Category: Toxic People

In abusive relationships, when the victim is beginning to see and mentions that something is isn’t working for them, the stakes of the game are often raised dramatically. The threats of the abuser may increase in severity. One of the greatest threats is that of taking ones own life. The suicide Card.

The suicide card is effective in abusive relationships because the victim cares so much about the abuser that they do not like the thought of them ending their own life. The abuser is so good at manipulating the victim that they are able to engineer the situation by which the victim believes that their actions WOULD be the cause of the death of the abuser. While obviously not the case, as the abuser would be taking their own life, the thoughts of this action are so bad that the victim is not able to think logically and consider what is really going on. This makes sense, given that logical thought and emotional responses cannot exist at the same time, with emotional responses taking precedence over logic.

How to respond when someone you care about plays the suicide card and blames it on your actions:

Step one – calmly deal with the immediate situation. Their statement is emotional and based on a sense of a loss of control. Given this, you need to make sure that nothing bad happens while the emotion is there. Assume that they are telling the truth and do what you need to make sure no drastic action occurs. Basically, say anything. You have NO control over their emotional state and you should not engage them on the same terms as you engage people who aren’t toxic or abusive. Your goal is to put out the fire, make sure no one gets physically hurt and lower the emotional arousal as quickly as possible. This phase in the cycle of abuse will end fairly quickly if you focus on letting go of whatever was the trigger for the abuser to play the suicide card.

Step two – once the threat has subsided, take stock of your situation. The threat of suicide is a threat of violence. Unless you want to be in a violent relationship, you need to quickly accept that the partnership is unworkable and that failure to terminate it at this point will result in an escalation of violence. I have spoken to a number of people who have left abusive relationships and almost all of them said that the suicide card was played more than once. Repeated threats are so common that it is safe to conclude that unless the situation changes (the abuser gets therapy or the victim ends all contact with the abuser) the suicide card will be played again. While I believe that therapy can definitely help an abuser identify the cause of their actions, they need to seek the help spontaneously and NOT as a condition of reconciliation.

Step three – tell someone you respect about what has happened. This will give you a chance to say it out loud which will often shed a new objective light on what has happened – saying it out loud to a parent, sibling or close friend makes the thing real and moves it away from seeming like some mental movie scene that we tend experience traumatic things as. Telling someone else about it will make returning to the abusive situation more challenging because you may end up feeling kind of dumb for even considering it. It is also a way for you to ask for help from them. People who love you want the best for you, and they’ll be able to remain more objective about the whole situation as they are not emotionally involved in it. Just make sure that you confide in someone who isn’t themselves a toxic or abusive person.

Step four – change your mind set. Given that most abusers do NOT seek therapy spontaneously, which is a condition for it to be effective, you need to accept that the abuser will not change; some do but the number is so low that to believe you are with one of the people who will isn’t realistic, particularly after they have threatened to commit suicide. You also need to accept that you give them the power because you care about them. Put these two conditions together and it should be evident that the situation is not workable EVER. You get the power back by taking it back. My opinion here is that the best way to take back the power when someone plays the suicide card is to consider, in your head, that they have been successful in their threat and that they are no longer alive. Action on this and stop talking to dead people. Ignore them, if you have to talk to them do not allow the conversations to last very long and do not answer their questions when they ask “why” because, again, these are not the types of questions you usually get from people who are dead. By engaging them again, you give them the power to hurt you and make no mistake about it, if you let them back into your life, THEY WILL HURT YOU AGAIN because that is how they interact with their world. It happens that someone will play the suicide card in their early 20’s and again in their early 30’s so do not fool yourself into believing that they will change.

Step five – take a long time to process EVERYTHING that has happened. There is a pattern to it and you must identify it. It isn’t enough to say “I’m not going to let that happen again” because you were powerless to stop it in the first place as you enabled the persons behavior by staying with them – playing the suicide card is not usually the first attempt at manipulation. You NEED to be able to observe this type of behavior very early on to prevent entering into an abusive relationship.

