Why Leaving a Toxic Relationship Feels Like Withdrawals

Kerrie Hudson • March 18, 2026

Understanding the Addictive Pull of Artificial Love

It’s confusing to leave a relationship for all the right reasons, only to experience the pain of withdrawal.


The truth is, we don’t become addicted to healthy things. You may crave a salad, feel the absence of the workout you skipped, or feel called to reengage in a spiritual practice, but you’re not addicted to them.


Why Healthy Love Isn’t Addictive

Similarly, walking away from a healthy relationship may leave the imprint of loss or heartbreak, but one thing is certain, no one goes through withdrawals from peace, consistency, or respect. Why? Because although we receive the reward of dopamine from healthy encounters, there’s only enough to make us feel good, not addicted.


The Addictive Pull of Artificial Love

Artificial love is a powerful drug, but not for everyone.


Its chaotic and unpredictable nature can ignite the chase in anyone who has been conditioned to equate love and passion with self-abandonment. It’s familiar, instinctive, and addictive. This is the cycle that many of the women I work with eventually break out of, yet if left unchecked, this is the pattern that continues. Not for lack of trying, many people stuck in these patterns are desperate for change, but they don’t know where to begin. They hate the chaos, yet lack the insight to identify the source of the problem. And that problem lies deep beneath the surface. It cannot be addressed by shallow superficial shifts. It requires deep reflective work to produce the necessary mindset shift to choose healthy love.


Before this shift occurs, healthy love is repulsive and toxic love is alluring and attractive. Without thinking, you can easily choose the most toxic person in the room while ignoring the calm and respectful pursuer. It’s not the case that you just so happen to keep choosing the wrong people, your nervous system is subconsciously choosing what’s familiar. Think about it, you want something better than you’ve gotten, yet you continue to choose the same person in a different body. In fact, your choices become more intense, more toxic, and often more dangerous. This pattern and cycle is so cemented that you begin to believe that this is your fate or destiny, so you settle even though you desperately want more. And when something healthier does appear, it’s perceived as boring, mundane, or not good enough.


This is because you can’t choose healthily from an unhealthy mindset. Until the underlying pattern is addressed, you’ll continue to be drawn toward what hurts you. You’ve got to break the addiction, and all of the beliefs attached to it to break free.


You’re attracted to the possibility or promise of love that actually exists outside of reach. That’s artificial love. The more it pulls away, the more it draws you in. It’s like watching the coyote chase the roadrunner, or Sylvester the cat chasing Tweety, they’re drawn to the chase that repeatedly hurts them, and you’re drawn to watching it, even though you know how it ends.


This dynamic is attractive because it’s familiar. It’s all you’ve ever known. And until you become familiar with a new dynamic, you’ll continue to repeat the pattern of attraction, chase, failure, and withdrawal over and over again.


This is the work I help women do: identifying the pattern beneath the attraction so they can finally choose something different.



Why Leaving Can Feel Like Withdrawal

The difference between artificial love and love is significant. Love is being seen, heard, understood, and accepted as you are. It comes with consistency, contentment, and peace. Artificial love is being picked up and dropped, praised and then criticized, attended to then ignored. It’s unpredictable. Chaotic. It’s toxic. And it sets your dopamine receptors on fire. You know it’s bad for you, and you want to just walk away, but you cannot resist. When you finally walk away for good, it’s only because the evidence against the relationship becomes insurmountable, you have to leave, and even though you know better, any hint of them triggers the addiction drawing you back in with conscious belief that “maybe this time things will be different”, while subconsciously you’re chasing the high or chaos and unpredictability. You don’t want it, but you depend on it.


If you’ve ever wondered why love feels like withdrawal, this is why.


For years you’ve called it love, when really, you’ve been stuck in the cycle of intermittent reward or reinforcement followed by emotional deprivation. After being deprived you desperately long for connection, affection, or approval, even if it lacks depth, compassion, or care.


The withdrawal comes when the reward doesn’t follow. There’s not just heartbreak, there’s pattern disruption. In some cases, there may not be heartbreak at all, because your heart was never really in it, you just felt the absence of their presence, and that alone produced the withdrawal.


