389. How to experience healthy love after toxic love
The Psychology of your 20s
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After toxic love, healthy love can feel surprisingly hard to recognise because you’ve likely learned to expect chaos, inconsistency, and emotional whiplash. In this episode, we unpack what toxic love actually looks like, how it shapes your beliefs about love in your 20s, and why calm, consistent connection can feel suspicious or even ‘boring’ when you’re used to intensity.
We explore:
• What toxic love is and how it intersects with abusive
• How this reshapes trust, pessimism, and your expectations of people
• The role of neurochemistry, addiction, and intermittent reinforcement in toxic bonds
• Self-sabotage and self-esteem
• The role of attachment patterns over time
• What healthy love and conflict actually feel like
• Practical ways to lean into safe love
If you’re conflicted between craving consistency or chaos, this episode is for you.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. |
| 0:24.1 | Hello, everybody. |
| 0:25.4 | Welcome back to the show. |
| 0:26.5 | Welcome back to the podcast. |
| 0:28.3 | It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down |
| 0:32.6 | the psychology of our 20s. |
| 0:35.6 | Today we are talking about a pain, I think. A lot of us carry around in |
| 0:40.2 | our 20s, but really at any age, at any age you can have this deep sadness and frustration around |
| 0:46.9 | how do I love again when I've been hurt so badly in the past? How do I love again when I have |
| 0:53.4 | learnt that love is not something that I can |
| 0:55.8 | trust? And just saying that, there's so much hurt in those statements, there's so much pain and |
| 1:01.2 | trauma in those statements. Especially when the love you've experienced in the past has been toxic, |
| 1:08.1 | I think this goes beyond heartbreak. It goes beyond somebody, you know, |
| 1:11.9 | you and somebody else just not working out. There is this reprogramming that occurs when you |
| 1:17.0 | experience toxic love. It changes how you interpret every single detail, every single thing somebody |
| 1:23.4 | does. It changes how you respond to closeness or even how safe you feel with somebody when they're |
| 1:31.7 | kind to you and when they do everything right and when they are the one. It can just train your body |
| 1:36.7 | to, even after a relationship is over, associate love with panic and love with hostility so that |
| 1:44.0 | when maybe one day you meet somebody |
| 1:47.0 | who is very calm and lovely instead of feeling bliss and instead of feeling safe you just feel |
| 1:53.9 | suspicious and you just feel restless like you're waiting you're waiting for the catch |
| 2:00.6 | you're waiting for something to go |
... |
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