Step six – when you start to date again, or get into a relationship, LEAVE IMMEDIATELY if the manipulation starts. Controlling your partners actions is rarely appropriate and until an abuser sees their behavior as inappropriate, makes the decision to change it and follows through on making the changes permanent, they are useless to you and will drain you of your will to care about people. They have a major problem, don’t make it yours by allowing them to treat you like garbage.

If someone tells you that they are going to kill themselves because of something you have done, try to see the immediate crisis resolved. Once they have calmed down, get away from them and pretend they have died. They may never do it, but if they do, you need to make sure it doesn’t have a huge negative impact on you because murdering yourself has nothing to do with other people.

If someone was to tell you that they were going to get you to pay for their lunch, when you had no intention of paying for it, you would likely laugh at them and say “buy your own!” But a lot of people spend a lot of their time and money buying individuals lunch, or clothes, trips, groceries, rent, etc… basically paying for things that they don’t want to pay for, things that they don’t personally need or want, and parting with time and money for things that have no direct positive impact on their life.

Why do some good people give away so much time and money to people who only care about getting the time and money? Simply because they are being psychologically manipulated by someone who is skilled at getting people to feel particular things.

The Wikipedia Psychological Manipulation page is fantastic! It reveals a number of techniques that can be used to create a feeling within someone that will help you to gain the upper hand in an interaction that will help you part them from their time, money and positive emotion. I do not condone behaving like this, but given the prevalence of emotionally impaired people in the world, one is wise to be aware of how they gain the upper hand in during interactions. NOTE – there are a number of people who can be lumped into category of toxic people including sociopaths, psychopaths, histrionic / narcissistic personality disorder and people who are insecure or suffer thoughts of being inferior to others so the chances of your not being exposed to someone who uses psychological manipulation to get you to do their work from them are pretty small. By learning their weapons, you’re going to go a long way in disarming them.

Below are a few of the techniques that I have seen used effectively on other people:

Lying and lying by omission – someone says something that isn’t true or they leave out a critical fact that prevents you from seeing things objectively. For example, a girl claiming that her body friend went out without her while not stating that she told him she was too busy to go out with him (lying by omission). A guy claiming that his girl friend went on a date with another guy when in fact she went to work. Neither is an objective account of the world.

Guilt tripping – a person suggests to the victim that they do not care, is selfish or has it very easy which creates bad feelings in the victim keeping them in a self-doubting and therefore submissive position. For example, a student telling someone they want to pay for their school that because they are able to work, they have money and don’t know who tough the life of a student is.

Projecting the blame – blaming another person for things that they had a clear hand in creating. For example, when someone puts off doing something until the last minute only to have something pop-up that prevents them from completing the task; the issue becomes what came-up and NOT putting the thing off until the last minute.

Playing the victim – by projecting the notion that they are actually the victim they are able to garner sympathy from others. For example, someone playing up their challenging upbringing as an excuse for behaving in a way that they know is inappropriate. While there are things about ones upbringing that will impact their future choices, adults reach a point when they are able to see their behavior as wrong as indicated by their citing a poor upbringing as the reason why they did the wrong thing.

So how do you use the above to get someone to buy you lunch? Let’s give it a shot! How to avoid buying lunch is in italics:

Lying – Can you please buy me lunch because I haven’t had anything to eat all day because my ex boy friend emptied my back account when he broke-up with me this weekend? You should talk to the police about that, sounds like a crime has been committed. Call them on their words. If what they are saying is true, a call to the police will take care of it very quickly.

Guilt tripping – I’m so hungry! How can you eat that sushi in front of me given me that I haven’t eaten all day? Strangely, you being hungry isn’t impacting the flavor one bit. This lets them know that their experience of the world does not impact you.

Projecting the blame – I had to pay for cab fare last night so that my friend wouldn’t drive home drunk and now I don’t have any money left for food. Sounds like you care more about your friends than you do yourself. Here’s my phone, call them up and get them to pay you for the cab fair. Presenting the solution objectively will let them know that you see the world very clearly.

