What Can You Do About Toxic People?
Toxic people poison us
It’s all too easy to scroll through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be overwhelmed by toxic people. Before you know it, you’re wasting your time, doomscrolling, feeling bad, and wondering if anything is worth it. These toxic people poison you into believing in lack, scarcity, and insufficiency which isn’t true.
And this is hardest to reconcile when they are friends and family.
The choice – stay, step back, or step away from them
Multiple people I call friend have gotten increasingly toxic in the past 5 years.
Sure, you can blame the pandemic for this – but the reality is that the pandemic just gave their toxic nature purchase.
Rather than seek options to effect useful change, they spew toxic complaints, concerns, cries for validation, and the like. They’re angry, upset, terrified, and almost impossible to approach.
You can only walk on eggshells around someone for so long before the eggshells get cracked.
Thus, you have a choice. Tall them, then decide to stay, step back, or step away from them.
This isn’t an easy choice. Even friends and family, when they’re being toxic people, will be resistant to being told they need to reevaluate. If you confront them about their toxic behaviors, they may double down, lash out, and make you feel awful.
Choosing how to handle challenges is how you take control of a given situation. The choice applies whether you’re dealing with a person, place, or thing.
You can’t detoxify toxic people
This is the hardest reality to accept. There is nothing you can do to detoxify toxic people.
Whether you point out their toxicity to them or walk away from them – if they’re unwilling to look within and recognize their toxic behaviors, you can’t make them recognize them. Neither can you do anything about it for them.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that you have choices. They might be imperfect, not wholly what you desire, and otherwise not ideal – but you still have them. And sometimes that less-than-desirable choice is still a valid stepping stone to a better path for your overall health, wellness, and wellbeing.
Will you choose to stay with, step back from, and/or step away from people – toxic or otherwise – for the good of your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health, wellness, and wellbeing?
This week’s Applied Guidance for Mindfulness Tool:
This will be both super easy and surprisingly challenging.
Take a whole day off from social media. No Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and all else. From waking to sleeping, don’t go on social media. (You can decide to disconnect from Messenger or not – but don’t go down a rabbit hole of memes and the like).
Why? Because while social media connects us in many ways – it’s one of the largest sources of toxicity out there. You might find you feel better and less stressed when you’ve taken a day off social media.
If this does have a positive impact – consider making a social-media-free day a regular weekly occurrence.
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