Is It a Toxic Relationship or your Cycle-Breaking Soulmate?
Toxic — Or Are You Being Asked to Break a Pattern?
How to Know If Your Relationship Is Draining You or Awakening You
We’ve all heard phrases like “twin flame,” “soulmate,” or “meant to be.” In a world that romanticizes intensity and calls chaos passion, it’s easy to confuse emotional rollercoasters with real, grounded love.
But here’s a deeper truth:
A soulmate connection isn’t always smooth. It’s meant to wake you up.But safety, respect, and repair are non-negotiables. Love doesn’t thrive in chaos — it thrives in conscious growth.
There is a difference between love that asks you to evolve… and dynamics that slowly unravel your sense of self. The line between the two can feel blurry — especially when you’re in the thick of it. So how do you discern what’s real, what’s yours, what’s theirs and what’s not okay?
Let’s break this down together.
Attachment Wounds & the Confusion Between Toxic vs Transformational Love
To understand what’s happening in a relationship — especially one filled with emotional highs and lows — we have to understand attachment. Our attachment system was wired in childhood, based on how safe, seen, soothed, and supported we felt in our early relationships.
Insecure attachment wounds often create:
Fear of abandonment or engulfment
Patterns of anxious pursuit or avoidant shutdown
Emotional overfunctioning or stonewalling
An internalized belief that love must be earned, chased, or controlled
When two people with unhealed attachment wounds come together, they often mirror and activate each other’s unmet childhood needs — leading to a push-pull, hot-cold, emotionally dysregulated dynamic. This is often where toxic patterns begin.
On the other hand, when two people are willing to do the inner work — not just react from their wounds, but meet each other in healing — something powerful happens: They co-create secure attachment.
It is important for me to name right away a few truths: fighting is normal. You are not in a toxic relationship if you fight. However, our society is not taught and is not resourced with the adequate knowledge of how to fight and how to honor their partners. With the right tools and understanding of healthy relational disagreement, many toxic patterns can transform and transmute into cycle-breaking freedom.
What Secure Attachment Actually Feels Like:
Secure love isn’t bland or boring. It’s rooted. Spacious. Challenging in ways that foster growth, but never harmful. It looks like:
Emotional availability
Honoring boundaries (yours and theirs)
Speaking your truth and being met with curiosity
Experiencing conflict with repair
Feeling like you don’t have to perform to be loved
A healthy, soul-expanding relationship allows your inner child to feel safe enough to rest, to stop seeking, proving, or running. Secure love is not passive — it’s an active choice to return to presence, again and again.
So yes, a soulmate relationship might trigger your fears — but it also becomes the safe container to heal those fears, not perpetuate them. This is the healthy masculine container. How do you co-create a safe space by each partner naming what their past, present and future selves need in loving relationships in order to feel deeply held in their feminine expression of emotions? Both individuals need a safe space to express.
Secure, healthy, cycle-breaking soulmate love will illuminate your deepest fears but give you the safety to let them move up and out of your system with presence, care, and nonjudgment.
How to Know If You're in a Pattern-Breaking Relationship or a Toxic One
Let’s get practical —
Signs You’re in a Conscious, Secure-Building Relationship:
You're triggered, but you both have tools to name and tend to it
You feel emotionally safe — even when things get hard
Boundaries are welcomed, not punished
There’s a desire to know yourselves deeper and grow as individuals and as partners
The relationship helps you come home to yourself — not lose yourself
There’s safety and encouragement in being vulnerable (even when it’s hard)
Your fears and wounds are mirrored with love, not weaponized – theres a desire to understand your deepest aspects of self
Both partners are willing to grow, repair, and own their part – responsibility, responsibility, responsibility
You feel challenged… but also deeply supported
Trigger moments or moments that bring up discomfort inside, lead to healing, new understanding, and deeper embrace
There is a commitment to initiating on both sides of the partnership
Signs the Relationship May Be Toxic or Rooted in Unhealed Insecurity:
Your nervous system is in chronic fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
Your needs are dismissed or used against you
Manipulation, power struggles, or gaslighting are regular
You constantly feel like you’re “not enough” or “too much”
There's no repair, only rupture after rupture
Your voice and needs are constantly dismissed or invalidated
You feel consistently unsafe — emotionally or physically
There is lack of permission for emotional expression
Repair doesn’t happen — conflict cycles just repeat
You feel smaller, like your individuality is disappearing, instead of expanding
There is a lack of willingness to seek to understand or get curious with your experience
Responsibility is one sided and apologizing tends to happen one-sidedly to create harmony
In the Fog of “Not Knowing” — Come Back to Your Body
"Not every relationship that triggers your fears is toxic.
Not every relationship that challenges you is wrong.
But some are unsafe, unhealthy, and draining your life force."When you’re unsure, check in:
BODY CHECK IN
What does my body feel around this person — expanded or constricted?
INDIVIDUALITY CHECK IN
Do I feel more like myself with them… or less?
FEARS CHECK IN
Are my inner child wounds being activated — or held with care — or both?
RECIPROCITY CHECK IN
Does this person meet me in communication, repair, and growth?
Secure attachment isn’t created by chance. It is co-created through safety, presence, and emotional responsibility — again and again.
Journal Prompts to Support Clarity:
Where do I feel like I’m shrinking in this relationship?
What patterns from my childhood do I see playing out?
What would a securely-attached relationship feel like in my body?
Am I chasing validation or feeling safe to be seen?
Do I trust this connection to hold me when things get hard?
Is there reciprocity in our connection?
Is this connection helping me evolve into my truest self?
If not, where am I losing myself in this relationship?
A Final Reminder
Let This Be Your Permission Slip: You don’t have to label everything — but you do get to choose what’s aligned for your nervous system, your heart, and your future.
The relationships that mirror our deepest fears can also be the ones that offer us our greatest freedom — if the container is safe. You are not here to stay stuck in loops. You are not here to confuse survival with love. You are not here to make yourself miserable in order to “heal,” love or be loved.
You’re here to thrive in love — and to receive a love that honors all of you. A soulmate doesn’t complete you. They reflect you.
And if the reflection is filled with fear, reactivity, and chaos — it may not be love. It may be an unhealed wound playing out in real time.
But if you feel a mutual commitment to presence, softness, truth-telling, and repair — you might just be standing inside a healing container for secure love to finally bloom.
You don’t have to get stuck in loops. You don’t have to earn love. You get to be met — securely, wholly, and deeply.
Need Help Telling the Difference?
If you’re wondering whether you’re in a relationship that can evolve or one that’s no longer aligned, I’m here to help. Ready to break toxic cycles and build a love that’s safe, passionate, and true? If you’re in a relationship and unsure whether the challenges you’re facing are a sign to walk away — or an invitation to heal and grow together — let’s explore it, together.
🌀 Book your free 30-minute Relationship Rediscovery Session
Let’s clarify your next step — rooted in self-trust, nervous system safety, and secure attachment.
❤️ My Couples Relationship Audit Program For partners ready to break old attachment cycles and build lasting intimacy, clarity, and emotional safety within the co-created container of sacred partnership.
⏰ Consider inquiring about a private couples retreat to go all-in on your secure attachment building in a 1:1 container with me!
🎥 Watch the Video about The Relationship Audit’s Frequently Asked Questions
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