You’re Not Being Dramatic — You’re Healing: What Toxic Love Does to Your Brain

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Navigating the aftermath of a toxic relationship can leave you feeling deeply misunderstood — especially by those closest to you. How do you explain that you're not being dramatic, not stuck in the past, but genuinely healing from neurobiological and soul-level wounds?

In this episode, we unpack the science of trauma healing using powerful, practical analogies you can share with family or friends who don't understand your journey.
💔 Your brain after relationship trauma is like a broken bone — it needs care, rest, and the right support to heal.
🐾 Your nervous system? It's like a traumatized animal, frozen in fear, needing time and safety before it can trust again.

We break down how trauma physically reshapes your brain — overactivating the amygdala (fight/flight), shrinking the hippocampus (memory), and disrupting the prefrontal cortex (decision-making). This explains why you might feel foggy, indecisive, or trapped in rumination — even when you know better.

Toxic love creates trauma bonds that operate like addiction — training your brain to confuse chaos with connection. Breaking free isn’t about willpower; it requires intentional, somatic healing: breathwork, movement, nervous system regulation, and trauma-informed therapy.

If you’re supporting someone on this path, know this: your presence matters more than your advice. Healing happens through feeling, not rehashing. It's not about returning to who they were — it's about helping them become who they were always meant to be.

Healing isn’t selfish — it’s sacred. You’re not broken. You adapted to survive. Now it’s time to reclaim your power.

Share this episode with someone who needs to understand your healing.
 💌 Or use these frameworks to finally explain your journey — in a way that actually makes sense.

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Healing After Trauma
• 8:05 The Broken Bone Analogy
• 12:54 Traumatized Animal Brain Response
• 16:13 Trauma Reshapes Your Brain
• 21:26 Healing Your Nervous System
• 24:49 Why You Can't Think Your Way Out
• 28:50 Addiction to Trauma & Rumination
• 33:01 Moving From Victim to Visionary

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back. If you've ever tried to explain your healing journey to someone and they just don't get it, this is the episode for you. Whether it's a parent, partner, friend, explaining why you're not the same person can feel frustrating or why you're still going over the same thing over and over again. But here's the truth You're not crazy, you're not dramatic, you're not broken. The main thing we've got to understand is you're healing. So maybe you want to pass this podcast onto somebody or take elements of this that you really understand and try and explain what's really happened.

Speaker 1: 0:40

One main way of actually explaining what's happened in a practical way is the broken bone analogy. Imagine you've broken your bone. No one in their right mind would say to you you need to walk tomorrow without a cast or any rest. Or just let's pretend it's not happened or any rest, or just let's pretend it's not happened. We would actually go get it x-rayed and we would get a cast, we would get physical therapy, we would rest, we would probably maybe even have crutches for a period of time, and trauma is exactly the same. It's an emotional wound, but it's literally. You've got broken bones in lots of different places. It's depending on how long you've been in the relationship and the truth of the matter is there's emotional wounds that trigger your nervous system. This is science. So the way to explain this to somebody would be ask them to go on YouTube and have a look at a traumatized animal like a dog, a traumatized cat or a dog, and just see how they react.

Speaker 1: 1:58

What happens is, if they're traumatized is even if you're trying to help them, they're going to try and attack you, their nervous system, the reptilian part of the brain. You can see that in action in an animal more clearly. Now we have to remember, even though we're human beings and we've got this amazing brain, we actually started off from that same animal brain. So we've got that animal brain in us. It's called the reptilian brain. So what happens if you see this traumatized cat or dog? They literally, if someone's trying to love them or be nice to them and they're attacking them, they're not feeling safe. That's basically what happens when we have trauma. We start to isolate ourselves, we start to be anxious around people. We don't feel safe like we used to. We have more fear. You might be able to hide it, to still go to work and things like that, but you're really struggling. You're fighting against this natural thing of just wanting to close off and shut down every single day.

