What do you do when someone shatters something that brought you joy? It’s important to know your limits in relationships and recognizing when resilience becomes a liability rather than a strength.
Learning how to navigate toward making the right decisions for you and those you love is the key to ensuring you don’t stay stuck in a situation that makes you unhappy all the time.
How bad does it have to get before you have to leave a bad situation?
What is your criteria? What’s your upper boundary – the point someone can push you to before you either stop it and get back from the edge, or fall off?
In other words, how tolerant are you of someone else’s behaviors before you’ve had enough?
What is your threshold?
How much more are you willing to take?
These are some of the most important questions I’d love for you to have real answers to.
My mom didn’t have those answers. She stayed in an abusive relationship for over 40 years until he finally left her. Her boundaries had no upper limit. There was no threshold.
Or perhaps there was a threshold, but he never pushed her to the point where she either had enough and had to go, or was pushed so far off the edge that she had a complete mental breakdown. She had mini breakdowns – not many, but some from my recollection while living with her and from what she’s told me. But she didn’t have enough for her to say “no more.”
And I don’t mean just say it. I mean act it – behave it – do it. When you truly act on “no more,” you’re going through the process of not accepting the behaviors anymore. You’re putting a stop to them. You’re either putting a stop to what they do or putting a stop to exposing yourself to it.
This, I understand, can sometimes require huge sacrifice. It could mean sacrificing your home, finances, and even impact children. Don’t take that the wrong way, but sometimes we feel stuck because children are involved. When you feel that stuck, I understand you might not be willing to consider what it would take to stop these hurtful behaviors or stop exposing yourself to them.
I understand being in a situation where you’re not purposefully exposing yourself to these behaviors, but you feel like you have no choice. You feel stuck. But how far will things go until you won’t take anymore?
This article stems from an email I received last year. I’m going to read you one part where this person wrote that her daughter came in second place at an event. It wasn’t enough to warrant getting a memorable sweatshirt (apparently first place winners got one), so her mom bought her one or something similar. When her father found out, he cut it to shreds with scissors.
When I read that, I was shocked and angry. I just can’t imagine that happening. Her own father cut up this nice gift her mom gave to her dauther to make her feel special on a day where she didn’t get first place. Second place is still amazing! And this special gift given to her was cut up into shreds. Who does that? That’s just not right.
That’s why I ask you the question: what is your threshold? At what point do you say, “I can’t take this anymore”? At what point do you say, “This is unacceptable. This is appalling. And I will not be with someone who does something like this.”
And again, I understand some circumstances may be out of your control. You may not be able to change things or leave. You may not have the resources. But anyone can get pushed to their breaking point. Anyone can get pushed to that edge where they’re about to fall off and they have to go into self-protection mode, no matter what it takes.
And I’m not trying to force you into a decision if you’re facing something similar. That’s not what I’m trying to do at all. I want you to consider what your threshold is. You can ask yourself, if they did or said “this”, would that be too far? i.e., “If my partner called me a _____, would that be what pushes me over the edge?”
That’s a question for reflection. What could they do that would be at the highest upper limit of what you can tolerate? And would you stick around after that or leave? Perhaps anything beyond that you might leave, but it’s very helpful to know your toleration point and commit it to memory.
And what does “beyond that” look like? Meaning, you’ve found you’re just below your toleration point but what needs to happen to push you over the edge? What does that look like?
For example, it could be your partner calls their coworker and has very personal conversations and it bothers you, but it’s not enough to make you protect yourself and get away from them. So what’s one step further than that?
Okay, they send nude pics. Would that push you over the edge?
Or perhaps they’re going to meet for dinner after some very personal texting or very personal phone calls. Would that be enough? Or will you tolerate it as part of the cycle of what you’ve already been going through?
This is something I’ve talked about before, but a growing, expanding level of toleration can develop in any type of relationship. And when it does, you can continue tolerating ever-worsening bad behavior, which raises the upper limit of your boundaries.