Playing the victim – someone stole my jacket from coat check and it had my wallet in it. Now I’m not able to buy lunch because someone stole from me. You need to start taking care of your things. It’s pretty unwise to leave your wallet at coat check. By letting them know that they created the situation themselves your give them the information to prevent it from happening again.

The key is to not respond in the natural automatic emotional way. Take what they give you and run with it. They just want a free lunch, they don’t want wisdom, humor or anything enlightened so give them these things and they’ll move on to the next person who may have the money to buy them what they want.

A common experience reported by individuals who are in abusive and toxic relationships is that of a strong effort by the abuser to control the communication that the victim has with their friends and family. Often disguised as a sincere attempt to protect the victim, the abuser will subtly imply that a friend or family member isn’t exactly as the victim believes they are – the suggestion of a questionable work ethic may come-up, questionable morals, or a general statement of disgust or just “not liking them”. This is great ammo for toxic people as victims in these relationships are prone to believe what the abuser says. It’s a war of attrition and over time it’s the small things that help to give an erroneous or controlling notion traction.

The abuser does have a lot to lose in that their illusion of control may hang in the balance; at the very least, the abuser will need to escalate their manipulation attempts once the victim begins to talk to other people usually starting with stronger efforts of character assassination once the victims communication with an objective outsider increase.

What is the abuser afraid of? Simply put, they KNOW there is something not entirely right about the relationship dynamics and they know that in a group of two, their influence has at least 50% of the impact and more likely much higher than that given their overbearing, controlling and manipulative nature. They are also aware that adding a third perspective into the mix can dramatically reduce the level of control they have as this will dilute their influence, particularly when the opinion goes against the abuser – check out Solomon Asch experiments on conformity – were one person agreeing with the victim is often enough for them to break free from the grip of the abuser.

Speaking to other people also affords the victim an opportunity to clearly define what is going on, and this is often very effective at helping someone see what is happening in their life. Friends and family tend to ask lots of questions about things that don’t make any sense so the practice of explaining these can help add some objectivity to an unclear situation. Objectivity is NOT what abusers want so they will often try to limit and control the communication of their partners.

People in healthy relationships do not fear their partners talking to other people because they have nothing to hide. If you find your partner, or yourself, trying to control the external communication, you should take this as a warning sign that the motives may not be as pure as they should be. Take some time to examine the reasons given for discouraging the communication and make whatever adjustments you need to in order to address the situation appropriately.

Even in healthy relationships, there will be a time when one partner needs to control the behavior of the other – usually in times of crisis when the objectivity of one is severally impacted. In a true partnership this is what needs to happen – we table the decision making process to someone who will look after our best interests when we are not able to see the world clearly. When I heard about Natalie dying, I immediately called my father to tell him because I felt that I only had a few minutes before I lost perspective and I knew my father would look out for me better than almost everyone on the planet. It was tough on him, but he held it together, he held me together and he worked with my mom and my brother to help me through it. I handed responsibility for me over to him so I could just fall to pieces. The thing is, he didn’t try to control my actions very much. He just needed to be sure I didn’t do anything rash that I would come to regret or worse, die from. I think he and the rest of my family did a great job!

So that’s the ideal, an empathetic and compassionate partner who guides you through a crisis without projecting their will on you. They help you objectively engage the world in your terms. So, in this regard, there is rarely a time when a partner should try to control your behavior.

Sadly, this isn’t the case in number of couples. Drawn to me are a lot of people who are in controlling relationships with partners who lack the awareness to objectively observe and control their own experience of the world. Given the dissonance these individuals experience between their understanding of the world and the objective reality of the world, and their inability to see that through effort they can alter their understanding, the only form of reconciliation they have is to force the world to conform to their world view. This is impossible given the size and interdependent nature of the world so they are only able to control a few things about their immediate world and most often it will be their partner and their children.

Controlling the actions of someone who loves you simply because you do not wish to put the effort into learning how to see the world objectively is immoral because it causes suffering and drastically inappropriate because it uses ones love again them. Because they love you, they give you the power to hurt them and because you have very little self awareness, you use this power to make them feel something unpleasant (hence the term toxic) that isn’t actually there.

