Why Do I Stay When I Know I Should Leave?
Kerrie Hudson • September 15, 2026
Change is hard. Let’s start there.
You’ve nestled in. Invested quite a bit of time and energy. Planned for the future. Now you’re faced with shaking things up, and sometimes the pain or discomfort of your present situation has to outweigh the cost of walking away. If we’re being honest, it probably already does. You’ve simply found yourself comfortable in your discomfort; so much so that you can’t even see the benefit of walking away.
You’re human. And in general, humans hate change, unless there’s already proof that this change brings a reward. We hate to move. We loathe dieting. Some of us are such creatures of habit that we feel lost when there are changes to our routine. We appreciate consistency and reliability, and if you’re reading this, it’s likely that the constant in your relationship is disappointment and you can rely on them to let you down yet again.
Why Is It So Hard to Leave a Toxic Relationship?
You know you should leave, but you’ve stayed anyway. You’re human, and you’re not alone. Not only are you facing the human challenge of change, you’re also dealing with the conditions that have made this relationship feel far more comfortable than it ever really was. Those conditions are the difference between the woman who stays in the disrespect and neglect, and the woman who doesn’t entertain anything less than what she deserves.
Let’s be honest, you like your relationships a little toxic. In fact, something in you needs it in order for it to feel like something meaningful and worth your while. It’s not because there’s something wrong with you. It’s that toxic is how you learned to love. The problem is, when it comes to love, especially in romantic love, it’s never just “a little toxic.” You can’t control the temperature on the toxic, but you’ve stayed in it believing you can. Not only do you think you can do things to influence their behavior, you want to. Again, something in you needs to. This is because you’ve always had to. Like many women, the first people you ever loved didn’t show up for you consistently. They taught you that you couldn’t consistently count on anyone. When they fell short, you stepped up to prioritize them when they were supposed to prioritize you. You thought if you took care of them, they would then be there to meet your needs. You believed you were a conduit for keeping the love alive, and you still do.
When You Learn to Work for Love
You learned to work for love, and now you won’t have it any other way. Let me be clear: you really want love. You simply don’t know any other way to experience it. It’s normal, even when it’s not. When this is the norm, you accept that it’s not so bad to have to work for love. In fact, you don’t even see how much you work for love. What you do see is that it’s better to leave, but you can’t help but stay.
The woman who walks away doesn’t take on the responsibility of making the unacceptable acceptable. She doesn’t stay to fix it or heal him. She walks. It requires a level of confidence to do this that comes from all of the work she’s done to see her patterns, recognize how they’ve failed her, and lay them to rest. She no longer sees value in trying to turn water into wine. She accepts that would be a miracle, and that is not her calling. She doesn’t waste time. She values it. She values herself.
Knowing You Should Leave Isn’t Enough
This isn’t achieved by simply recognizing it’s time to go. If that were true, you’d have done it by now. The question isn’t “Why do I stay when I know better?” It’s “What keeps driving me back to the thing I no longer want?” When you know the answer to that, you arrive at the starting line of your new life. The one where you become the woman who walks away. Her transformation doesn’t just give her confidence in romantic relationships. It gives her confidence in every area of her life. That type of transformation isn’t achieved overnight. It’s achieved through focused, intentional work to heal the patterns and replace the beliefs that got you here.
Knowing you should leave, knowing why you stay, and having the power to walk away are three different phases of becoming the woman you desire to be. Shifting from knowing better to choosing differently is the work we begin in Unhooked.
Unhooked is my complimentary live workshop where we go beneath what you already know, uncover the hook that keeps pulling you back toward what you no longer want, and release it.
One hour. One hook. One step closer to free.
