What is a karmic relationship?

Karmic relationships are powerful. Intense. Passionate. Volatile. While other kinds of relationships might feel like a peaceful stroll through a meadow, karmic relationships are more like white water rafting. Most of the time, you’re holding on for dear life and trying to white knuckle your way through turbulent times together.

When you’ve met a karmic soulmate, it often feels like there are two wildly different sides to the relationship. You reach heights of bliss you may have never experienced before. And then you plunge down into depths darker than you’ve ever encountered.

The word “karma” comes from Sanskrit and relates to destiny and fate— a future that’s determined by what happened in the past. Karmic relationships share this powerful sense of fate. In a karmic relationship, you feel destined to meet each other, like fate brought you together.

Meaning of a karmic relationship

While karmic relationships are sometimes described as involving partners who have unresolved issues with each other from past lives, our definition of karmic relationships is a little different.

We see karmic relationships as ones in which each partner brings their unresolved experiences from the past—often from childhood—into the relationship, in the hopes of healing the past and creating a relationship in which the past no longer affects the present.

Oftentimes, partners are trying to work through issues from childhood like feelings of deep hurt, rejection, abandonment, or the lack of feeling loved unconditionally by those who were supposed to love you. Most often, the past issues that need to be resolved involve things that happened with parents who weren’t able to be there for you in the way you needed them to be.

Karmic relationships can feel mysterious because the connection feels overwhelming — like a current that impossible to resist.

The power of this connection is incredibly seductive right from the beginning, which is why partners in a karmic relationship often bond much more quickly than in typical dating couples.

It’s the instant intensity of a karmic connection that keeps partners invested in the relationship even when the relationship starts to become volatile. Karmic partners remain committed to the relationship, long after another person may have called it quits in the same situation.

When you’re in an intense, dramatic karmic relationship, it’s not uncommon that your friends and family members may be looking at your relationship and feeling confused or worried about why you’re still in it.

This often leads to feeling misunderstood (or like your partner is misunderstood) by those around you, like no one else gets it. It may feel like you need to defend your karmic partner, which then intensifies the feeling that only this person can understand you.

Defending a partner is a way of validating the relationship, but it also tends to isolate you from other relationships.

It can be hard to navigate the huge gap between how you see your relationship, which includes very high highs in addition to the low lows, and how your friends and family view the relationship as unhealthy, toxic, or even abusive.

At best, trying to maintain two perspectives on the relationship—well-intentioned advice from the outside, and experiences from inside—is confusing. The incompatible perspectives are mutually exclusive. The resulting confusion can feel isolating and fuel a desire to cling tighter to a karmic partner.

Five Signs of a Karmic Relationship

1 : The relationship is intense, unpredictable, and volatile

You know you’ve met a karmic soulmate when your relationship flips suddenly between feeling like you’re at the gates of heaven to feeling like you’re dropped into hell.

You might be in the midst of a blissful Sunday morning together and one wrong word triggers a raging argument that takes you hours (or days) to recover from.

When you’re in a karmic bond with a partner, you may find yourself tolerating behavior from a partner that you never thought you’d tolerate. Or you might find yourself behaving in ways that you never imagined you could behave in a relationship.

This experience is totally confusing and often leads people to start keeping the darker aspects of their relationship a secret from friends and family. The attempt to keep secrets increases the tendency toward isolation already present in karmic relationships. Instead of talking about these parts of the relationship, you try not to think about them, because they stir up fear, confusion, and shame.

When you do think about them, there can be a wave of shame, followed by questions like, “How could I let myself be treated this way?” or “How could I have done that to someone I love?”

2 : There’s an instant connection

In a karmic relationship, you feel like you’ve known each other forever. You may even feel like your karmic partner knows you better than anyone’s ever known you.

In the beginning you may feel seen and accepted in a way you’ve never experienced before. This sense of instant connection, and the belief that you’ve finally found The One, is often mistaken for an indication that the relationship is a good fit for you.

The force of instant connection should not be underestimated.

In our experience, this is the quality of karmic relationships that makes it incredibly difficult to end the relationship. It can feel like you’re not just giving up on your partner and the relationship, but also on your one chance to have a relationship with someone you feel so incredibly connected to.

This is the power of the karmic bond. It’s something you’ll need to reckon with as you make the decision to leave the relationship for good.

3 : It feels like it’s meant to be

Similarly, the feeling that this relationship is meant to be starts very early, before you’ve truly gotten to know each other. The sense that the relationship is meant to be might be amplified by eerie similarities you two share.

Or perhaps the circumstances around meeting each other go far beyond the typical meet cute and feel much more like your whole life was leading to this meeting point. This is why the sense of fate can be so strong in karmic relationships.

4 : The relationship is all consuming

We all know that intimate relationships require time and attention in order to flourish. Many intimate relationships are forged in the furnace of passionate love. When we first fall in love, it’s common to feel like the new relationship is all consuming.

Karmic relationships take this to a whole other level.