Speaker 1: 3:11

So if we look at this whole broken bone analogy, if you've got this emotional wound, you can't expect to just get up and pretend like nothing happened. You need to take some time. Toxic relationships the brain responds just like the body responds after an injury, and it enters that survival mode, basically the same thing as when you're a cat or a dog and you traumatize. So basically the trauma reshapes how the brain works. So you're more in your amygdala, which is the fight-flight center, where you're becoming more hyper-alert. That means you're like that cat or dog. You know you're scared, basically, and it's understandable to be scared scared given everything you've been through.

Speaker 1: 4:08

This isn't something you can just override. It's something you have to feel just like a cat or a dog. We need to climatize and know we feel safe. Slowly. You can't. It's just too much. It's too much to just go from being like abused as a dog to then being okay the next day. It doesn't work that way. It's not like you can just know everything's okay and then we have to allow that part of the brain to feel safe and that part of the brain you can't talk to, just like you can't talk to a cat and dog. It's much more about having a soothing tone, breathing, going in slowly, being loving, hugging, touching. It's that kind of part of the brain we need to feel safe physically. Yeah, it's about it's going to take time to to know that we're safe. So part of the the way to heal is to help your nervous system reset. Yeah, so there's certain things that you can do as well and if you're listening and you're a parent, you want to encourage your child or your friend, whoever it is, to actually connect back with nature, to have moments where they can feel safe and breathe, to go in gently, give them a hug, you know, and if they don't want a hug, maybe just hold their hand, know that they're safe and tell them everything's going to be okay, cry with them, cry Sometimes we don't have the words to make things okay, but it just like being with someone, not necessarily having to say anything, but just being in their space and then slowly, slowly, you feel safe.

Speaker 1: 6:15

The second thing that happens in a toxic when you've been in a toxic relationship is there's a lot of emotional pain but we'll look at that as well that there's so much more in the amygdala. So there's a lot of emotional pain but we'll look at that as well that there's so much more in the amygdala, so this. But you might feel numb because you've got to shut off from all the emotion. So a lot of the time we're talking, talking, talking about the situation and it's addictive and I'll come to that as well. But the other part of the brain that gets impacted is the hippocampus. It can shrink. That's the part of the brain where we learn from things and it's also our short-term memory, so we might not remember things like we used to and we can feel frustrated that we don't remember things. And we can also find it hard to learn from the experience and move from it. And the reason why we can't just learn from the experience and move on is because we have to feel the pain, so that's in the amygdala, so the person has to feel the pain before it can be passed on to the hippocampus, which means that we learn from the experience so that we can then move forward, so that if you're trying to explain it to someone, you have to say, look, it's going to take time because it's like a broken bone to heal and the way we heal it is and the way we put a cast on it is.

Speaker 1: 7:47

We have to allow ourself time to go still. So, just like you don't move the leg, you can't do stuff. You need time to feel again, to feel the pain, but in short bursts. You can't do it all in one. So you might need some painkillers, and those painkillers might be you need to take some rest, you need to go into walk with nature, you need to do some breath work, you need to do some somatic work. You might need, basically, trauma healing. Yeah, you need trauma healing to release the pain.

Speaker 1: 8:34

So, because you need to go still and the reason why you need to still yourself is because you need to find yourself again and you're not going to find yourself by going outward and doing stuff and keeping yourself busy and because that's just a way of avoiding the pain you have to still yourself so that you can find yourself within yourself, because the truth of the matter is you would lose yourself because you had to just please this other person. Everything was always about the other person and you don't know how to still yourself anymore. So let's just stick with the emotional stick, with the broken leg analogy. You have to go inward, find yourself again, allow yourself the time and space to know who am I, to connect with myself, and from there you can then feel the emotions and you can pass on the emotions to the hippocampus. So it's like parcel parcel in the brain and from there we basically can connect back to the prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of the brain and the decision part of the brain and that goes offline after stress. So you might find that you can't make decisions like you used to and someone might say things like you're different now.

