As solo parents, we may not have experienced healthy relationships in our past resulting in a distorted view of what relationships should actually look like. So how can we define healthy relationships and what are some guidelines so that we’re able to identify toxic or unsafe connections in our lives?

Laurie Lokey is a licensed professional counselor who specializes in individual intensive therapy around the impacts of trauma. She and her late husband, Bill Lokey, co-founded Resilient Love, a program based on decades of clinical therapy experience that partners with people on their journey to find hope and resiliency.

Tell me about a relationship that you thought was healthy, but eventually realized it was unhealthy. How did you deal with it?

Let’s pull a name out of the hat. My marriage. Actually, I don’t know that I ever realized. I don’t know that I ever went into it thinking, “Oh, this is healthy. This is what a good relationship should look like.” Never asked the question. That was never even a thing. But once I became aware of what healthy versus unhealthy relationships look like, which was really just a journey of me saying, “Something’s not right here and I’ve got to figure this out. Something’s not settled with me and I need help,” that’s when it became clear that it was an unhealthy relationship—not so much just on his part, but also on mine and just a lot of the things that I needed to work through. And he did too. He chose not to. I wanted to. So here we are.

Laurie, how would you define a healthy relationship? What does it look like? What does it feel like?

I believe it starts with having a healthy relationship with yourself—often, in our childhood, we become disconnected from ourselves into places where we have to learn to survive. And so the first step is really Am I connected within myself? Do I know who I am? Am I able to be connected to another person?

What are the signs of a healthy relationship? 

If I think back to Bill and I’s relationship, we could just be. He knew all the ins and outs of the good, bad and the ugly, and I knew his ins and outs of the good, bad and the ugly, and we could just be together. There wasn’t a place where we were afraid or a place that we would run away. If we did have an argument, which we did, we would stay in the ring and we would learn to look at our own selves of what’s going on inside of me right now that’s triggering this argument that we’re having instead of, You are the problem. I had to look at my own self. 

If someone’s in a relationship and they’re questioning if it’s healthy or not, what are the primary red flags or warning signs they should look for?

There would be a lot of red flags. Number one, are they able to be themselves? Are they able to just relax and show up? Can they be open? Can they be honest? Can they be authentic? If they’re not, they’re probably in a place of performance: Let me show you how great I am, trying to prove to you I’m so good. Or a place of fear: Getting small and not showing up in their own ability to have their own language or discussions because they’re afraid of saying what they really believe. Or maybe they run away. They avoid the relationship. So it’s really two people able to stay together and hold the space for one another in relationship

As single parents, when you’re starting to think about dating again and loving again, it’s scary because you’ve been hurt before—whether it’s abandonment or death of a spouse or abuse. We have a good sense of “I’m not going to do that again.” We’ve seen the red flags. What should we be looking for? What are some green flags that you would say to a single parent getting back into the dating scene? What are things to look for in a healthy relationship?

Number one, that thought is terrifying. Just to give yourself permission to know when you’re stepping out there into a new relationship, you have to be aware of your rejection buttons, and if you can still be okay if this person doesn’t like you or maybe you don’t like them. And so the first step is really self-compassion; you’re going out into a hard place. And I’m saying this because I have been divorced after a 25-and-a-half year marriage that was very unhealthy. Then [I was] married again, and now a widow. Does the thought ever come through my head that I perhaps might want to go out with somebody someday? Not yet. I’m just kidding. I could maybe, depending on the day.

I am just saying that if you’ve been hurt in a relationship before and you are a solo parent, then that hurt needs to be grieved. It (what happened in the first relationship) needs to be understood. What were the strategies that each of the people in that relationship were using to protect their hearts? When you meet someone new, they’re probably protecting their hearts too. And because it’s scary, our greatest fear is, Are we going to be loved and liked? Right? That’s our greatest fear. And am I too much for that other person? Am I enough? And yet, really we all are, but that lie creeps in. Those insecurities creep in, and I just want to be real with this audience. I just want to say this is tough. Relationships are hard, and I would much rather be alone than be with someone who I have to placate or pretend or be afraid of. I’d much rather not be in a relationship.

