My Battle with Toxic People

The past few weeks have been very difficult emotionally. Family has always been important to me. For more years than I care to admit, my family has been a touchy subject with me. I crave the closeness that I felt a family should be. I long for the unconditional love that is supposed to come with family. What I got, instead, made me feel worthless and always on edge. I had a toxic family.

I had heard the term toxic people for years. I had even thought that my family may be toxic. There are some websites out there that make me feel that I'm toxic. Since my family swears that if I would do this or that, we would have no problems, I almost convinced myself that the problem was my being toxic.

The truth is that there are different degrees of toxicity. Have I been toxic? Yes, at times. I've whined. I've complained. I've passed on my negativity to others. Was it intentional? Not completely. I needed to be reassured. I needed to know that I was not the bad person that my family was trying to convince me that I was.

I was at fault. I kept making bad choices. I knew that I did not get along with my family, but because I felt families were meant to stay together, I stayed. I listened to their threats when I tried to leave. I believed them all. I took their verbal and physical abuse. They had to love me somewhere deep down. Families love each other right?

It all sounds so simple now. It all sounds like someone in an abusive marriage. If I knew someone that was married to a spouse that treated them the way my family treated me, I would have done anything that I could to help them leave. I was doing everything I could to stay.

The result was that I began to complain all the time. I began to feel horrible and worthless more and more often. I stayed depressed. I felt that I could do nothing right. Slowly, I began turning to those in my life for help. My cries for salvation came in the form of toxicity. I would tell the same stories over and over searching for someone to help me. Help never truly came. Some of my friends would try to get me to leave. Some would just walk away. Some were strong enough to stand by me even when I continued to let it happen. They would listen, yet again, and try to console my weary spirit.

I began to see what was happening to me. I would spend hours doing anything I could to help others. I still felt like a horrible person. I knew that I was boring people to death with my “problems” but I truly needed help. I was not strong enough to deal with this on my own.

Things with my family would continue to escalate until they were so out of control that I would end up mixing the physical parts with them. My family would start and I would push them to try to get away. There were times that they were hurt. It was never my intention to hurt them. Even when I was physically attacked to the point that I had to hit back, it was never with the intent to hurt them, only to stun them enough to let me get away.

After one particularly bad physical episode, my boss required me to go to counseling. Both my boss and the counselor said that if I did not get away, that my family would end up killing me. I disagreed and stayed. My family does not consist of killers. They are people that just have to be too controlling. They think they know what is best for me and they were quite determined that it was their way or no way. The problem was that I was becoming controlling in the process. I felt so out of control that I searched for ways of being in control of something.

As I fought to stop the toxicity that was controlling my life, I was becoming toxic to others. It all finally hit home that I had to make some changes when I could not even stand to look in the mirror or touch my face. The physical side of the toxicity had come out again. I was left with cuts on my eye, forehead, and nose. Both eyes eventually turned black and I had a bump over my eyebrow that refused to go down. Even after over two weeks, it was so tender to the touch that I knew my decision to not go to the doctor had been a bad one. Yes, I would survive. The other person did not have a single mark on them. They were going around telling a version of what happened that would make them look justified for what they did to me. It did not matter that it was not true. Now, there are always three sides to every story involving a disagreement between two people; each person's and then the truth. This time, there was a witness. I could no longer tell myself that I was more to blame than I was.

Whether I was in the right or wrong really did not matter. What mattered was that I came to the realization that it would not stop until I stopped it. I had to remove the toxicity from my life. It was family, how could I do that? When I get it all figured out, I'll be glad to let you know.

I'm still not to the point of getting rid of all the toxicity. What I have done is begun to distance myself from these people. I'm trying to pay closer attention to myself and stop when I start trying to share the negativity with others. In some ways, this piece is sharing the negativity, but it is done with the spirit of sharing my experience so hopefully anyone that has to deal with toxic people will find their solution much easier than I did.

As I slowly rid myself of the toxic people in my life, I hope that I will become myself again. I pray that my helping spirit will come through and that others can see the real me that my friends have seen. I still want the family and love that I have always craved. It is my sincerest hope that by ridding my life of the toxic members of my family that I can allow the rest of my family to share in a much happier life. If they and my friends can only bear with me as I work to overcome my own level of toxicity, the future should definitely be much brighter for us all.