Hey everybody, welcome back!

A while back someone had written me about the fears of leaving a toxic relationship. In fact, I’ve had several people contact me. But I want to address one particular fear today, and that is the fear of being lonely.

The definition of loneliness is feeling sad and unhappy about being socially isolated. Now, I’m guessing you know something about the feeling of isolation. Remember that toxic people in general feel the need for control. If you have family or if you have friends that are a really strong support system or have good intentions for what’s best for you, that’s obviously going to pose a threat to the control and the amount of power that the toxic person can have over you.

During a toxic relationship, you may notice—and upon entering into a toxic relationship this may be something you notice and give them the benefit of the doubt for and brush it aside like it’s no big deal—family members that were close start being slowly removed from your day-to-day life, whether it’s phone calls or visits or seeing them a lot or at family events. There is slowly going to be more time between visits and less time during them.

You’ll be slowly cut off from the people that are closest to you. Those are the people that support you and know you the best and probably love you the most. There will be excuses why you can’t go see your family, whether they be “We can’t afford it,” “There’s no time,” “We have other things to do,” “We’re way too busy,” “You’re family doesn’t like me,” or “They’re way too boring.” They will go to whatever extent to convince you that you don’t need to see your family. They may even go to the extent of saying, “Well, if you really love me, then what do you need your family for?” Now with our type of personality, this will sow an immediate seed of guilt. We feel guilty because they are saying that if we want to see our family, we don’t love them or care about them enough. So of course we don’t want conflict with them, so we are going to lessen the time with our family.

That is one thing that you may notice in the beginning or early on; the mention of family or family visits is a sticky point.

Another thing that you’ll notice is that you won’t be “allowed” or you’ll be made to feel uncomfortable if you have a close group of friends. If you have a close group of guy friends you always go out with and you do the guy thing and the guy trip, that will be very threatening to a person who needs to control you in order to feel validated. If you have a girls’ night out—you know, the shopping trips, the wine nights—that is soon going to change if you are in the midst of a toxic relationship. And the reason that is, is because close friends operate very much like a family. Your close true friends are going to stick up for you. Your close true friends are going to tell you they’re worried about you. Your close true friends are going to make it known that they think what’s going on is not normal. A toxic person will not allow that in the relationship, because friends who are supportive and strong and stand behind you are a threat to their control over you.

They will say things like, “I don’t really like your friends” or “I don’t think your friends have very good morals. I don’t think you should be hanging out with them” or “Why do you even waste your time hanging out with those people?” If it’s a guys’ trip, it will be, “What do you do on these guys trips? Chase other women? It seems like a bad position to be in, and I don’t like it when you go on these trips.”

You become interrogated, or there is always conflict and discomfort when you want to be with your friends. Now, if you are someone who stands up for yourself and you tell them that you are going to go be with your friends anyway, then you pose the risk of your phone blowing up nonstop the whole time you’re with them. It’s ringing. You’re getting texts. You’re not answering, so they’re calling your friends or the place you’re staying at or the place that you went and pretending that they are very concerned that they haven’t heard from you.

Essentially, what’s going to happen is you’re going to be embarrassed because of the behavior of this person in your life. You can’t even go out with your friends without eighty phone calls or texts or lists of things you did wrong or things you have to do when you get home. They will say whatever it is that they need to say in order for you to leave where you’re at and come home. So that’s the second type of isolation.

Here is the third type of isolation: If you have hobbies that you enjoy and that take up your time and get your attention, eventually those hobbies will be made to go away. If you like to make crafts and you like to sell them…first of all, if you’re good at it, that gets you attention. If you’re selling them, that’s making you money, which isn’t allowed either. They will make excuses why your hobbies do not fit into your life. It’s too expensive. You’re too busy.

So you’ve compromised your family. You’ve compromised your friends. You’ve decided that since you can’t have family and friends, you’ll get yourself a hobby. And then they take that away too. Because anything that takes your attention off of them is going to be a threat to them, which includes close family members, close friends, and things that you enjoy.

So what happens to you inside when everything that makes you happy is taken away? Obviously, loneliness sets in. And the sad thing about this type of loneliness is that you can be lonely with a hundred people around you. Because on top of the loneliness, what else sets in? Resentment for the person who is making you give up everything that makes you happy. And they can say it as much as they want—“Well, if you really loved me, I should be your only source of happiness!”—but you know as well as I do that you can’t force that when somebody is undermining you.

It’s very understandable to feel fear when you are thinking about leaving a toxic relationship, changing a job, or leaving a friend circle, and to ask yourself, “Who am I now?”

Let’s think about this. Get out a pen and paper.

Are there people in your life that you no longer get to spend time with? Did you used to go to family events? Were the holidays important? Did you celebrate things? I even quit sending birthday cards, and that’s something I could have done regardless. It had such a negative connotation that I just quit asking to do things. I quit asking to go home. I quit asking to go out. Because conflict with family is easier than having conflict with the toxic person. You all know as well as I do that toxic people do not run out of fight. They love chaos. They love drama. They love conflict. So they have no problem fighting about the family, fighting about the friends, and fighting about your hobbies every time they come up. You’re the one who gets exhausted fighting about it.

So are there people in your life that you no longer spend time with that you felt were very good for you, loved you, and supported you? Write them down.

Then think about whether or not your friend group has changed. Have they stayed with you, or have you noticed that friends are starting to fall away? That’s a two-sided dynamic with friends, because if you have friends that are really strong and really support you but don’t understand a toxic relationship, even though they love and support you, they may fall away because they won’t understand why you aren’t removing yourself.

Have you felt forced to quit something that you really enjoyed because someone else didn’t think you had time for it? Or were you forced to give up any money you made through a hobby you had because that would detour you from continuing to do it?