What were things that you were looking for in a relationship after the divorce?

After the divorce, I was still having to go to therapy school to get healthy, but I made a decision that whatever that was, I never wanted that to happen again. And so I had to develop a self. In other words, who am I? What is it that I like and love? And I like to be playful, so who can play with me? I like to be adventuresome, who can go on adventures with me? I like to go down deep into the depths of life, who can go there with me in honesty and truth? Because if I were to date now and somebody was like, “Hey, I don’t want to talk about that,” then that’s probably not going to be the right person for me. But starting out with Who are you? What do you like? Is there someone that you can be best friends with first and foremost?

One of my issues is I’ve caught myself being unwilling to go to a certain place because I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to be hurt like that again.” For instance, I have two step kids from my marriage, Jax’s older brother and sister. I have a great relationship with them and I love them. They’re my own. I have a hard time picturing myself opening my heart up to other kids in a relationship with a significant other. I have a hard time picturing what that would be like and even being willing to open myself up for that type of hurt again, because it is very hurtful. Again, we have a great relationship, but there’s still just something different. I don’t get the holidays with them. We have to make an extra effort for me to see them when they’re in town (with my ex’s kids) because they have two other parents they have to go see. So I kind of fall to the bottom of the totem pole naturally—I would never expect anything differently, but it has been very hard. It’s one of the things that I’ve had to grieve. I still grieve even seven years later. And so when I think about opening myself up fully, even in the relationship I’m in now, there’s something that holds me back. I do not want to be hurt like that again. And so I think about other single parents potentially experiencing the same thing, whether through death of a spouse or through divorce and just not being willing to go there. They don’t want to get hurt.

Now you’re talking about capacity. How much capacity do you have to open up your heart to give to other people? And the grief of the loss of your previous stepchildren—where is that in the process? Which is a risk. There’s no guarantee that we’re not going to get hurt again. And so sometimes I have to make a decision of how much capacity I have to add anything else or anyone else, including friendships into my world, right now at capacity. That’s an awareness of, Okay, I’m still reeling from my stepchildren. I see these other children that could be potential people for me to lose again. How much capacity do I have to open up my heart to them right now? And that’s a good question and that’s a great awareness that you have as you’re struggling through that.

I would love to even know what thoughts you have around increasing capacity or staying where you’re at, just being okay with it? Does it naturally come later as you grieve, as you process, or is it something that you have to be intentional about?

Yeah, I think that’s a hard question to answer. So I’m a year and a half out from Bill going to be with Jesus, and so I’m careful with my capacity. What do I have capacity for? Maybe by next year this time, I will have the ability to maybe open up more, but right now my heart’s still hurting. And so in that grief process, I don’t know. I’m hoping that next year, next Christmas may be a little bit less painful, but this past Christmas was very painful. It was the second year, out of denial. The first year is pretty much denial. Second year’s real. You’re seven years out of missing your stepchildren and you’re still struggling in that relationship of going, “I really wanted to be able to see them more and do I have room yet to open up?” So maybe as you grieve not being able to see them this year, maybe next year you’ll have more capacity, but you never know. I do ask God for the capacity to get through what I have to get through and to open my heart more, to love deeper and more.

The more I hear you talk about capacity, the more [I realize] it’s not just capacity to engage in other relationships; it’s also knowing that I have to grieve and that takes capacity. It’s not just relationships, it’s really carving out space to do the work to grieve all of that. Is that fair?

Yes. Because of course we want to avoid pain, right? Yes. Who wants to feel pain? And yet I think Christmas Eve was one of the hardest, most painful moments  I’ve had since Bill’s been gone. But I had to feel it. I had to grieve it, I had to let it go. I had to say, this is life now, which then gave me the freedom to move into 2025. If I had not, then I would’ve been stuck there in that grief process. And so part of living fully is being able to embrace that life is hard and it hurts, and we have tears for a reason, and we have our hearts that hurt for a reason, and our hearts and our tears matter. We don’t want to get stuck there in a cycle of depression. But to be able to cry honestly and openly and say, “This is really sad, and my heart hurts and I miss what life was before” and as I grieve, I can let go and then move ahead to what’s next.

