is poison.
Blame is a way to protect yourself at the cost of the relationship and the other person.
See, in an ultimately loving and healthy relationship, it’s not about who is right or wrong.
It’s not about pointing fingers.
It really should be about taking responsibility
and dealing with what has happened in a vulnerable way as a team together.
It's a non zero sum game.
In other words, if you win, your lover doesn't lose.
You either both win or both lose.
Blame has no place in an ultimately healthy relationship.
So those were the 10 seemingly harmless signs of a toxic relationship.
Let me know below in the comments, which of these 10 toxic signs you have experienced,
AND which of the toxic signs you never noticed in a relationship, but should have!
In the meantime, I think we should get out of this parking lot and you can come home with me.
It's starting to feel a bit creepy here.
Ok, thank goodness we are back.
I want to let you know that sometimes it's not easy to get yourself out of a toxic situation.
After all, toxicity may be all that you know.
And because you don’t know any different, toxicity becomes your comfort zone.
I know, horrible right?
But if you're in that situation right now, take the leap right now, and decide - no more.
The quicker you break that pattern, the better, and the healthier everything will become for you.
It's never easy getting outside your comfort zone, but it's important.
Remember, you only have one life.
You ain't got time to mess around in toxic relationships that simply ruin your innocence
and trust in relationships.
Here's the good news.
It doesn't matter how long you've been in a toxic relationship or environment,
there is hope for you.
You can start to turn things around today.
I spent the first 20 years of my life in a completely dysfunctional, toxic family.
And because of that, like a lot of people, I didn’t have any healthy attachments in my life-
not to my parents or to anyone else.
As a result, it was easy for me to attract more toxic people and toxic relationships into my life.
It was a long journey of hard work that got me out of these toxic patterns, and it certainly
wasn't easy, because patterns of healthy relationships and healthy attachment
were completely outside of my norm and outside of my comfort zone.
They felt completely foreign to me.
By the way, If you want to have a better idea of what a healthy relationship looks like,
go and watch my video, the 10 ultimate signs of a healthy relationship.
I tell my story a bit more in that video.
You can click the little info button at the top right hand corner, or else i'll make sure
to put the link in the description below.
Ok it's giveaway time.
I want to give away 3 of these beautiful mugs.
It says respect femininity.
It is beautifully designed with a cherry blossom on the other side, and best of all,
it is a fresh shade of red on the inside.
You see, ever since I started the feminine woman blog back in 2009,
I've had over 10 million readers and hundreds of thousands of email subscribers.
And in that time, I've realised how we live in this world that has systematically pushed down
the natural feminine energy in most of us women.
We are encouraged to become more masculine to fit into this society and the workforce.
Some of us are literally numb to most of our feelings and our innately intelligent bodies.
So we got these mugs made as a reminder that not only do men need to respect our femininity
but we as women, also need to respect our own femininity first.
So, we are giving away 3 of these mugs.
All you have to do to enter this giveaway draw, is to leave a comment below this video.
That is it.
You can tell me which one of these 10 signs you resonated with the most.
We will contact the winners and if you win, we'll make sure
you get your hands on a copy of this mug.
And one last thing.
We've just put together a brand new report in case you haven't gotten your hands on it yet.
The title of the report is the 7 common signs that a woman is low value in the eyes of men.
Here's what it really important to understand…….Men perceive value in very different ways to women
when it comes to love, dating and relationships.
What you as a woman make think is value, may not be so high value in the eyes of men.
So we've put together 7 common signs that a woman is showing up low value in the eyes of men.
If you haven't downloaded that report, I'll make sure I add a link at the top right hand
corner of this video, or in the description below so that you can get your hands on a copy.
What I’ve learned is that, as you show up in a more intrinsically high value way,
you will naturally and automatically attract healthy relationships into your life,
as well as attract men of real value.
So that's all from me today.
I hope this video has served you and I'll talk to you very soon.