Toxic Relationships Rewire Your Brain (And How to Reset It)

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Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to break free from a toxic relationship? You're not imagining it—toxic people actually rewire your brain, making you addicted to the emotional rollercoaster. But the good news? You can reset your mind and heal.

In this episode, Dr. Amen Kaur unpacks the neuroscience of trauma bonding, explaining why your brain gets stuck in cycles of self-doubt, anxiety, and emotional addiction. You'll learn how toxic relationships hijack your nervous system, why breakups with toxic people feel uniquely painful, and—most importantly—how to reprogram your brain for self-worth, inner peace, and healthier relationships.

✨ In this episode, you'll discover:
✅ The brain science behind toxic love & why it’s so hard to let go
✅ How your nervous system gets stuck in survival mode after emotional abuse
✅ Proven techniques to regulate emotions, calm anxiety & restore balance
✅ How to retrain your brain to stop craving unhealthy relationships

Your healing starts now. 🔥 Tune in, subscribe, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. Your breakthrough is just one episode away. 💡✨

Chapters

• 0:04 Welcome to the Toxic Relationship Detox
• 13:40 Deep Dive into Trauma and Your Body
• 29:39 Understanding Narcissism and Emotional Addiction
• 1:06:55 Neurology of Toxic Love
• 1:31:39 Healing the Nervous System
• 2:01:20 Reclaiming Your Identity and Sleep

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Toxic Relationship Detox, where we break down the science and also bring in some spirituality to heal from toxic relationships so you can rebuild your life with clarity and confidence. My name is Dr Eamon Core, and today we're going to do a deep dive into what actually happens to your brain and body after a toxic relationship. The reason for doing this deep dive is so that we can learn how to heal from it. Now, if you've ever been stuck in cycles of self doubt, anxiety, physical exhaustion after a breakup, you're really not imagining any of this. The effects of emotional abuse, the gaslighting, the manipulation they're not just psychological. It's a real, deep neurological and psychological impact on us. By the end of this podcast, you'll have a clear roadmap for detoxing from emotional trauma and reprogramming your nervous system and reclaiming your sense of self. Let's start by actually understanding what happens in your brain the neurology of toxic love. If you've ever noticed, even after breaking up from a toxic person, your mind keeps replaying those memories, that's because your brain has been rewired through something called trauma bonding. Trauma bonding is something that people do overlook in a big way. I just wish people understood this. It's it's actually a cycle of dopamine and cortisol spikes in your brain, so your brain is releasing some feel-good chemicals during the love bombing, and love bombing with a toxic individual is absolutely brilliant, because feel like you've found the one, and it feels so good to be true and is everything you've ever wanted. But when the manipulation and the rejection and the devaluation and the discard happens and there's all these things like they're lying, they're gaslighting, they're doing all those things, there's obviously going to be stress hormones flooding your system. It's very normal, but this constant on off, on off creates an addiction to the relationship itself, making it harder to leave, even when you know it's unhealthy. Now, the key thing here is your brain is not addicted to the person. It's actually addicted to the cycle, and this is really important, because a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to leave this relationship and then I'm going to meet someone else and it'll be okay, and it takes us till we get into our 40s or 50s to actually realise we're repeating the cycle, and that's because our brain is addicted to the cycle, not to the individual. But the key here, again, is that cycles can be broken. How do we do this, though? We do need to understand our nervous system and learn to retrain our nervous system and then start looking at our brain, the way our brain functions, and start regulating that and helping our brain learn how to be in healthy relationships. And the first start is really about regulating your body before you can really look at your mind and your emotions. So how do we regulate our nervous system after a toxic relationship or a breakup?

Speaker 1: 3:44

Your nervous system has two main states your survival mode, which is your sympathetic nervous system, and you activate that when your body feels like it's on edge. It's hypervigilant, it's emotionally drained, so you go into fight, flight or shutdown mode. Basically, you can go into freeze mode as well, and that's your survival. And people have stayed in survival mode for years sometimes, especially if they've grown up in an environment where they were in survival mode, and they just haven't been able to break that cycle. Even though they might have done a lot of therapy in terms of talk therapy, they haven't been able to break that cycle. Even though they might have done a lot of therapy in terms of talk therapy, they haven't been able to break that cycle because of the biology behind it.

Speaker 1: 4:30

The second nervous system state is the healing mode. It's the parasympathetic nervous system and you can activate that as well. This is a state where your body starts to repair, calm down and rebuild. It's where you start to heal and you can go into thrive mode from here. Okay, that's why some people stay in survival mode for years but they don't actually manage to get into thrive mode. But there's so many different ways that you can shift out of survival mode and you can train your brain and train your nervous system to calm down when it does get into survival mode.

Speaker 1: 5:11

We have to help our body get back into healing mode. Some of those things can be like breath work, where you heal, inhale sorry for five seconds. Like we can do it together now. Inhale for five for five seconds. Like we can do it together now. Inhale for five, hold for five and exhale for seven. If you exhale longer than you've held in, it's better for your nervous system because it tells your nervous system that you're safe now. So you can try that for one minute whenever you feel emotionally overwhelmed and over time you'll retrain your body to feel safe without needing external validation. Now I do have a program called Calm. It's 21 days. It can help you reset yourself over a 21 day period. You can have a look in the resources section if that is something that you want to do.