And every time you raise the upper limit of your boundaries, the circumstances almost always get worse. That’s another important part of this – 99% of the time, your circumstances will get worse as you become more tolerant.
The 1% where it’s not getting worse is when you become accepting the incremental levels of bad behavior. Acceptance means you just say, “That’s who they are and I’m okay with it. I may not like it, but I accept that they’re never going to change.”
If you can be in that space, then you are in that 1% space where no matter what they do, at least what they’ve done so far, it’s not bad enough to leave or break up or whatever. And while you’re in that 1%, the reason it’s not so bad is because you aren’t resisting anymore. You aren’t hoping, wishing, or praying they change. You’re just accepting that’s who they’ll always be.
Normally, acceptance is a great place to be in a healthy, easy to navigate relationship. Acceptance can be liberating. I used to be a judgmental person. But the day I chose acceptance over judging and trying to control others, wow, that changed everything.
When I became accepting, I developed a mantra:
if I have a problem with someone, it’s my problem, not theirs.
As soon as I make my problem with them their problem, I’m being judgmental and may become hurtful and even emotionally abusive.
But if I choose to accept that my problem with somebody else is my problem, not theirs, then I can choose what to do with my life after that. For example, if my wife started doing something that really bothered or offended me, if it was against my values, first, we’d have a conversation about it: “Hey, when you do that, it bothers me.”
If she chose not to change after that conversation, I might have to say, “I can’t accept that behavior in my life. I can’t be with someone who does that because it’s just too hurtful (or offensive, or immoral, etc.).”
That sounds like I’m giving an ultimatum, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just letting someone know that I can’t allow their behaviors into my life. I’m not saying, “You better stop or else.” I’m just saying I can’t be around that.
Let’s say she doesn’t change and doesn’t care how I feel about how her behaviors affect me and says, “Too bad. That’s who I am.”
This is where step three comes in: Make a choice. My choice after she says something like that is whether to continue to stay with somebody and resist who they are, or accept who they are then choose what I’m going to do with my life next.
That’s where my mantra comes in: if I have a problem with the person I’m with, it’s my problem, not theirs. What that means is I don’t make their life more difficult by telling them what they need to do or not do. I don’t want to change or control who they are because they’re choosing to be who they are.
I’ve already told them how it makes me feel when they do or say certain things. They’re making a conscious choice to continue these behaviors or say these words, knowing how it makes me feel. That comes back to me where I acknowledge how I feel about what they do, and now I have to make a choice. The choice I have to make is about what to do with my life and ask myself what my threshold is.
I need to ask How bad does it need to get before I can’t take anymore? Is it bad enough now? Or should I raise my level of toleration? Should I become more resilient?
Resilience can be a good thing in some situations, but it’s actually not a good thing in situations like this. You don’t want to become more resilient to gasoline fumes, for example. You wouldn’t say, “Hey, I can tolerate gasoline fumes. I want to be around that more” or paint fumes or any toxic substance. Would you say, “I can tolerate toxicity. I want to expose myself to it more so I can continue to tolerate it more,”?
If you do that, it will eat away at you from the inside out. That’s why victims of abusive relationships say they feel like ‘a shell of their former self.’ It’s a “hollowing out,” which is a terrible way to describe what happens, but… that’s what happens! It feels like you’re being eaten away from the inside out.
But if you decide to leave the relationship, you have another challenge: you have to figure out who you are again. But it’s okay if you can’t figure that out because sometimes you just have to start over. Like giving yourself a reset. When someone won’t change after you’ve told them how their behaviors affect you, you may have to follow your own path from there.
Sometimes you can reconnect with who you were, and sometimes you have to restart. I know that might be hard to hear if you’re considering leaving, but if you have to reconnect with who you were or restart, it’s better than continuing to breathe in those toxic fumes.
In fact, it’s so much better because you’re no longer poisoning your system. You might have to start fresh. You might have to figure a lot of things out when you restart your life. But when you consider the alternative – exposing yourself to this toxicity – you know at the deepest level which choice is the healthiest one to make, even if it’s the toughest or most impossible choice.
