Some thoughts about "toxic" people

[flippinada]

I've read and contributed to a couple of threads where people are having to deal with what I would describe as toxic friends and family and the distress that it cause. I've had issues in the past with people this myself and it's really got me thinking.

Once thing that struck me from these threads, plus my own experience of toxic types is that there seems to be common "themes" - the one that immediately comes to mind is that the toxic person needs an enabler - usually a husband or wife who panders to their awful behaviour and colludes with them.

I know there's already a wonderful support thread (stately homes) but I thought it might be helpful to have a general discussion about how to identify these people and cope with them, plus a kind of support thing so folk know they aren't alone in having to deal with it alone?

I scan my behaviour for mother. Which is a worry. I look alot like her, which I think is the root of the problem. face transplant

lola- I have my mums facial features unfortunately, but dad's colouring (depending on who my dad is, as in earlier posts on this thread). I haven't got wrinkles as bad as hers, though.

Seriously though, one of the reasons I don't go out with her in public anymore is so that nobody can remind me we look alike.

That, though, won't be half as bad as anybody saying we're alike personality wise. Luckily, that hasn't happened. However, if the occasion should arise, I will not render myself responsible for my actions....

The most ashamed I ever felt of her was inveigling herself into the hospital room of a friends son on the grounds of supporting his mother and basically watching him die. Rather than absent herself and allow the family to be with him as he took his last breath (he was 22 or so and a life times illness) she felt it was OK to sit there. Naturally she reported the details (it wasn't a good death) in that rapt breathless wonder like she had seen something unique. It disgusted me and still does but she can't imagine what the problem was.

Oh lola how utterly horrible.

If you told her you wee disgusted and ashamed would it even register? I'm not really one for internet diagnoses but from all you've described she sounds sociopathic.

lola-I'm finding it difficult to find the words...

My psychiatrist has said that she sounds a sociopath to not put too fine a point on it. I told her that she had behaved appallingly but she saw herself as a charitable person helping the mother. Would not have it she had overstepped any sort of a boundary. The mother who she was so concerned for is a person she wouldn't piss on if they were on fire. Bit like everyone else she encounters.
Like the day after my dad dies, she got a neighbour to drown the dog....for no apparent reason. I saw him taking the dog away in his arms down to the river. She thought we hadn't noticed. Never explained that one either.

A litany of abuse throughout my childhood and beyond. But she was the "only adult there" having to cope with us and being widowed. a hard station indeed but I don't see how it means you have all your empathy for 4 grieving children wiped out.

Oh lola - {{{hug}}} what a fucking bitch, It makes me wonder if we're all going to become alcoholics

Yes, I think that just about sums it up dothraki

I know this sounds melodramatic but I physically shuddered when I read your last post lola

I know it's just words on a screen but I just feel so sorry that you and your siblings had to go through that.

lola .

I am a bit of a o actually. It helps me after a day at work. I start thinking about it and looking forward to it at about 2pm each day

Crushed and dothraki, it has to be turned around to be all about them, Every. Time.

I've had a bit of a lightbulb moment about toxic colleagues and why they're popular. Could it be positive and negative 'strokes'? So when they're really nice to someone it's so out of character that people feel they're somehow privileged and special to be given this treatment?

I could be absolutely wrong about that of course

Oh yeah 0blio I think there's something in that.

It's the work version of scapegoating and golden child, isn't it?

My awful ex-colleague had favourites and people she didn't like. She would openly talk about peoples personal issues in front of others. I once asked a long standing member of the team if I'd done something wrong as she seemed to really dislike me. His reply "no, it isn't your fault-she doesn't like anyone".

Oblio - I agree with that too.

We didn't all work in the same hell hole did we

Sadly no dothraki, I'm still there.

Oblio - well here's some for you
and just for later

speaking of

I remember another occasion
When me and my dsis's were younger, my dad worked shifts so we were at the mercy of our mum.

One particular day, she went to the freezer to get some ice cream out after we had our tea. She opened the ice cream tub to find there was not much ice cream left in it. She went mad. It was a new tub. She asked us who had eaten the ice cream, and nobody answered.