I was reflecting on the relationship I have with my older sister. Well, we don’t have much of a relationship today. Growing up, she was my very first trauma bond. Verbally, she expressed so much love and care, and at the same time, I experienced so much hate at her hands. I loved her. I was loyal to her. I was confused. That’s essentially at the core of a trauma bond. Confusion. And if the trauma bond itself isn’t confusing enough, they can be found everywhere: in churches, families, and especially in love, making them so difficult to detect. When you’ve grown up in a family where you were trauma bonded, then possibly a church or another institution where trauma bonding runs rampant, the dynamic becomes commonplace. In fact, it feels like home, a smelly one. One where visitors detect it, but the people who live there are oblivious. Just like someone who’s invited you into an offensive home, the realization that you’ve been trauma bonding can produce shame. In both situations it’s easy to overlook. Many people do. There’s nothing to do about the past, and taking responsibility for the future is key. But first, the issue at hand. At worst, a smelly home is offensive. But trauma bonds? They hurt. And that pain can go unnoticed for a while. Often, the pain of a trauma bond is first perceived by recognizing its impact on another. In churches, it looks like a pastor or authority figure hurting others while the congregation defends them. Eventually, the protection emboldens more abuse, and the hurt spreads. Some walk away, others continue to endure it because they hold onto the good and reject the bad even though it hurts. That’s the bond at work. In a family, a child defends the parent who hurts the other parent. They don’t understand the dynamic because the abusive parent is kind to them. Eventually as they grow, they are directly targeted and abused. In spite of the pain they feel, they hold on, because it “isn’t that bad”. The child knows two people, one who’s kind, and one who’s abusive. They want to believe the former is the “real them”, while they work to appease the latter, and it grows more intense. Early experiences like these create the mindset that causes you to hope for the best while experiencing the worst instead of walking away. It’s the setup for leaning into love that hurts, until it hurts so much that you eventually have no choice but to walk away. It’s a part of the relational blueprint you developed early that dictates love is supposed to hurt, at least a little; and when you tolerate a little hurt, you will tolerate a lot of it. When the warning signs of a trauma bond are visible to others, the people closest to you can see it; even those who can’t see it in their own relationships. They may not know what it’s called, but they can detect its impact, either now or in the future. If they intervene (and it’s best that they do), their expressions of concern can land as a threat to one of our most basic needs, love. It can also reinforce shame due to the exposure of the truth that you’ve been explaining away or hiding from yourself to make love work. Ultimately, it can lead to isolation and even more pain. For many people, instead of taking the intervention into consideration, they reject it, and often reject the people who love them most. The presence of pain, now or in the future, isn’t a big enough threat because it aligns with what you’ve come to believe love is. So, of course you’ll chase the trauma bond, because this is what “love” has always looked like. Love, or the potential for love, can be blinding to the reality of pain, especially if you’re starting with an unhealthy blueprint. The key is to take an honest look at the blueprint to determine how you got here, and to re-work it so it leads you to real love, not love as you’ve known it, but the love you desperately desire. I know that part of you may be pushing back, because you’ve already tried doing things differently, and it didn’t work. Journaling, listening to podcasts, and even taking the steps to fix your approach or your appearance. None of these are wrong; they are incomplete. You can’t attract something new from an old mindset. What you haven’t yet tried is doing the actual work of healing: exploring the dynamics that led you here, embracing thoughts of new possibilities, and becoming the person who no longer tolerates unhealthy dynamics so she has room for healthy ones. That’s the work. If you’re ready to do the work, The Restoration Group is where it happens. You learn the signs of abuse, and more importantly you’ll learn to detect it, to feel it in your body, to trust yourself. You’ll explore the difficulties of your attachment style and relationship dynamics and rework them to healthier ways of relating. The most important work we do is restoring the relationship with yourself, because if you don’t love you, you’ll reject anyone who does. Join this powerful group of women as they become the women they never imagined they could be. The next cohort begins this Thursday, August 13 th . After that, there’s only one more opportunity to do this work for the rest of the year. Register now.
