Everyone is Toxic Except Me, and Possibly You?
Why buying into the cult of Good Vibes Only™ might be costing you long term friendships, relationships, and your family
We’ve all had a friend who seems to be constantly dating crazy monsters. Well, sort of: they certainly think they’ve dated crazy monsters. You’ll be regaled with tales of how ‘toxic’ Tom, Dick or Harry was, or how totally ‘crazy’ Aisha, Beth, and Chris turned out to be when they moved in with you. At first, you’ll be sympathetic: we’ve all dated or made friends with morons. But eventually, you’ll realize they’ve fallen out with everyone they’ve ever formed a close relationship with. And that hints at something deeper than bad luck.
Now, some people definitely just have horrible families that they should definitely avoid contact with. Not all of us are blessed with lovely mommies and daddies who bake us birthday cakes and teach us how to climb trees. Similarly, sometimes you’ll end up with abusive partners who are definitely the problem. You should never blame yourself when anyone decides to hit you, or emotionally abuse you. No one should ever blame you for leaving a marriage, relationship, or friendship, that makes you feel unsafe, on any level.
However -and this is a big however- if you externalize your anxieties, flaws, doubts and insecurities onto all the familial, platonic and romantic relationships you have in life, you’re never going to have a healthy, constant support network. Before I get into this, let’s be really clear about this early on:
You are not a bad person because you are flawed.
Usually, the people negatively labelled as having ‘low empathy’ don’t have low empathy at all: they just haven’t exercised understanding other people’s emotions as deeply as their own. They can understand their own emotions and feelings very deeply, often to the point where they suffer from extreme sensitivity to their own fears and frustrations. This isn’t because they are spoilt or selfish. You can only ever develop communication and social skills through practising them, and people who experienced isolation, abandonment, or loss early on often struggle to healthily navigate efforts to compromise or fix problems in relationships.
If you’ve never had a close childhood friend to fall out with and make up with, how can you have a positive blueprint to navigate arguments? If you’ve never had a relationship with your parents where you can voice failure safely, how can you enact the same expression of problems as adults? And if you’ve never seen adults overcome issues or arguments as couples in a healthy, constructive way, how can society expect you to pick it up naturally at 30?
There’s some easy markers on someone with attachment abnormality.
- Do you find yourself having an extreme or defensive reaction to small criticisms or disagreements with your partners?
- Do you end relationships because you feel too hurt to confront criticisms or disagreements with your partner?
- Do you have a high turn over in friends and relationships?
- Do you have a high percentage of former friends or partners who you no longer speak with, or can communicate neutrally to positively with?
- Do you find yourself elaborating or exaggerating on a former friend or partners flaws to justify your failed relationship with them?
You’ll see this pattern a lot in people who haven’t had a nutritiously communicative childhood: they struggle to make friends or find serious partners, develop obsessive relationships when they do, and then externalize rejection or the end of the relationship or friendship as the other person being crazy, evil or toxic. They have very few people in their lives who have been there for more than a few months, or a year. They have a very hostile relationship with everyone from ‘the past’.
When you can’t ask ‘is it me’ because it hurts too much, or society has told you that it’s abnormal to ask for help with social development, the problem never stops. You can’t understand criticism as anything more than hurtful antagonism, or understand your own actions as anything other than positive or justified. The cycle continues: you meet the ‘amazing’ new friend/boyfriend, they are ‘totally different to the last one’, then they end up being flawed or seeing you as imperfect, and you have to kick them out of your life to avoid confronting your own feelings of rejection or self doubt. Sometimes this person will go through five or six marriages believing that the problem was always their partner.
Some of this problem is re-enforced with the new fad of over-using ‘toxicity’. My family is toxic, my parents are toxic, my friends are toxic, my boyfriend is toxic, my therapist is toxic. It’s very, very easy to find ‘toxic’ behaviour in every single person on earth: and, if you’re honest, including yourself. Your mom will be mean about your haircut when you’re 14. Your dad will miss your school play that one time. Your best friend will say something nasty when she’s drunk. You will have a friend who calls you out for making a distasteful joke or comment. Your boyfriend will call you stupid in that big argument. Because negativity happens. The ‘good vibes only’ crowd will have it that you can go through life only experiencing light and happiness if only you get rid of the Bad People.
That’s just a recipe for loneliness and isolation, because it’s impossible. In real life, you have to experience arguments, disagreements, fights and ‘unhealthy’ communication. You have to go through phases in your relationship where you can’t agree on who takes the trash out. You have to fight with your mom about whether you’re going to wear her wedding dress. You have to fall out with your little sister because she mocked you for being a vegan. That stuff happens.
That isn’t ‘toxic’ or ‘ruining your life’: that is life.
So if you’ve bought into the ‘Ban Bad People’ school of Good Vibes, please rethink why. There’s an enormous difference between ending a relationship with your parents because they are a threat to your addiction recovery, and cutting off your entire family because they don’t believe in global warming. Unless you have grown up in a cult and just left, it’s unlikely that you need to cut out your entire social circle and start over. If everyone in your life is ‘toxic’:
It might be time to ask yourself whether that’s true.
