Toxic Friendships: How to Identify and Distance Yourself from Them
Humans are naturally social beings, and this explains why friendships are so important in our lives. However, some of these relationships can evolve into toxic friendships, harming your emotional health instead of making you happier.
With healthy friendships, whether you’re experiencing pleasant moments together, sharing secrets or enjoying someone’s company, having friends gives a sense of emotional balance and well-being. With toxic friendships, however, these people alter your emotions and often bring about chaos.
Friendships are very influential, and these toxic ones drain your energy in one way or another. They limit what you want to do, and they create negative feelings like stress, depression and anguish.
Get to know when someone is negatively influencing your life and try to distance yourself from them to stay emotionally balanced. Below, we are going to help you identify these toxic friendships.
1. The passive-aggressive type of toxic friendship
These are the type of people that are never satisfied. They’re unable to say what they mean. Instead, they talk in circles around what they think, speaking indirectly or insinuating things.
They generally stay quiet and behave strangely so that other people have to figure out what’s going on. Because of this, y ou need to be very careful with these individuals.
They are generally easily annoyed, even though they don’t show it. Sometimes their bad moods “accumulate,” and they end up being aggressive, which could end badly.
2. The competitive type
No matter what you’re doing, they want to be better than you. If you tell them you got a great job offer, they’ll tell you they got something better. If you tell them you’re in pain, they’ll find a way of showing you how their pain is worse.
This type of people is waiting for the moment when you fall, so they can feel superior. They’re used to criticizing friends behind their backs. And, they do so especially with those that are everything that they’re not: people that are more confident than them, full of life and love for other people.
You might also like: Learn How to Defend Yourself from Criticism and Be Assertive
3. The dramatic type
It’s one thing to support your friends through rough times; and, it’s something completely different to always have to support them through drama that sometimes can’t be fixed.
These friends use other people as therapists, yet they almost never let themselves be helped. They’re always gushing about their fears and insecurities, but they’re incapable of taking advice, and they can even get annoyed by it.
They don’t care if their friend is also going through a rough time because theirs is always worse, and more important. Moreover, they can be so intense that they end up leaving the other person exhausted, worried, or stressed. What’s worse is that a lot of friends give them wise advice, but they always find the “but.”
4. The bitter type
These people are always complaining because nothing’s going right. They even see the bad side of things when everything is going well. Their complaints are habits, which is why most of the time they appear to be or truly are, angry.
Generally, these people don’t have much confidence in themselves, they have low self-esteem and they get angry when they see other people happy.
5. The manipulator
Be careful with being too nice!! Manipulative people generally take advantage of people that want to avoid confrontation or people that easily accept doing favors, and never say no. They always want what you have, and that’s why they try to control you with anger or pity.
Read also: 7 Ways Abusers Manipulate Others
6. The envious type
Be careful with this type! They never have anything good to say about others. They get angry when things go well for other people, whenever others do well or get a streak of good luck. And, they never recognize other people’s success, often creating gossip to generate disdain for them.
These people are hypocrites, and they hate other people’s happiness. They will try to spread their negativity whenever possible.
Distance yourself from those toxic friendships!
Do you have any toxic friendships? If so, you might need to start to change the way to treat this friendship or distance yourself so they no longer influence your life.
Something as simple as saying “NO” when necessary, setting trust boundaries, and cutting off negative conversations can help keep you away from their negativity.
If none of that works, though, and the person doesn’t seem to change, simply leave them behind and try to fill your time with people that bring good things to your life.
Stop chatting with these people, tell them you’re busy or find an excuse so that they understand that you don’t want to be around them.
As we say around here…”When you distance yourself from toxic people, even your physical health will improve.”