I’m not saying you have to leave the person you’re with, either. If you can work it out with them, great. If they can understand and empathize and say, “Wow, I didn’t realize how much it was affecting you. I would like to work on this,” that’s a step in the right direction.
I’ve worked with many emotionally abusive people, and they usually realize one day too late that they need to change. That’s the most common pattern: the emotional abuser pushes the other person past their threshold until that person finally says, “I’ve had enough. No more. I’m done.”
And then the emotional abuser is one day late, saying, “Whoops! Oh crap. I screwed up. I better change. I better heal or else I’ll lose my relationship.” At that point, they finally reflect. Not all abusers reflect after learning they are going to lose the relationship, but most will, reflecting on their behaviors and all the harm they’ve done for so long. It’s at this point they’ll stop feeling righteous and justified and finally step into humility, learning exactly what they do that hurts other people.
I know it might be befuddling to hear this (if you’re reading something like this for the first time). It’s mind-blowing to think how someone could be hurting you but not know they’re hurting you.
And that’s the big question, right? They see you hurting, miserable, depressed, maybe crying, or completely unhappy in the relationship… How could they not know they’re words and behaviors are hurtful? How could they not know they are the cause of your hurt?
I talk about this in another article. It address the question, “If you loved me, why would you hurt me?” It’s an excellent question, too. Why would someone who claims to love you, hurt you?
The quick answer is: They believe they’re right. They believe their behaviors are justified. They believe what they’re doing is for the best of the relationship. It’s as if they believe they need to change you in order for both of you to have a happy relationship.
I know what you’re thinking: “That sounds ridiculous! Someone should know that they’re hurting you and should stop doing it if they love you.”
But the reason they don’t stop is because they’re practically in this righteous, trance-like state, and they might not be able to snap out of it until somebody kicks them in the proverbial butt.
They need that metaphoric slap in the face that tells them, “I have no choice but to leave if that’s the only way you’ll listen. Everything I’ve tried up to this point hasn’t worked.”
What happens after you tell someone who has been emotionally abusing you all this time that you’ve had enough and you will no longer tolerate anymore? Most will say, “Oh, NOW I understand.”
Most emotionally abusive people simply do not believe they are doing anything wrong, so they will not likely listen until the person they are hurting wants to leave the relationship. It seems at that point they finally realize the importance and impact their behavior is having. Then hopefully after that they finally start the journey of healing and reflecting on everything they’ve been doing.
When I work with people who join my Healed Being program, they often don’t realize just how much they need to change. It’s almost a 180-degree turn for most of them.
Imaging, you’re going through life in one direction, believing what you’re doing is justified and righteous and good. Then someone comes along and shows you truths that make you realize just how wrong you’ve been almost all of your life?
When you believe you’ve been doing the right thing throughout your life in all your relationships, and somebody comes along and says, “Everything you know is wrong. Here’s why your relationships are failing,” it can be jarring at first, but also enlightening as you understand your own behaviors more and more.
For many emotionally abusive people, almost everything they believe about how to communicate with others, especially in a romantic relationship, is false. How they’ve been treating the other person in their life is simply wrong. In most cases, people like that are treating those they are supposed to love completely opposite of how they’re supposed to treat them.
In the program I teach where this comes from and what causes emotional triggers that lead to emotionally abusive behaviors. When you develop terrible coping mechanisms as a child, you tend to bring those same, child-created coping mechanisms into adult relationships. Most emotionallya abusive people do not know how to deal with challenging situaitons in an emotionally intelligent way, so they resort to controlling and power-stealing tactics that hurt others.
The emotionally abusive people who have started a healing journey learn the hard way that almost everything they know is wrong. That’s important to understand. Most emotionally abusive people have a concrete belief that they’re behaviors and words are justified, therefore there’s no reason to change.
The reason that’s important to understand is because once you understand it, you start to realize more and more that it’s rarely you, if ever, causing the problems in a relationship. It’s them and their faulty beliefs making them do and say hurtful things.