This Christmas Eve was the hardest that I can remember as well. So I totally resonate with that. And staying in that is important to recognize. But also, what I hear you saying is having a point where you say, “Okay, it’s time to move forward, and it’s time to say, ‘Okay, this is life now and now we’re going to move forward.’”

I don’t think I could have [done that] without letting it go, [acknowledging] that this is hard. I miss him. I miss our family. I miss the way we were. And that would be the same thing for a person who’s divorced. I miss our family. I still grieve my family that was intact and whole, but again, it’s continuing to grieve it and going, “But I still have breath and I still have life. And then how can I live this day to the fullness of who I am, who God’s created me to be?”

How do we know when to walk away from a relationship versus working on it or hoping for it to become a healthy, sustainable relationship? It’s really, really important before you get married again, before you create, before the cement dries again that you understand, is this sustainable? Is this a healthy place? How do we know when to walk away or how to stay working at it?

So if you’re in the dating process and you’re doing all the work and the other person’s not willing to do any of the work, then that would be a red flag. That would be a place of going, “Okay, this is pretty much how it’s going to be for the next years of my life.” And you have to make a choice in that. If you’re married and you’re going, “Okay, I’m doing all the work, but my spouse doesn’t want to do the work,” then my encouragement is always invite the spouse into doing the work and not making it just about them (“Oh, if they would do the work”) because then that makes them an external regulator Instead of you being okay with you. But invite them in to say, “Hey, I think there’s some places that we can improve and have a richer, more intimate relationship. Would you be willing to come and work with me on these things?” If the relationship is abusive, that’s a whole other category. However, it’s interesting, in my first 25-and-a-half years of marriage, I would’ve said that my relationship was abusive. And he was not a nice man to me, but looking back at my helplessness, in my victimhood, I look at the places I’m responsible for his disrespect toward me, and I wouldn’t have respected me either. So you have to be careful with calling everyone a narcissist or using those terms or saying, “I’m in an abusive relationship.” What I learned through that is I had to work on myself and develop a self or find out who “myself” was. And now knowing, I probably could have handled that kind of relationship.

We often gravitate towards what we know in relationships. So if we had an unhealthy relationship modeled for us while growing up, from our parents or whoever raised us, we may seek that type of dynamic—just because it’s comfortable or familiar, whether we know it or not. How can we change this? 

I’m thinking specifically about not only me, but also my stepson who we’ve talked a little bit about. He was in a very toxic relationship for a lot of years—lots of codependency, everything you’ve taught me about the victim perpetrator and rescuer, that triangle, all of those things. And I know that that was modeled for him because I was married to his dad and that’s what we modeled for him. And I can only imagine what his mom has modeled for him. So I see it now playing out. Luckily he’s just gotten out of [that relationship] in the last week actually. But just thinking further than that, I’ve even seen some of my own things show up with relationships that I’ve had, not just in my marriage, but other relationships as well. How can we break that cycle? Because we do tend to go to what’s familiar, what we know, what we think actually is healthy. Because some people put their parents and their parents’ relationship on a pedestal. They’re like, “Well, they’ve made it 40 something years, 50 years, they must be doing something right.” And that’s not actually true. So what can we do?

So you only know what you know. As a child, you look at mom and dad and you have mirroring neurons and you watch them and you learn their strategies of protection. You learn when there’s not enough or too much of something. You bring that into your adult life and you grow up going, “Oh, isn’t this normal?” So you don’t know until you get into an unhealthy relationship and then you start going, “Oh, wait a minute, this is harmful and hurtful to me.” And so that’s the place of learning, which is part of the resilient love. And part of the trauma work I do is understanding what’s going on inside of me. What is it that I don’t know that I’ve normalized? And I normalized codependency. I normalized being a victim. I didn’t know. I just kept on going to counseling, trying to go, “I’m broken, something’s wrong. How do I fix this?” And unfortunately, a lot of counselors didn’t know how to fix it. And then there were those who did. And so as I continued to do my work, I began to understand, “Oh, these are the ways I’ve learned to protect my heart.