The good news is you don’t have to stay stuck in this cycle. The women I work with often come in believing they are doomed to repeat this pattern over and over again, but when they realize it isn’t destiny, it’s conditioning, they begin the work to break free. Why? Because conditioning can be changed.


Real love doesn’t require you to jump through hoops, to bend until you break, or to give until you’re depleted. It’s steady. It’s considerate. It’s consistent.


And once you’ve broken your addiction to artificial love, you’ll never mistake chaos for love again. 



If this resonated with you, you’ll want to be part of Next Chapter, where I go deeper into the patterns behind love, healing, and becoming the woman who can no longer be pulled into cycles like this.


Join Next Chapter

Woman peacefully journaling

Protecting My Peace

By Kerrie Hudson • March 10, 2026
There’s a lot of talk about protecting one’s peace these days, but what does that even mean? And how do you protect your peace? Let’s dig in. Peace is an emotion. In psychology there are five basic emotions that are widely accepted: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and happiness. Unfortunately, of the five only one would be considered a positive emotion, though I believe all are positive in that they provide you with information. But I digress. Happiness, the more positive of the five is the one emotion you likely welcome with open arms, and when it comes, you want it to stay. You protect it. Peace lives on the spectrum of happiness, and like all other emotions, it is literally a feeling in the body. It feels like serenity; there’s stillness and a calm that comes over you. I’ve had folks identify peace in their bodies as the absence of the feelings they’re accustomed to: tightness in their chest, sweaty palms, stomach discomfort, etc. For many, peace is rarely felt, so when they feel it, or any other emotion for that matter, they fail to recognize the environment that nurtured it; and if you’re going to protect your peace, you’ve got to notice when you feel it and what contributed to it. Understanding peace as an emotion is necessary because the role of your emotions is to provide you with information about your environment. At times, emotions can be so intense and distressing that the focus shifts from the environment that ignited them, to suppressing or extinguishing them. But emotions aren’t the problem, the environment is. Every emotion is important, even those that you’ve identified as negative. They tell you that something in your circumstances or environment needs your attention, and when you ignore your emotions, you ignore the task at hand. Peace is a gift, and not everybody or every environment offers it. When you notice peace in your body, you also need to notice what nurtured it. Are there people who bring peace? Are there places where you feel more at ease? Identifying these sources gives you what you need to take care of yourself by accessing more of it. On the other hand, where do you experience the opposite of peace? Where, and with whom do you find chaos and confusion? If you’re going to protect your peace, these are environments and people who you need to limit contact with. If you’re going to protect your peace, you’ve gotta increase your self-connection by noticing your emotions, and allowing them to tell you what you need to increase your overall well-being. When you fight your emotions, you fight yourself and your best interests. Extended periods of suppressing emotions can lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions because two things are working against you: you are becoming more disconnected from yourself while existing in environment that don’t serve you. There’s no magic pill that creates more peace and happiness, it’s the consistent work of nurturing self-connection and meeting your needs, because you are the most important person in your world. May you grow exponentially in peace! If this resonated with you, you’re not alone. These are the conversations we continue inside Next Chapter: Notes from The Other Side, my monthly newsletter where I share insights, reflections, and guidance for women breaking toxic patterns and learning how to love themselves differently. Join Next Chapter here

