Hi everyone,
“What’s that stage of grief called where you look back on your toxic relationship and go over and over all those little crossroads when you should have left but you didn’t?”
I recently posted this on Threads on a whim. I had been reflecting on this particular form of pain that both I and many of my clients have experienced, and how it seems like an important component of healing. One reader offered a name for it: “ambiguous grief—the grief that has no place to land because there’s no way to resolve past choices, only to grieve what life might have looked like if you’d left sooner.” That’s it exactly.
This is one of those times on Threads when I was genuinely humbled by the depth, thoughtfulness, and vulnerability I saw in the comments. One reader talked about realizing how we “tolerate and minimize and think that it’s not that bad, then we are shocked that we put up with so much.” This captures the layers of regret we feel: Who could we have become had we not spent so much energy trying to “fix someone”? What might we have done with all that time we wasted fretting about their actions? We can never know the answers to those questions, but the pain of these lost possibilities is real, and we have to honor it.
But sitting with that grief is only part of the work. We must also examine our own role in the toxic dynamic. One reader explained: “You have to take accountability for staying. For getting to the point of resentment. For choosing potential over reality. For repeating cycles because you are too loyal to others but not loyal to yourself.”
This idea of accountability surfaced in a painful story one reader shared about reading through her old journals: “I realized I had been writing about needing to leave him for the same behaviors for almost 20 years. I went through my mind and counted how many times I tried to leave him before. And then it was like I was free.”
But as we sort through our mistakes, we must also embrace self-forgiveness. One reader explained that “we simply hoped that the person we believed they were would reappear.” She encouraged compassion toward our past selves, reminding that “hope is a powerful drug.”
Many readers eventually arrived at a better place. They called this “clarity,” “learning,” “an awakening,” and even “the dawning.”
I guess hope inspires poetry, even on Threads.
Until next time,
Dana
P.S. A big thank you to everyone who commented on this post and those who gave me permission to use their wise and beautiful words here.