Dr. Ramani did a talk on Women of Impact where she brought up the things that impact/harm our health and she called out how toxic relationships seem to have an equal negative impact on our health to smoking.  The body responds to the state of mind and that is with us 24/7, so if we are constantly under stress, duress, and pressure, the body never finds its way to a relaxed state to allow normal function.  Constantly living in fight or flight mode creates unhealthy levels of stress hormones and responses and those things impact our basal rates in such a way that the body begins to thing stress is the norm.  Dr. Ramani also brought up how we ask about smoking, drinking, and exercise but we don’t talk about the impact of relationships.  Dr. Ramani went so far as to call out that getting relational trauma off the table can help people live longer—physical and mental health are not two separate entities.  Dr. Ramani expresses we have concern about things like smoking, drinking, and sleep but we don’t ask about our mental state enough.  She flat out stated that bad relationships are just as bad if not worse for health than smoking.

Our society doesn’t do well to demonstrate healthy relationships or healthy habits.  We glorify the drama and the busy life and the constant hustle and the jaded/angry/frustrated persona.  We have confused ego with self-care and we do not know how to function in cooperation with people so we have unwittingly normalized dysfunctional relationships.  We confuse boundaries, control, and respect by either tolerating behavior we shouldn’t or allowing ourselves to be manipulated. It’s also common that we fail to process things that have happened to us so we repeat our unhealthy habits.  Having a firm sense of self and truly knowing who we are prevents some of this behavior.  We have to do the work first (and on our own) in order to eliminate narcissistic behavior—ironic we need to focus on the self in order to focus on others.  Once we get to a healthy state of mind about who we are, we can look at the state of our relationships—the more familiar we are with ourselves, the more we can catch our patterns and recognize things in others.  We need to be healthy to have healthy relationships because the impact we have on each other is profound.

That isn’t to say throw away our relationships like we throw away smoking or any other bad habit.  It is to say we need to create an awareness around our behavior and habits.  It’s better to understand what we are capable of changing and work on accepting that than it is to allow the stress of something that doesn’t work or is completely unhealthy to infiltrate us to the point of making us sick.  That is the truth of it: certain relationships make us sick and if we are going to turn things around we need to have a better relationship with ourselves and understand the impact of the people we allow access to our lives.  We do not need to engage in stressful behavior to make others happy.  We need to empower ourselves to have healthy boundaries and healthy understanding of what we need.  It’s ok to walk away.