She pulled out a bottle of brandy and sat there drinking it. She said if nobody was going to own up to eating it, she was going to ring a taxi to take her to the nearest river and throw herself into it. It was horrifying. She had hold of the telephone receiver in her hand ready to dial, looking at us all, waiting for us to own up.

Then she 'rang' a taxi firm to pick her up.
We were hysterical by this time, not realising she hadn't REALLY rang for a taxi. We all owned up. The look of satisfaction that crossed her face because she got a result. 'Well, if you owned up in the first place, I wouldn't have had to do that, would I' Our fault.

Hope I'm not hogging, things keep coming back. And I do like a myself.

Ye gods Crushed you hit on something mother dearest used to do. We were never allowed to finish anything. If you finish something, you're greedy. As in 'Oh Chaos, no wonder you're fat, you finished this jar of marmite, how greedy of you!'

Our cupboard was stuffed full of jars of various things, jam, marmite, peanut butter etc with just the last scrape in them. My DB and I were masters at doing this, because neither of us wanted to hear the 'I have no money, and you're eating me out of house and home' litany. It got so bad that at one point we had very little actual food in the cupboard because it was full of almost empty packets of things, my DGP's looked after us one weekend and threw them all away. Terrifying!

Even now I find myself doing this, my DH thinks I'm insane, and deliberately finishes things, while giggling that he's being greedy!

oh yeah, the 'eating us out of house and home' one. I was a little chubby when I was little, loved my food, always went for 'seconds' at school dinners. Mum used to buy things in that she knew I liked, yet would admonish me for eating them. ??..

As I grew older, I lost the puppy fat, and have maintained a respectable weight since. With much carping from mum, who is a few sizes bigger, looking me up and down when I walk through the door. 'How do you do it?' she asks... . My piece of advice, 'well, don't buy in what you know you'll eat a lot of'. she replies 'that's something I've never done'

YY to eating me out of house and home! Afternoons usually started with moaning about 'having to cook for you' and then once she had'slaved away without any help' (if I went into the kitchen I was getting in the way or doing everything wrong - I wasn't even capable of grating cheese properly!) and then if I had the audacity to eat the whole plate full of food, I was guzzling/going to get really fat by the age of 30/must have worms. You can't win. If I ever pointed out that her food was nice - NICE was a word I wasn't allowed to use as it was a flimsy word - then I was patronising her....

atouchofstuffing-hmmm, interesting that saying nice things is being patronising.

So we, at the receiving end of this toxicity, are patronising, then. Because, obviously we are nice. Too nice. And they can't stand it, can they? So they try to make us feel small, because we are something they can never be. Trying to stamp it out of us, bit by bit. They want us to be like them, maybe, because we show them up by being nice.

How dare we be nice?

I'm surprised there isn't a book written especially by narks/toxics, called 'Being nice...What's WRONG with these people?'

I'd buy it in an instant, I 'd want to know why they say what they say.

"You can't win"

I think that about sums these types up.

You tie yourself in knots trying to do the right thing but you'll never get it right because they are setting you up to get it wrong.

By which I mean wrong in their eyes....which is all the time...and on it goes.

you're right, flipp. 'you can't win'.

As for the setting you up to get it wrong..where DO they get the energy to think about these things and put it in motion?

Do you think there is hiiden away NarcsNet - where they joyfully swop their stories of spite and venom. It seems so bizarre to me that all these totally random people are behaving in exactly the same way

That's the million dollar question isn't it crushed. Why?

I will just never, ever get it when it's just so much easier to be nice.

I do think it must be a miserable existence, being so relentlessly negative all the time.

The ones like Lolas Mum frighten the life out of me (sorry to talk about you in the third person Lola)

I think I might ring my mum up in a bit and ask her:

'Wow, how DO you do it? All that ENERGY you use for the relentless negativity you pass on, by God, surely you must get tired sometimes? Are you taking a 'nasty' version of pro plus?