The important distinction is that karmic relationships continue to consume massive amounts of energy and attention, well after the initial honeymoon phase has ended.

Often this involves a cycle of dramatic, disruptive conflicts followed by passionate reconnection. Over time, the amount of energy that goes into working on the relationship and trying to fix it continues to increase, while the intense highs of the relationship become more and more rare.

Paradoxically, the more negative a karmic relationship becomes, the more intense the highs start to feel, precisely because they’re so rare.

This means that even when the relationship has become overwhelming stressful, difficult, and painful, the infrequent highs continue to blaze brightly in your overall picture of the relationship.

Contrast this with a healthy relationship, in which the initial passion stokes the fires of love in ways that continue to nourish the relationship over time. In a karmic relationship, passion drives conflict that truly does feel all consuming, as though there’s nothing left of you outside this relationship. This sense is exaggerated by having fewer deep relationships with anyone other than your karmic partner.

5 : Your childhood trauma is activated but not healed in relationship

Intimate relationships can be a potent container in which partners can heal trauma from childhood and past relationships. Longterm relationships can allow us to work through past experiences and to process and heal experiences that caused pain during childhood. For example, with a stable and loving partner, early experiences of rejection and abandonment can eventually be healed so that those past experiences no longer affect you in the same way.

A key driving force in karmic bonds is that both partners have relational trauma from the past.

Unconsciously, karmic partners are drawn into this relationship with the hope that the relationship can become a container for healing past wounds. This is a valid impulse, because it is possible to heal past hurts within a relationship, but the relationship has to be safe in order for us to heal.

A necessary part of healing past wounds is that old trauma is triggered and brought to the surface. This happens in healthy relationships, as well as karmic relationships.

But it’s what happens after trauma is triggered that distinguishes a healthy relationship from a karmic relationship. In a healthy relationship, the outcome in the relationship is completely different than what happened during the original trauma.

For example, if you’re sensitive to experiences of being abandoned because you were left for a year with extended family when you were three years old, it’s likely that certain relationship experiences are going to activate that trauma. Let’s say you had dinner plans with a partner who doesn’t show up and two hours go by before you hear from them.  Most likely, this will be a very challenging experience for you and old feelings of abandonment will get stirred up. In a healthy relationship, a partner will have a good explanation for what happened that prevented them from meeting up. And they’ll be sensitive, understanding, and supportive with your feelings about what happened.

In a karmic relationship with the same exact scenario, the outcome looks a lot different.

Let’s say you finally hear from your partner but they either don’t have a clear explanation for what happened. Or they tell you something that your gut says isn’t completely true. On top of this, they’re not understanding about your feelings. Instead you’re told that you’re making too big a deal over what happened. This means that your old trauma got stirred up, but instead of having a reparative experience of connection, you’re left feeling confused, upset, and bad for making such a big deal out of it.

This is the difference between an experience that repairs and heals past trauma and an experience that repeats trauma. One of the key features of a karmic relationship is that trauma is repeated.

You have similar kinds of emotional experiences as you did when you were younger, but there’s no healing. There’s only additional hurt.

Karmic relationships open old wounds and expose something raw and vulnerable inside you. This is part of what fuels the intensity of karmic bonds. Because so many relationship injuries go unrepaired, the relationship becomes an increasingly destabilizing part of your life.

Are karmic partners soulmates?

The answer to this question depends on what you mean by soulmates. If by soulmate you mean someone you are destined to be with forever because they’re your one true love, the answer is no.

Karmic partners aren’t soulmates in the sense of being The One. But karmic partners are soulmates in another sense.

We come into this life in order to have experiences that help us grow at a soul level. Karmic relationships are a very effective and powerful learning opportunity.

If we approach karmic relationships in this way, we can learn an incredible amount about ourselves. We can translate what we learn into personal growth that propels us further along our life journey, toward experiences that offer us opportunities to create the kind of relationships we really want to have—relationships that are passionate, deeply caring, and sustainable over the long term.

In order to receive the benefit of karmic relationships, we have to learn the lessons the relationship presents us with. And we have to figure out how to break the karmic bond and leave the relationship.

Why is it so hard to leave a karmic relationship?

Before we share strategies for getting out of a karmic relationship, first we want to talk about why it’s so hard to leave a karmic relationship, even when you’ve recognized for a long time that the relationship is unhealthy, toxic, or even abusive.

Like trying to navigate in the midst of a blizzard, karmic relationships are disorienting and chaotic.

It’s hard to get a clear picture of what’s going on when so many emotions (both your own and your partner’s) are swirling around you. It’s even hard to get a sense of direction when your own inner guidance is telling you something completely different than what your partner is telling you.

This lack of clarity is amplified by the “us vs. them” dynamic that develops in karmic relationships.

Your inner confusion about the reality of the relationship is reflected in the difference between what your partner is telling you vs. what friends and loved ones are telling you. This makes is nearly impossible to create the inner stillness you need in order to really listen to yourself.