The One Thing Standing Between You & Success

By Kerrie Hudson • February 8, 2026
The new year typically comes with a desire to be successful in an area where winning has been challenging. As such, we spend time thinking about what we want for the year ahead and commit to doing things that will help us achieve our goals. The challenge many of us run into is that we quit on our goals before we can clear the first few months of the year; so, while January is still with us, I want to share with you some information about what I believe to be the number killer of success, anxiety, and how to overcome it so you can have a greater chance at winning this year. Regardless of your goals, anxiety has a way of stepping in and stealing your motivation before you can gain much momentum. It’s the quiet voice lurking in the background telling you that you can’t have what you really want because it’s too hard, or you’re not good enough, or if you do attain it, something terrible will come along and take it away. Essentially, anxiety is at the heart of why you settle; you’ve listened to that little fearful voice that’s informed only by your limited experience and/or imagination, and convinced yourself you can’t have the thing you deeply desire; so your only option is to go without the tightened body, or the love you deserve, or the business that would positively impact the lives of others, which ultimately leaves you dissatisfied and even regretful. You’ve given up on your goals and dreams because of something that might happen, but probably won’t. If you’re going to disrupt this cycle the key is to challenge your ego. Many people believe the issue with the ego is cockiness and arrogance that leads one to see themselves as above others, and while that’s true, what most people fail to understand is the arrogance in perceiving fear as fact versus seeing it as just one of many possibilities. When you see your fears as fact you treat them as certainty and you make decisions that align with them, ultimately shortchanging yourself of the life you deserve. In reality, the ego can work for or against you, and combined with anxiety, an unhealthy ego will kill your ability to enjoy your life and achieve your goals. So, if you you’re going to succeed in anything and have a good time doing it, you must check your ego and anxiety so they don’t keep you in a constant state of settling in fear. If left unchecked, the ego will convince you not to invest too much or not to try too hard because “this probably won’t even work”, or “nothing good ever happens for me”. It will see losses as catastrophic events and overinflate the importance of a few outside opinions. Its goal is to keep you safe, when in reality, the things that pose a threat to you are likely not threatening at all. The key is balancing the ego by removing certainty from your beliefs, because anything that hasn’t yet happened isn’t certain, it’s a possibility. When you begin to see your fears as possibilities you can move from a place of guardedness to a place of curiosity; this helps you to open yourself to more possibilities than the one rooted in your fears, and when you see more possibilities, you can free yourself to take risks (which is necessary to succeed). With this shift, you can begin to see losses as lessons so you can use your setbacks as a setup to do better, to refine your approach, to put the proper supports in place; and as your gain more experience, you’ll begin to see realistic likelihoods of what can happen over possibilities and certainties, reducing the size of your fears. You begin to think “if I take these steps, it is possible that I won’t achieve my goal, but it is likely that I’ll be closer to it than if I settle here”, and when you take on this perspective beautiful things happen.
Gate symbolizing boundaries

What's The Deal With Boundaries

By Kerrie Hudson • December 21, 2025
Most of us are trying to improve our lives, and as such, we can cling to ideas and concepts that we believe will help us to get there. A lot of times these ideas and concepts lose their true meaning and become a crutch that we lean on to resist change, instead of a skill we develop to become a better us. Boundaries is one of those concepts that’s often used, rarely understood, and often weaponized in ways that keeps us stuck in the same old patterns; that changes for you today. Simply put, boundaries are our deeply held, internal ‘no’, and when our boundaries have been violated, you feel it. Think about the feeling you get in your body when you’ve waited for a parking space, and someone steals it, or when you’ve loaned someone money that they fail to repay; these are boundary violations. Boundaries are the line we’re not willing to cross in our interactions with others, and that line is your responsibility to maintain. For example, you may have a boundary that dictates you don’t loan money; but, if someone asks you to borrow money and you give them the loan, you have violated your own boundary, and that feeling is far worse than violations from the outside. When you don’t know and/or do not articulate your boundaries you are hurting yourself, and that type of behavior sets you on a course for a world of pain. When you fail to take responsibility for your boundaries it becomes difficult to trust and depend on yourself; and if you can’t trust and depend on you, who can you really trust? Bottom line, boundaries are ingrained into the fabric of our person, they don’t go away; and boundary-setting and protection are necessary skills to develop in order to become a confident and self-assured human who is fulfilled in life. If you struggle with identifying and honoring your boundaries, Becoming Her Again is the gamechanger you need to step into the woman who no longer shrinks or settles for less than she deserves. The course is coming soon, join the waitlist to be the first to access this powerful resource. (P.S., it comes with 2 bonuses: The Boundary Starter Pack & Scripts for Difficult Conversations)