I am basically love hungry. I am starving for love, and so I’m going to give myself away to anybody to get that love.” And then other people had too much. Maybe a mom or a dad that used them to be their little parent; that would be more on the enmeshed side. I was abandoned. And I just want to own this as filters of what my child developed from and my filters were broken. And then there is the enmeshed side, which then those children who grew up into adults tend to be avoidant. Don’t anyone ever need me ever again.  And so they’re going to run away from anybody who’s needy. Hence, I’m giving you my dynamic. And so again, why was I needy? Because I was a very sensitive child needing a lot of extra love and attention from parents who didn’t know how to give that to me. And again, it’s really being willing to step into looking at our places that we protect our hearts, that we’re disconnected from ourselves, to learn how to connect within ourselves, to find that other person who knows how to connect within themselves so that you can have a healthy relationship.

How do we model this healthy relationship for our kids? Even if we’re not dating?

My children were in their twenties when I realized I was a big hot mess. And that’s when I started doing tons of work. As I did my work, it changed them as they saw me take responsibility for my life, growing and learning and who I am, and then they began to do the same. And that doesn’t mean that they didn’t go to all the programs and all the counseling too. It means that they begin to see, “Oh, that’s healthy and that’s not healthy.” So it really only takes one parent to do the work in order for the children to go, “Oh, that’s what healthy is.”

That’s so true. I’ve seen that in my girls and the dynamics. I mean, it has taken me a while to get to a place where I’m at least moving in the right direction. And it has changed everything about our relationship and even some of the choices that they make with guys that they might want to date. I was just talking to my daughter about that last night, but it wasn’t because of anything I ever said to them. When I started seeking health and taking account for my own stuff … They’re always watching. 

I call that a living amends. I messed up in the beginning, but I have chosen to live my life differently [since I didn’t know]. And that’s really where Jesus says, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” I didn’t know what I was doing and I was acting out of a place of survival instead of knowing who I am and whose I am.

How can I have healthy relationships if I know that I myself am not a healthy person?

I’m not sure that’s possible. I think number one, being healthy means I have an awareness of my strategies. I have an awareness of the places I protect my heart. My house is being renovated and I’m living with my daughter and son-in-law right now, and being able to go when my son-in-law tells me that perhaps I’m triggering him with some stuff. Then I have to search my heart and go, “Oh, I was trying to rescue.” Well, that puts shame on a person. I have to own it, but I have to be aware and to have the awareness of, “Oh, okay, I went there.” I need to stay grounded in myself and begin to practice that. I’m not going to [do] it perfectly till eternity. So today is the day I have to look and go, “Okay, how’s my heart today? What’s going on in it? Am I protecting? Am I afraid? Am I wanting to run away? Am I in a freeze state or can I just be?” 

So I was in a very traumatic addicted marriage. I wasn’t addicted but my ex [was]. And so there was drama all the time. When I started dating again, one of the benchmarks (that I’m recognizing now) was just stability. And I’m realizing that wasn’t necessarily the only thing I should have been looking for. 

Is a “boring” or “just a fine” relationship a “healthy” relationship? A lot of single parents have gone through the drama, up and down, and they’re finally in a relationship where it’s just like, “Well, at least it’s not drama.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a healthy relationship, right?

No, it doesn’t because intimacy is “into me, you see.” When Bill got cancer, he fought it for six years, but it was the ability for us to each show up in our knee. Somebody asked him the three things that he loved most about me, and he said, it was my willingness to show up in the relationship, and even when he’s struggling with cancer, I will say, “I have a need too.” And he said that normalized his cancer. Instead of him being the victim all the time, it normalized him to be able to go, “Oh, I still have something to offer.” And I’m like, “Yes, I want to be pursued today. You’re kind of feeling good. So I want to be pursued today.” And he said that made him feel like a normal person, and it’s just being able to go into me. You see, I have needs, he has needs. We both show up in them even when it’s not comfortable.

