CA086: Emotionally draining vampires - dealing with toxic relationships

Last week we gave you the ultimate guide to recognising toxic people and relationships.

Now it’s all very well recognising toxic people and the characteristic behaviours of these relationships, but it’s not much good if you can’t deal with them.

So this week we thought we’d look at those emotionally draining vampires and the process of dealing with toxic relationships.

“You let go of a toxic and unhealthy relationship not because you are weak, not because you no longer love the other person, but because you are strong enough to understand that there are times when two people will be a lot happier if they go separate ways than if they stay together.”

Dealing with toxic relationships and people

So how do you deal with toxic relationships, toxic people and their behaviour?

By literally detoxifying! Or as the dictionary would define it:

“a process or period of time in which one abstains from or rids the body of toxic or unhealthy substances.”

And we like that definition of ‘detox’ for that is sort of what you are doing here.  Taking time out: “a process or period of time in which one abstains from or rids the body of the toxic source” (in this case the person).  It’s a process of distancing and this can take the form of mental, physical or emotional detachment.

But what if these are people that you can't necessarily extract from your life or your situation?

So this could be someone you work with, or a member of your family.

And in this instance, the approach would be about how we manage these people and their behaviours.

Essentially a process of controlling what you can and eliminating what you can’t.

We’ve identified 15 ways that can help you can do just that. 

15 ways to deal with toxic relationships or emotionally draining vampires

1. Realise that you are more in control than you might believe. Toxic people will typically focus on problems rather than solutions. And what is it that they want from you in that situation? They want you to join in this conspiracy, so you can typically find yourself listening to these negative people and being sucked in to their negativity. To overcome this, set limits in your mind to this type of behaviour and then at the end of that time distance yourself from the behaviour or person. You can combine this with another useful technique, which is to ask the person how they would solve the problem they are complaining about.  This redirects their attention in a more productive way and makes them more responsible for their actions and resolving them.
2. Rise above the behaviour. Rather than reacting to the irrational behaviour, or finding yourself getting caught up in the emotion of it all, view it as an experiment with you as the experimenter and the toxic person as the subject of the experiment. See in your mind if you can identify some of the behaviours we identified last week – as a scientist noticing and noting down the subject’s response.  This will keep you more distanced from the toxic behaviour and less likely to be drawn into the drama. It’s a sort of emotional distancing. So in this dispassionate state you can have thoughts in your mind like ‘O look, there’s that person behaving, negatively - or look they’ve just tried to manipulate or exaggerate the situation.  And if you want to get really scientific, you can mentally observe your own behaviour – observing how you might go about trying to justify your own behaviour, for example.
3. Establish your limits. Just because you live or work with a person doesn’t mea