The Problem of Social Toxicity
I wish I loved interacting with everyone equally. But I don’t. Some people leave me feeling worse after our interactions, and maintaining a relationship with them feels like an obligation. I’m sure a few people in your own circle fit that description as well. Maybe you’ve thought of removing these people from your life, but guilt and duty simultaneously make that decision harder than you’d like. After all, it only takes a small leap of empathy to imagine what life must be like for them. Another Friday night alone, no one to talk to, no one to be happy with. Of course you want them to stick around, to invite them to things, to watch them thrive by your side. But every time you interact with them you are quickly reminded why exactly it is that they’re so alone in the first place.
We often describe these people as draining because that’s exactly how they make us feel. And after feeling this way enough times, you eventually develop a sort of anticipatory dread towards interacting with them. Then through the natural impulse of emotional preservation, you create distance. If they were merely an acquaintance you would step away permanently. But oftentimes these individuals are people that you can’t escape from, either for practical reasons such as with coworkers, or obligatory reasons such as with family and old friends. It is one of life’s most typical dilemmas, and it seems that, as far as any protocol is concerned on how to interact with these people, the jury is still out.
On the one hand the modern sentiment tells you to completely eliminate these people from your life. To go ‘no contact’ as a quick and easy solution. That is, unless you would rather fall into their orbit and allow them to slowly sap the life out of you one conversation at a time. The first option is cold, and conflicts with your most basic instincts of empathy. The second option subjects you to a repeated misery from which there seems to be no escape. Personally, I think both options are immature and shortsighted. They lead to a lose-lose situation for everyone involved, and are reflections of our society’s defunct attitudes towards handling conflict and emotionally turbulent relationships. You might say that we are steadily losing the ability to set healthy and strong boundaries that facilitate the collective emotional growth of everyone involved. But then again, you might say that we were never really good at that in the first place.
Let’s establish some definitions. I believe that there are three fundamental types of socially toxic behaviors, and one superset of socially healthy behaviors. They are as follows:
Taking: bragging, steamrolling conversations, giving unnecessary instructions, sharing idiosyncratic philosophies as truth, morally grandstanding, doling out opinions condescendingly, etc.
Draining: complaining, engaging topics only relevant to themselves, being in a pissy mood, being overly defensive, sulking, playing the victim, trauma dumping, etc.
Neutralizing: ignoring text messages/not returning calls, not offering opinions in conversation, interrupting, refusing to engage deeper topics, not laughing at or attempting jokes, etc.
And then the natural inverse of all of those:
Giving: active listening, showing genuine interest in others’ lives, being in a good mood, responding quickly to communications, contributing positively to conversations, displaying humility, making people feel at ease, uplifting others… or in other words the opposite of all the aforementioned toxic behaviors.
Taking these ingredients we can roughly sketch the process and outcome of most social interactions. People give, take, drain, and neutralize in a dance of small increments that ultimately leaves both individuals in a state of social equilibrium. For example, you could have someone who, despite being an incredibly attentive and careful listener, has the annoying habit of bragging and one-upping their conversation partner. Or you could have someone who pays wonderful compliments and lights the room up with their energy, but in turn has the nasty tendency to interrupt people and commandeer conversations. Indeed, the psychosocial identity of most individuals remains unremarkably balanced, so that either in the immediate one time conversation, or over the long term of many conversations, most interactions go largely unnoticed. Simplified even more, people have their good social habits and their bad social habits and that’s okay.
People start to take note of their conversation partner’s tendencies when they consistently leave interactions feeling either charged up or drained. Do one set of behaviors long enough and people will eventually learn to either seek you out or avoid you. Most people, however, keep these typically ‘toxic’ behaviors in check. Such as ‘oh I’m complaining too much, I should ask them about their day’. Or ‘that was an inappropriate time for me to mention how expensive my car was’. That is to say, that most behaviors that we label as ‘toxic’ are actually quite normal and at times are healthy aspects of a typical human interaction. Being in a bad mood, bragging about a good thing that happened to you, or taking over a conversation are all behaviors that have their time and place. To suggest that someone should never complain because it could be interpreted as negative would not only be an egregious oversimplification of social dynamics, but it would also be close to impossible. Most of the time there is nothing to worry about because at worst, when done in moderation these behaviors typically just get folded into your overall social profile and are remarked on as either subtle insecurities or as an inner negativity that you’re having a tough time dealing with. But truly, most of the time they are not remarked on at all.