It’s kind of the opposite. It is showing up and not being afraid of conflict. And healthy relationships have a fair amount of conflict. I mean, that’s life, right? It is healthy to have conflict. And a lot of times we’re seeking out things that have triggered or wounded us. And so a tendency could be to look for the calm in the storm, but that’s not intimacy. 

I’ve been trained through childhood with my dad and through my marriage and all of that to walk on eggshells and not rock the boat and just keep everything steady. And so it feels like to me, this boring relationship. I tend to go to not rocking the boat then. And not using my voice, not speaking up, not saying that I have needs, taking care of everything myself, managing feelings, all of that so that everybody’s happy, everything’s okay, and we can just have fun. We don’t have to do anything hard or difficult or whatever. Fill in the blank. And I very much see that that’s not a healthy thing, a healthy place to be. So I feel some insecurity too that’s developed over time. 

What’s the difference then between feeling insecure and feeling unsafe or disrespected? 

Well, insecure is, I’m going to go into feeling small and less than unsafe and disrespected. You still may get small because it’s scary. Disrespected is if someone’s going to disrespect me, then I’ll probably ask them, “Could you say that in a different way?” I’ll ask them for what I need. But insecure is “I’m losing myself in the process.” If somebody is unsafe and feels afraid, I may have a boundary then and I’m going to go to another room, or I’m going to leave the house, or I’m going to go somewhere else. Being disrespected, I may ask for them to say it in a different way than they said it. And if they can’t, then I’m going to have a boundary. 

So there is some security that can happen, or being secure within yourself. That can still happen with feeling unsafe and disrespected. The insecurity comes when, for instance, if I resort back to walking on eggshells or resort back to getting small and just keeping everything level, not bringing up the hard conversations, just being, “Nope, we’re not going to rock the boat.” And then that person might disrespect you or treat you poorly because of that. You’re actually on the victim part of the triangle. You’re going down into the “I’m going to be small, I’m going to be afraid, I’m not going to rock the boat” mindset. And they’re sensing disconnection because anytime we go into our strategies, we have now disconnected from the person that we’re with. If I was to be really afraid right now, then y’all wouldn’t be able to connect with me. Does that make sense? Did y’all feel that just then? The difference instead of “I’m here, you’re here. We’re all connected, we’re all seeing what we want to say, and we’re respecting each other in it.”

Being a solo parent is stressful, and we often carry that stress into everything—into all of our relationships and thought processes. How do we know if it’s a relationship that stresses me out versus going through a stressful time?

I try not to make other people be responsible for my own response or my own behavior. So if I’m in a stressful relationship, if someone is not being connected, if they’re not being kind, then I have to look at how I want to address that. I’m the one who has to be responsible for staying in my adult consciousness and not going to my child consciousness, which is more survival. 

So let’s say someone listens to this podcast and they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to give it a go. I’ve been single for X number of years. I’m going to jump in the pool, see what happens.” And all of a sudden they’re not as healthy as they thought they were because that other person brings out some things and triggers. All the things that even your son-in-law was saying that you were triggering him. What can you do to push past the fear that might take you into saying, “Oh, I didn’t think I was ready. I’m not ready.” What do you do to work through that? How do you know that’s okay to still kind of keep moving forward?

Let’s say they go out with someone who triggers their insecurity. Well, there is an awareness. There’s something about that person where I don’t feel comfortable being me. If you want to go on date two, can you show up differently? Can you show up in yourself? And if you can’t, that’s probably a sign that there’s something not going on well in that dynamic. But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be somebody else that you could show up with. It’s just like we all have friends and there are people that you can be with and laugh with and show up in your full self. It’s the same thing in dating relationships. Who is it that can love you for you and you love them for them? Not everyone’s going to like me. Certainly not everyone’s going to love me. And so I have to go into relationships knowing that not everyone’s going to like me. That doesn’t mean that I’m unlikable. That doesn’t mean that I don’t stop stepping into my fear because if we don’t step into our fear, our fear just gets bigger. And then we just shut down and we isolate and we give up. It is being able to go, “You know what? I have something to bring to this world.” And if I don’t feel that, then that would be a place to really go and do some deeper work. What’s in the way of you knowing that you have something to bring to this world?