The common scenario has the abuser (the immature control partner) feeling out of control when it comes to their partner’s actions or thoughts. Since they don’t want to put the effort into transcending their lack of understanding – or even put some time into considering that they may be able to adjust their understanding or that their understanding is based on something other than reality – they set about to create guilt within victim so they feel bad and motivated to change their actions.

Guilt is very effective only because of the compassionate love the victim feels towards the abuser. It doesn’t work with people who don’t care about them. Statements like “you are breaking up our family” or “I am going to kill myself” don’t have any impact on people who don’t care about you. But if you care about the person who says it, you are sure as hell going to feel something horrible. Toxic people are really good at making compassionate people feel badly about their benign actions.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about the cycle of abuse. There has been a shift in her thinking about a few people in her life recently and as the world changes, she is seeing things a lot more objectively. She’s seeing abuse were previously she saw herself as the cause of the actions of the abuser.

The theory isn’t entirely comprehensive but it does an effective job at describing a lot of abuse situations. There are 4 stages that those caught in abusive or conflict prone relationships will cycle through at various speeds:

1. Tension building phase – communication is starting to breakdown, the victim begins to modify their behavior in an effort to avoid triggering their partner to act abusively.
2. Acting-out phase – the abuser does or says something that hurts the victim physically or emotionally. It could be a punch in the face, the threat of violence or a manipulative technique. The goal of the abuser is to control the thoughts, emotions or actions of the victim.
3. Reconciliation or honeymoon phase – this marks the end of the abusive behavior and the start of the apologies. It is paradoxical in that the abuser is trying to control how the victim feels in order to restore the relationship back to *normal*. The abuser will often be extremely nice, apologetic and kind during this phase, or they can use psychological manipulation to win back or coerce the victim back into the relationship.
4. Calm phase – this is the phase between the acceptance of the reconciliation and the start of the tension building phase.

This isn’t entirely earth shattering, but it is a fairly good model for what happens in a number of abusive relationships.

The conversation moved towards the calm phase and how it never seemed to last very long. In fact, my friend had noticed two disturbing things about the temporal nature of the cycle.

The first is that over a period of a few years, she noticed that SHE never really entered into the calm phase or the honeymoon period either as she could never get past what had been said to her by someone who apparently loved her and she couldn’t understand how the abuser had put it behind them so quickly e.g. “how can he not still feel horrible about saying or doing that to me?”

The second was that the calm phase was getting shorter and shorter as she related her awareness of the cycle to her partner. He didn’t respond well to being made aware that the behavior was automatic, as he claimed to have no awareness that is was happening and objected to her suggestion that he was in control of his anger as it was clearly a response to something she was doing. The thing was, after the acting out phase, he always apologized and admitted that his behavior was out-of-line. She was able to circumvent the honeymoon portion and the calm phase and go directly to the tension building phase simply by letting him know which state they were in.

I’ve yet to meet someone who was caught in the cycle of abuse who was able to stop it; this isn’t to say that it can’t be stopped, just that I haven’t met an abuser who as objective enough to see the cycle for what it was and be willing to see and take on their role in putting an end to the pattern. Which does, sadly, make a lot of sense given that objectivity is needed and in partnerships of abuse, it is sadly lacking. I have met a lot of ex-abusers who are filled with remorse for throwing away relationships, children, friendship and a lot of good times because they didn’t see the cycle until it was too late.

In the end it works out though. They learn their lesson and take care of their next partner while their previous partner moves on to deal with the residue from being treated like a psychological punchbag for years.

Been doing a lot of listening to my clients recently because we’ve been working together for long enough that I don’t have to coach them as much.

One of them blew my mind when he mentioned that “there is little worse than being around someone who is great when things are good but horrible when things are bad”. I laughed because it didn’t make any sense but he is right. “You are always going to be a punching bag when things go bad because that is the persons coping mechanism.” It’s kind of frightening because it’s an obvious pattern that I had interpreted as the exact opposite.

It’s easy to be a pleasure when times are fun and easy. It’s very hard to be a pleasure when your world is falling in on you. The issue is that life is tough if you are trying to improve it and as an enlightened or challenging seeking individual you are ALWAYS going t try and improve it therefore times are not always going to be fun and easy.

