AI Edits from The Cost of Toxic Relationship Stress_ Why Your Body Is Crashing
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[00:00:00] Maybe you're exhausted, but wired feeling at the same time. Maybe you're sleeping, but you're not recovering. Maybe your stomach is always off or it's a mess. Maybe your jaw is tight. Maybe your chest feels heavy or your immune system pretty much just shot. You're getting headaches, your body aches, your brain will just not work the way that it used to, like you can't focus.
When that happens, ~m- ~most people start to blame themselves or feel like there's something wrong. Like they think, "What is wrong with me? Why can't I handle this? Why am I so sensitive? Why do I keep crashing?" But what if it's not your body that's betraying you? What if your body is actually telling you the truth?
What if your body is reacting to the cost of living in a relationship where you never fully feel safe? That is what we're talking about in today's video. We're gonna talk about why your body is crashing out. [00:01:00] This is the cost of living in a chronic toxic relationship stress state, and this can happen in a marriage, a dating relationship, a parent-child relationship, a family relationship, friendship, a high conflict co-parenting kind of situation, work situation, or relationship affected by addiction.
It's not just about one argument. That's not what we're talking about. This is about living in a repeated pattern where you feel erased, blamed, confused, dismissed, over responsible, afraid, or constantly alert. And before we get into it too much, tell me in the comments or in the live chat, where does that stress tend to show up in your body first?
Is it in your sleep? Is it in your stomach, your chest, your jaw, headaches, pain, [00:02:00] exhaustion? ~Do you find that you get sick more often, like you just catch every bug that goes around? ~Do you experience it more like brain fog? Tell me where you feel it first, because I promise you, you are not the only one having these physical symptoms.
This is where the stress of the toxic relationship, this is different than normal stress. It's not the same because normal stress has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You have, there's like a deadline, right? Maybe you have a deadline at work, you have a busy week, you have a stressful event. You get through it and eventually your body comes back down.
But toxic relationship stress often does not have a clean ending in sight because even when nothing is happening in the moment, your body is still preparing for what could happen next. You're wondering, "What mood are they gonna be in today? Are they gonna blow up at me? Are they gonna shut down?"
Are they gonna twist things around on me like [00:03:00] Darvo? Are they lying? Are they gonna blame me? Are they gonna punish me with the silent treatment? Are they gonna make me feel crazy for bringing something up that's real? And if addiction is part of your situation, you may be wondering, are they drinking again?
~Are they using again? Are they hiding something? What are we about to go through another? Because you're always on guard for crisis. ~That's the kind of stress that does not always look dramatic from the outside, but your nervous system knows how much work it takes to live that way, because your body does not only react to what happened, your body reacts to what it has learned to expect.
This is why you can be sitting in a quiet house, you can be still and you still feel anxious. Nothing is happening right now, but your nervous system remembers. It remembers the look on their face right before they snap. It remembers the tone of their voice before the argument or the silence before the punishment.
It remembers the [00:04:00] nice phase before the crisis or the big blowout, before the
~Remember and your body before it even arrives. ~So you start checking. Checking their mood, checking your phone, checking their tone. You're constantly looking for the signals. You're trying to protect yourself. You're looking at their facial expression. You're checking whether they a little bit off. You start rehearsing what you're gonna say.
You try to keep everyone calm. You try not to say the wrong thing. You try to prevent the next crisis. You try to be reasonable enough, loving enough, calm enough, helpful enough, patient enough And maybe sometimes, maybe just maybe, it won't fall apart, or maybe it will fall apart. It's just hard to know, and that's why your body, your alarm system is just staying on edge.
And [00:05:00] even when it's not doing anything, or at least from the outside it looks like it's not doing anything, it's visible labor. This is your nervous system pretty much working overtime all the time. It's a hypervigilance, and hypervigilance burns energy even when you look calm on the outside. Your body senses threat, it shifts into survival mode, and threat does not have to be someone physically chasing you, right?
The threat can be emotional, it can be relational, it can be financial, it can be fear of abandonment or fear of betrayal, or the fear of being blamed again, or the fear of one more conversation is gonna turn into a three-hour long argument ~where you show up-- ~where somehow you end up apologizing for bringing up the problem yet again.
~Your body doesn't say this is only emotional stress, so no need to react." That's not what happens. ~Your body reacts to the perceived danger. In a toxic or chronic toxic [00:06:00] danger is often unpredictable, right? That is what keeps your body activated. The most exhausting stress is the stress you cannot predict and you can't fully resolve it.