For the emotional abuser, learn how to respond to challenges can be a huge challenge. But once they do, like I did for many years, the changes are like comparing night to day. The former abuser feels lighter, and they’re no longer carrying around a burden of the need to control or change someone else. It’s a relief, actually.
When I healed, I felt better and started treating people the way they deserve to be treated. I chose to accept people for who they are. And even when I didn’t like what they’re doing or who they were, I still made sure not to make them bad or wrong. I just accepted that we all have our own perspective of the world. If they don’t want to change, I choose to do what I need to do with my life. That might mean staying and accepting who they are, or it might mean not staying, or perhaps doing something else entirely.
It also might mean ending up homeless! Sometimes we get to a point where enough is enough and we are willing to do whatever it takes to stop breathing in the toxic fumes – the emotional toxicity.
Remember that emotional toxicity in a relationship can make your thinking fuzzy. You start to distrust yourself. You don’t know what decisions to make.
I understand that. That’s why I want to give you little, simple processes to plant a seed in your mind, to help you get to the point where you can ask yourself the right questions and take the right steps – questions that really lead to what’s best for you.
The questions I ask you to ask yourself, the reflections I ask you to reflect upon, I do so to help build a solid foundation of what is true inside you. So when the time comes to make an important decision, you know reality.
You know what’s real. Sometimes you have to start with these little steps toward truth, because truth becomes fuzzy in an emotionally abusive relationship. When you’re constantly ingesting emotional toxicity throughout the years, your thinking becomes fuzzy.
What’s interesting though is that your thinking becomes very clear and focused as soon as you’ve passed your threshold. As soon as you’ve passed your breaking point, suddenly things are crystal clear and you know what you will and won’t accept anymore. I don’t want you to get to that point, but sometimes you have to.
I think it’s best to build a solid foundation so that you get to that point with more clarity. When you understand why you reached this decision, even though you can’t understand mostly what’s going on in the relationship, at least you can understand what’s going on inside yourself.
So when I read something like, “my husband cut up the gift I gave to my daughter,” the very first thing I think about, of course, is, “you son of a…” I get really angry inside. I think about my own situation – if my wife cut something up that I got for someone I loved, or she destroyed it, or she got in the way and decided to make sure they never get the gift… If she ever did any of that, first, it would be a total shock to me because she’s not like that. But let’s just say we were having trouble and she did that.
To me, that would be the last straw. She has nothing to do with my gift to someone else. And her interfering with that would be the last straw for me. Now, I say this because I’m not in the situation, and it’s a lot easier for me to come to that conclusion. But I wanted to bring up this specific incident because there’s something tied to that.
It’s not just about the gift of the sweatshirt. There’s something deeper tied to the process of giving a gift. What’s tied to that? When I think about giving a gift to someone I care about, what’s tied to that is my love and affection for that person and wanting to see them happy.
Giving them a gift that makes them happy becomes a bonding moment where we can feel more affection toward each other, and it has a lot of love and good feelings wrapped up into it. When I read that somebody cut up a gift that this woman gave to her daughter – their daughter really – he should be supportive of that. Instead, he cut up the very fabric of that love and affection. He didn’t just cut up a shirt. He cut up all the components that make up the bonding and the affection and all the goodness that was in something like that.
It’s just so much bigger than something material. It’s attached to so many other things. That’s why I get angry. That’s why I would say that’s the last straw if this happened to me. I would tell my partner, “What you just did was interfere and destroy a loving moment between me and this person. You had no right to do that and I will not accept that kind of behavior. I won’t accept somebody who’s supposed to love me, who’s supposed to want to see me happy and support that happiness and support the decisions I make to create happiness in my life.”
I won’t accept somebody trying to disintegrate love from my life and neither should you. When you read the story I shared above, did it hit you at a very deep level? Does it feel like someone trying to disintegrate love from your life?
If so, remember that you are worth so much more than that and should never see that kind of behavior as normal.
