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

How to Know If He's Good For You

By Kerrie Hudson • October 20, 2026
Spoiler alert. Let’s get straight to the answer. The way to know if he’s good for you is to take the time to get to know him. I know, I know. Duh, Kerrie. It seems like a simple answer, and I’m certain that getting to know him is exactly what you think you’ve been doing. And yet, if you had actually taken the time to get to know him, how do you keep arriving at the conclusion over and over again that you didn’t know any of them at all? How are you surprised at how it all ended? This answer is also pretty simple: you’ve known who you wanted them to be; you didn’t really know them. Like many women, you’ve likely found yourself certain about a love prospect only to find that you were certainly wrong when it all blew up months, years, maybe even decades later. After a few failures, you’ve either sworn off relationships altogether, or you go into each of them with trepidation, wondering, “How can I be sure this time?” And the answer is, you can’t. Not without significant time spent getting to know this person, and more importantly, getting to know yourself and the mindset that you bring to choosing. Until now, you’ve chosen based on vibes and intensity instead of values and character. You’ve chased the high that swells from a flirtatious exchange or that craveable attention or that look of desire he always gave you. I get it. It felt good. And in the words of my granny, it wasn’t worth a nickel. You placed all of your value on the feels, and you ignored the thing that sticks around long after the spark fades: character. You see, it’s who he is when he’s not giving you excessive attention or spoiling you with things or touching you in a way that drives your body crazy that creates the experience you’ll live with from day to day. And because he was so good at giving you the feels, you excused his behavior and projected onto him the person you wanted, and likely needed him to be in order to make this work. And when the vibes settle and the excuses fade, you’re left with the thing you ignored all along: the truth of who he’s always been. He didn’t trick you. I’m sure he lied and deceived, and that’s on him. And as hard as it may be to receive, you tricked yourself by setting aside your discernment because you wanted what he fed you to be true. And we’re not doing that anymore. If you want to choose well, you’ve got to view well. Set down the rose-colored glasses and put on the clear spectacles that bring things into 20/20 vision. You don’t need to magnify what you see, and you certainly don’t need to diminish it. You just need to see things as they are. Doing that takes time. So, if you’re going to choose well, you need patience. Slow down. I know that love feels urgent. Society places all sorts of pressure on women to get married and start families. But trust me, doing any of that with the wrong man is far worse than you can ever imagine. Churches, families, friends, heck, even strangers add pressure, and you don’t have to succumb to it just because you’re trying to do things the “right way.” At times, your choices can feel very natural, and he can feel right. If he is right, what’s the rush? Really? And maybe you’re asking, “What am I waiting for?” It’s this. The purpose of patience is to give yourself the time to gather information. Who is his family? What are their values (because he isn’t likely to stray too far away from them)? Who are his friends? How does he handle responsibility? Conflict? Disappointment? And most importantly, how do you feel engaging with him in all of these scenarios and more? If you’re going to live a life with him, what are the samples of life revealing to you about his character? Be honest with yourself. There’s no point in engaging in any of these exercises if the goal is to have HIM at all costs. If the goal, however, is to choose a good man, it’s not enough to just see him as he is, it’s being honest with yourself about what you see. Often honesty is replaced with excuses. And to your credit, he’s made it easy for you to lean into them. Before you saw his issues, you heard his explanation for them, which made it easy to excuse poor decision-making and bad behavior. You’ve got a reason for things like interpersonal conflict, estrangement from children, and his life struggles, and he isn’t at the center of any of it. The challenges in his life are all their fault. He sold you the sob story, and you ate it up. Not only are you there in support of him, but you’re on the front lines fighting his battles and working to clean up his messes that he continues to make every time you turn away. Not only have you chosen wrong, you’re now invested, which often leads to significant loss. And again, we’re not doing that anymore. What we are doing is taking the time to get to know ourselves and the reasons for our choices. There is a reason you’ve been choosing the same man over and over again, and this is a cycle that is within your power to break. Because there is a man who’s good for you, and no one will know him other than you. The key is knowing what’s good for you. What do you want? What do you need? And who’s most suitable to give those things to you? In large part, you couldn’t know what was good for you if it knocked on your front door because you didn’t know yourself. You haven’t even known what it means to truly care for yourself beyond meeting your physical needs. This is why it’s been easy to settle for behavior that’s painful. And I want better for you. As I mentioned before, there’s no way to know for certain that he’s right for you without significant evidence. And even with evidence, the key is to become certain about your ability to do what’s best for you, and that requires putting in the work to heal and overcome some things. Because the power and ability to choose what’s best for you have been in you all along. They’ve just been pushed aside by the thing you keep running back to: pain. And we’re healing that.
Woman walking away

Why Do I Stay When I Know I Should Leave?

By Kerrie Hudson • September 15, 2026
You know the relationship is toxic. You know you should leave. So why do you stay? Learn how familiar relationship patterns can keep pulling you back.

Why Do I Defend Someone Who Hurts Me? Understanding Trauma Bonds

By Kerrie Hudson • August 11, 2026
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.