Why It’s So Hard to Leave a Narcissistic Relationship | Matt Monday
3 Feb 2025 · 0 min
In this episode Matthew Hussey opens with brief ad reads for Amica Insurance and Regain Couples Therapy before diving into a deep exploration of why leaving a narcissistic or otherwise toxic relationship feels so impossible. He frames the "narcissist" loosely as a maligning, destructive force—whether or not clinically diagnosed—whose influence erodes confidence, finances, mental health, and overall life stability. Hussey outlines the cascade of emotions that follow a break, focusing on guilt (feeling ruthless), grief and longing for the imagined version of the person, and a pervasive sense of finality that mimics death even though the individual is still alive. He describes a circular pattern of indecision where the survivor repeatedly questions whether to re‑establish contact, only to realize that without genuine change the relationship would remain unsatisfying. To break this loop, he uses a house‑fire analogy, urging listeners to view the act of leaving as a necessary rescue rather than a betrayal. The episode concludes with a promotion for Hussey’s upcoming two‑day in‑person coaching retreat in Miami, inviting listeners to attend for deeper work on confidence, emotional management, and life‑design.
Questions this episode answers
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There is some effect that happens that is so strange and so difficult and confusing that it can make the pain of losing someone something that feels like it's never going to end. in my book, love life, which came out last year, I wrote an entire chapter. What chapter was it? Chapter 12. It was called how to leave when you can't seem to leave. What it was really about was how to leave a narcissist. I didn't use the word narcissist in the title because I didn't want to. You know, we live in a world today where narcissism is quite a divisive thing. A lot of people accuse content creators of throwing around the word with situations and people where it's not warranted. Now my hope is that many people read that chapter and then left someone that they needed to leave as a result. But I know that committing to the decision to leave and holding to that decision are two very different things. Once we have left someone, we still have an enormous amount of work ahead of us in dealing with the emotions that will inevitably arise, emotions that threaten to make us go back to the source of our pain. For some, moving on from a situation like this can take years. For others, it can feel like they're not going to get any relief until the day someone dies, or we do. So before we get into this and I give you my thoughts on why it is so difficult to move on from these situations and what you can do about it, it probably makes sense to loosely define the kind of person I'm talking about here. Now, I'm not going to give a clinical definition of a narcissist because for the purposes of this video, it's not actually necessary. I want you to think about this person, whether they are diagnosable as a narcissist or not, as someone who has been a maligning force in your life, someone whose behavior is either intentionally malignant or the effect of the way they operate. is just poison for our lives. We're constantly gaslit with this person. We are constantly made to feel like we're crazy. It's disorienting. We lose our confidence around them. And maybe beyond just losing our confidence, this person is an extraordinarily destructive force in our life in general, either for our relationships, for our lifestyle, for our finances, for our mental health in general. And whether or not they intend to do all of this damage or doing all of this damage is just a byproduct of the way that they are. The result is the same. You cannot hope to heal, to come home to yourself, or to realize your true potential as long as this person is in your life. When we break away from someone like this, which is a huge and courageous thing to do, there are all sorts of instincts over time, especially as time passes, to let someone back in. We may consider reuniting with them romantically and beginning a whole new relationship with them. But even when that's not possible, when someone has betrayed us so badly, hurt us so badly, done so much irreversible damage that we couldn't possibly let them back in romantically, there's still an instinct to connect with them on some level, whether it's picking up their calls, responding to their text messages, inviting them to key occasions, or just supporting them emotionally when it seems like they need it. There are so many people who come out of long-term marriages that span decades that feel this exact thing. Even if they know deep down they shouldn't have contact with someone, it still feels alien and strange not to. And this isn't just true of romantic situations. We could be talking about a parent that we have had to distance ourself from, a best friend or an ex-best friend, even an adult child, dare I say we could be talking about. There are also all sorts of relationships in our life where we have to decide enough is enough, I can't have this person in my life anymore. But when we think we've done the hardest thing by breaking away from them, we come to realize that there are so many difficult moments coming where we have to question whether we're doing the right thing by not having any communication with this person. We move someone to the outer perimeter of our lives initially out of a desire to protect ourselves, but then we have to decide a thousand times whether someone is able to reach us from that outer perimeter or whether they're no longer allowed to have contact with our world. What this means is that even after the great fractures of our relational life occur, there are still these difficult emotions lying in wait for us in the future. So let's talk about what those emotions are. One of them is guilt. We feel guilt. We may have been wronged a thousand times by this person in seemingly unforgivable ways, and yet when we cut off communication with them, many of us feel guilt. We feel