You’ve ended another toxic relationship. Looking back, you realize there were red flags that you saw and ignored. Now you’re wondering, “Why don’t I trust myself?” You’ve tried to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, and you’ve come to find that you’re successful in many areas of your life, except in love. As a result, you believe that self-trust lives on a spectrum, and that in some domains of your life you trust yourself wholeheartedly, while you struggle in others. But what if you actually don’t trust yourself at all? What if your trust has been placed outside of yourself all along? Let me explain. We live in a society that rewards conformity over difference, and for many of us our households followed suit. When we came into the world, we had to place our trust with others. We trusted our parents and caretakers to do right by us: to feed, clothe, and emotionally nurture us. When we were cute, cuddly, and without speech, they did all three instinctively without thought. The moment our differences began to emerge, it presented a challenge: to continue to nurture or to impose conformity. Instinctively, they chose the latter. For example, when a small child utters the words ‘no’ the typical caretaker views this as defiance that must be disciplined away instead of individuality that must be nurtured. One builds self-trust, the other strips it away. You, like many others, probably grew up in an environment that stripped it away. You colored. It needed to be in the lines. You chose mismatched clothes. You had to change. You might have even had objections to certain foods, but you had to eat everything on your plate. Experiences like these were foundational to you not being able to trust yourself. They taught you your thoughts, expression, and choices could not be your own. Naturally, you learned to ignore yourself while looking to those you relied on most for approval; not superficial approval, but you saw this as a means of survival, and it’s been that way ever since. With your inner world shaped around them, instead of being formed around that little one who naturally embodied the spirit of ‘no’, you leaned into behaviors that were guided by your need for approval. You likely performed well in school, sports, or some other talent. You learned to place value in the areas where you were celebrated. You prioritized the thoughts and opinions of others over your own. In many ways, this brought success. You did well, and it’s the reason for your achievements today. Where it fell short is that it never handed you the opportunity to think, feel, and behave independently, even when others didn’t agree. Ultimately, you learned to only trust yourself when it met the approval of others versus being able to trust yourself in spite of others. A strategy that worked beautifully back then, but has left you with holes that you can’t seem to fill today. You work hard, and maybe even enjoy the finer things in life, but ultimately, you’re unfulfilled. At work, your value is acknowledged, but not compensated. With family, you feel loved and accepted, but not authentic. And in love, you give all you’ve got, and find yourself circling back to pain. All of these dynamics are frustrating at best, but in love, it’s intolerable. Work provides. Family is intact. But love, it’s nowhere to be found. Let’s get into the why. At work, conformity is rewarded with a paycheck that also reinforces constraints that you can feel, but tolerate. With family, you know exactly which role you need to occupy to receive whatever benefit you can get. You may not like it, but it’s the way it’s always been. In love, you give, you perform, and you come up short every time. There’s the temporary comfort of a relationship, but ultimately the cycle repeats itself. You show up for love; they do you wrong. You’ve tried to address it by giving more, meeting demands, and changing yourself as you have in the other areas of your life. Here, however, the strategy doesn’t work, and this is why. True love is never rewarded by performance; it’s rewarded by authenticity. Love cannot exist without authenticity. Loving another requires that you be honest with yourself while determining if the person you’re considering is someone you can truly love. Being loved also requires you to be honest with yourself to show up as the real you and not the version that you believe others want. This level of honesty requires you to let go of control. Until now you’ve played it small and leaned into performance in an effort to control outcomes. You wanted them to love you. It hasn’t worked. You didn’t take a beat to consider if they were even worthy of loving you, nor do you know the person you’re presenting to be loved. When you release the outcome and trust that what’s for you will come to you, you’ve created the foundation from which to build self-trust. Letting go of outcomes is essentially letting go of others; and when you do, you free yourself to grab ahold of the person who matters most, you. You reclaim the responsibility to nurture the little person who once said ‘no’. She wasn’t wrong. She was raw, she felt things, and she wanted to be heard. The same is true for you today. You feel things, you’ve wanted to say things, but you’ve ignored them and pushed them away, for fear that you wouldn’t be accepted. You’ve even felt things about people. You gave them a chance anyway only to find that you were right about them all along. You’ve ignored your boundaries and said ‘yes’ when you meant ‘no’ because performance is all you’ve known. Here’s the truth: you might not be accepted everywhere (and that’s okay because everywhere isn’t acceptable for you), but you will be accepted somewhere. When you embrace this, the real work begins. The real work is reconnecting with everything that went dark as you were conformed instead of nurtured. Feeling your emotions instead of managing them. Trusting your gut instead of silencing it. Honoring your ‘no’ even when saying it threatens the outcome. This is the work of getting to the other side, and it’s the work we walk through together inside The Restoration Group. You don't have to know how yet. You just have to be willing to look. If you're ready to see where you stand today, that's where we start: Take the Diagnostic →
