urlet. discontinuitate. absență. granița dintre vis-paradis și real-banal-pedagogic s-a rupt. mii de așchii de amintiri la timpul incert aleargă încercând să ajungă la mal pe sub pleoape
alunecă timpi morți spre prăpastie, secunde mute, un infinit de secunde care aleargă spre un înainte abstractizat de vocația victimei premature
unde de șoc anafilactic animă corpuri la auzul unui nume, un semn-sumă a altor convenții disparate, e iar perioada aceea din an.
ochi. privire. buze. zâmbet. mâini. atingere. toate elemente ale unui discurs rămas în epiderma cunoscătoarelor, un fel de stigmat inversat, și amintirea izolează oamenii în unele zile.
nu există dureri colective, nici măcar colectivități ale purtătorilor durerii. ceva atât de singular, de amplu, de obscur înainte de a fi intim, cadențat nu se face să fie banalizat într-o grămadă.
există doar Durerea. una sfâșietoare și separatoare durere, care vine când vrea și nici măcar nu cere timp, pasiune sau lacrimi. ea există, și-i destul ca timpul să i se plece mut.
Lately, I’ve been spending more time than usual thinking about something that has always been very important to me: love. I’ve always thought that a healthy relationship can do more for a person than any personal development workshop it could possibly attend, but what does it even mean a healthy relationship anymore?
And, as always, I have started to apply my oldest method, which involves, as a first step, discovering what a healthy and loving relationship is not. And that’s a seriously long list.
First of all, a healthy relationship is not controlling.
Yes, a good partner will care about you, will ask you about your day, and will want to know about you, but s/he will do it naturally. You won’t feel interrogated or pressed. And, no, Where did you went dressed up like that?, Why are you coming home this late? or Who was calling you earlier? are not signs that your partner cares about you. They are, instead, signs of controlling behavior, and should not be ignored in the first place, or you will witness them escalating slowly but surely, as time flies.
A healthy relationship helps you grow.
And this is so important, I can’t even stress it out enough. If your partner tries to convince you to give up on your dreams or your long-time planned path for us, that’s not gonna work. A relationship where one has to sacrifice its desire for growth and evolution because the other doesn’t want more than s/he already has is a failure from beginning to an end. A good friend of mine gave up on a long time relationship because her partner disapproved of her career plans. I didn’t really understand that immediately, but I did a few years later when I’ve been put in front of the same choice: do I want that relationship, or I want to accomplish my dreams? I’ve ended up by choosing myself, and I still would, if I would be put in front of that choice again. Because a partner which is, indeed, a good fit, won’t make you make decisions that could throw you into an inner war. For a good partner, your inner peace is just as important as its own, and your evolution is not a threat. If s/he pressures you into giving up on your education or change your career pretexting that it is for the future good of the relationship, run.
A healthy relationship won’t make you feel unworthy.
Yes, being criticized is an important part of human interactions, regardless of their kind. Somehow, you have to pay some extra attention to how your partner’s negative feedback makes you feel. If it makes you feel unworthy, not good enough or a disappointment, if it makes your self-doubt explode, there is a big chance that your relationship is a toxic one.
Toxic relationships are lasting just because one of the partners know how to constantly make the other feel guilty and ashamed.
An unhealthy relationship will always let you feel that all the fault is yours, for whatever rough corners that relationship might have. It is always you to blame, never the partner. And this is where the drama starts, as it teaches you that those are the kind of behaviors that you deserve. Needless to say, that’s one of the most obvious signs that a person has a toxic history to battle.
It won’t happen fast.
Even if this might sound counterintuitive, truth is that most of the toxic relationships have a common trait: they happen all of a sudden. You two get to know each other out of nowhere, online or maybe from some social event, that’s less important, you overshare, tend to be inseparable and, after less than a month, the first I love you is said, too. Does it sound familiar? If yes, then I’m sorry, but you have, also, a toxic past behind.
Love, true, healthy love, is rather built than found. It implies knowing each other, making sure that you share the same core values, and being friends. Yes, friends. Because when the lust is over, that’s when the actual relationship starts. And it can either be a healthy, long-time standing one if the partners took care of also befriending each other in the meantime or a living hell if there was one of those stories where the aggressor and the victim have found each other.
If there’s a truth behind all this, that is the fact that a toxic relationship is extremely hard to escape from. Even if one manages to cut ties with the toxic partner, there will remain something, usually known as the narcissistic wound to be dealt with. This usually involves low self-esteem, depression, fear of creating intimate connections with other people, and, depending on the length of the toxic relationship and the forms of the abuse experienced, might also include symptoms of PTSD. This is why, after getting out of a toxic relationship, some people tend to fall again for a partner with the same behavioral pattern as their former abuser: because, without professional help, one rarely manages to overcome all these issues on its own. And without a complete recovery, the relapse is just a matter of time.
Because, and that is something it took me a long while to see, all our relationships, and our romantic ones especially, are the reflection of one thing: the relationship we have with ourselves.
Only by improving our self-image, by understanding our inner worth and the fact that it is independent of our human interactions, we will learn to put and respect some boundaries without guilt. Of course, our toxic partners play their parts as well, but they wouldn’t get to become our partners in the first place if we weren’t toxic for ourselves. If we would be understanding and supportive when it comes to us just the way we are with our best friends. If we would keep learning and exploring, even with the risk of seeming ridiculous. If we wouldn’t just assume that we have everything figured out already. If we wouldn’t put so much unnecessary pressure on ourselves, on a daily basis.
