Should I Stay or Leave This Relationship? How to Find Clarity When You’re Pretty Sure You Don’t Want To End Things, But You Keep Thinking About It
Why this decision feels so impossible
When you’re in love, have been in love, want to love again, and yet you’re facing repeated conflicts in your relationship that seem unresolvable, it’s actually so understandable that you’d be at this crossroads, wondering to yourself, “should I stay in this relationship or is it finally time that I leave?”
Highly sensitive, self aware women, are often super attuned to when things aren’t going well in the relationship and very much connected to the hopeless, protective, fight or flight parts that say, “let’s end things.”
Attachment wounding makes us especially susceptible to indecision and nervous system activation. When the mind and body still hold stories from the past; stories of rejection, abandonment, betrayal and loss, it can be so hard to make decisions from a place of grounded calm, confidence, clarity and courage when things feel messy in a relationship.
Before anything else: are you safe?
Safety check. Are you safe? When we’re exploring whether or not a relationship is “meant to be” or not, we have to be honest with ourselves about our level of physical and emotional safety. When you glance at your situation, does it seem inherently unsafe? For example, are their patterns of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse? Is your partner being controlling, do they try to isolate you from other loved ones, do they gaslight you or make you feel unsafe when you express yourself to them or to others?
If any of this is present in your relationship, your safety matters more than saving the relationship. I know that it can be difficult to hear; but above all, your safety matters. If you’re feeling unsafe in your relationship or at home, text START to 88788 (for the National Domestic Violence Hotline) or text or call 988 (for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). If not, and things are more of an emotional roller coaster than they are a safety concern, stay with me.
Is it relationship anxiety, or is something truly wrong?
It can be hard to tease apart relationship anxiety from when there’s actually something wrong in the relationship. Said from a highly sensitive, obsessive compulsive (no, literally by diagnosis) woman; relationship anxiety is so different from there being a true, accurate, real issue in the relationship.
Relationship anxiety can look like having self doubt, vigilantly scanning for things that are “off” or wrong in the relationship, anticipating the next blow-up argument, overthinking past conflicts, imagining hopeless future scenarios, over-reading into non-verbal cues, or even instigating conflict automatically because the nervous system feels like something is or should be wrong.
In the case of relationship anxiety, we’re operating from anxious, hypervigilant parts of ourselves that expect something has gone wrong, is going wrong or will go wrong in the relationship. Anxieties are probably informed by things that did happen in the past; anxieties aren’t invalid, but the intensity of the anxiety doesn’t match the intensity of the current situation.
Relationship anxiety can cause highly sensitive women to overthink, spiral, and fixate on the relationship; sometimes self sabotaging from a place of stress.
But we know that it’s not just relationship anxiety and there really is something wrong in the relationship when we start to notice the following:
You and your partner are struggling to respect each others needs, even when needs are directly and clearly expressed (ex. connection, acts of service, emotional support, share of the mental load, improved communication)
When you and your partner get into arguments, neither of you tries to resolve or repair, issues continue to be swept under the rug
If you or your partner tries to repair, the other is unwilling and either stonewalls or lashes out
One or both of you is struggling to take accountability with full apologies (1. what the apology is for 2. why the apology is important 3. what the plan is to change things for the future)
One or both of you struggles to actively listen, reflect and honor what the other is saying, even when you disagree or have an alternate perspective
One or the other is controlling and struggles to respect the autonomy of the other
There’s repeated betrayal or disrespect
Relationship anxiety can be present and also separate issues can be present in the relationship at the same time (that aren’t explained by relationship anxiety itself).
Questions to ask yourself to help offer some clarity
When you’re overwhelmed with indecision and grief in your heart, it can be so hard to think clearly and know where to begin. As you explore your relationship and where it’s at now, consider some of the following questions to help guide whether or not it’s really time to end things or time to work on things a little more.
1. Is there basic safety and respect here?
During conflicts, it’s really common for things to get disrespectful, but they shouldn’t become unsafe. Outside of those conflicts, your partnership should always come with basic safety and respect. Think, when you and your partner aren’t triggered is there safety and respect? (certainly, we always want to be working toward greater respect even during triggering and upsetting moments)
2. Have we tried to repair this?
Have you and your partner spoken directly and clearly about what’s going on in the relationship? We’re looking to see if you’ve directly addressed the issue and if steps have been taken to make things better. If not, perhaps we have to see what’s blocking that work. Maybe, if we tried to repair, we could.
3. Are my needs and boundaries taken seriously?
As humans, we’re all going to make mistakes and our partners won’t always be able to meet our needs and respect our boundaries in the way we need them to, or in the way they should. But is your partner willing to acknowledge when they didn’t meet the need or respect the boundary appropriately and are they willing to continually work on meeting those needs more often than not? Are you willing to do the same for your partner?