There's no end in sight. This is the part I re-really want you to understand. Toxic relationship stress doesn't just live in your mind. Over time, it becomes like a full body experience. It affects your sleep, your digestion, your pain levels, your muscle tension, your mood, your focus, your blood pressure, and your immune system, even your hormones and your ability to recover.
Now, I'm not saying that your relationship is the only cause of a medical condition, and I'm not saying that every symptom is just stress, but chronic stress is not just harmless. When someone says, "This relationship is making me [00:07:00] sick," sometimes it's not just a figure of speech. Your body may be sending signals for years of emotional overdraft, like when your checking account is overdrafted You can only fight or flight for so long before your body starts demanding the payment, right?
~The interest. ~Sometimes that payment looks like exhaustion. Sometimes it looks like anxiety or like depression, or sometimes it looks like headaches or stomach problems or pain like flaring up in different places, sleep problems, or just that you're chronically sick. Like you feel like you always get every cold or flu or virus that comes around, or feeling like your body just doesn't bounce back anymore.
Like Again, you guys, I'm blaming the relationship for every issue, but what I am saying is don't ignore the fact that your relationship affects your body. This is something that confuses a lot of people. They don't always [00:08:00] crash, like during the emergency. Like during the emergency, a lot of times people can perform, they can handle the argument, they can clean up the mess, they can smooth things over, they can go to work or take care of the kids.
They answer the text, ~they make excuses, ~they hold the family together. They basically just do what has to be done. But then when things get quiet, their body crashes, and so they think, "What is wrong with me? It's over now. Why do I feel worse now that it's passed?" But sometimes your body doesn't feel safe enough to collapse until sometimes it comes after danger, because this is
the first moment where your body has permission to stop performing So if you're exhausted after the argument, after that or after the relapse or after the family event or breakup Or even just after the big conversation that you've been anticipating and looking for and worried about basically. [00:09:00] It doesn't really mean that you've handled it badly, it just means that your body finally got the chance to tell you the truth of what's going on.
And I do wanna say this very carefully because this is not about blaming you, but sometimes you have a role
And do you have adapted and it's keeping your body in threat mode? Maybe you've become the monitor, the fixer, the rescuer, peacekeeper, the detective. If you can relate to any of those things, the rescuer, the peacekeeper, the detective, or the emotional translator, mediator, the family PR person, the one who absorbs the consequences.
You're the one that sees the pattern before everyone else even admits the pattern. ~Put that in the chat. ~What is the role that you have habituated into that keeps you stuck? It's probably a part of why you're staying in [00:10:00] that fight or flight response. And if addiction is part of the situation, this role might look like, constantly checking, like checking bottles or checking locations or monitoring behavior or tracking money or listening for slurred speech or watching for signs of relapse or doing what I call like the smell.
Basically, you're trying to prevent the next disaster by seeing it coming. That's what leads you to this hypervigilant state. But all of these things can happen without addiction, too. This isn't just addiction specific. It can happen, too, if you have an emotionally immature partner or a manipulative parent or a sibling who always creates chaos, an adult child who can't seem to stay out of crisis.
~They're constantly in... They're, like, unstable all the time. ~They pull you into their crisis, and then you feel like you have to fix it or things are gonna go bad. Or it can even just be a friend who only wants connection when they need rescuing. At some point, the [00:11:00] problem is not just what they're doing, it's what your body has become in order to stay connected to them, and that's where people get drained because you're not just in the relationship, you're managing a system.
And this is the kind of thing where you're trying to understand the patterns underneath the toxic relationship, whether it's addiction, denial, boundaries, overfunctioning,
and why you feel like you're losing yourself trying to help someone else. ~You relate to these things? And you subscribe to this channel? You subscribe because around here, we don't just say, "Set a boundary," leave you hanging. ~We talk about what is actually happening underneath the pattern, about why it's so hard to stop participating in it, how to get yourself back.
All right, now. ~Now that everybody's subscribed, ~let's talk about the trap of trying to fix them so your body can relax. Because a lot of people will tell you, "Stop trying to con-" Control. Sometimes true, but I think might be a little bit too simplistic, right? Because sometimes what [00:12:00] looks like control is actually just,
just your nervous system begging for some sort of predictability, right? You're not always trying to fix them because you're like a bossy person. Sometimes you're trying to fix them because your body is desperate for safety. You think, "If they would just stop lying, I could relax," right? If they would just be kind, I could breathe.
