What you might be experiencing
Missing an ex after a toxic relationship often feels like two things happening at once: a real ache for something you lost, and a quieter knowledge that what you lost was also hurting you. That combination can be disorienting. You might find yourself remembering the good moments with surprising sharpness while the painful ones feel abstract or far away. That is not denial — it is how memory works, especially when a relationship involved alternating warmth and harm.
What makes this particular kind of missing so hard is the phenomenon sometimes called a trauma bond — a connection that forms not despite the painful cycles but partly because of them. When someone is a source of both distress and relief, your nervous system can become organized around them in ways that feel a lot like love, and are hard to simply turn off. This does not mean you are confused about reality. It means you were in something genuinely complicated, and your feelings are reflecting that complexity back to you.
You may also be grieving things that were real and good — moments of genuine connection, a sense of being known, physical closeness, shared routines. Those things existed. Acknowledging them does not undo the harm. Holding both truths is not a sign that you are romanticizing the relationship; it is a sign that you are being honest about it.
What can help
One of the most grounding things you can do is get specific about what you miss. Not the person as a whole, but the particular things — company late at night, the sense of being chosen, a shared sense of humor, a feeling of safety that showed up sometimes. When you name those things precisely, they become needs you can recognize and eventually meet in other ways. A monolith is hard to move past; a list of specific needs is something you can actually work with.
Keeping what some people call a reality list can also help — a written record that holds both the genuine good and the actual harm side by side. This is not about convincing yourself you did not love them. It is about not letting nostalgia do the editing. Memory under grief tends to smooth over what hurt; having it written down in your own words from a clearer moment gives you something to return to when a wave hits.
For the deeper patterns — the intensity of the pull, the cycling thoughts, the way missing them sometimes overrides what you know — trauma-informed therapy is worth pursuing. A therapist who understands intermittent reinforcement and trauma bonding can help you understand why this particular kind of attachment feels so hard to release, and that understanding tends to reduce the shame around it considerably.
When to reach out
Reaching out for support after a toxic relationship is not a last resort — it is a reasonable response to something that was genuinely hard. You do not have to be in crisis to deserve help making sense of what you went through.
That said, there are signs that professional support is warranted sooner rather than later: if the missing is pulling you back toward contact with someone who harmed you; if you are returning to or considering returning to the relationship; if fear for your safety is present alongside the longing; or if the grief is making it hard to function day to day. These are not signs of weakness — they are signs that what you are carrying is heavier than one person should sort through alone, and that trauma-informed support would make a real difference.
If you are in the US and need immediate support, you can call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) at any time. If your safety is at risk because of the relationship or a potential return to it, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233 and can help you think through safety planning without pressure.