And so it’s here that we must make the distinction between acute and chronic social toxicity. Acute being what I just talked about, and chronic being what happens when these behaviors become the dominant flavor of most—if not all—of an individual’s social interactions. That is to say, if I complain about something that annoyed me once or twice in a day then that’s fine, but if all I do is complain with everyone I talk to on most days over the course of months or years, then this behavior has now turned into something that is definitively toxic. Usually this toxicity arises when there is an internal issue of unreleased negativity or low self esteem that manifests as an outward set of behaviors that is carried out with a subconscious intention of satisfying the individual’s problems. These issues are symptoms of an unresolved and deep pain that is so pervasive that it is totally invisible to the individual in question. To everyone on the outside there is a clear elephant in the room, but to the individual there has always been an elephant, and so they only see the room. Their socially toxic behavior is thus seamlessly baked into their entire interpretation of regular social convention. Following the thread, we ultimately discover that social toxicity, by nature of it being an outward attempt to satisfy a deep pain, is a set of behaviors that stems entirely from a mechanism of self preservation.
Important note: Clearly you can see that I am not attempting to write a catch-all for every type of negative social behavior. We will be very closely sticking to what I have defined as social toxicity in my own terms. There may be scenarios where you find yourself asking ‘well what about this or that situation?’ and chances are it is because I am not talking about those situations. To be even clearer on this point, I will not be discussing socially destructive behaviors such as anything along the lines of cheating, manipulation, physical abuse, compulsive lying, etc.
The Nature of Taking – A Hole in Your Cup
The common thread among all taking behaviors is that they result in the feeling of superiority to others, whether on an individual, group, or population level. To illustrate this, let’s use an analogy of a cup with a hole in it. The cup and the water within it are a representation of how you feel on a day to day basis (self esteem). In an ideal state the cup is full all of the time and so you feel maximally good about yourself nearly constantly. If someone or something were to add water to your cup, it would simply overflow because there is no room for it to go. A compliment for example, while nice, would not do anything to truly affect your sense of self worth. In other words, you would not seek anything outside of you because nothing outside of you could make you feel any better than you already do.
But let’s imagine now that a hole were to be punctured in the side of your cup. And now every time water fills the cup beyond the level of the hole, it simply leaks out until it matches the height of the puncture. Any feeling associated with a full cup could and would forever be temporary. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Your base state of self-worth would be defined by the position of the hole, and no matter how much water you added—no matter how many external factors you relied on—you’d inevitably wind up feeling the same way about yourself. No amount of anything or anyone from outside could bring you to a lasting state of fullness. The location of the hole, whether near the bottom, middle, or top, thus dictates how you feel about yourself all the time, despite what the world tells you or gives you. And here we can draw a corollary: anything that makes you feel superior can only make you feel that way because you were lacking that feeling within yourself in the first place.
So taking behaviors, having by nature the intended effect of making you feel better than others are thus nothing more than a means of tending to a chronically injured sense of self esteem. They are attempts to fill your cup past the point that it cannot be filled—a state of existence only achievable by means of self healing. Now there is much to be said about the nature of your desires and how they indicate where you lack self love, but that is another road to walk down another time. For now, let’s focus this concept up using an example.
Imagine someone who is in the habit of suffocating conversations with unsolicited lectures and information dumps. We’ll call this person Neil. You have probably met someone like Neil, or several people like him in your lifetime. You will certainly meet many more. Why does he do this?
Well, Neil has always been a rather precocious and intelligent boy, yet somewhere in his developmental years a negative confluence of relationships, circumstances, and events, such as growing up in poverty, being abused, being bullied, etc., made him feel that he was less than other people. These feelings, being triggered in childhood where conscious processing of negative emotion and trauma is impossible, became pervasive aspects of his psyche. In other words, a hole was punctured into his cup and unknown to him, he grew up never understanding what it felt like to have any more water than his cup was capable of handling. This feeling of being less was now an innate acceptance of how life should be perceived by him, because naturally there was nothing else to compare to.
Then let’s say, on some random day at school in his adolescence, and by nature of his intellect, Neil happened to impress his peers with the recital of some obscure fact or definition of some difficult word. And as his friends innocuously asked ‘woah, how did you even know that?’ Neil became simultaneously aware of the fact that he could do something that others could not. For the first time water filled up beyond the point of the hole, and so was the seed planted of his intellectual identity. Again, remembering that Neil could never have compared this feeling to anything else, he now discovered a behavior that could temporarily assuage his feeling of being less while still being completely unaware that the hole even existed or even could exist at all. In other words, Neil learned that he could use his intellect to make himself feel superior to others without understanding where the feeling of superiority even came from. This behavior would now be a key component of his social interactions, and he would find himself ping ponging back and forth between an inflated and deflated sense of ego for the rest of his life.