Speaker 1: 6:11

The third thing we need to do is rewire our thoughts and break that emotional addiction. So now, let's say we've calmed the body, we need to start looking at our emotions next. The reason why we need to look at our emotions next is because we're going to carry on ruminating as a protection mechanism to avoid feeling the emotions, because one of the key things that happens in toxic relationship is essentially living in fear. We're literally being controlled through fear fear of loss, fear of not being able to survive, fear of loss of love, fear of loss of validation. There's so much fear. That is the main way that they control, have power and control over people is through creating fear in them, and our body then starts to react. That's our nervous system. Our body is on high alert. Once you've calmed your nervous system down, we then need to look at the fear that's inherently been programmed into us. Now this is really important Any kind of like judgmental thoughts or feelings.

Speaker 1: 7:28

They've all really been learned honestly. So one of the things that you will find after being in a toxic relationship is that you have learned to really dislike this person as well as love them. Okay, you think you love them, but you also dislike them. You might even go as far as hating them towards the end, because your nervous system is scared to be around them. It's understandable that you will hate some of the things that they do to you, the intense fear they've created, because it feels like there's no way out of this whole thing, because if you could just leave, they would destroy you, the amount that goes into these relationships. Well, we've learned to not like this person. It's inevitable. You're not going to like this person because of the way that they've treated you.

Speaker 1: 8:22

We might have grown up in an environment where we've been taught to dislike what we should think. It's the human condition. Being around a narcissist is really truly, from a spiritual perspective, learning how to transcend all these learned thoughts and conditions and programs. And what we have to do first is become aware of how we feel. We have to start becoming aware of our feelings and to do this honestly, without any shame. Yeah, I feel fear. I feel afraid and we need to do it in a non-judgmental way. And unfortunately, we've been so judged, we've been so devalued that everything we feel, we feel as if there's something wrong with us, but I want you to really think about this.

Speaker 1: 9:20

The feelings that you feel are not who you are. You're inherently a very good human being, but these feelings have been generated and created within you because of these experiences. You might feel something because of the experience that you've been put through, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person. So you have to feel the feeling and become aware of it without judgment before we can heal. We have to see the problem before we can heal it. And it's only then we can let go and become free to be who you really are, to feel better, which allows you to have a greater self-realization of who you really are.

Speaker 1: 10:12

And the only reason to observe and recognize these feelings that might not be good, like you might hate on this person, you might wish them ill is so that you can let it go, to surrender that feeling. It's not about analysing it and creating a meaning around it and thinking that, oh my gosh, I'm a bad person. That just means that you're holding on to that feeling even more and you're making it even bigger than it was originally. But having resistance towards feeling means that and those feelings will keep being in your amygdala, which is the part of the brain that holds all the trauma and you won't be able to let that conditioning go because you'd be conditioned to feel that, okay, so it's not really you. So holding on or resisting feeling in the first place means that we're programmed to struggle. We're programmed to feel these bad feelings and have all these stories, but we've got a resistance or fear of feeling that because of the illusion that they've created about who you are.

Speaker 1: 11:25

And what we've got to do is really be honest with ourselves. You're not the same person you were when you were one year old. Really be honest with ourself. You're not the same person you were when you were one year old. You're not the same person that you were when you were 10 years old. Just because this toxic individual labeled you in certain ways doesn't mean it's true. It just means that you might believe it's true right now, for you, at the moment. But you can let that go and evolve and grow.

Speaker 1: 11:52

Once you've done the work around healing the emotional pain, then you can rewire your thoughts and really break that emotional addiction, because toxic relationships really hijack your perception gaslighting, blame shifting, manipulation it's all distorting how you see yourself, your identity, and your brain starts forming negative neural pathways, patterns of thinking that reinforce your self-doubt and your unworthiness. But thoughts are just like circuits in a brain and circuits can be rewired. So neuroscience is helping us understand cognitively that we can reframe anything. And we can do this by actually focusing on what is the evidence, what is the truth. Instead of feeling fear of like failure, for instance, you start looking at oh, I showed up, I tried and I achieved more than I knew yesterday. So you're starting to rebuild that growth mindset, which goes against what the narcissist being around the narcissist is all about.

Speaker 1: 13:11

And then you can really stop those cravings of being around someone who hurts you. You might be at the moment asking why do I still miss them, even though they treat me badly? And the answer lies in your neurotransmitters. Things like dopamine withdrawal. You're used to those constant highs and lows and your brain craves another hit of excitement, even if the excitement is toxic, because it kind of feels like you're alive again. And the trick to replace that craving is actually starting to develop healthier brain habits like daily dopamine detox plan. Go outside, get 10 minutes of sunlight it it boosts serotonin, it stabilizes mood. Go for a walk in the afternoon. Cut off social media two hours before bed. Stop stalking their profile, because sometimes stalking the profile gives us more hits. So what you want to do is create new habits within your brain, and if that is something you want to do and you want to go through this whole process of helping your body and then releasing all the trauma and then creating a new mindset and creating a new identity, please do book in a one-to-one with me. You can apply for that and we can see if you're the right fit for the Heal to Thrive program, because that is pretty much what we do in there and part of that is reclaiming your identity.

