How to Let Go of a Toxic Relationship When You Still Love Them

This is a post on how to let go of a toxic relationship when you still love them.

Telling someone you don’t want to be with them anymore is the simple part. However, gathering all your courage to actually do it is a whole other story.

People in relationships with a toxic person are groomed and manipulated to the point where their memory even gets selective – they find it hard to remember all the abuse they endured!

In fact, sometimes these same people don’t feel worthy enough to break away from a toxic person because they feel like they don’t deserve a better life.

When you feel like you don’t deserve to be treated like an actual human being, chances are that you don’t acknowledge your true feelings. Your inner mind wants you to get out, but you feel like you are not worthy of a better life.

All these are things that affect us when we want to break up with a toxic person.

This is a post about how to let go of a toxic relationship when you still love them.

6 Ways to Let Go of a Toxic Relationship When you Still Love Them

1 – Track all the things they do to you

Ever since I heard about tracking habits from The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, my life has been changed. Writing things down really brings a lot of things into perspective. Tracking habits is very important. When you are dealing with any relationship whether toxic or not, it is a very good idea to keep track of the good (and bad) things that your partner does for you or to you.

I’m the kind of person that gets burnt out from doing things for people and feeling like no one ever does the same for me. It helps me to track the good things they do for me so that I get over the feeling that no one is reciprocating the way I treat them.

In this manner, I encourage you to track all the bad things your toxic significant other is doing to you. You should always write things down, or use an app on your phone. I know it can be hard to do this for fear of being found out, but figure out a way to keep track.

Keeping track helps you to know for sure all the bad things that were done to you. Sometimes it’s easy to forget what you went through. You can also record yourself explaining what they did to you. Again, if you fear getting caught, use online voice recorders.

This is one way you can let go of a toxic relationship when you still love them.

2 – Think about how you truly feel

I’ll be the first one to admit that we don’t always treat ourselves like actual human beings. We allow others to use us and abuse and get away with it. It’s not fair to be a grown adult and have to walk on eggshells just because someone might get mad at us. That’s not the way to live. It’s a sad existence.

You need to meditate and go deep within your soul to decide how the toxic person makes you feel. I know it can be difficult for a lot of us to feel things. You can start figuring out how you feel by putting things into perspective.

Sometimes I find it hard to understand, to realize when someone is being incredibly unfair to me. What works is putting things into perspective. You can do this by writing your thoughts and feelings down, or recording an audio.

You can also go ahead and share your story with someone else. It’s true what they say, that you don’t understand how bad someone is to you until you tell someone else. This can help you to understand how you truly feel about them.

3 – Put in place coping mechanisms for the attachment issues

How can you let go of a toxic relationship when you still love them?

When you break up with a toxic person, or any normal person, really, you are going to feel that level of attachment. What is attachment?

Attachment are those invisible strings that connect you to another person. All that bonding you had during the good times, or when they were there for you, it doesn’t just vanish. There are invisible strings that will tug at you whenever you remember the closeness you feel for each other, or the good times when they made you happy.

This is bound to occur, with any relationship. Be strong when you feel the attachment tugging at you. Put in place some coping mechanisms. These are activities that you will do whenever you miss them terribly.

Also remember that with a toxic relationship, you are going to feel attachment from the bad things that were done to you. It’s some form of Stockholm Syndrome that is going to make you remember all the bad times and still feel attachment.

 Therefore, you need to be aware of the attachment you will feel.

4 – Remember that adults don’t need permission to do anything

Many toxic people groom you into this dystopian lifestyle where you need their permission to just step out of the house. This is inhuman. It’s not normal to have to ask for permission to do anything that involves basic human rights.

Emotionally abusive people transform you into this shell of a person whose only reason for existence is to serve their needs.

How about how you feel? What about what you want? You are a human being just like everyone else, no matter how undeserving and unworthy you feel of yourself.

These are things to remember when you break up with a toxic person even when you still love them.

5 – Don’t think about life without them

How do you let go of a toxic relationship when you still love them?

Whenever you are getting out of any relationship, it helps to completely block of that part of you that imagines life without your ex.

This is a slippery road, because everyone fears the unknown. If you don’t deal with these thoughts the right way, you will find yourself taking back the toxic person. All this because you didn’t know how you were going to live without them.

Remember this: Every human being (at least the ones brought up lovingly) has the ability to exist independently on their own, with no need to feel validation or approval from other people. If you are incapable of existing emotionally on your own, it might point to an unloving childhood.

 The good news is that you can learn to show up for yourself, and always be your own best friend. You can learn to support yourself emotionally. You can learn to never need anyone’s approval or validation ever again. You can learn to be emotionally strong.

It’s the birthright of every human to be enough by themselves.

6 – Learn to love yourself

Here is how to let go of a toxic relationship even when you still love them: Love yourself first!

What does loving yourself mean? Loving yourself means that you will always put yourself first, and never criticize yourself.

I never got how teachers like Louise Hay talked about never criticizing yourself.

I don’t criticize myself, I thought. Well, I was wrong. One day I decided to track all my mental commentary, and I realized that I criticize myself almost every hour. My mental chatter WAS ALL SELF CRITICISM. I never praised myself or said anything good to myself. All I did was highlight and point out everything that I did wrong.

A few days ago, I heard the oddest thought in my head.

You did a very good job today, do you know that?

I was gob smacked. Yes, gob smacked. Absolutely shell-shocked to hear self-praise. It was true pure self praise. This just goes to show how little I actually know about self love. Learn to put yourself first, and never criticize yourself. That is when you will learn to love yourself.

You can Let go and Live

We can’t keep on living our lives waiting on other people and anticipating their every need. No, we need to give 100% of our effort to ourselves and our pursuits. It’s time to let go of this toxic person, even when you still love them.

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