I'm Afraid to Be Alone, So I Stay in a Bad Relationship

You've named the mechanism honestly, which most people can't do, so start by giving that its due. You know you'd leave if you weren't afraid to be alone, which means you know the fear is making the decision, not the relationship's merits. That's already a clearer sight than most. Now the question is what the fear of being alone is actually about, because it's rarely about solitude itself. Plenty of people are content alone. What you're afraid of is something the aloneness would expose.

For many people the fear of being alone is really the fear of being alone with themselves. As long as there's another person in the room, you're spared the full weight of your own company, and something in you believes that company is unbearable, that if you were truly alone you'd meet an emptiness or a worthlessness you couldn't survive. So the relationship, even a bad one, functions as a shield against yourself. Its job isn't to make you happy. Its job is to stand between you and a confrontation with your own interior, and it does that job whether or not it's a good relationship, which is why a bad one will do.

This is where the wound tends to live. If early on you learned that you were only okay when someone was there to reflect you, that your worth existed in someone else's attention and vanished without it, then being alone doesn't feel like solitude. It feels like ceasing to exist. That's not a preference for company. It's a survival-level belief that you need another person to be real, and it will keep you in almost any relationship rather than test whether it's true. The bad relationship is the price you pay to never find out you might be all right on your own.

The cost is severe and it compounds quietly. You stay somewhere that's harming you, and in staying you confirm the very belief that traps you, that you can't be alone, because you never let yourself find out otherwise. You also hand the other person enormous power, because they're not just a partner, they're the thing standing between you and an unbearable aloneness, and that's too much weight for any relationship to carry without distorting. You cling, they feel the clinging, and the whole thing warps around your fear.

You don't have to conquer the fear to see what it's guarding. Understanding that the fear of being alone is often a fear of yourself, planted early, is what begins to change your relationship to it. If you want to look at where that fear was set and what's actually on the other side of it, the free book Before Approaching the Threshold and the free Atlas at app.codexofthearchitect.com are a place to begin.