228 - From Pain to Healing: Recovering From Toxic Relationships and Estrangement | Life Happens the Podcast
Life Happens with Barb & Michelle
Michelle Maros & Barb Schmidt
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you know when enough is enough?
Join us for a heartfelt conversation on trusting your intuition, leaning on your values, and honoring your feelings when navigating toxic or one-sided relationships.
In this week’s episode of Life Happens with Barb & Michelle, we’re answering your personal questions about recovering from toxic relationships, managing one-sided friendships, grieving relationship endings, and more.
💬 In this episode:
- Barb shares her unique perspective on forgiveness and letting go, drawing from her experiences as a divorcee and recovering perfectionist.
- Michelle opens up about grieving her estranged stepdad, and her experiences with both platonic and romantic breakups — including the stigma around ending friendships.
✨ Episode Highlights:
- Enough is enough: Lean on your values, desires, and intuition to know your limits in relationships.
- Recovering from toxic treatment: Forgive yourself as you heal from hurtful relationships.
- Endings are okay: Find peace and acceptance when relationships — especially friendships — don’t last forever.
- Grieving estranged relationships: Feel your feelings and set boundaries as you process grief that comes from distance or estrangement.
Remember, people come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime — and it’s okay for relationships to end and dynamics to shift. Trust that the right people will stay.
📖 Michelle’s new book — Dear Friend — is now available for pre-order!
Filled with 365 reflections, it’s your daily companion for cultivating self-love, clarity, and inner peace.
👉 Pre-order your copy here: https://amzn.to/3Us9eqg
💛 Episode Topics:
- When to know enough is enough
- Handling one-side relationships
- Accepting we can’t change people
- Healing isn’t a linear process
- Feeling your feelings when ending a relationship
💬 We’d love to hear from you! What insight or moment resonated most with you in this episode? Share in the comments—we truly read every one.
📅 Subscribe & Join Us Next Tuesday for another heartfelt episode of Life Happens with Barb and Michelle! 💕
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🎙️ Host by:
- https://www.instagram.com/peaceful_barb/
- https://www.instagram.com/michellemaros/
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🎙️ New episodes of Life Happens with Barb and Michelle are released every Tuesday
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Life Happens podcast with Barb and Michelle. We are so happy that |
| 0:06.5 | you're listening and watching with us again this week. We have a great Q&A episode in store for you all. |
| 0:11.8 | As you guys know by now, my mom loves a Q&A episode and we've got some pretty hefty questions to get into today. |
| 0:18.8 | So let's dive in. Hey, Mom. Hi, Michelle. Yeah. You ready? I am. I don't usually know the questions ahead of time, but you told me they were relationship-based. Yeah. To get you into the right mindset, it's not, you know, practice it. Well, I mean, you're going to talk about practices, I'm sure. But today we're going to |
| 0:38.5 | really dive into a lot of questions that you all submitted, especially regarding relationships, |
| 0:44.2 | toxic relationships, difficult conversations, when to end a relationship. So we've got some good |
| 0:51.1 | stuff in store. And I'm excited to hear what you have to say about it. All the things. |
| 0:54.5 | You just said a whole lot there. |
| 0:56.9 | Things that I know that you certainly have been through a lot lately. I've been through. We've all been through. And so hopefully you've got some good stuff to say. I will share my experiences. Yes, I will. So the first one that we have from a lovely listener, watcher is, when do I know it's |
| 1:13.1 | time to say goodbye to a relationship? |
| 1:15.8 | How many chances do I give to someone? |
| 1:19.5 | Really? |
| 1:20.1 | We could start with that one. |
| 1:21.7 | A softball for you. |
| 1:23.2 | Oh, my gosh. |
| 1:24.5 | Well. |
| 1:25.3 | I liked this one too because the second part of the question I thought was very |
| 1:30.5 | interesting. How many chances do I give? Which I think, you know, we all know, when do I say goodbye? |
| 1:35.6 | But it's sometimes we feel like, okay, I'm not just going to be so cut and dry with people. |
| 1:41.8 | So when is enough enough? Yeah, it's very interesting this question because I just going to be so cut and dry with people. So when is enough enough? Yeah, it's very interesting this question |
| 1:44.9 | because I just concluded two years ago a 33-year marriage, |
| 1:50.3 | which many of you may know because you've listened |
... |
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