Speaker 1: 10:02

Why are you so sensitive? Well, it's because your nervous system is healing, from years maybe of being in survival mode. So remember that traumatized cat or dog. It's in survival mode for so long and it needs some time to regulate its nervous system. And the way you regulate your nervous system is through doing calming things, that things that help you nervous system calm down. Not busying yourself, not doing stuff. Try not to talk about it over and over again, but actually having some time to just connect back to you.

Speaker 1: 10:42

Now, the other way of really understanding the emotional analogy we've all got phones these days. Right, our brain is like a phone running on outdated software. Have you ever like had you haven't updated the software on your phone and it starts getting glitchy. It's really full of bugs. Healing is like you have to downgrade, download the upgrade, yeah, and, and what that means is you've got to have some time out to upgrade and that is, and you have to go offline for a bit. Yeah, have you ever had to upload your phone for a little while? It takes time and the whole system has to reboot. That's literally what happens when you see a traumatised animal. It needs some time for the whole system to reboot, for it to feel safe again. Your old identity was based on survival, people pleasing, staying small, staying safe, being on high alert.

Speaker 1: 11:51

Healing is about updating your system to be able to thrive, to speak your truth, to live from alignment and not fear. Basically, you've lived in fear so much that you don't know how to live anymore. So you need time to heal and, from a spiritual perspective, your soul is reclaiming its power again, when you're not just healing the trauma. Okay. So from a spiritual perspective, you're actually reclaiming your soul, your power, your authority, and what that means is you have to heal your relationship with power. Sometimes it might be that you have to break ancestral patterns. You have to rewrite maybe money wounds. You have to heal self-worth imprints that might be passed down from generations or from the relationship itself. The key here is healing isn't selfish, it's actually sacred, it's divine. You're not charging or changing your life. You're changing your ability to connect with God, the creator, infinite intelligence, your intuition, your guidance system, whatever you believe in, and you're here to become who you were meant to always be, and this experience is, for that reason, is for an upgrade.

Speaker 1: 13:25

Now, sometimes the person just goes into shutdown mode and doesn't get the upgrade. They have that broken leg and they isolate themselves and they don't get a cast, they don't get their crutches, they don't do the healing work and they don't stop. Yeah, they're just isolated, living at home trying to do their own thing. You do need some help. Okay, there is no way you can just get on with and heal from trauma. It can live with you forever unless you get some proper trauma healing.

Speaker 1: 14:02

So I would say what you would say to your family is I'm not trying to be distant or difficult, I'm healing right now. I've carried, maybe, patterns that weren't mine for years and I've been programmed differently to what I used to be, and now I'm learning how to show up in ways that feel safe for me, where I can be honest and true and authentic. This isn't about creating a life I want to create. This isn't about creating a life I want to create. I want to heal so that I can show up differently, so I can be different from this experience and not be in survival but maybe have a different legacy. You're allowed to have boundaries and you're allowed to outgrow your old dynamics. You're allowed to be unrecognizable to people who knew the old version of you, the shrinking version of you.

Speaker 1: 14:59

Now, the other thing they might notice is that you've, you might feel like you've given up on your dreams, feels like everything takes up too much energy, like you're just existing, you're not living. That's true, and it's really important to know that. You're not lazy, you're not broken, you're not too emotional. Your nervous system is in shutdown and that's not your fault. So let's go back to the animal part of the brain, right? Let's remember the king of the jungle.

Speaker 1: 15:28

Imagine you're in the jungle and a lion appears. You fight, you flee, but eventually you realize you can't escape and that's when your body goes and does something wild. It goes into shutdown mode. You stop resisting, your system freezes and this is your primitive part of the brain trying to protect you. The reason why that happens, by by the way, is because that primitive part of the brain is trying to pretend that, as a last resort, the lion will think oh yeah, this deer or whatever isn't moving, so I can just go and do something else for a second, and they just sort of don't notice. And then you have a chance of getting up and running, and that happens in the jungle that you can see documentaries and animal documentaries. That happens. So there is a real reason why we go into shutdown mode as human beings and we call this the dorsal vagal shutdown.