If they could just stop exploding, then I could stop walking on eggshells. If they would just admit the truth, I could stop feeling crazy, and just so I could sleep at night and get a whole night's sleep. If they just change, my body could fully, finally wind down, come down from this hypervigilant state."
And yeah, it makes sense, but there is a... It's your body can only Rel- That's when they would
~Being held someone else's choice, right? ~And that's a hard... That doesn't mean [00:13:00] that... It just means that your body needs a plan that does not depend entirely on them becoming healthy. Because when you're in that situation, you're pretty much just held hostage. This is... It's stuck because sometimes you just, you do not know.
You don't know if it's an issue of whether it's do I need better boundaries? Do I need a different strategy? Do I stop engaging in the same way? Do I need to create more distance between me and this person? Or do I need to seriously consider getting all the way out of this relationship? If that's the loop that you have to keep spinning in your own head in that because you go back and forth.
If this is a relationship or family situation that's starting to feel, and you're not sure whether it would be better to set more boundaries or whether you create that space, [00:14:00] and you just need some help brainstorming or thinking through, you can always schedule a consult with someone on our team.
We can look at the actual pattern, help you sort through what's happened, help you think through what your next right step might be. ~If you're interested in that, I'm gonna put the link in the description, okay? ~But just know this, your body is trying to tell you something. It may be saying, "This is too much."
~It's trying to talk to you that it's trying to help not feel safe here. ~I cannot keep observing this. I can't keep pretending this is normal. You need a reset. You need the truth so that your body can feel calm and relaxed and safe. You need boundaries, right? You need to stop participating in conversations that leave you feeling crazy.
You need to stop sacrificing your health just to prove how much you care. Your body's trying to tell you something that maybe your mind is just not completely- Fully ready to admit just yet, because your [00:15:00] mind will ~rationalize. You guys know how people are in denial or ~rationalize. Your body is less easy to fool.
So even if your mind is over here in denial, your body knows what's happening. It's picking up the signals, it's absorbing that stuff. And it's not... you might be thinking it's not that bad," but your body is saying something different. If it's not that bad, then why do you always feel raced?
Your mind is telling you maybe I'm overreacting, but then he says why do we, why do I or why do we feel sick every time their name pops up on the phone?" Does anyone ever have that experience when you see a certain person's name pop up on the caller ID, you just feel sick to your stomach? ~I know I've certainly experienced that before, and ~it's and the reason that happens because it's like you know when this person calls, no matter what happens, you're gonna be put in a bad position, right? Maybe they're gonna ask you to do something to, pay a bill or enable them, and you can either say yes, and then you feel guilty for saying yes, or you say no, and then you feel guilty for saying no, right?
You feel sick because you know that [00:16:00] whatever's about to come is gonna be very stressful, and there's no clear answer to it, right? Your body has been handling this problem that your mind's been trying to avoid basically. That's what's going on here. So your body's in survival mode. That it's not the moment that you have the important conversation necessarily.
~It's the moment to send... ~It's not the moment to send the six-paragraph text, blow up their phone. It's not the moment for you to prove your case. It's not the moment for you to beg someone to understand you, or not the moment to make any kind of like life-altering decisions, unless you're dealing with an immediate, like life-threatening safety danger issue right now.
Like I said, someone's running in front of a bus, right? You gotta deal with that right now. Because the reason you don't wanna deal with these things in that moment, your nervous system is flooded, right? And it just wants relief. And so it'll do whatever feels easiest in that moment, not always the best [00:17:00] long-term strategic decision because relief and wisdom are not always the same thing.
Relief says
Text them again, right? That little says, wait until your body settles down and you can really through, how am I... understand now. That's that relief thing. It's like you wanna plead your case, you wanna argue, when you wanna show the evidence. But a lot of times they may
~Not be capable of hearing all that, right? ~Everybody's probably in a fight or flight state. So you have to take yourself some time. Wisd- because wisdom is gonna tell you that more information is not going to give you more peace. More information is not gonna get them to see the... The goal is not to ignore your body.
The goal is to respect your body enough, 'cause it's trying to tell you something on a deep below your consciousness level sometimes, to stop making major moves when you're in that panic feeling. So you're probably asking, what do you do instead, right? [00:18:00] You stabilize your body, you reduce the unnecessary exposure to chaos, and you change your role in the family system, right?
Sometimes you have to do a complete change of how you're operating, all the things you're doing. ~Not because, calm, ~not because it's just like I wanna calm or I wanna feel better, because it's like strategic arms what to do to help myself in this relationship, but to help my physical body be okay because you can feel it when you're breaking down, right?
