Have you ever walked away from friends of
family feeling bad about yourself?
Do you keep feeling hurt by the same
people?
Do you keep going over incidents that have
upset or emotionally hurt you?
Do you keep trying with a family member,
but every time you are in their company come away feeling sad, hurt and
exhausted?
People inspire you or drain you - pick them wisely. -
Hans F Hasen.
What is a toxic person? A toxic person can
be someone who upset you in the past and/or continues to do so in the present.
They can also be someone who drains you of all your positive emotion and energy
every time you are in their company, either by what they say or what they do.
What is a toxic event? A toxic event is
something that happened that upset or disturbed you so much you have never
forgotten it. And not only is it not forgotten, you find yourself thinking
about it over and over again, maybe persecuting yourself with it by reliving
the negative emotions you felt at that moment.
You can’t start the next chapter of
your life if you keep re-reading your last one. - Michael
McMillan
I first learnt about the idea of toxic
people and toxic events and how they can affect your entire thinking when I was
using Dr Phil’s website several years ago. I was going through the Finding Your
Authentic Self (Self Matters) articles, and one of the questions asked to pick
a toxic event from my life. For me, there was one in my early childhood that
came up every time. I would think through it and remember how I had felt (alone,
rejected, hurt), and feel it again.
While working through it, I
uncovered how this particular event had affected how I thought and in
particular my perception of ‘family’ and why just the word had negative
connotations for me.
It led me to realise that it
affected my ability to trust people around me permanently, even though they
were my immediate family. And through the process of these articles I was able
to unravel this thinking and find a new way of thinking about it.
When you change the way you look at things, the things
you look at change. - Wayne
Dyer
Once you identify these toxic events and/or
people, you can then look at how they have negatively impacted you, in terms of
your
thinking and perceptions as well as your actions and reactions towards
them.
And then, rather than going into a victim
mindset and tell yourself ‘this happened to me’ or ‘this person is in my
life, therefore I am damaged and can’t function or be who I want to be, or have
what I want’, you can make a conscious choice to change it (how you feel about
it, how you respond to it), and feel empowered and able to have a say in how it
continues to affect you and your life.
As I mentioned in my previous
post about backtracking emotions, you can ‘update’ how you want to
feel about it and see it through more objective, rational eyes.
You can decide what you need to
do to either limit its impact on your life and feelings (particularly when it’s
a toxic person), or decide to change what meaning you attach to it.
Toxic people will pollute everything around them.
Don’t hesitate, fumigate. - Mandy Hale
As a child, I had limited abilities to
decide how it affected me. I could only respond with internal feelings of hurt,
shame, or rejection. And I was left feeling that anything related to ‘family’
could not be trusted and would only hurt me.
As an adult, I can acknowledge
those feelings, but I can then reassure myself that it no longer has to be true
— especially in terms of the family I’ve created with my husband. I don’t have
to repeat those toxic actions or words, and I can choose to create a ‘family’
that is safe, nurturing and supportive.
By identifying toxic events and
toxic people I was able to take a step back from a toxic situation or person
that continued to negatively impact me. I could see the situation as something
I had the power to change. And that change came in the form of my reaction and
resulted in me changing the meaning I gave it.
If a toxic person was going over
past events and making me responsible, blaming or triggering negative emotions
within me, I could see that it was their perception of the situation, or of me,
and not necessarily the truth.
This meant I didn’t have to argue
that truth anymore, because I already knew my own truth about it. And once I
stopped engaging in the dialogue with that person, in either an argumentative
or defensive stance, that person lost their ability to manipulate me. They
could no longer trigger those negative emotions by sparking me into a dialogue
that disempowered me. Plus I could restrict how much time I spent in that
person’s company.
And the same applied to a toxic
event: it was past, it could not be changed, and it could no longer affect my
life — unless I kept it alive myself. I could see it as something that
happened, rather than something that defined who I was now.
The past can not be changed, forgotten, edited or erased;
it can only be accepted. - Wiz Khalifa
The negative things you say to yourself are
often the things that toxic people in you life has said to you, which you then
take on and use against yourself.
Toxic events may have left you
believing something that isn’t true about yourself, which you then repeat
continuously to yourself at low times.
Ask yourself, what are my labels, and where
do they come from? Whose voice is really behind them? Also ask yourself, why am
I defining myself by an external perception or past event?
And from the answers decide for
yourself who you are, and what you want to believe.
Quietly affirm that you will define
your own reality from now on and that your definition will be based on your
inner wisdom. - Wayne
Dyer
I recently discovered that I labelled myself almost always in a negative way. I've had to think hard to overcome that and alter the labels to positives. I dealt with the toxic events about a decade ago, the people are more difficult!
ReplyDeleteWe should be so careful not to inadvertently give our children, or anyone, negative labels, it's easily done, but very hard to retract!