There are some situations that really do outstay their welcome. What starts off as a seemingly good thing can result in you feeling as though, day by day, you’ve been eroded to almost nothing. During those times, there often comes a point where you know walking away is what you need to do.
But it’s also the hardest part of it all.
Why is that?
You know your light has been dimmed, and people may be telling you to “just walk away,” yet leaving and not looking back seems unfathomable. These 8 things are often the challenges people face when feeling stuck at that crossroads.
1. Using hope instead of evidence to anticipate improvement.
Hope has its place. It’s not inherently bad. We hope it’ll be nice weather on the weekend. We hope our favorite team wins the finals. We hope the price of food doesn’t keep skyrocketing. Hope can help us keep our heads above water in hard times, and that’s a good thing.
So, when does hope become problematic? Well, when it’s the fuel that keeps you in a situation that is wrecking your wellbeing and diminishing you.
You might overlook any evidence that tells you to leave or walk away. Someone might be treating you terribly, but you hope they change, so you stay another day, week, month, even year.
But nothing changes.
The reason you found it hard to draw a line under it and go is the hope that you held onto. You’re not alone if this is you. Hope sells us a story of what could be, and when we believe that’s possible, we wait for it.
2. Not wanting all the time, energy, and emotion you invested to be for nothing.
What psychologists call the “sunk cost fallacy” is a huge aspect of staying too long that people really struggle with. To leave means to admit that you did waste a lot of time, emotion, and energy on someone or something that made your life worse.
That’s a grief to wade through that feels thick and uncomfortable. It can equally make you feel like a failure. You don’t want to be seen as someone who couldn’t make it work, even though you really wanted it to. But you can only control your actions; you can’t be held responsible for the actions of others. And there are almost always others involved in toxic situations.
Instead of seeing that time as wasted, see it as an investment into what you won’t tolerate in your next relationship or environment.
Clarity can be far more powerful than regret if you give it the space to be so.
3. Convincing yourself that if you tried harder, things would get better.
And as a result, you burn out trying, right? That’s exactly what happens to those who stay in unhealthy situations because they believe that if they just applied a bit more effort, they would start to see positive results.
When you’re feeling diminished, you’re already feeling small and less important than your partner, colleague, friend, or whoever it is that’s involved in the toxic dynamic. No matter what you do or say, or how hard you work, nothing will help. Because you’re not the only one responsible in this dynamic.
Until you’ve realized that, there’s no way out of this. You deserve more, and staying prevents you from finding it. Unfortunately, sometimes, you can only see that with hindsight.
4. Panic about how your finances would pan out if you walked away.
Whether it’s staying in a toxic workplace or leaving an unhealthy relationship, money often plays a significant role. In fact, research shows that a startling 1 in 3 couples remain in unhealthy relationships due to finances. The strain of having to go it alone is too much for these people, who find themselves staying and living miserably in order to keep afloat.
The thought of leaving negative situations can fill people with sheer panic when money is involved. “How could I possibly pay rent and bills, as well as have enough to eat on my wages alone?”
The answer for them is to stay where they are rather than walk away, even though they’ve thought about leaving every single day. I honestly can’t imagine what that must be like, and how trapping it is to think your only choice to live is to remain somewhere that’s destroying you. But it is the reality for many.
If you’re still in this situation, I’m not going to tell you that leaving a relationship or job you rely on financially will be a walk in the park. Everybody is in a different situation, and some of you may genuinely be struggling. The key is to begin to build a life – and identity – for yourself so that someday, you are in that position to walk away and never look back.
5. Being conditioned to believe other people’s needs come first.
Imagine trying to meet someone at their comfort level constantly, just to try and make the environment perfect for them. This might be a romantic relationship, a friendship, or even a work environment.
You arrange the shared space how they want or need it, even if it’s not to your needs or preferences, you make allowances for their behavior even when it hurts you, and you do all you can to try to make the environment or relationship one they want to be a part of.
Then what? Your efforts to make them more comfortable lead you to lose yourself and to lose sight of what you actually deserve.
This can be incredibly common in people pleasers and those who were raised to believe that shrinking yourself for others’ comfort and being selfless is the right thing to do. And of course, it’s good to be a considerate person. But the problem is that people who give a lot tend to be magnets for people to take a lot. And this becomes a toxic dynamic.
Walking away requires you to believe that your needs are worth prioritizing. But if the situation has slowly stripped that belief from you, or you never had that belief in the first place, leaving becomes incredibly hard — not because things are good, but because you don’t realize you deserve better.
6. The familiarity of unhappiness can feel safer than the risk of the unknown.
Our brains are fascinating organs that we really still only know a little bit about, but what we do know is that our brains are not trying to keep us happy; they are trying to keep us alive. That means anything new will be deemed risky, and as a result, we can be naturally inclined to pull back from it.
In this instance, the brain knows you are unhappy in a situation that’s diminishing you, but all it sees is familiarity. You’ve been here before, and it’s a path the brain already knows well, and so it doesn’t, and will never, push you to leave.
It likes the predictability of where you are, at the cost of losing yourself. It’s an evolutionary trait that kept our cave-dwelling ancestors safe from bears, but it doesn’t translate well to modern life.
It’s wild, isn’t it? Even though you would have been happier walking away, your brain scanned where you were and judged it as safe. It’s also one of the major reasons why people who grew up in chaotic or abusive environments repeat them in later life. This is what makes healing so complex.
7. Adjustment to mistreatment or neglect that you may have once deemed unacceptable.
Mistreatment can be so subtle that you don’t even realize it’s happening. The same happens with neglect. You may not have lacked self-respect from the start, but the toxic relationship or environment slowly morphed into you feeling and being treated as if you don’t matter.
And you somehow adjusted to it.
Once upon a time, you’d never have dreamed of being in this position, yet time has shown that it’s very possible to fall into the trap, a trap that feels impossible to get out of. It’s rather like the analogy of the frog being slowly boiled. It doesn’t realize the harm that’s being done to it until it’s too late.
Your self-respect was slowly eroded, and with it, you began to believe you deserved this treatment.
Trying to walk away when you can’t put your finger on a single moment where your relationship went from respectful to disrespectful blurs the lines of what is and isn’t acceptable. And without that clarity, you stay.
8. Worrying about what everybody else would think if you left.
Essentially, you would rather feel uncomfortable and lost in a relationship than have the people you know be aware that said relationship is over. This is often a particular concern for people who crave external validation, or whose lives have been heavily dictated by the opinions of others.
Of course, there’s a natural concern about what people will think of us, but you know, people always want something to talk about. If it’s you today, tomorrow it’ll be Mrs Brown down the road who is having an affair with the mailman.
Staying doesn’t make your life more peaceful; you’ll only end up enduring more sadness and loss because you’re trying to live someone else’s definition of happiness.
And that’s no way to live, if you ask me.
Final thoughts…
Choosing to stay in a situation that slowly diminishes you doesn’t make you a fool. Finding it hard to walk away doesn’t mean you have a weak character.
Staying often shows reluctance. Reluctance to open up another ending for you, to go it alone, to risk something unfamiliar, and admit the truth about the situation. Reluctance to believe in yourself or what you’re capable of, and also reluctance to let go of something you once put your time and faith into.
We rarely watch ourselves shrink in real-time. One day, we just wake up and realize we are a portion of the person we used to be.
It’s often then that we know that some action must be taken, before it’s too late.
