And that's the thing that they just carry on, by the way, into further relationships in their life, into work, relationships.

Yeah, when you talked about someone being the chill or the cool girlfriend, I could really see I've worked with someone who have that going on as well.

So not wanting to ask for too much, not wanting to be demanding or always there for what they need.

And it can feel really wrong to them to be asking for anything.

And they let so many things go promises not kept all of those things.

Yeah.

So I can remember specifically even being

in the workplace and having a job that had a lot of freedom, but I couldn't give it to myself.

Melissa? Even though they can understand this stuff intellectually, what's happening that they're still caught up in it, I guess, emotionally?

Yeah, I think, well, two things.

One, there certainly are some that are caught up emotionally.

And then there's a huge subset that is like so over the relationship.

And they're like, I'm not trauma bonded anymore.

And I always say they're not really understanding the use of the term because that's not really a thing to not be trauma bonded in that way anymore, unless you go through the process to break it.

But they may be totally over it.

So what actually then leads from your perspective, what leads to healing?

Would you try to make that link with them and show them why this is so exciting and that they can't give it up because it's filling something in them that went missing?

To an extent, yes.

I mean, I'm not a therapist, so I'm not doing therapy and I don't come at it from the therapist lens.

I work with people after they've done therapy.

So I'm not coming from the psychoanalysis piece.

But what I often show them is most people will come to me because they've either had a romantic relationship or a business partnership that's gone really bad.

And they think that is the first toxic relationship that they've ever been in and that this blindsided them and came out of nowhere.

And the higher they go up, you know, the more magical and wonderful it is, the lower the crash is going to be when they come down, the inevitable crash, because relationships just can't maintain that sort of high.