And if it hasn't changed, then on what basis are you thinking it's going to change in the future? What we're about to talk about can relate to anybody that you're with, who has consistently treated you poorly, who has ignored your needs, who has disregarded your happiness,

who has been gaslighting you for a long time, lying to you, breaking promises, someone who consistently lets you down,

disappoints you. I want to talk about how we come to trap ourselves in these situations

and what it really requires for us to break free of them because the nature of what Dr. Romney and other

psychologists called the trauma bond is that we can become imprisoned by that bond and it can be extraordinarily difficult to break free from it and to finally release ourselves from

a relationship like that.

And we should say that a relationship like that is tremendously detrimental to our mental health, our well-being, our self-esteem,

our quality of life. It is a situation that is maddening. It slowly erodes your confidence

in yourself, especially if your needs are ignored, if you are

gaslit over things that you would like to happen and told that it's crazy for you to want

those things or your high maintenance for wanting those things or that when someone tries to convince you that

your version of reality is completely false, it can have the effect of you not knowing which

way is up anymore. You stop trusting yourself. And of course, when you're with someone who

constantly breaks their promises to you, constantly

lies to you, and then if you catch them in the lie, makes it your fault somehow, it makes us

unable to see what the truth is anymore. It divorces us from ourselves. We start becoming

somebody else. We live a life of trying to manage this person. We live a life of trying to read

between the lines of what things this person is saying are true and which things are false.

So we pay a price for staying with someone like this.

I want to start by just talking about how we find ourselves in these situations and how one of the qualities that we like most about

ourselves in other contexts can become our biggest enemy in the context of a relationship like this

and that is our empathy we show a level of understanding about this person that allows them to get away with the same thing over and over again.

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