It’s not that you think your family, your friends, or your hobbies aren’t important. You are just exhausted. You get tired of the fights, so you just give up.

So if you have any of these scenarios in your life, I really want you to think about that. Because by pulling the things that you love and taking your happiness away, that makes you completely dependent on them for your happiness and for your camaraderie and for your interaction with people. Your identity has then become what you are to them. You no longer have your own identity because they start sucking it all out of you.

You rate your identity on how well you can keep everybody happy, right? So then, should you decide to change the dynamic of the toxic relationship, they’re gone and you’re left—now where are you? It’s a very understandable fear. “At least while I was there I knew who I was. I had a spot. I had a job. I had an identity. Now look at me! I don’t know who I am. I can’t make a decision. I don’t know what my hobbies are. And I’m not making anybody happy either.” So it is very fearful to leave a dynamic of even an unhealthy relationship if you don’t know what your true identity is.

I have clients whose identities are so based on who they are with that when they go through the trouble of leaving a toxic relationship, they don’t know how to be by themselves, even for a night. They can hardly stand to stay at the house by themselves because they don’t know what it’s like to be calm and be idle. Those are the types of people that will then quickly go find someone else to date or quickly go find a different friend group or quickly go find something to do, because their identities aren’t solid in who they are. They jump into another spot where their identity is given to them.

Finding your identity is tough stuff. Leaving or changing the dynamic of a toxic relationship is tough stuff. But then finding yourself afterward is tough. And I see it over and over, jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, because it’s so hard to figure out who you are. You’re going to have to learn to like to be with yourself. And you know, we talk a lot about self-love and self-care and choosing yourself, but where in the heck do you start when someone has been telling you who you are supposed to be for years?? And if you’ve grown up in an environment that was unhealthy, you really don’t know where to start! Someone has been telling you who you should be, how you should act, what you should say, and what you should think is important since the day you were born. And now all of a sudden you’re supposed to be by yourself?

It’s not easy, and I get it. But you need to spend the time that you need to find yourself. It’s all about moving forward. My coaching program is all about this. I am not a counselor, and I am not a therapist. I offer awareness and healing. I offer education on the toxic person so that you understand who they are and why they do it, so you can emotionally disconnect from that relationship. And then there you are—sitting right where we are talking about today. “Okay, I got that done. Now who the heck am I?”

Moving forward, you have to do some self-discovery, or some self-rediscovery. When I have clients coming to me and saying, “I don’t even know who I am anymore” or “I don’t even feel like myself,” that tells me we better get to work. What are your hobbies? What are your values? What do you like to do? What did you want to do with your life? What did you want to be when you grew up?

Have you thought about anything of this recently? Probably not. You’ve probably been worried about whatever everybody else is doing. If you have kids, you can relate to this: What do we tell them at high school graduation? “You can do anything you want to do, be anything you want to be!” But we sit in a room by ourselves and think that we, ourselves, can do nothing. We’re stuck. We’re trapped. We don’t have the power to do anything. And that’s not true! You DO have the power! And you can start wherever you are right now!

You know what? Make a list! I’m going to give you my favorite homework assignment ever. Write the alphabet from A to Z twice, in two columns. The first list of A to Z I want you to write something you want more of in your life that starts with every single letter. In the second column, I want you to write something that you want less of in your life that starts with every letter.

News flash! The life you are living right now is the A to Z list of stuff you want less of in your life. Because if there is stuff in your less of list, then you are currently living it. So to discover what you want and where to go, read the list of what you want more of in your life every single day. That’s going to start the thought process on who you are, and what you want, and where you want to be.

The dismal reality is that the life you are living is on the other side of the paper. And I know that if you were to just hand someone the list of what you want less of, it would look pretty dark and gray and dismal.

What we concentrate on is what we attract. So if you are worried about being lonely, you are going to attract loneliness. You all know it’s mind over matter. And, yes, I’m sitting here on the other side of it saying, “Just do this!” But it’s because I’ve been there. I know it. I had to dig my own ass out of a tunnel. And it was hard, but it was totally worth it. And the only way you can overcome all the fears is to start concentrating on you and what you want. If you concentrate on not having enough money to pay bills, what comes in the mail? More bills. You never get a check in the mail addressed to you when all you are worried about is how many bills you have. Right? Start being thankful for the money that comes into your life, and I promise your bills will be paid. And that’s just an example; what we concentrate on, we attract. So quit concentrating on the things in your life you want less of, because you are going to attract more of it.

The loneliness factor? I get it. But you have been trained to be isolated. They wanted you isolated for more control and more power. The more isolated you are from people who are strong and the things that make you happy, the more dependent you are on them and the easier it is for them to control you.

So start today with the A to Z list! It is the most powerful homework assignment that I have any of my clients do. It is also my personal favorite. I do it several times a year myself.

Again, I know that change is fearful—I KNOW it is—but overcoming fear is freedom. And that is exactly what you need to do; you need to understand that having courage is having the heart to act in spite of the fear you feel. So don’t assume that you are going to be lonely and let that hold you back. Because there are good people out there. There are relationships out there to foster and to reconnect with.

If you haven’t yet checked out my secret group on Facebook, Strength Within, consider joining this forward motion support group. You will need to ask to join and fill out a few questions, after which I will look through your answers and answer your pending request shortly thereafter. The point is that you do NOT have to do any of this alone. There are people out there, and I don’t just mean me, who have walked similar paths to yours and are not only willing to share their stories with you but to encourage you to share yours. To build you up and support you as you decide which direction you’re going to walk next.

You never have to be alone. Click HERE to view the group on Facebook.