The lesson is to not be mean when times are tough. Try to avoid lashing out when you feel your actions do not seem to be moving anything forward. If you feel victimized by someone you are close to when their life is tough make them aware that you feel they are doing it and allow them to make the decision to either change their approach to you or keep it the same. If it remains the same and you don’t want to be a punching bag when they feel challenged you will need to change the situation.

When someone calls you toxic you first need to figure-out if they are correct. This is very simple if you are self aware and are able to observe your actions. You’ll see very quickly that you are trying to influence their emotional state to gain advantage or favor. If they are accurate, you need to make the decision if what you are trying to gain is worth losing the person. If the answer is no, stop doing it and lower your threshold for identifying your manipulation attempts so you are able to stop your behaviour before it becomes toxic. If the answer is yes, consider getting a good self help book, set up an appointment with the therapist or start going to a life coach to create a plan for you to achieve the desired goal independently. If that is impossible, and it really shouldn’t be, ask the person directly for what you want vs. trying to game them into it. They may say no but at least they won’t tell you to get out of their life.

If you are not self aware, it’s a little trickier because you won’t have any idea the you have control over your behaviour and therefore your world. You first need to accept that the person cares about you – or else they won’t have responded emotionally to what you said; this is a good thing because it means that even if they do not give you what you want, they are likely going to be able to offer some support to help you through not getting what you want. It’s great to have friends and it’s even better to have friends who are able to see the truth.

Once you have accepted that you are loved and that you may not get what you want using the method you have, you need to make the decision if what you want is actually that important. If the answer is no, don’t think about it anymore. If the thing is that important, you need to find a direct way to get it. Ask the person for it, ask them for help in getting it, ask them for advice on how to get it. Figure-out how you are going to get it without involving anyone else or without using manipulation and guilt to get other people do to it for you.

Once you’ve achieved it, moved on from it or accepted that you won’t be getting it, you need address your toxic nature.

Step one, accept that you love yourself and believe that you have the right to have nice things and to get your way.

Step two, accept that other people love themselves and believe that they have the right to nice things and to get their way.

Step three, accept that other people have an experience of reality that is unique and separate from yours. This is absolutely critical and it should be taught to people in school because so many go through life using other people as objects in their life vs. automatons (to say the very least about ones experience of reality).

Step four, accept that you learned how to manipulate and use guilt to get what you want and that this approach will keep you from ever being complete and independent. Think about it this way, if that is your tool to get things, you will always need other people in your life because you will not possess the necessary skills to get what you want on your own.

Step five, make the decision that you don’t want to be toxic and invest in going without some of the things you like unless you are willing to get them yourself. If you cannot accept this, stop reading now and prepare for a life filled with lots of people, lots of shallow interactions with these people and an existence of co-dependence on people who are too weak to kick you to the curb. Frankly, if you can constantly control another person you likely don’t want them in your life anyway because they aren’t going to help you grow. They will enable you every step of your unsatisfying and distraction dependent live.

Step six, take the time to create new strategies to get what you want and need. Hard work is a good way to achieve this. Changing your priorities is another effective way at eliminating the need for stuff. Admitting that you need help and asking for it is another way to free yourself from the manipulation of others.

Step seven, be aware and always cautious that you have a skill that is useful but very damaging to the quality of interactions with others, particularly the people who care about you the most. Always remember that you are one manipulative effort away from having one less friend. Before you set out to get someone to do stuff for you ask yourself the question “is what I’m trying to achieve worth losing this person forever?” The truth is that if it is worth losing someone forever they will help you if you ask. If it isn’t, they could drop you like garbage and, frankly, if you are trying to manipulate the people who love you, you are either a child or garbage.

We create the world we live in using our thoughts and actions. If yours is a toxic waste land of short term friendships, x partners who don’t want anything to do with you and a feeling worthlessness, it’s time to create a new world based on honesty with yourself, with others and the awareness that your primary coping tool may be the very source of your unhappiness.