Identifying and dispelling toxic people & events in your life

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