Another aspect of karmic relationships that makes it difficult to leave is the magnetic attraction that happens in karmic bonds.

Karmic partners are powerfully attracted to each other, not just physically but emotionally as well. In order to leave, you have to figure out how to break that magnetic pull that keeps you attached to your partner.

Karmic relationships nearly always become so unhealthy that others in your life who are aware of what’s happening encourage you to get out as quickly as possible.

Eventually you also recognize that the relationship is detrimental to your emotional wellbeing, your mental health, and even your physical health, but it can still be hard to leave.

One reason for this is that it’s very hard to give up the hope that the relationship can get better. You’ve experienced intoxicating highs in this relationship. Even when those moments become few and far between, you might still believe that if you just work harder and put in more effort, you could turn this relationship around and get it onto stable ground.

There’s often a mistaken assumption that the karmic relationship has the potential to be healthy and if you only find the secret key, you can unlock the potential for more of the high highs without the low lows.

But this just isn’t true.

Another reason it’s so hard to end karmic relationships is that so much of who you are gets consumed by the relationship that it’s difficult to imagine who you would be without the relationship.

Your life before the karmic relationship may not seem enticing or interesting to you any more. So much of your identity exists in connection to the relationship that you’ve lost touch with who you are outside of the relationship.

You may also feel like there’s no one else in the world who will ever get you the way your karmic partner gets you.

One thing that’s hard for outsiders to understand is that even with all the chaos and crises in the relationship, there’s still something that feels familiar. And because we’re comforted by what we find familiar, paradoxically, you might feel very comfortable in the same relationship that’s also making you miserable.

Getting out of a karmic relationship

Leaving a karmic relationship takes time. You might be thinking about it for a while before you make a move to end it. And even when you do end it, you might need to break off the relationship several times before the breakup becomes permanent.

In order to end a karmic relationship, you must come to accept that the relationship isn’t healthy and it will never be healthy.

It will never be the relationship you wanted it to be, no matter how much time, energy, love and care you invest in the relationship.

The only way to move beyond the karmic relationship is to learn to hold the positive and negative aspects of the relationship simultaneously. While others might encourage you to only focus on the negative aspects of the relationship, in our experience this approach is doomed to fail.

You will almost definitely remember the highs. But the good times need to be put into the context of the relationship as a whole, so that you can see the good times set alongside the darkest times.

This lets you have an integrated perspective on the relationship, instead of focusing only on the good times while excluding the larger truth of the relationship.

It’s also important to talk with someone you trust as you’re navigating the breakup. This can be a close friend or loved one. It can also be a therapist or other professional.

You need to talk with someone with whom you can be fully honest, without keeping secrets or trying to protect your partner. It’s essential that you choose someone who’s able to listen and be nonjudgmental.

That means finding someone who can listen to your experience without weighing in with their own opinion about what you should do.

Just as importantly, it’s important that this person doesn’t attack or criticize your karmic partner.

Sometimes it might feel good to hear someone else say something negative about your partner, but ultimately this tends to backfire. Most likely, you still love this person. Also, karmic bonds involve an intense loyalty to a partner, so hearing someone else berate the one you love will usually trigger defensiveness and protectiveness toward your partner. This makes leaving the relationship even more difficult than it already is.

For more guidance on leaving a karmic relationship and healing after a breakup, check out our article on leaving a toxic relationship.

Lessons of a karmic relationship

Because karmic relationships can be such effective (albeit difficult and painful) learning experiences, it’s important as you’re healing after a karmic relationship that you also take time to reflect on what happened in the relationship, why you stayed as long as you did, and what you can learn from all of this.

After you’re fully out of the relationship, you might be tempted to judge or criticize yourself for what you put up with in the relationship. Don’t do it.

Don’t criticize yourself for what happened. Instead, try to take a compassionate perspective on what you’ve experienced. Remind yourself how difficult it is to extricate yourself from this kind of relationship … and how difficult it is to truly see what’s happening while you’re still in the relationship.

Then ask yourself what you can learn from this experience.

You may find lessons around personal boundaries, over-giving in relationships, being unable to keep a clear-eyed view of someone you deeply love, or a tendency to make excuses for others when they let you down repeatedly. Any of these discoveries will be growth opportunities for you.

Another way in which you can use karmic relationships to grow personally is start getting clarity on what you want in an intimate relationship.

You’ve just experienced a lot of things that you don’t want. Now’s the time to start asking yourself what it is that you do want.

If there’s any part of you who doesn’t believe you deserve to have a completely loving relationship with a partner, that’s something to address before getting into another relationship. You can get your copy of our free guide, Healed and Whole: 5 Ways to Nurture Your Heart and Love Yourself More After a Breakup.

xoxo,

Angela & Daniel

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About angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon

We help those with painful childhood experiences to heal your relationship with yourself, deeply connect with others, and learn the skills for having fulfilling relationships. 

Fulfilling relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.