Takeaways
A healthy versus unhealthy relationship really starts with awareness and me doing the work. Because then wherever you go, if you’re in a healthy place, it doesn’t mean that everyone around you is going to be healthy, but you’re going to have a really good sense of decisions on whether you enter into a relationship or not. But it won’t happen unless I’ve worked on my health first. That’s what I’m pulling away from this more than anything.

Listener Question

Compare who you were, compare who you were when you met your first spouse to who you are now. Personality, hobbies, job style, likes, dislikes, habits.

Gosh, I am night and day from all these things. I mean, I was in my twenties … I was at my peak of adventure. All I wanted to do was go and experience life and be in my twenties and party and have fun. And I was working, I worked to travel, I worked to buy clothes and I worked to go out on weekends and to pay my rent. That’s it. That’s all I wanted to do. I had no other care in the world. One of my friends who knew me back then before my ex and I met and started dating actually pointed out recently, “The reason why you guys got together and the reason why it worked while it did is because you were a breath of fresh air for him. He had gone through a divorce. He had two kids that he only had every other weekend. You were this adventurous, free spirited, ‘let’s go have fun’ wind the sails. He loved everything that you brought to his life in that regard. He was nine to five or singing in a band on weekends and at nights, and he missed out because he had a child at a young age. He missed out on all the adventure that I was getting to have and that I created for my life then.” And then we had our own child and the adventure went away, so to speak, in the way that we knew it. And so she was like, “So of course he lost interest. Of course you couldn’t grow together in that way because it wasn’t what he signed up for and it wasn’t what you signed up for and whatever.” And so anyway, that’s who I was back then. I still have the adventurous spirit as you are. I still love to travel, still love to do my thing, but I don’t necessarily party hard like I used to. Well, age does that too. I mean, I’m a different person.

And I think that this ties right into what we’ve been talking about, that if you have a healthy relationship, you have your own awareness, and Lord willing, you’re growing together. So you’re both changing. I mean, I’m a completely different person from when I first got married.

Oh yeah, I am not the same. Got married, had a child, first child at 21, second at 24, I was crafty. I cleaned the house all the time. That’s not me. I mean, I do like a neat house, but I’m not crafty anymore and I’m a totally different person than I was back then. I was very codependent, very “Let me please you, let me please you, let me please you.” And now I want to be kind to you, but don’t necessarily have to please you anymore. It’s so interesting looking back, I barely recognize [myself]. I mean, there’s little bits, obviously there’s little nuances, and I still like to hike and still like to adventure, but I’m not really crafty.

Well, I’m still driven, but I was driven and I was filling this void that I wasn’t enough and the way I would become something was to achieve. And so I wasn’t going to depend on anybody. I learned at an early age that I have to be self-reliant: If I’m going to have to create my future. I’m going to have to create all this, and that is not sustainable. And actually the divorce really helped me come to terms with a lot of those things. So I’m still ambitious. I still have drive. I still like all those things, but the “why” is different. And I still have a tendency to be self-reliant … It’s a work in progress moving past the default. I can actually have intimacy with other people and create dependencies on just really needing them, not for the sake of acquiring. My friend group has gotten smaller, but they’re real friends. They’re deep friends. 

Resources

The first one would be BillandLaurieLokey.com. And there are some free videos to watch and there’s one on healthy relationships. There’s one on codependency that Bill did, and I’ve kept them up because I want people to be able to have access to them. The second one is called ResilientLoveProgram.com. And that one is a group program where you can come and really begin to look at the places that you disconnect from yourself and understand those strategies, whether they’re pride-based strategies or shame-based strategies, and you can get all the information on that website.

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