While many people have negative tendencies, a toxic person is negative in many aspects of their personality, often leaving those around them feeling emotionally exhausted and worse about themselves.
You can escape their negativity as you master dealing with toxic people effectively. This article offers the best techniques and helps you unpack your questions about toxic people.
Key Takeaways:
- A toxic person often exhibits negative behaviors like manipulation, lying, and gaslighting
- Toxic people can love you, but their behavior may still harm your self-esteem and well-being
- Key signs of toxic people include frequent conflicts, boundary violations, and self-centeredness
- Effective strategies for dealing with toxic people include maintaining firm boundaries, avoiding drama, and practicing emotional forgiveness
- Seeking support from friends or a therapist is crucial for managing relationships with toxic people and ensuring your well-being
What is a Toxic Person?
A toxic person is someone who often portrays negative behavior. This can be in the form of lying, gaslighting, guilt-tripping, and other manipulation tactics. Toxic people are usually involved in conflict and are highly self-centered.
Can a Toxic Person Love You?
Yes, it is possible that a toxic person can love you, but they may not be capable of giving you what you deserve in a relationship or friendship. What’s more important is how you feel about yourself when you are with them.
Signs of Toxic People
Knowing the signs of a toxic person helps you understand the problem and note any bias you may have about the situation. This, in turn, makes you more confident and allows you to set boundaries more confidently.
You’ll likely know a toxic person through the following signs:
- They’re involved in lots of conflicts.
- They disrespect and violate your boundaries no matter how many times you set them.
- They repeatedly switch from friend to enemy, and vice versa.
- Their conversations are largely made up of criticizing others while speaking highly of themselves.
- They often practice manipulation tactics such as gaslighting, silent treatment, guilt-tripping, and lying.
- They don’t apologize, but instead blame others for making them feel or act the way they do.
- They’re constantly complaining and blaming others.
- They’re self-centered.
- They have self-esteem but it often appears that they think they are better than others.
One toxic individual might not display all of the above signs. However, their behavior is mostly negative, and it influences others the same way.
How to Deal with Toxic People
1. Remember Your Sense of Control
A mindset shift is effective when dealing with toxic people since the power to run your life remains when you understand that you’re in control of your life, you choose how you want to be treated, and you’ll know what to do when others don’t respect your values.
It’s your choice how much one can occupy your life, how much time you give to them, and how you can treat them — it’s your life. You can acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses and accept that you’re growing so that you can handle negativity in a respectable yet self-confident manner.
2. Choose to Let Go
Letting go of the pain that a toxic person has caused you improves your relationship with them and your well-being.
Three studies on forgiveness revealed that emotional forgiveness helps one heal better than decisional forgiveness. Emotional forgiveness involves replacing negative emotions one feels about being hurt with positive ones, while decisional forgiveness is about deciding to let go of what someone did to you.
Emotional forgiveness helps you deal with resentment, anger, and hatred, among other emotions that come in the way. It also helps you forget unnecessary details about how someone wronged you and helps you understand the situation more.
Instead of focusing on problems the person has caused you, focus on solutions to help you move on with your life. Replace blame-filled thoughts and speech with thoughts of improving your life. You can practice this through mindfulness exercises to reshape your relationship with toxic people, no matter your past with them.
3. Avoid Contributing to Their Drama
Up to 3% of the general population have a dramatic personality disorder. They tend to exaggerate their emotions to seek people’s attention, a toxic behavior derailing their relationships.
When dealing with such a person, one tip is to keep conversations shallow to avoid getting into sensitive subjects that trigger dramatic behaviors. Try to stay calm no matter what emotional outbursts they have in front of you.
4. Maintain Firm Boundaries
Boundaries help you stay in control of your life despite the difficult people surrounding you.
In some situations, staying away from toxic people in your life is tough. They might be one of your family members, a partner you’re willing to stay with, co-workers — anyone you’re staying close to because of unavoidable circumstances.
That’s where boundaries come in.
Healthy boundaries help you establish who you are, what you like, and how you prefer to run your life. It helps others understand your values and interact with you that way.
Setting boundaries may involve telling a person you are unavailable to gossip with them, that you need to go to sleep, or that you will no longer remain in a conversation or situation if they treat you in certain ways.
Toxic people are notorious for breaking boundaries, so you have to enforce them. While they might be disrespectful and resistant initially, toxic people can respect your boundaries in the long run if you stay consistent.
However, sometimes people who are toxic or abusive will ‘punish’ the person trying to set boundaries with them.
This could be emotional punishment or sometimes things can become physically violent. If you feel unsafe setting boundaries with anyone in your life, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for specialized support and referrals to resources in your local area. Call- 800-799-7233, or Text START to 88788
5. Talk to Them about Their Behavior
A toxic person isn’t necessarily a bad person. Most toxic people are that way because of a traumatic background or heredity issues. You can express empathy towards them without enabling their behavior using tips for speaking to a toxic person.
Don’t take responsibility for their behavior or support them in ways you’re uncomfortable with. When you point them towards help, they’re the ones who need to take the step. If they don’t, you aren’t to blame.
What you give them is enough contribution to aid their change.
6. Surround Yourself with Support
Dealing with a toxic person is mentally challenging and emotionally draining, so it’s best to have a support system to help you deal with these relationship issues. You can speak to a friend you trust to have sound judgment so that they may help you see another perspective.
It may be time to consult a mental health therapist if you’re dealing with someone close, such as a toxic friend or partner.
The therapist can help you process your experiences accurately, offer accountability as you apply the above tips, and help you better your well-being with more personalized solutions.
Conclusion
Remember that it’s key to focus on yourself, engage in positive self-care practices and seek support from a therapist if you need help coping with a toxic person.
Remember that you have the power to stay in control of your life, and no one can keep you a victim.
Learning to deal with toxic people can be challenging, but over time actions like setting boundaries, practicing self-care and seeing manipulative behaviors for what they are can become easier.
If you are seeking help in mastering these tips, a qualified therapist at Grow Therapy can help. You can choose one near you for online or in-person therapy sessions.
