The Truth I Needed to Hear to Finally Let Go
Why ending trauma bonds is the key to healing from heartbreak
Heartbreak can feel like an emotional storm, leaving you exhausted, confused, and questioning your sense of worth.
Recently, I’ve been navigating challenges of toxic & unhealthy connections, meeting unaligned men who rather ghost than communicate effectively, and hopping on & off emotional hamster wheels with men from my past that leave me with more questions & confusion than answers + closure.
So… what are the lessons to learn throughout this uncomfortable ass process?
I’m learning that true healing comes from not chasing someone else or forcing answers. It shows up when you turn your focus inward. Reclaiming your energy after heartbreak is one of the most empowering steps to take. And it’s the reason why ending trauma bonds is key to heal from heartbreak. When you protect your emotional space and prioritize you instead, you open the door to personal growth, stronger boundaries, and healthier future relationships.
Why Protecting Your Emotional Energy is Crucial
Every interaction, message, or lingering thought about someone carries energy. When you invest in people who are emotionally unavailable, avoidant, even abusive or constantly disregard your boundaries, you end up draining your most valuable resource… that’s you, sis.
Protecting your emotional energy means being mindful of who you allow into your life, what behaviors you tolerate, and how much of yourself you decide to give away. Learning to manage this is such a necessity when it comes to emotional well-being and personal development. I’ve found that setting clear boundaries and standing on them allows me to conserve my energy and redirect it to areas that bring me growth and clarity, like tapping back into my creativity or pulling some tarot cards. Stop chasing what drains or confuses you, beloved. You don’t need to negotiate with turmoil & trauma.
The Importance of Self-Reflection for Emotional Clarity
Let me break it down the way your soul needs to hear it: there’s a different kind of power that comes from sitting with yourself. No distractions or noise. Self-reflection is how you get honest about what you want, what you’ve been tolerating, and what your heart is actually asking for.
Journaling, meditation, my daily tarot pulls, listening to music, blogging & recording on my podcast, has allowed me to not only tap back into the creative being I’ve always been. But, it’s also shown me the patterns I didn’t even realize I was repeating. Expressing myself has helped me see the truth for what it really is. I can see what no longer serves me, what I’ve outgrown, what cycles I’m repeating and what I need to release. This is part of one of my favorite forms of therapy, helping move through old confusion and step into emotional clarity. That’s the thing about reflection: it doesn’t give answers, it reveals truths you’ve been ready for.
If you’re ready to have a similar conversation with yourself, try this exercise. Let the questions land and move something in you. Ask yourself:
- What am I finally ready to stop waiting for?
- What part of me is ready to heal and move forward?
- What truth about a situation or person am I now willing to see clearly?
- What painful cycle am I ready to release for good?
- What truth or clarity is trying to shine through in my life right now?
- What attachment or habit am I breaking that once held me back?
Take your time with these questions, sis. Remember that asking yourself these questions isn’t about blaming yourself or rewriting the past. These questions help awaken your awareness and show you how to break patterns that held you back. Every experience, even the painful ones, turn into wisdom when you’re willing to sit with the discomfort. I’m learning to sit side-by-side with my own answers to these same questions without shame, without getting the closure I’ve hoped for, and without shrinking myself for anyone else ever again. This moment is where emotional freedom begins.
Finding Happiness Within Yourself
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned on my healing journey is that happiness doesn’t come from someone else. The moment you stop outsourcing your happiness is when life changes. Finding fulfillment within yourself isn’t just reserved for cute self-care chats or going to the nail salon (while those are great and necessary, the inner work required is deeper than that). I’m talking about real emotional healing.
Sometimes happiness looks like creativity flowing through you again. I put my podcast, Watch Us Thrive, on a temporary pause back in February 2025 because I needed to take a step back and reflect. I had to sit with the difficult situations that kept creeping up in my life and why they kept reappearing. I’m slowly getting back to my routine and will eventually bring back my show, which is one piece of happiness I cannot wait to get back to. Pour your energy into those creative outlets that keep showing up, sis. I read this quote I recently that really stuck with me:
If your intuition speaks twice, act on it the third time.
And that’s exactly what I’m doing… getting back to making me happy for me.
Sometimes happiness means listening to that playlist that hits your Spirit just right, writing your truth in a blog post, meditating in silence, or showing up for those small daily rituals that remind you you’re here for a reason. These moments may seem simple, but I promise they rebuild you back to self.