Breathing exercises in the moment are helpful, but they're not gonna... toxic behavior, right? 'Cause you cannot think clearly when your body believes you're in danger. We tend to make bad decisions when we're in a fear or desperation state. So I want you to, the best that you can, reduce any unnecessary exposure to chaos.
This might mean, or [00:19:00] probably does mean, no more late night circular arguments ~that go every- ~that go endlessly and get you nowhere. No more arguing with someone that's intoxicated, right? That's not gonna do you any good. No more defending yourself to someone that's pretty much committed to misunderstanding you, right?
Like they're dug in. They're not gonna understand what you say because they don't want to. No more doing the detective work. It gives you information but no actual peace. Take your little FBI badge out and turn it in, right? Put it in the desk drawer and lock it up, right? You are not the detective anymore.
~Because when you're doing detective work, it feels like you're trying to predict what's coming, but it's really just keeping you hypervigilant. ~And this one might be the hardest of all, ~right? No more re- Rescuing one from preventable their problem is incurring, ~right? Other thing to do is just change your role in that system like we talked about before.
I want you to move the fixed observer position, right? From the prosecutor to the pattern namer, from the rescuer to the boundary holder, from emotional shock absorber in your family [00:20:00] system to instead, right? The goal, you don't care about this person or you don't have empathy, is basically to stop donating and giving away your health to a relationship that keeps demanding more than it's giving back, right?
Because it is draining you, and it will drain you until there's absolutely nothing left. Don't assume that every symptom is just stress, right? If you're having major chest pains, don't just say it's just stress." For goodness sake, go to the doctor and get it checked because you could be having a full-out heart attack, right?
But a lot of the symptoms that you're feeling are very likely
~They're being called, not being-- ~They're exacerbated by this chronic re- relationship That you're under those scares or some... You might even have, feel like you've gotten to the point that you have full-blown attacks in this kind of situation, right? [00:21:00] Because these kind of symptoms interfere with your life, right?
~Get the medical attention you need, certainly, right? ~Get medical attention if you need it. But even more than that, ~figure out what is the underlying cause. People send their loved ones to therapy all the time, and they wanna ~figure out what ~the underlying cause ~is, ~and I'm telling you, you gotta figure out what ~the underlying cause ~is.~
Why are you sick? Why do you catch every single thing that comes your way, right? Every flu or virus. Because your immune system is weakened because of this constant stress that you... Stress is real. Medical issues are real. Some of you may have seen the video I had about Gabor Maté and his research on chronic inventory illnesses and stuff like that, and how they're related to being under stress.
And he actually connects it directly to when you have difficulty setting boundaries or difficulty setting, what happens to your body. Because there are some illnesses that are directly connected to those kind of things, particularly if you have people-pleasing tendencies. There, there's research that shows the chances that you're gonna have one of those kind of illnesses are [00:22:00] completely different than if you don't have this.
And I call it the cram effect, right? You're cramming it in, you're cramming it in, you're cramming it in, and eventually the container's full. It doesn't have anywhere to go, and so your body starts to somehow react to that. That's not me saying it's in your head and you're crazy. These physical symptoms aren't happening.
That's me saying what you're dealing with is causing real physical symptoms and sometimes real medical diagnosable problems. And you're gonna know this is you, especially if you feel like you're just chronically that way. Not like if you get sick every now and then it goes away, but if you just chronically have headaches and you can't blow on allergies anymore, right?
~It's every... ~It's like throughout all the seasons and all the different things that are going on, you feel this way a lot. That's a really good indicator that a lot of that could be ~coming from your physical symptoms. Your, not those physical are ~coming from your relationship symptoms, right?
~Just a second. Okay. ~Some questions, some comments, hear from you. Brooke is back there in the background as our moderator, so she's gonna be looking out for your questions and comments, put it on the screen. So go ahead and get those in the chat. And while you [00:23:00] do that, I'll remind you, as always, there are resources in the description.
If you need to brainstorm your relationship situation, then consider, make an appointment. A lot of times in just one consultation session, you can get a lot of information. I- is this relationship Salvageable, right? Do I need better boundaries? Do I need to cut ties, right? Because sometimes you do need to cut ties, and you'll make yourself crazy going back and forth about that, about what you need to do next.