like we've been ruthless in saying, I'm not only going to not be with you or have you in my life, I'm not going to communicate with you at all. And we may have decided that for good reason, but we feel guilt. We feel like a ruthless person. And sometimes that idea is validated by the people closest to us. Relatives. In some cases, it can be your own children who are saying, you know, this is a bit much. You're not having any communication with this person. And this wounds us precisely because on the surface at least, it goes against all of our normal, natural, loving instincts. And unlike certain wounds that heal, the more time that passes, the more liable some of us are to feel an increase in this guilt. Because as we start to feel better, when what started as these open wounds callous into scars that no longer demand our focus and attention, we start to forget our pain. We forget the ways that this person has hurt us. We get distance from their wrongs. and with that distance and as our pain no longer monopolizes our focus, we start to recollect things differently. We start to think of the good moments. We start to think of the better parts of their nature that we occasionally saw. And as we start to positively recollect that relationship, we start to wonder if there's something wrong with us for being so strict about the way we've cut this person out of our lives. The more these positive recollections come up for us, the more we feel a sense of torture and confusion. We start to wonder, maybe this person isn't as bad as I've made them out to be. Maybe I am being too extreme. Maybe I am being too ruthless. We begin to relitigate that which has already been litigated, that this person is a dangerous person in my life. Now for some people that means physically, for others it means emotionally and to do with their mental health, for others it means financially. But this person was once a danger with time and healing and feeling better and more positive recollections, we can start to forget this fact and this compounds our guilt at having no communication with them. The second set of emotions we have to go through is sadness and longing. i.e. Grief. Grief at the space that they once occupied but don't occupy any longer. The missing of this person in our lives, even if that person's presence in our lives was something that hurt us deeply or did an enormous amount of damage. But the kind of grief we feel in a situation with a person like this is not just normal grief. It's not just the heartbreak of losing someone. It is a far more complicated kind of grief. We have to grieve the person we thought they were, but that never really existed, not in the way that we imagined. And that is just so big. It's almost too big. For many people, they never reach this stage of grief because it's easier to grieve over the heartbreak of losing someone, of losing this love, however imperfect, than it is to truly grieve the idea of someone that they had in their mind. Because if we grieve the person we thought they were and admit to ourselves they were never really that person, we have now compromised the structural integrity of our past. It's like we have to rewrite history. We have to rewrite the story of what our life has been about. We become a book that is already on chapter 17, but suddenly has no narrative. But here's the weirdest part of all of this. This is the part that can make it so difficult to move on from a situation like this, to ever feel better and keep us locked in it if we're not careful. When we break contact with someone, when we get them out of our lives and no longer have communication with them, we can have the uncanny sense of someone having died. whom we know hasn't. They are still out there walking the earth just as we are, sometimes in the same town as us. And I respect the fact that not everyone watching this is even able to go completely no contact with someone that they have broken away from like this. Even when we only have 10% of the contact we used to with someone, it can still create this feeling of someone having died in our lives. and it's such a strange feeling. It's such a painful feeling because we then go into these thought patterns of, am I really going to just keep this up forever now? Is this just the relationship? It's non-existent I don't speak to this person anymore. I just go about my life and they go about theirs. And each of us age and age and age until we eventually die. like, that's it. There is this bizarre sense of finality about that that occurs long before the point of actual physical death. And that makes us feel even worse because we go, am I gonna regret this? Am I gonna one day say these were the lost years? I should never have let them go. I should have had more contact with them. I should have tried to rekindle things. I should have tried to be closer with that parent that I decided I didn't want to talk to anymore because of the way they were or what they had done. Am I going to that, you know, all those years lost with that friend were a waste? Am I gonna decide that I should never have been so ruthless in the first place? Is this decision going to haunt me? But here's where it becomes circular. When we actually run the experiment of, okay, then let me connect with this person. If we're being honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we would be going back to the same person that we broke away from in the first place. That if that person hasn't changed, nothing is going to be different. There is no relationship that is possible in the way that we would hope. With enough time passing, you can even find yourself wondering, what the hell would we even talk about now? so much has happened. So we now have this impossibly unsatisfying situation, this catch 22, where we have made the decision to sever the relationship, which in itself doesn't feel right, but know that even if we went back, there would be nothing rewarding or satisfying about this situation. And that brings us right back to square one of maintaining the status of being severed from this person. But amidst the guilt and grief and strange