What to do with the people in our lives who are toxic



What to do with the people in our lives who are toxic? You have tried various alternatives: you have been sweet, hoping to communicate by example—natch. You have been angry, hoping to communicate by emotional force—natch. Perhaps you have tried a cause-and-effect approach; ergo, you are sweet when he/she is sweet, you are angry when he/she is angry—even then, natch!

Frankly, it is disheartening. And the age I feel when I get disheartened is six years old. That was the age when I first had some very vivid lessons that people could and would hurt me, that they would not be sorry--not now, not ever--that no matter what I did or said (or didn’t do or didn’t say), some people are ugly anyway. The toxic people in my adult life are not physically violent. But in my childhood, I did get exposed to violence and those experiences are seared in my brain.

That little girl learned that logic does not work in certain situations. No matter what she does, he does whatever he wants. Thus, she learns she has no power.

It has been a long, hard battle for me as an adult to discover my own power. And part of that discovery is clearly recognizing when I am powerless. I realize that sounds contrary—power in powerlessness? However, I can then take necessary action in response. Twelve-step programs are based on that recognition. For example, in the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step reads: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

By that admittance, a person finally does away with denial, the denial that kept him/her tangling with a deadly force, a battle he/she would ultimately and always lose. Remember that with toxic people: if you keep on throwing yourself up against the wall of their toxicity, hoping that somehow the relationship will improve, you too are engaged in a battle. You will end up bloodied while, too often, he/she simply will not acknowledge the damage.

I am admitting to powerlessness when it comes to toxic people. I no longer tell myself, “I can handle them; this person is my friend with whom I have had a long relationship and although that relationship turned on me and turned on me badly, a part of me still clings to the idea of longevity and loyalty. Maybe things will improve magically!

Nope—not gonna happen.

I have a client who often says that phrase and says it firmly. “Not gonna happen!” she raps out sternly in a pretend dialogue with her extremely abusive ‘boyfriend’ (for lack of a better term). In the world outside the safe confines of my office, she experiments with behavior, quietly resistant behavior such as not returning his call the minute he makes it. This lack of instant and obedient response on her part then results in many more calls the same day which, she is learning, she then can take the step of simply turning off her cell phone. She also now erases the increasingly threatening messages he leaves without listening to each and every one the whole way through. She knows the gist already: she is a terrible, horrible person, it is her fault entirely that he is now upset, how dare she not respond instantly to his demands, she is positively forcing him, you see, to once again threaten her…

It is her making him so upset, see! Certainly her gradual retreat away from him has nothing to do with his own behavior lo these many years.

I too have gradually retreated from a few people. With them, I finally had to recognize my own powerlessness. I cannot make another person take responsibility. My client cannot make her ‘boyfriend’ anything than what he is, no matter how protectively she tries to believe that somewhere in there is a decent person who might own up to his actions and even, glory be, change them.

Nope. Not gonna happen.

She is powerless over such a person. And in many key ways, he too is powerless. He is powerless over his own severe limitations that keep him truly unable to grasp concepts like responsibility, fairness, ethics, human rights when they apply to anyone other than himself.

So, when spelled out this clearly, what can she do?

With truly toxic people, we can learn the hard lesson that it does not matter how we behave. We can behave nicely, we can behave badly, we can stay in contact, we can withdraw—and not one small sliver of choice we make appears to influence their opinion of us or their behavior with us. And we can finally take a good hard look at our own choices should we continue with this person in the same way we have before our realizations.

In admitting powerlessness with such people, we take back our own power: the power to see a situation for what it is, rather than how we would like it to be. We can then choose appropriate action. Sometimes we choose simply to not have a relationship at all; with others we may keep the interaction limited; with still others, the only thing that changes—but it’s a big thing—is our own internal expectations. Whatever we choose, we protect our rights as human beings to be treated, as we need to treat others, with respect for those basic rights. Hey—the Golden Rule works in reverse too.

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