Speaker 1: 14:53

A toxic relationship often forces you to shrink yourself to be lovable for them, but healing is all about expansion. It's looking at who was I before them, what parts of me did I neglect in this relationship and what excites me that has nothing to do with them. What is it that I am? Who am I? And your worth isn't based on how someone else treats you. It really isn't. You get a five pound or a five dollar note. That note is irrelevant on how you get treated. It's still the same same value. It doesn't matter how that person that holds it treats it. It's really knowing your own value through how you treat yourself, moving forward, and the fastest way to rebuild confidence is to be your own best friend.

Speaker 1: 15:51

Look, if you actually had someone around all the time that told you you're not good enough, you need to do better, you need to work harder, what would happen eventually? You would stop doing anything because it would just break you down. You would try and prove your worth for a period of time and then you're just going to get tired over time. But what if you had someone outside of you 24-7 that said you know what? I think you're amazing, go for it, you can do this, you can do this, I know you can do it. Well done, you're doing well. And each time, they just loved you and loved you and loved you and believed in you and trusted you that you can do it. I promise you you would fulfill your purpose, you would fulfill your dreams. You would just go for it. You would give it your whole all the time, and that's what we need within ourself is to really truly love yourself.

Speaker 1: 16:51

The other thing I really wanted to talk about is how toxic relationships disrupt your sleep and how you can reset it. It's one of the most overlooked effects of toxic relationships is disruptive sleep. You can fall asleep, but your mind is replaying conversations and you wake up three o'clock in the morning and your heart is racing. You're feeling anxious or you feel exhausted, no matter how much sleep you're getting, because that's your nervous system still in survival mode, and even when you're supposed to be resting, you can't. So that just shows that you need to go back to step one and get your nervous system in the right place, because sleep is controlled by your autonomic nervous system. It's the same system that regulates stress, and when you're in a toxic relationship, your body is often in a state of hypervigilance and your nervous system is on 24-7. A state of hypervigilance and your nervous system is on 24-7, your sympathetic nervous system, your fight and flight mode, is activated, cortisol is high, which is a stress hormone when it should be low at night, and your brain doesn't enter REM sleep, where emotional processing happens, and that's really important. That's why, even after you leave a toxic relationship, you might struggle to sleep for the rest of your life until you actually learn how to calm your nervous system down so your body isn't wired up to expect danger still now that the threat has gone.

Speaker 1: 18:38

Now that the threat has gone. We need to look at maybe creating some sort of ritual to help your brain know it's safe, like doing a small action that signals I am safe now. Like lighting a candle and saying out loud I'm safe. Wrapping yourself in a soft blanket, listening to meditation and doing rhythmic breathing to help your nervous system calm down. Now, your nervous system learns through repetition, because it's learned to be on high alert through repetition as well. And the more you associate bedtime with safety, the easier sleep becomes. So that you can help yourself recover Things like avoiding overthinking late at night.

Speaker 1: 19:19

Don't start listening to anything negative around narcissism just before you go to bed. If you really need to, there's a technique called brain dump. You can just dump everything out on a piece of paper and just tell yourself I'll deal with this at some point. Just get it out of your system and then listen to some meditation or some rain sounds or whatever you like, and then use the light and darkness to help reset your rhythm, your sleep rhythm. So get 10 minutes of natural sunlight within 30 minutes of waking up. That might mean you just sit outside or you sit by the window where you're getting natural light, because that resets your body clock and boosts your morning energy and dim your lights two hours before bed so it can help your brain to start setting up for sleep.

Speaker 1: 20:14

Healing happens in deep sleep, so that's why I'm bringing this up and your rest is sacred. Your healing is happening then. So look in terms of healing is not just about forgetting the past and being strong and moving on. It doesn't work that way when you've been in toxic relationships and don't listen to those people that tell you oh, you just get over it. Yes, they haven't been in a toxic relationship, or they're pretending they've got over it, but they haven't. It's really reclaiming the present moment now. Your nervous system, your mind and your identity they all belong to you now. It doesn't matter what anybody else has done. You take control of your life, moving forward.

Speaker 1: 21:02

If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to breathe, place your hand. I'm worth healing and you are so worth it. You really are and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. Don't hold on to that trauma or those thoughts that niggle or that anxiety that keeps you in survival mode. You can move through it. Let me know if there's anything in particular you would like me to do a podcast on. I really appreciate you people that send me messages to tell me what it is that they're struggling with right now, so I know how I can support you through this, know that you can get through this. You've got this sending you, so no-transcript no-transcript.