Speaker 1: 16:29

It's the third state of the trauma response after fight and flight, and many people, especially women, are living in this state every single day. So your nervous system might be like this for survival for years. You're not in danger anymore, but your body still thinks it is and it can look like extreme fatigue. Everything feels too much Brain fog, hopelessness, thinks it is and it can look like extreme fatigue. Everything feels too much brain fog, hopelessness, feeling like a victim, withdrawal, numbness, outbursts of rage or irritation when you feel trapped, and then you feel guilty about it and then you go back into shutdown. If you feel anger, don't feel bad about it. Okay, because that is a positive thing. You're going from immobilized to mobilized energy. That means that you're moving out of the shutdown mode. So if you find that you feel this rage, don't repress it.

Speaker 1: 17:25

I'm not saying go out and start hitting people or harming others, but find ways to release that, get it out of your system. Do ways of expressing your emotions, your anger, knowing that you're in full right to feel that anger. It's like you're a traumatized animal hiding in a corner, not because you're weak, but because your body never got the signal that it's safe now. And that's the difference between an animal that has just a primitive brain and a human being is that we don't. We have to work our way to know and help our nervous system come out of the shutdown mode. So if you're worried that you've checked out, it's not weak, it's deeply wise. Your soul have said I can't be here fully until it's safe to return. So you waited. It's not dysfunctional, it's a form of divine pause. It's like cocooning.

Speaker 1: 18:25

The goal isn't to push through, it's to gently teach your nervous system to feel safe again through breath, through boundaries, through somatics, through presence, and if you're looking to do that, there's so many different things that you can do. Or if you're listening to this and you're wondering what can I do for somebody else, you want them to connect back to nature, take their time to just even if it's 10 minutes, to do some breath work, to learn some techniques. I've got a calm program. It's really cost effective. You can go through that for 21 days. That will make a huge difference and you use those practices on a daily basis to help your nervous system calm down.

Speaker 1: 19:08

You are not just depressed, you're not just numb, you're not small, you're actually healing. And healing doesn't mean you jump from shutdown to joy. It means you slowly, tenderly, teach your body how to feel safe again. That's the work, that's the magic. And knowing that you will hit anger, you will hit rage, you will hit that feeling and that is a positive sign. Then you can start doing different types of work, like dancing, like, maybe, boxing. You'll find different ways of processing those emotions and here's how you can start to re-regulate your nervous system Tiny movements If you feel like you're so tired, just start stretching, maybe.

Speaker 1: 19:58

Do some yin yoga or slow movement yoga. You might want to do cold, hot therapy, warm shower, cold shower. I don't like that. You might be braver than me. You might want to do humming, singing, chanting. You can start naming the emotion.

Speaker 1: 20:17

I feel shut down, I feel like I want to hide, I feel numb, I feel I don't feel anything, I feel sad, aware of that emotion and in that awareness, you're starting to move out of those feelings and having a sense. Real self-compassion is the most important thing. Okay now the other thing that people do is they keep obsessing over what did I do, what, why did I do it, and they keep talking about. It's this part of the brain where you're going around and around in circles and you're actually. It's called rumination. It's an addiction. It's there because your brain is trying to survive, it's trying to learn from it, but unfortunately you can't learn from it, because the only way you can learn from it is to feel it, becoming aware, self-awareness, and then feeling, and then you pass it on to the hippocampus and then you learn from it. So, unfortunately, when we're just talking about it, it becomes addictive.

Speaker 1: 21:25

Being in a toxic relationship is really like being in a slot machine in Vegas. Every now and again you get a little win, the love bomb, the apology I'm going to change. And we get that little bit of hit of dopamine and it hooks us. And the actual relationship hoovering. We have to explain to people that you know narcissistic, toxic relationships. They're not all bad. They do this hoovering. They pull you back in with affection where you feel like, oh, maybe it's all going to be okay. Then there's devaluation, there's criticism, gaslighting, withholding, then there's discard where they're ghosting, breaking up, emotional abandonment. The cycle repeats and they give you. Every now and again they give you something for your brain, specifically the reward center. It gets a crumb of validation. Every crumb of validation releases dopamine.

