“Is this relationship toxic???”
by Mira and Charles on April 13th, 2009If you’re stuck in a toxic relationship, you need to know because things can’t say they way they are. So are you stuck in a toxic relationship?
In the last few years there’s actually been a revolution in our understanding of toxic relationships, and it’s one that we had a lot to do with developing.
I’ll make it real simple. A toxic relationship is one that hurts one or both people in it and that lacks the capacity to heal itself.
How do you know that a relationship with a friend or family member is hurting you? It’s hurting you if it has any one of these signs:
1. It takes up a lot of your time for which you get little back.
2. Encounters with the other person more often than not leave you feeling badly about yourself, or depressed, or anxious, or stressed out, or angry.
3. You find yourself obsessing about that person or your relationship with him and these thoughts are either painful or make it hard for you to function effectively.
4. For a good period of time, say a couple of months, you find yourself consistently wishing that you didn’t have to have anything more to do with this person.
But this by itself isn’t enough to make a relationship toxic. After all, you could be driving around with a car that’s noisy and smelly, but if you brought it in to have it fixed, it might be fine. That’s not a toxic car. For a relationship to be toxic, you also need the fact that the relationship can’t heal itself. How can you tell that?
Here are some of the most telling signs, and having just one of them means that you have a toxic relationship with this friend or family member:
1. The person is controlling. It’s his way or the highway. He always has to win. Now this is not the same as someone having strong needs of their own. Lots of us have lots of needs. And we may fight for them. But a controlling person can’t admit the co-existence of another set of needs other than his own. And so he can never come to agreements that are fair to both people.
2. The person shuts down communication. When you bring up topics that are important to you, he refuses to talk about them. Or he blows up. Or he walks out. Or he gets irrational. You never feel that you can work things out by talking.
3. The person is untrustworthy. He doesn’t do what he says he’s going to do. He doesn’t follow through on agreements he’s made. He lies. He cheats.
4. The person is mentally unstable. There’s a lot of talk about mental problems as illnesses. And that may be true. But looking at the other person’s instability only as an illness makes you feel that there’s something wrong with you if you’re not being sympathetic. Sure, we should be sympathetic to people who are mentally ill. But at the same time that doesn’t make it any less toxic to be in a relationship with a friend or family member whose mental illness makes the relationship painful for you and prevents the two of you from working things out.
Now what does this mean for you? Fasten your seat belt, because I’m going to say something dramatic. This means that you can’t be in a relationship with this person. After all, you’ve just proven that this is a relationship that hurts you and yet can’t heal itself.
Because the relationship can’t heal itself, there’s no point in confronting the other person. Instead, just don’t have much to do with him. Don’t initiate communication. Don’t respond to phone messages. Just let the two of you drift apart.
But don’t put any more of yourself into this relationship or do anything to keep it going. You’ve just proven that it’s not a healthy relationship for you, and not one that can get better. The stress and emotional fatigue are just not worth it.
Hope this helps all of you that are in toxic relationships. Let me hear from you. Have I been too harsh? Have I left something out? What have your experiences in toxic relationships been like? Your answers will help a lot of people.
Love, Mira and Charles
