How to Recognise Toxic Love Patterns

The Relationship That Wasn’t Really a Relationship

The first relationship I had after leaving my husband wasn’t a relationship. It was a complicationship. A tangled, dramatic, deeply unserious situation with an alcoholic I worked with, which is a sentence that should have set off every alarm in my body but somehow did not. We worked together. We fought at work. We made up on the phone. We did this on a loop for longer than I’d like to admit in writing.

At the office, he picked fights, bullied me, made everything harder than it needed to be. Then I’d get home, the phone would ring, and we’d spend hours dreaming up a future neither of us was actually building. Holidays we’d take. A house we’d live in. The version of him that existed only on the phone after 9pm, when the lights were low and the wine was flowing and reality was somewhere in the next suburb.

I had walked out of an abusive marriage and walked straight into a different shape of the same problem. Same chaos, different packaging. And I genuinely could not see it. I thought I’d done the hard work. I thought leaving was the finish line. Turns out leaving was barely the warm up.

Healing Isn’t a Finish Line, It’s a Whole Sport

Here’s what no one tells you about leaving a bad relationship. You don’t automatically arrive at the good ones. You don’t graduate. There’s no certificate. You don’t walk out the door enlightened and immediately attract the kind of love you deserve. Your nervous system doesn’t get the memo. Your patterns don’t dissolve in the carpark on the way to your new life.

I had started healing before I left my husband. I’d done the reading. I’d done some therapy. I’d had the realisations that felt enormous at the time. But beginning to heal and being healed are two entirely different postcodes. I had enough awareness to know something was wrong. I did not have enough awareness to recognise myself doing the wrong thing again, in a new outfit, with a new face attached to it.

That’s the brutal bit. The patterns don’t announce themselves. They don’t show up wearing a name tag that says Hi, I’m Your Old Wound, Nice to See You Again. They show up as butterflies. As intensity. As the feeling that this person understands you in a way no one else does. Which, by the way, is usually because they’re activating the exact same nervous system response that your previous relationship trained you to mistake for love.

Spot the Pattern, Not Just the Person

So how do you actually recognise a toxic pattern when you’re in the thick of it? Start with the dynamic, not the person. People are easy to blame. Dynamics are harder to see, because you’re inside them. But the dynamic is where the truth lives. Ask yourself what role you keep ending up in. The fixer. The peacekeeper. The one who softens themselves to keep things smooth. The one who waits to be chosen instead of choosing.

If you keep ending up in the same role across very different people, that’s not bad luck, babe. That’s a pattern. The packaging changes. The script does not. Different name, different job, different hair, same emotional choreography. You’re auditioning, they’re auditioning, and the play is one you’ve performed before. The chaos feels familiar because it is familiar. Familiarity is not the same as compatibility, even though your body keeps insisting it is.

The other tell is what you tolerate in the name of potential. Toxic patterns thrive on potential. The version of them you can see if you just love them hard enough. The future they keep promising. The person they could be if circumstances were different. Healthy love doesn’t ask you to date a hypothetical. Healthy love shows up in the actual, boring, real-life present, where someone is consistent on a Tuesday and not just romantic on a Friday.

The Common Denominator Conversation

Eventually, after enough therapy and journalling and brutal late night conversations with myself, I had to sit with a sentence I did not want to sit with. I am the common denominator. Not because I was to blame for how anyone treated me. Let me be very clear about that. Their behaviour was theirs. Their choices were theirs. I am not absorbing responsibility for things that were done to me, and neither should you.

But I kept choosing the same dynamic in different packaging, and that part was mine to look at. I was attached to the idea of love. The intensity. The longing. The waiting. The almost. I had confused activation for connection so many times that calm felt boring and unsafe felt like home. My picker was broken because my picker had been trained by the wrong teachers, and no one had sat me down and said, honey, you’re going to keep falling for the same problem until you name it.

Naming it changed everything. Not overnight. Not cleanly. But once I could see the pattern, I could start interrupting it. I could notice the moment I started shape-shifting to fit someone. I could clock the second I began making excuses for behaviour that would have horrified me from the outside. I could catch myself romanticising chaos and gently, firmly, say no. We’re not doing that this time. We’ve done that. We know how it ends. We’re choosing something else.

Boring Is the New Goal

Here’s where I’ve landed, and I say this with my whole chest. Boring is the goal. Calm is the goal. Predictable in the good way is the goal. A man who texts back when he says he will. A man who doesn’t make you feel insane for having normal emotional needs. A man who is present, not performative. A man who doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to be loved by him.

If your nervous system is bracing for impact every time your phone lights up, that is information. If you’re constantly drafting and redrafting messages, that is information. If you feel slightly sick most of the time and call it love, that is information. Anxiety is not chemistry. Confusion is not depth. Inconsistency is not mystery. These are patterns dressed up as feelings, and your body is trying to tell you something your heart is desperately trying to ignore.

You’re allowed to want easy. You’re allowed to want someone who feels like a deep exhale rather than a held breath. You’re allowed to walk away from anyone who only loves you in private and undermines you in public. You’re allowed to notice the pattern, name it out loud, and refuse to dance with it one more time. That’s not closing yourself off. That’s growing up. That’s the work. That’s how you stop trading one kind of dysfunction for another, and finally start choosing the kind of love that actually feels like love.

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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