If that's where you are, you're not alone, and you're not imagining it.

Most of us hope for relationships that feel caring, and hopefully loving — at work, in our families, with the people we love. Places where we can relax and feel free to be ourselves. But as many of us know, not all relationships are like that. Something unexpected happens, something shifts, and instead of safety there's a low hum of uncertainty. Instead of support, there's confusion about unreasonable criticism, and about whose feelings even matter anymore.

Naming what's happening

It helps to have language to frame and talk about what you're experiencing, even loosely.

Narcissistic dynamics involve someone whose needs consistently override everyone else's — who dismisses, exploits, or belittles rather than relates. Not every self-focused person is abusive, but when this becomes the pattern rather than the exception, relationships stop being mutual and become unhealthy.

Toxic relationships don't always involve obvious cruelty. They just leave you feeling confused and diminished — drained, uncertain of yourself, questioning your intentions, quietly ashamed, and unsupported.

Abusive relationships involve a deliberate or habitual pattern — emotional, financial, psychological, sometimes physical — aimed at controlling another person. It isn't always dramatic. Often it's quiet: the feeling that no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you do, it isn't enough. That's part of what makes it so disorienting.

What links all three is imbalance: one person's comfort or needs consistently come before the other's wellbeing.

At home

In intimate relationships, this can look like being told your perception of events is wrong — that you're "too sensitive" or "imagining things." It can also be control dressed up as care: decisions about money, time, or friendships that quietly stop being yours to make. It can be an exhausting rhythm of affection followed by cruelty, which keeps you working hard just to stay steady. Slowly, often invisibly, you find yourself isolated and wondering who you've become. Many people end up feeling like a shadow of who they used to be.

In families

Family dynamics carry their own particular weight, because loyalty can feel non-negotiable — even when staying loyal costs you something real.

I see this show up as a child carrying a parent's emotional load long before they're ready to. As one sibling becoming the family's designated problem while another can do no wrong. As attempts to discuss feelings or family dynamics being repeatedly met with dismissal, until we learn not to bring them up at all.

"That's just how my family is" can feel like an explanation, and because it's all we've ever known, it's easy to underestimate how much these patterns continue to shape us as adults — the guilt, the obligation, the conflict that never quite resolves.

At work

Toxicity doesn't stop at the front door. Workplaces have their own version: persistent undermining or exclusion by a colleague or manager; micromanagement that strips away autonomy and replaces it with fear; leadership that divides a team by rewarding some and scapegoating others; being expected to give more — time, labour, guilt — than is fair or sustainable.

The cost is real: burnout, anxiety, depression, a creeping loss of confidence in work you once did well.

What it leaves behind

Wherever it happens, the aftermath tends to look similar. Self-doubt where confidence used to be. A kind of hypervigilance — always scanning for what might go wrong next, or what you might do wrong. Shame that belongs to someone else but has settled on you. A pulling away from the people and activities that used to matter. Sometimes, genuine trauma symptoms: intrusive memories, disrupted sleep, a nervous system stuck on high alert.

These don't simply fade once the relationship ends or the job changes. Left unprocessed, they can quietly shape the years that follow.

How therapy helps

In my own experience, the work tends to move through several threads, though rarely in a straight line.

• Validation, first. Naming what happened accurately helps loosen the grip of self-blame and minimisation that so often keeps people stuck.
• Rebuilding a sense of self. Toxic dynamics erode your trust in your own judgment. Part of the work is reconnecting with your values, your intuition, your voice — not as an abstract exercise, but as something felt and rebuilt in the relationship between us.
• Learning to hold a boundary. For many people who've lived inside these dynamics, saying no doesn't come easily — it can feel dangerous, even now. Therapy offers a place to explore this, gently and at your own pace.
• Working with what the body remembers. Abuse and chronic toxicity often leave imprints on the nervous system that talking alone doesn't fully reach. Trauma-informed and somatic approaches help the nervous system find its way out of fight, flight, fawn and freeze, and back toward calm and rest.
• Looking forward. Healing isn't only about getting away from what harmed you. Eventually, the work turns toward what you're moving toward — connection, care, authenticity, relationships that don't cost you yourself.

That was not okay, and it was not your fault.

"Why didn't I just leave?"

Almost everyone I work with asks some version of this question, often with a mix of self-judgment and curiosity.

Pete Walker's work on trauma responses — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — offers a different way of understanding it. Staying, appeasing, going quiet, minimising: these are often survival strategies, not character flaws. Add in financial dependence, fear, guilt, or simple hope that things might change, and staying makes a great deal of sense. It was never a failure of judgment. It was your system doing its best to keep you safe.

A path forward

Whether the harm came from a partner, a parent, or a work colleague, therapy offers something steady in the middle of it: a chance to reflect on what actually happened, and support in finding your way back to a life that's true to who you really are.

You are not to blame. Your experience is real. And genuine, lasting healing is possible.

If any of this resonates and you'd like to talk it through, I offer both in-person sessions in Shoreditch and online sessions. Feel free to get in touch to arrange an initial conversation.