Speaker 1: 22:20

Your amygdala gets activated and what happens is our brain, whether we know it or not, whether it's logical or not, is actually addicted to seeking the resolution which never comes. It's like the big win which never comes. So your nervous system can be still in the relationship, even if you aren't. It keeps replaying the story. You vent about how bad they were, not because you want revenge, and you might want revenge, and that's okay. I'm just going to say that out there because obviously the anger is going to come up at some point and I don't want you to make it bad, but because you're also craving validation and you try and make it make sense because your reality was distorted for so long, you feel shame for not leaving sooner. You feel embarrassed for it or fear about what happens next. You might even miss them and then you hate them yourself for that.

Speaker 1: 23:20

This is called the trauma bond. This is what trauma bonds do. They erode self-worth, fragment your identity and teach your brain that chaos is love. We don't know what love is anymore. We've been reprogrammed about what love is, and when someone's self-worth has been destroyed, they're not looking for sympathy. They're just wanting evidence that they're not crazy. They're trying to make sense of something that cannot be made sense of. So you may have spent months, maybe years, being gaslit. So now you talk about it over and over and over again because your nervous system is saying I need someone to witness what I went through. That's why in my work, we don't shame anyone for needing to talk about it. We hold you while you slowly rewire the parts of you that equated pain with love.

Speaker 1: 24:18

What you really need isn't to go over the story. To be honest, it's not really about knowing how awful they are, because you know that. It's about how far from yourself you had to go and how you abandoned yourself over and over again. That's what you need healing. That's the journey back to your worth. You weren't stupid. You were trauma bonded. You weren't addicted to them. You were addicted to the hope that they'd finally love you the way you once did and that it could all be okay. So you want to speak your truth with someone that holds space for you but not keep re-traumatizing you. You don't want to keep talking about the same thing over and over again. You want to feel again. So really, what you need is trauma therapy. You don't want to keep talking about it or thinking about what they did, because that will keep you stuck.

Speaker 1: 25:23

It's time to shift, because healing doesn't come from rehashing the story. It comes from feeling what the story left behind. Let's talk about what to do when your nervous system is addicted to the drama okay, and your soul is begging for peace. It's so common, especially after toxic relations, to ruminate. It's an obsession and you replay every word. Talk about how awful they were. You could basically talk about it to anyone and everything. It's like you don't know what else to talk about. You're not talking for clarity. You're really talking about it for validation because your self-worth was eroded and it's okay, it's human.

Speaker 1: 26:07

You won't find peace by going round and round in circles and, I'll be honest, the person listening is finding it hard to listen to this as well. What you're trying to do is get resolution from a place that has the resolution. There's no completion, there's no closure and unfortunately, our brain needs closure and completion. So it's like staying at the scene of a crash hoping it will reverse itself. It's not going to happen. It's a crash, it's bad.

Speaker 1: 26:37

So the way we have to do the shift is is we have to move away from talking about what they did to feeling what it feels like within you, and that's where the healing is. The body actually remembers, your nervous system holds it all and you won't think your way out of this. You have to feel your way out of being free. That's why the broken leg analogy is so important. You have to stay still to some degree. I'm not saying physically still, I'm saying you have to take the time to feel. You have to slow down everything and actually take some time to feel, every now and again, whatever time you can get. I know you're going to have a busy life, you're dealing with a trauma. You're firefighting still maybe, but you've got to take some time to just breathe. It's really important, otherwise you're never going to get out of this and trauma-informed therapy is really important here.

Speaker 1: 27:37

It's not just about talk therapy. Don't just get talk therapy. This is not about rehashing the story. It's about healing your response to it. Your trauma lives in your body, not in the mind. Tell your listener saying I don't need trauma therapy is like saying I'll just hobble through life with a listeners. Saying I don't need trauma therapy is like saying I'll just hobble through life with a broken leg, I don't need a cast. Yeah, you don't ignore a broken bone. You don't ignore a broken nervous system. Please don't ignore a broken nervous system because your whole life experience is just going to be terrible for the rest of your life. Don't, please, don't Invest in some somatic healing nervous system regulation or my Reclaim your Power program or I've got a Calm program.

