134. I Can’t Bring Myself to Leave Him, What Should I Do?

The most important thing to know is that your brain, by default, prefers the status quo over change. That means it will always try to stop you from separating, because it can’t predict what happens after the breakup.

This also means fear isn’t an indicator of whether you’re making the right or the wrong decision to separate.

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There are several other, entirely legitimate reasons that explain why it’s hard to break up:

• You’re hoping the situation will change. To help you see whether it’s changeable, ask yourself the following questions:
  • For the situation to change, what are the facts? Have you taken the time to tell the facts apart from your perception of the facts (this will be the topic of episode 137)? What do you need to change, and what does the other person need to change?
  • Have you changed your own part: your perception and your behavior?
  • In what you feel the other person needs to change, is it a personality trait or a behavior toward you?
  • If it’s a behavior, have you talked about it? Are you able to discuss it constructively? Listen to episode 131, where I explain how to argue well.
  • Have you reached a win-win agreement, and is that agreement being kept?
• You’re afraid of regretting your choice, of not having put in enough effort, of giving up too soon. Indeed, a crisis in a relationship can last quite a while (sometimes even a year), and it can be hard to know how long you should keep trying and when it’s better to leave. You can listen to episode 47, where I detail the stages of a crisis. To help you move forward in your decision-making, ask yourself the following questions:
  • Have you identified the underlying wounds behind the crisis? Have you gotten past your own wound?
  • Do you have a good dynamic within conflict, meaning are you able to understand each other’s point of view? Does your part reflect a good dynamic in conflict?
  • If you can’t manage it on your own, are you willing to start couples therapy before separating? If your partner doesn’t want to work on themselves, are you willing to start individual therapy?
  • How much time are you willing to give it to check whether change is possible? Setting yourself an internal deadline will help you avoid putting off action to save your relationship, or putting off your decision.
• You’re afraid of being alone afterward. To help minimize this fear, you can remind yourself of the other times you decided to leave someone and ended up meeting someone good afterward.
• You’re focusing on the small things that are working, instead of the underlying problem that isn’t. Basically, it’s like celebrating the cake crumbs when you don’t have the whole cake. To avoid this behavior, I suggest the hara-kiri method, which involves reminding yourself why you want to leave this person every time you start appreciating the little things they do.
• Your love patterns can generally make you stay in relationships where you’re not happy, because unconsciously you believe you can’t have better. This is what’s called the trauma bond. This is particularly the case for people who are emotionally dependent: this love pattern can be very blocking, and deep work on your past is needed to understand where this emotional dependency comes from, change this pattern, and strengthen your confidence in yourself and your identity so you’re able to leave the other person.
• You’re afraid of the consequences of this choice for others (your partner, your children, the in-laws…). To get a full picture of the situation, you can ask yourself about the negative consequences for others that come from staying, because there are some, and we often don’t see them. For example, what’s worse for a child: having two parents who divorce, or two parents who stay together but don’t love each other or argue constantly? Having coached quite a few people, children of divorced parents aren’t worse off than others. You can also weigh the cost of sacrificing yourself at the expense of others’ happiness, and assess whether you feel capable of handling the consequences this can have in your relationship with them — for example, by indirectly making them pay the price of that sacrifice through your expectations of them or in your emotional reactions (see my article on the emotional bank account).