Farzana Gunjan

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Why Toxic Relationships Are So Addictive

 

Once I wrote a poem named 'Love is a drug from Heaven' It is one of my personal favorites till now. I wrote that one during the healing period from a toxic relationship and narcissistic abuse. It was written from deep feeling, like any of my poetries, those are not logical even but yeah it was quirky haha. But I wanted to break down how a toxic relationship works like an addiction so here it goes.

 

So a toxic relationships usually includes a lot of emotional highs and lows. Any of the partners or both of them, could be involved in generating the cycle repeatedly. The similarity between a toxic relationship and drug addiction is in these cycles of highs and lows.

What happens when someone is addicted to a substance? They take one dose, get high on that and enjoy that phase for a short period of time. The euphoria starts to fade away after some time and the person starts to feel low, More time passes, and this low feeling becomes shittier and shittier. Then he/she takes another dose to get back that euphoria. With time, our body gets used to this highs and lows, our hormones give us signals to take the next dose and it gets imprinted in your system day by day. That's where the craving come from. Our body gets chemically dependent on that substance.

 

In a toxic relationship, these highs are created with love bombing, creating chaos and emotional abuse. Actually, it's much more complicated than being addicted to one drug, you are emotionally dependent on one person but that person is stimulating different types of highs and lows in your system. Let me take you through the steps once-

 

It starts with a fight (as we are talking about toxicity, let's start here) the fight gets nasty, you may curse each other or one partner is giving the silent treatment or whatever, you get super excited and after the fight you may feel energy drained totally. After some time your partner comes to you or you take the first step towards rebound. This is the second step where the manipulator will gaslight you to deny your version of reality, apologize to you for the parts which can't be manipulated and make a lot of effort to make you believe this won't happen again. Then next few days (or few hours) it will be like a fairytale. You will be treated so well that you'll feel like the luckiest person in the world. You will be so grateful and will secretly curse yourself for even thinking about leaving your person during the last fight. Then after some time this good time will wear off, any of you will start the chaos again, cause your body and mind is not used to stability, it needs that emotional roller coaster. If you are thingking why can't you just stay in the high phase man?

 

You can't, Cause you are wired to the cycle already. Subconsciously you may even start an argument. You need either too high or too low. Stability seems boring to you. You have been compromising the low phases oin the greed of those high phases. So then again that fight starts or maybe not a fight, just a trail of verbal abuse where one party is listening and the other one is saying.

 

Usually this is recognized by the abused partner after a while, they start seeking a way out. But they often go back many many times like any other addict in need of that chaos or love bombing. Without their partner they feel threatened to survive in the physical world. Their body doesn't cooperate with them. Often they do it subconsciously. They don't even know the craving is hard wired in their bodies; it's not just 'love' that is making them suffer.

 

Toxic relationships are addictive, more addictive than a substance often. The diversity of a human addiction is much more complicated than a substance, I believe. And anyone trying to get out of a relationship like that will face withdrawal symptoms. Will have severe cravings which will make them feel crazy sometimes, will have physical pain in there body and will feel numb for days and months even years in some cases. 

Sad part is there is no rehab center to get over this kind of addiction, yeah you can seek therapy but in a country like Bangladesh that is also not reliable. So we are on our own and internet is our last hope in these cases haha. 

 

So Here goes one more input from a survivor of this addiction to all those who is trying to get over this. I see you, if I can do it then you can too. The Universe has your back. I can’t tell you how beautiful this world is on the other side, how peaceful stability is and how liberating it is to walk around without that huge burden on your shoulders all the time. Hold on tight, your time is coming. cheers!