And it's hard to think when chronic stress state, and that's why sometimes it's just that having a sound board can really help you sort through it, especially a sounding board with someone who we deal with all the time. ~All right. Do we have any questions or comments from our live viewers? And if you're watching the playback, hey, we want to welcome you too.~
~We're glad you're here. Go ahead and throw your comments and questions in the chat. ~All right. Miss Max3 says, "Husband is still in denial despite complete- despite currently abstaining from his drug of choice. Doesn't think he's an addict despite talking frequently about cravings." There... Is he seeking an alternative in the occasional [00:24:00] booze, frequent sugar, and excitement in general?
Those are his words. What is my part here? I just listen calmly when he talks about this So I feel like there's sort of two pieces here. There's the first part you were saying which was about even though he's not using, he's abstaining, he seems to be in denial. He doesn't consider himself an addict.
So that may-- tells me that he's probably currently sober, abstaining, whatever you wanna call it, because he's either trying to test himself to prove to himself that he's not an addict. People will do things like this all... they'll just be like I'm gonna quit drinking for a week," or a month, or maybe even three months, right?
Because an alcoholic couldn't quit drinking for any period of time, and then they go back to drinking and then it becomes traumatic again, right? Could be testing himself. Or it could be they're like a middle, it's, "I'm not an addict, but I know these behavior are not healthy for me, so I'm trying to stop or cut them back."
So you don't always have to call yourself an addict to know you need to stop doing something. [00:25:00] It could be, or even a combination of those two things. Where is your part? You just listen calmly when he talks about this. I think that's an exact really good thing to do. That's pretty close to what I would advise you to do, because him being able to talk about...
~first of all, ~the fact that he talks about it with you tells me that you've created a safe space in that relationship to be able for him to talk about it, which is really important. But as he's talking to you about this, a lot of times just talking about things out loud helps people figure things out, right?
And so if you're just a good listener, maybe you can throw in some reflection statements, some mirroring or something like that. That's gonna help him. If it is addiction and you're trying to get... And, he needs to figure that out, it's gonna get him closer to doing that than if you argue with him.
Because if you argued with him or tried to put these important points in front of him or something, you're sending him articles or something, he's just gonna defend, right? And he's gonna... And as he defends, he's gonna rationalize, he's gonna minimize, he's gonna justify, he's gonna blame you, and then that's just [00:26:00] convincing him even further that he does have a problem.
So I would say being a good listener is definitely the right move to make. And that's not always easy, because, it's like, "Why can't you see this?" You just wanna shake him by the shoulders.
~What else do we have back there, Ms. Free?~
All right, here's another one. "I feel like I need to monitor my partner for how long he has slept when he's coming home so I know what I'm going to deal with. Are you saying this is just hurting me?" Yeah, I think when you live in that hypervigilant state where you're constantly monitoring, 'cause it's almost like living on eggshells, it keeps you from being able to rest good, right?
'Cause now your body can't rest and relax 'cause you're vigilant. "What's going on? What kind of mood he's gonna be in? Has he slept?" "Has he done this or that or the other?" "Has he had a bad day?" And that keeps you hypervigilant. It's part of checklist that is not really that much different than on here I talk about people will try to check for evidence that someone's drinking or using, or paraphernalia or something like that. It's a checking behavior
All right, our new question is, [00:27:00] "I'm hypervigilant about his health issues due to his drinking. My health, how do I deal with that stress?" That's a good question. It's I'm hypervigilant because I know that his drinking issue is affecting my health, so you're saying I'm vigilant about it, not just 'cause of his health, but because of my health.
~And that makes sense, but it's also one of those catch-22 traps, right? ~And so the hypervigilance is not serving you well. You would be better served by figuring out how to get your body out of fight or flight response. That's what's gonna help, because it's not really his drinking that's causing you the health issues.
It's your hypervigilance about his drinking that's causing health issues, right? It's your body saying fight or flight, feeling under threat. ~And there's this sort of mind trick that if it's like we can find all the evidence, if we're hypervigilant, if we know what's going on, feels like we're protecting ourself because it can give us a head up.~
And sometimes there's a truth in that, but we're causing a lot of long-term damage doing that
~All right. Bree says that we are running to the end of our time. It looks like I talked too much today. We had some tech issues. Thank you for sticking through that. We had a sound issue at the beginning, and then I saw the camera was blinking off and on. I don't know what went on with the tech, but I will try to investigate so it'll be better next time.~
All right. Thank- thanks for everybody who showed up live, and for those of you who watch on the playback, if you wanna join live, we are live every Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern, and we would love to have you in the conversation. [00:28:00] Don't forget to subscribe or send this video to someone who might need to see it, someone who's just being impacted by a relationship problem.
Bye, everybody.