When you focus on self-fulfillment, you stop chasing after toxic connections that drain you. You begin attracting people who match your energy, and not because you needthem to fill a void, but because you already feel whole. That’s the shift.
True empowerment comes from realizing you’re already complete. Your happiness, peace & joy belong to you. And sis, when you finally stop looking for someone else to hand you what you can give yourself? Life starts to align in ways you didn’t even know were possible.
How the Truth Helps You Move Forward
Trying to control outcomes in relationships leads to frustration, disappointment, and eventually heartbreak. I say this speaking from experience. I did a self-reading last night and had so many epiphanies over a recent toxic connection that I was struggling to let go of. The Universe told me about myself in the most toughest-love way possible. I learned that:
- I make a connection with a man my identity. I merge, fuse and take the spiritual chemistry I feel with someone and turn it into a spiritual contract.
- I fall in love with potential and connection, not reality.
- My heart moves fast, but the relationship itself doesn’t. It becomes a stop & go, making me feel stuck and confused while they remain inconsistent. This is where trauma bonds are formed & where the fantasy keeps going (but the relationship doesn’t).
- I emotionally ruminate in relationships. I replay the good moments, fantasize and fall in love with the reflection of what I wished he could be. I sit “in the pool” of what happened instead of letting the water move downstream.
- I allow myself to get dimmed in unhealthy dynamics. I bend, shrink and self-sacrifice.
- I don’t just attract emotionally unavailable men: I remain loyal to them even after they hurt me.
- I think I need to fix the relationship alone and shut down my inner guidance to the point where I lose myself.
- My pattern is indecision and overthinking. I try to choose between what I feel and what I know.
- And finally, the root core wound:
- Abandonment. Rejection. Inner childhood wounds.
These are the core beliefs and wounds that need constant + consistent healing. This pattern didn’t develop overnight. It’s from childhood, my earliest love models and the lack of emotional presence I experienced. These wounds have been leading the way in every one of my romantic relationships for years…
You wanna talk about a loving bitch slap?
Yeah, I got clocked by The Universe, lol. But in all seriousness, there were so many wounds that showed up. I needed to see, hear and sit with my reality, even with how uncomfortable it made me feel. This is where radical acceptance comes into play.
As I sat with all of this heaviness… every pattern, truth, and uncomfortable realization, something clicked. All of these behaviors I keep circling back to weren’t random. They weren’t character flaws or me being dramatic. They all traced back to how I’ve felt about myself that I’ve been carrying for years:
That deep belief that I’m on the outside. The one who’s left. I’m the one who doesn’t get chosen. Love is something I have to earn, fight for, and prove myself worthy of because I’ll never be good enough.
Yikes.
These feelings are the reason why I held on too tightly and over-gave in mismatched dynamics. I tolerated inconsistency and called it potential. Clung to men who couldn’t (and also wouldn’t) meet me where I needed them to meet me. Used my body as a way to keep a man in my life because that’s all I thought I was good for. I didn’t stay with these men because they were special or because I thought one of them was my soulmate, but because my inner child was terrified of being left again.
Sitting in that realization was exactly I needed to start making a change. Once I read the message my last connection said to me, it was the reality check I needed in order to pull me out of the toxic cycle I was starting to repeat. He said:
“See, you know what? Reading all of this…girl, fuck you.”
There he was. That was the man who was reappearing in my energy. He wasn’t thesweet, gentle, kind, romantic, lustful man I once fell in love with. He was hiding behind a mask once again. This is who he is at his core. He was hiding this version of himself from me in our relationship the first time around.
Once I finally named this wound, I stopped letting it silently control my whole heart. I thumbs up’d his message and responded with:
“Take care of yourself.”
I haven’t heard from him since.
I share my truth and vulnerability so that you too can stop confusing survival patterns for love. Stop abandoning yourself just to avoid being abandoned by someone else. Quit staying in toxic dynamics and one-sided relationships and situationships because you have a rejection wound and hate being alone. It’s time to do the inner work needed to heal, like forreal forreal, sis.
And trust me, that awareness, as heavy as it is, is actually your doorway forward to freedom. Because now the next chapter is about something so much bigger: how to break these patterns, heal those core wounds, and choose yourself in a way you never have before.
To be continued…