You don’t want to let go of the person who accepted you because you feel like no one will accept you the way you are. Low self esteem prevents you from setting boundaries.
Even though intellectually you know you should not be treated in this way and you deserve to be respected. The fear of putting yourself out there and being rejected keeps you in the relationship.
The manipulation in the relationship is real– There is a lot of psychological and emotional manipulation that happens in toxic relationships. Your partner might be leaving out information, bending the truth, lying to you.
They might be gaslighting you.
For example, you ask your partner a simple question like “do you want to pick what to make for dinner today?” and they get mad at you, start yelling and screaming and you are all confused thinking what just happened. Then you apologize and take the blame for upsetting them even though you have no idea what you did.
For example, You share with your partner that you don’t like them liking pictures of other women on social media, they respond to you in an apologetic way and tell you that they did not have any bad intentions, then they go and do the exact thing you asked them not to do. Then they tell you that you are just overreacting.
In the middle of all this manipulation it is very difficult to hold on to your sense of self.
You might find yourself doubting your intuition a lot. When we cannot trust ourselves it is difficult to follow what feels right. So even if you feel like you should leave you will keep going back to the toxic relationship.
On top of that if you have grown up in a toxic household then you go back to your original patterns and figure out how to survive the toxicity. You don’t think of leaving. Even if you decide “I need to leave” cutting off completely might not be so easy.
We keep going back to a toxic relationship because of the strong hold it has over us due to the reasons mentioned above. We all have a need to connect, you don’t have to settle for a toxic person. Check out my article on why do we need relationships if you are curious about why we need to connect.
My article on how to stop being codependent in a relationship talks about signs of a healthy relationship, feel free to check that out. Also, the article on how to set emotional boundaries has a few useful tips on boundary setting.
Some of the things you can do to not keep going back to a toxic relationship are-
Connecting with your feelings and needs
Working on building your self esteem
Working on being kind and compassionate towards yourself
Seeking out help to work though the patterns created in your childhood due to difficult experiences growing up. Check out my article on individual therapy for relationship issues, it talks about the process of healing.