If I took my sick fish out of his dirty tank, drove him to the vet, paid for the treatment, watched him get better, and then brought him straight home and put him back into the same dirty water, would anyone be surprised when he got sick again?
People do this to themselves constantly. You cannot heal within the environment that made you sick. That doesn’t automatically mean you have to leave it. Sometimes things can genuinely change. But if nothing changes and the environment stays exactly as it was, one thing is certain. You will keep becoming more diminished, less yourself, and it will keep going.
I watch people do years of this. Years of therapy, somatic work, wellness retreats, yoga, medication, regular check ins with a psychiatrist, and all of it is being spent managing the bad marriage, managing the workplace that runs on fear, managing the friendship that only ever takes. They walk back through their own front door and feel sick before they’ve even turned the key, because their body already knows exactly what’s waiting on the other side.
Here’s the maths nobody wants to do. An hour of healing a week, even five or ten hours a week, does not compete with a hundred plus hours of toxicity, stress, and overwhelm. It can help you manage it, barely. It’s two steps forward and five back, every single week, until eventually the healing gets abandoned because it was never going to be enough. The environment wins.
If you’ve ever done cold exposure, you’ll know the phrase. The ice always wins. It’s the same principle here. The environment always wins, no matter how good you get at regulating your nervous system, no matter how disciplined your thinking becomes. Eventually it beats you.
So what do you actually do. First option, change the environment completely, which for most people feels impossible, though I’ve worked with plenty who eventually did exactly that and found the uncertainty of starting over easier to live with than the certainty of staying. Second option, change the environment you’re in, which means communicating clearly. This isn’t working. This dynamic is making me unwell. This needs to shift, and it needs both of us. Sometimes that lands. Often, particularly with family and with certain workplaces, it doesn’t, because the other person isn’t willing, or isn’t able, or has their own reasons for needing nothing to change.
If you try that path honestly and it goes nowhere, you’re left with the third option. Remove yourself. This is the one people resist longest, because it comes with real loneliness, real uncertainty, a period of genuinely not knowing if you made the right call. But the alternative is staying inside a system that keeps delivering the same message on repeat. You don’t count. What you do isn’t enough. Look what I’ve had to sacrifice because of you. Those messages are not going to stop on their own.
The thing worth remembering, especially if you were once a child in an environment like this with no power to leave, is that you are not that child anymore. You’re a capable adult with resources, even if you have to build some of them first. You are, as it happens, roughly the sum of the four or five people you spend the most time with. Spend it around people who are working through adversity and taking accountability, and something in you starts to lift too.
Empty the vessel. Change the water. Slowly the environment you place yourself in starts to change with you, and eventually you stop coping in it and start actually thriving inside it.
If you’re still not sure, ask yourself the only question that actually matters. Why am I still here. What am I getting from this.
That answer usually tells you everything you need to know.