Because, at the end of the day, any person who will ever meet you will learn how to treat you from yourself. What you allow and what you don’t, what you care about, and what are you only pretending to care about. You will teach them which are your limits, your self-worth and you will show, by the way, you treat and talk about yourself, what you’re expecting and accepting from others. So what if you’d wake up one morning and, while sipping your coffee and listening to your favorite music, would decide to actually act as positive and firmly as you talk on the Internet feed?
And to anyone out there reading this article, if you find yourself in a toxic relationship, please, PLEASE, RUN AWAY! SEEK HELP! Talk to anyone you trust about your problems, and accept any type of help you are offered. It will hurt, but you owe it to yourself to escape. You are worth living a beautiful, fulfilling life, so run as fast as you can of anyone trying to convince you that you’re not. The man that tries to make you live a life dominated by fear, guilt, and shame doesn’t love you. He won’t change. But you have to, so be brave, be bold enough, and leave. You’re gonna thank yourself later for doing so.
…As a famous pop-song said, once upon a time during my childhood. One of the most common notions met in the mainstream mental health conversation is the one called toxic people. We are frequently told to avoid them, as they are bad for our emotional balance and mental well-being. That they are also victims, people with traumatic experiences, and so on. But one of the things no one talks about is the fact that every single one of us could, at a certain point, become toxic. For the others or, even worse, for ourselves.
Because no one is really clean and no one is toxic either. The oh-so-popular toxicity is a social label covering a very wide range of behaviors. In other words, being toxic is something one mostly learns, not an inherited feature of the individual.
Some of the most popular (and common) behaviors labeled as toxic are:
Jealousy
Even if it comes to jealousy in a romantic context, a professional one or a friendship, it is one of the most common toxic behaviors. It affects the quality of the relationship and it often brings unwanted drama.
Belittling
This happens whenever a person tries to diminish the importance and validity of other’s feelings, experiences, plans, and dreams. How many of you have heard that ‘You’re making it look like a bigger deal than it is!’? Well, that’s a sign of toxic behavior right there.
Attention Seeking
One of the easiest to notice warning signs is this. A toxic person looooves to make everything about themselves. You’re telling her about something that recently happened to you? No worries, she got it the same way, too! And, of course, it wasn’t such a big deal, I’ve just dealt with it! Or, au contraire, they’re drama masters. There seems to be some drama unfolding wherever they go, and they never get tired of it.
Lying
A toxic person will lie, and often, and will know how to do it.
Victim-blaming
This is the easiest to see when everything is over. You will see, at some point, that you were to blame for everything by that specific person. You never got anything right, ever. In fact, you’re to blame for every wrong in the relationship, every failure, every miscommunication. Nothing to blame them for, just you. In the long run, it often becomes tiresome to always be the guilty one, so don’t beat yourself up for choosing to give up on the relationship.
Perfectionism
Whatever is less than perfect, is a failure. Number two is the first of the losers! Does this kind of discourse ring a bell to you? If it does, then chances are that your toxic person was, as well, a perfectionist. And even it is a common trait, as I’ve previously said here, it makes you feel bad way more often than it makes you feel good around that someone. Let’s be honest, no one likes being around somebody who’s never satisfied with what they have at the moment. It just ruins the moment, as well as the other person’s joy.
These are the main clues to be looked after, but, from my experience, the thing is pretty simple. It all begins and ends with the way that person makes you feel about yourself. If you, and that’s the key-word here if you constantly feel bad about yourself if you constantly feel like you’re not doing or being good enough for that person, leave.
It might sound harsh, even selfish, but don’t feel bad if reading the lines from above, you’ve recognized a loved one. A relative, someone from your family, perhaps… It’s not you, it’s them. Toxic attitudes have no bloodline, they just happen.
Of course, there are different shades to it, some people are not even aware of their toxic behaviors, or the ways they affect you. And this is where you come- a calm, yet firm talk about how their behavior makes you feel could work wonders, especially if you will give them alternative ways of doing or saying things that hurt you less or not at all. Because not all the toxic people are evil, some just don’t know that they are acting wrong. And you might have a chance, if you won’t lose your temper during the talk, to actually improve those relationships.
It won’t be easy, but it would definitely be worth it, especially if those connections are important to you. But, and this is huge, having a talk with your dear ones about what harms you coming from them, and tolerating the same things over and over, these are two very different things. It is, indeed, their right to know what they are doing wrong and how could they possibly change this, but if they will just keep going with their old ways, feel free to put up new boundaries in your interaction with them.
At the end of the day, there’s not about relatives, family members, friends or even lovers. It is about your mental health, one of the most important things. And it is so, so important to be your own safe place in a toxic environment. What good could possibly happen in a world where you’re being toxic for yourself? Choose wisely, and if it happens to be the toxic person from your life yourself, just sit with yourself a little and ask yourself how much of your toxic behavior is internalized during your life from somewhere else? Because more often than not, the root of one’s toxic attitude about itself has external roots. Find the root, seek professional help, and remove it, as simply addressing the immediate effect won’t help.