desire to still want to please someone even after everything that's happened, there is some effect that happens that is so strange and so difficult and confusing that it can make the pain of losing someone something that feels like it's never going to end. When we decide that someone cannot stay in our lives, it's because of the way they are. So we lose them. And after a certain amount of time, we start asking ourselves, When, if ever, do I let this person back in? And if they're so bad, and such a poisonous force in our life that we say, I can't let them back in unless they change, then we're forced to ask the question, well, when are they going to change? Because that's the moment where I can let them back in. But if we come to the conclusion, and we would be smart to come to this conclusion in these cases, that they won't change, where does that leave us? We say, I can only let them back in if they change, but they're not going to change, so I don't let them back in ever. So now we have this strange finality that we have to confront, this feeling of a person having died who hasn't yet died. So, does that mean I just run out the clock on life with this person until they die or I do? Does that mean that I'm gonna have deep regrets later on? Am I gonna wish that I just got over these things or that I could just accept them and had some kind of relationship with them, whatever kind of relationship was possible? Because I'm not gonna be able to live with the idea that that was it, that it's game over from this point forward and they're missing every year in my life from now on and I'm missing every year in theirs. Is that really it? That is such a difficult thing to come to terms with that we end up in this circular argument with ourselves constantly thinking, well, maybe we will one day reconnect, and then you go, but they're not going to change. so I don't think I can do that. So you go, so I guess I can't reconnect, but it doesn't feel good not to reconnect because that's the same as saying that they're dead to me, and I don't want that to be the case. And this is the circle. And if we don't find a way to interrupt that circular thinking, we will find ourselves, with a lack of closure, our entire lives constantly debating ourselves. constantly in a place of indecision about something we have already decided. Instead of having to decide it once, we're having to decide it every single day. And that's like a form of torture. If you relate to this video, if you're connecting with everything I'm saying, this relationship isn't over because of you. It's over because of them. You are not the reason that you can't have a relationship. See, when we beat ourselves up and we make ourselves feel guilty because we feel like we're being too ruthless by not picking up the phone to that person when they call, not answering their texts, or staying strong to our decision to not have them in our lives, we are feeling like it's all on us. We're the one who has made that decision. And so the blame lies with us. And of course, the other person is likely reinforcing that. You know, you won't talk to me, you won't have a relationship with me. Maybe they even say that to other people around you and talk about how harsh you're being, playing the victim in some sort, right? That's also a key part of this from the other side. And that makes us feel like we're the perpetrator. But I want to give you a different way of thinking about this. If your house was on fire and at the last possible minute before the whole thing collapsed in on you, you ran out of the house and into the street, would you say, I abandoned my house? You don't blame yourself for having to get out of the house. You say that was my only option. And if the house no longer exists afterwards, you don't take responsibility for that either, especially if it was someone else who set the house on fire. The relationship doesn't exist anymore because of them, not because of you. Before you go, remind yourself that the fact that you did leave the burning house, the fact that you did get yourself out of the painful relationship that would have continued to be painful and hurt you if you hadn't, is something to be celebrated. It is not something to look at yourself and blame yourself for or to feel guilty for. It's something you should be thanking yourself for. Thank you for putting me in a better position in life. Thank you for getting me to a point of relative peace and calm where I can finally start to breathe and make decisions about what I want the next chapter of my life to be about. That's an incredible thing. And if this year you are figuring out what you want the next chapter of your life to be about, if you're figuring out what's the next bold and beautiful decision I want to make for myself, where do I go from here? I hope you will come and join me. in October for my in-person weekend retreat. It is happening over two days on the 18th and 19th of October. It is the first time I have ever run this brand new program. We're inviting women and men alike. Everyone can come and it is going to be an immersive and powerful coaching weekend where we're going to explore our blind spots together. what's holding us back from the life and the goals that we want to achieve, how to manage our emotions differently, how to build true core confidence and a powerful relationship with ourselves, how to make key decisions about where to go next, instill the habits that are going to get us there and build the life we want starting this year. So if you haven't already got your ticket, go to mHretreat.com, make that the next big decision you make for your life and your future. And I want to remind everyone that we have early bird tickets on sale right now. Once those are over, the prices are going to go up. It's super affordable this weekend for so many of you who have always wanted to come to one of my events. This is your chance. I'll leave a link below, mHretreat.com, go check it out. And I can't wait to see you in Miami in October. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to leave me a comment. and I'll see you next time.