Speaker 1: 28:18

Do things to reconnect to your spirit when you're in shutdown. You need to reconnect to that life force. Things like yin, yoga, nature works, qigong, breath work, massage, touch therapy, doing drama therapy, art therapy, dance therapy, nervous system there's so many things in my calm program. We can't force the leg to heal faster than it's going to heal. We can't speed this up, but we can give it the best conditions for healing.

Speaker 1: 28:56

And the other thing we have to shift our identity from we don't want to keep talking about it is we've got to go from victim identity to visionary or victor. Your identity becomes the one who is hurt, and that's really difficult to get into. Healing feels like letting go of who you are. You're much more than what they did to you. You are not the wound. You are the person rising from that wound. Remember that, and it's about you remembering that over and over again and having people around you who tell you look, you know, I know you're hurting at the moment and I believe and I trust in you and I want you to believe and trust in yourself.

Speaker 1: 29:45

So, in essence, if it was my daughter and she had been in a toxic relationship and this is one of my biggest fears, I'll be honest I would understand that. Hey, I know it's not her fault what she's going through now, but the first thing I really want to support her with is just to be around her, just my presence, to be with her and know that she's going to go through lots of different emotions and lots of different things, and it's going to be hard for me to watch her go through that as well. So I might need some support too by watching someone that I really really love going through something so difficult. I would probably take some time for myself as well to heal. I would probably take some time for myself as well to heal, but I would want to spend some time with her, just in her presence, just to be around. We don't have to talk about it. I say Please don't talk about it, because it's not going to be good for you to keep going over it. But I'll hold you while you cry. I will tell you you're going to be okay, I will hold your hand. Let's maybe go and watch something that's funny, let's do some laughter therapy. But if you want to cry, you want to let it all out, I'm here, I will hold you or I will hug you while you do that.

Speaker 1: 31:05

Sometimes I'll sit in silence with her just to be there and just do some every day, every day thing, like go shopping, just to give her some energy to do those things that she feels exhausted doing and just help her in those sort of things, and then say go and get some proper therapy. I would get her someone professional, because even as someone that knows everything there is to do and I help people, I myself would not be healing my own daughter. I would get somebody else to do some trauma healing with her, some nervous system healing for her. I would help her with some breath work and stuff and maybe I'd go to some classes with her, like yin yoga or qigong, or I would encourage her to get those classes. I'd also encourage her to find her talents again. I'd get her to express what she enjoys doing. Do some artwork together. Do encourage her to do it, but not force, but encourage. Just say, oh, do you encourage her to do it, but not force, but encourage. Just say, oh, do you fancy doing that? I wouldn't. I'd do it slowly, like so that she comes. Give her the resources so that when she's ready she's able to find herself again. I would probably go to a comedy club or something. Get her to laugh again. Laughter is really the trauma.

Speaker 1: 32:31

Healing is the most important thing. The most important thing is to really believe and trust that they're going to heal. See them healed not as someone that needs sympathy, but empathy. Empathy is where you believe and trust in them that they can do it. But you're there to acknowledge their emotions. That's empathy. You can acknowledge that. That they must be feeling bad, that's empathy.

Speaker 1: 32:59

But even with the empathy, you feel like I know you're going to get out of this. I know, I trust and believe in you so much, in your spirit, in your soul, that I know you're going to get through this. If you're going through it, I know you're going to get through this. I'm with you all the way You're going to get through this. I trust and believe in you. I know the spirit in you. Remember what you were like when you were a child. You've got that spirit. You've got this. Life can become a real burden when you've been in a toxic relationship and we want you to find your spirit again to enjoy life once more. I'm so grateful for the person that asked me to look at this podcast, because I think I'm sorry I've talked so long, but it is such an amazing question that I really wanted to go through it, and I hope you can share this with someone that you love so that they can understand what you've gone through, sending you so much love Till next time.