Rebecca Humphries on healing from being 'poster couple for toxic love' with Seann Walsh

Rebecca Humphries has shared how she has managed to quit unhealthy relationships after becoming "the poster couple for toxic love" with ex Seann Walsh.

In 2018, comedian Walsh was photographed kissing his Strictly Come Dancing partner Katya Jones on then-girlfriend Humphries' birthday.

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The pictures lead to the end of their relationship, as well as eventually Strictly stars Katya and Neil Jones' marriage break-up, and prompted actor and author Humphries to write a now-infamous open letter in which she detailed Walsh's gaslighting behaviour during their relationship.

But speaking to The Guardian, Humphries said she ended up with another heartbreak in her next relationship and had learned tough lessons about how she had been trying to fix her partners while making herself smaller to accommodate them.

Talking about the public split with Walsh, she said: "For a brief while, I was one half of the poster couple for toxic love. I hadn’t even known that love shouldn’t look like it did for us, that an insidious loss of joy, opinion and confidence wasn’t what was required of me.

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"I just thought relationships took work and compromise, and weren’t always plain sailing, and a whole host of other unhelpful soundbites I had filed away over the years to justify the daily pain."

Revealing how she had been so heartbroken by the end of her next relationship that she had been completely unaffected by a scarily turbulent flight in the days afterwards because she felt she was "already dead", Humphries said that she had come to some difficult realisations.

She said: "Though they had been very different men, I had behaved the same in both relationships. I had shrunk myself to tiptoe around their difficulties. I had prioritised their needs to the point where I couldn’t remember what mine were."

Humphries said that she had been through an "excruciating, exhausting" healing process but said that she had created healthy boundaries to guard against repeating the same situation again.

She recently published the book Why Did You Stay? where she details her split from Walsh and the self-worth lessons she learned from it.

Watch: Rebecca Humphries calls Seann Walsh split 'like a bizarre stress dream'