If you’ve watched Shark Tank you’ve seen how inventors and business owners appeal to the panel of investors for money in exchange for ownership in their business. Some appeals are successful because the presenter has the magic sauce composed of an effective product, supportive financial data, a reasonable assessment of value, and an entrepreneur with attractive business qualities. Others fall flat because they’re missing one or more of these factors. The objective of the show is clear, and so are the requirements to walk away with a deal, yet many people walk away with no deal in hand because investing is serious business, and not everyone is a fit to enter into a business relationship with. The truth is, not everyone is a fit to enter into any relationship with, and similar to the Shark Tank panel, when it comes to matters of the heart, not everyone is worthy of your investment. Anything that you pour into with the expectation of receiving something in return is an investment. Relationships are an investment. Healthy relationships require you to pour time, attention, affection, and commitment into another person, and before doing so, it’s important to assess whether or not you can expect to receive a return. Unfortunately, for many, the assessment process never happens. Instead of approaching matters of the heart from the perspective of an investor, they approach them as a gambler; high on the waves of emotion, heavily entertained, yet seeking a profitable return. A return which almost never comes. Gambling is emotional, and like many people in pursuit of love, the desired outcome doesn’t align with the process. In both cases the parties in pursuit walk away disappointed at best and severely set back at worst. This happens because they fail to soberly assess whether or not there’s proof, not promise or potential, that the choice in front of them is capable of producing their desired outcome. In your case, the desired outcome is love contained within a healthy committed relationship. Similar to what I’ve witnessed during the Shark Tank assessment process, vetting someone for a healthy relationship strikes a delicate balance between the practical and personal. In the case of Shark Tank, the practical is the data, the numbers that provide factual information about the performance of the business. If there’s no proof of performance, investing becomes a gamble. After the numbers review the panel shifts their focus to the person to determine if they can work with them to take what they’ve built and multiply it. In this case, the numbers don’t matter if it doesn’t feel like a fit, and that ‘feel’ comes largely from the gut. In love, the practical data is the factual information that you acquire through conversation and observation that informs you about who this person is. Some practical information includes facts about work and self-sufficiency, temperament, ethics and integrity, and values. This information tells you whether or not this person is suited to be in partnership with you. Will they contribute equitably to the household? Will they provide suitable care for you? Will they be consistent and committed when life gets difficult? The practical data is key to a healthy relationship and needs to be the box that is checked first in your assessment process. The personal assessment becomes equally important only after you’ve determined that the core person, independent of what you can do for or with them, is good enough to be in a relationship with you. And yes, they must be good enough to be in a relationship with you. For some the idea of someone else being good enough stings, because it touches that part of you that’s always believed there was something about you that wasn’t good enough. I submit to you that you’re worthy of love. You deserve someone who is good enough to give it and receive it from you. Deep down you know that, and you’ve wanted to protect your investment, you just haven’t known how. When you assess someone on the personal level you become the protection that you never knew you could be. The personal assessment involves chemistry and a determination of whether or not you like this person, but more than that, the personal vetting process requires you to be clear about how you feel. Feelings in this case aren’t as much about feeling good, as they are about feeling right. This is where your gut comes into play, because what you’ve been told, and even what you’ve observed on the surface may not align with the truth. This is where you go from trusting them to trusting you. There is truth in your feelings that you must learn to trust. Are there any internal warning signs? Are you able to be calm and settled in their presence? What do you notice about you when you’re with them? These are the feelings that matter because anyone can make you feel good, but not everyone will feel right. After reading this you might notice there’s a distance between knowing how to assess someone and actually being able to do it, between knowing your worth and believing it. There’s a chasm between knowing you have a gut and how to trust it. That distance is where the work begins. It's closing the gap between understanding the investor mindset and becoming the woman who lives it: the one who can no longer be talked out of what she knows, who protects her investment without apology, who finally believes she's worth protecting. You may have finished this and felt that gap open a little wider: you understand the assessment, but you're not sure you could actually run it. You know, in theory, that your gut has been talking. You're just not sure you'd trust it if it did. That's not a flaw in you. It's what happens when the pattern you grew up inside taught you the warning signs were normal, that feeling small was love, that being talked out of what you knew was just being reasonable. You can't trust a gut you were trained to override. So don't start with him. Start with the pattern. The Relationship Pattern Diagnostic is a few honest questions that reflect back the thing you've felt but haven't been able to name. It won't tell you what to do. It'll show you what you keep doing, which is the first thing that has to become visible before any of this becomes possible. [TAKE THE DIAGNOSTIC →]