4. Have I communicated what I need in a calm and grounded way?
It’s possible we all communicate what we need at some point, in some way, but if we don’t communicate it calmly, what we say might not be heard. If we express a need through tears, through shouting, or mid-argument… that need won’t necessarily be processed and later addressed for you. We have to arrange intentional conversations where we name what we need in a calm and grounded way, so it can be processed and saved in the brain (we can’t process and save the information if we’re in fight or flight, survival mode).
5. Has there been historical progress and has there been recent progress in the relationship?
Have you been stagnant in your relationship? Is your partner absolutely unwilling to grow with you, hear you, respect your needs, and move towards improved connection? Or is it possible that you and your partner are going through an especially difficult chapter, but when we look back at the last few years or even the last few months, when you two sit and talk, you’re able to start making small steps of progress again? If so, maybe what’s needed is more of the work, more consistently, more intentionally, and even more authentically.
If in looking at these questions, you’re feeling slightly drawn back to your partner, that might be a sign that the relationship really isn’t over yet, and that maybe instead there’s deeper work to be done.
You’re tired of your own reactions
If you have been in this difficult chapter with your partner, you’ve probably seen sides of yourself you don’t want to see so often; angry, resentful, hopeless, and super, super sad parts of you. It’s possible you’ve seen yourself lash out, shut down, stonewall, and operate in ways that you don’t feel incredibly proud of. I get it, and I want to invite you to take a moment to breathe in just an ounce of self compassion if you can.
It’s okay to honor the part of you that says “we need to end the relationship” by recognizing that underneath that, what it’s saying is “we need to end these cycles of stress.”
And that is powerful.
A soft and sweet reminder though… you can do that without ending the relationship, if you want to.
2 key rules to start implementing today
When your mind has been spinning and your body is used to auto-pilot reacting with sensations of fight or flight when conflict comes up in the relationship, there are 2 very important main rules to start following today.
1. Don’t try to make decisions when you’re dysregulated; if you feel yourself gearing up into fight or flight, you know that it’s not the time to make decisions of any kind (unless the decision is about what snack you’re going to eat to help ground yourself)
2. If either you or your partner has gone into fight or flight, you need to separate temporarily (a few minutes up to a couple of hours if really necessary) to focus on regulating emotionally before coming back together to repair
How somatic therapy and parts-work (IFS informed therapy) can help you find regulation in your system and repair in your relationship
Somatic means ‘of the body’ and so when we approach our emotions somatically, we’re finding them in the body and working directly with the sensations that flare up when we’re emotional. Somatic therapy can help highly sensitive, and highly reactive women notice emotional sensations, observe them, soften them, even process through them, ground and release.
Parts work is an Internal Family Systems approach to finding emotional balance and honoring the different, conflicting messages your mind has for you (ex. “I want to stay in the relationship” versus “I want to leave the relationship”). IFS (Internal Family Systems) says that we’re a system made up internal parts, protective parts that manage us and that respond re-actively to crisis situations and exiled parts that we try to keep tucked away. IFS informed therapy actually helps us connect with our parts on purpose, unblend from our protective parts while still ensuring needs of our protectors and exiles are all met, and unburden the system little by little so that we don’t feel the need to operate from our old protective parts on auto pilot anymore.
IFS also says that central to and surrounding all our parts is Self Energy; our core internal energy made up of calm, confidence, courage, connectedness, clarity, creativity, compassion, and curiosity, untouched by stress and trauma. Through somatics, we can learn to cultivate or tap into Self Energy and we can start operating from it as opposed to from parts.
Somatic therapy blended with IFS informed work helps us find the deeper emotional wounds carried by our parts so that we can heal them and guide them from Self.
When to reach out for support (and how to work with me if you’re in California)
You know you’ll benefit from somatic and IFS informed therapy if you:
experience obsessive rumination and worry about your relationship
continue repeating old patterns on auto pilot, despite “knowing better”
become quickly dysregulated and go into fight or flight in your relationship
regularly oscillate between leaving your relationship or staying in it
If you live in California and you’re ready for a deeper, somatic therapy and IFS informed therapy approach that helps you heal from the inside out, you can book a free 20 minute consultation call with me here.
I offer 50 minute therapy sessions for $225 per session and 6 hour therapy intensives at $1400 per intensive (payment plans available). Clients with PPO insurance can access reimbursement through superbills or through Thrizer claims, submitted automatically.
If you’re ready to invest time, energy, and money into regulating your nervous system again and finding repair in your relationship, book a free 20 minute consultation call today.