As Neil grew up, however, his interjections would become less awe-inspiring, and instead more disruptive and suffocating. His preachings would become condescending and rude (the only way to give an edge to his high of self-superiority) and people would feel bad after listening to him explain something that on the surface should have been a delight to listen to. Neil’s insatiable desire to fill his cup transparently took precedence over the dance that is a healthy conversation. People did not want to be his cheerleader—they wanted to participate in a mutual exchange of social value with a peer. But none of them could directly tell him this, or even quite put their finger on why it was that Neil was such a drag to talk to. In their minds, he was just ‘a very smart person, but not really fun to be around’.
Of course Neil was no fool, nor was he so unconscious as to not recognize that people did not pay attention to him the way he wished they would when he talked. His listeners felt the absence of exchange, and felt the extent to which Neil was constantly proving something with his superior knowledge. Some people would be roped in, but the rest would simply nod their heads politely until he finished speaking. Sometimes people would rudely cut him off, change subjects abruptly, or leave before he finished his point. And just like anyone else on the planet, somewhere deep inside, Neil clocked these behaviors and internalized his ever lowering position on the social totem pole… It’s here where Neil would make the critical error of assessment common in all who suffer from low self esteem: Neil would take people’s lack of respect as a reflection of his inherent perceived lack of self worth (a self fulfilling prophecy from childhood) rather than correctly assessing it as a reflection of his inability to participate in the mutual social dance that is an empowering and pleasant conversation. That is, his drive to overpower conversations put people on the defensive, and in their own internalizations retreated to safety.
So through Neil’s continual attempt (and failure) to attain self satisfaction, he winds up fundamentally misunderstanding correct socializing behavior. He takes this predictably negative social outcome and uses it to justify his subliminal feeling of low self worth, instead of recognizing that healthy socializing is about the mutual dynamic and has absolutely nothing to do with him personally. This is a point worth repeating: socializing has nothing to do with him at all! It has to do with the mutual transfer of energy and value, like the intersection of a venn diagram. Yet from childhood and adolescence, Neil learned to interpret every social interaction from his side of the circle. Meaning that if a social interaction were to go poorly, it must have something to do with him, right? But it could not be further from the case, rather it is simply his failure to attain a value-laden middleground interaction between two parties.
Unfortunately Neil, unaware of both the rule of the social dance and the hole in his cup, learns instead to double down on his socially toxic behaviors in an attempt to achieve that ethereal sensation of temporary completeness that he grew up fixing on. But by doing so, he pushes everyone with healthy social boundaries away from him, which to no one’s surprise, only serves to further entrench the unconscious narrative of his low social worth. Eventually Neil will either come to only associate with people with low self esteem like him, or find himself completely isolated from regular healthy interactions.
And let’s be clear. Any of these ‘taking’ behaviors can be traced back and understood in the same way. If you take another example of someone who is extremely bossy and forces instructions on people when it’s not necessary (or what I call little lord syndrome) they are doing so only because they learned at some point that by making people pay attention to them, listen to them, and do what they say, that they can achieve a sensation of superiority. Again, it is only the internal lack of completeness that imparts on them the necessity to attain this feeling from outside of themselves. Or for another example, constant bragging can be seen as an attempt to directly manifest feelings of desirability and value from others, and so on and so forth.
A quick note on intentions:
Many young men are apprehensive of approaching women on the street because of the fear of being labeled creepy or aggressive. But try to understand that the only reason such a reputation exists is because the people who most often do it approach the act from a framework of taking. If I were to approach eighty women in a single Sunday afternoon so that I could collect as many numbers as possible, the women with whom I talk to would automatically become interchangeable conduits for the satisfaction of my low self esteem. Like Neil filling his cup with intellectual posturing, I would be filling my cup with cheap validation from women. Usually in such a case, this could be any woman because it has nothing to do with them, only me and me only. My interactions would follow theory instead of instinct, and my approach would be based around manipulating the female psychology in an effort to satisfy my own desires. This is the antithesis of healthy giving behavior, and interpreted from the analogy of our intersecting venn diagram, this would be the equivalent of pulling people into my side of the circle entirely. Make no mistake that this is a predatory and self-centered way of operating in the world and serves no other purpose than to make me feel superior.
Everything changes when I engage from a perspective of genuine giving. My attitude shifts towards forming a connection, lightening the woman’s day up with a genuine compliment, and relinquishing the desire to own the conversation for my own means. A rejection becomes a simple answer that things were never meant to be and I move on with my day knowing that I made someone else’s better. If all approaches to women happened in this way, then the stigma would vanish. In another light, we can see that if a behavior is done solely with the benefit of the seeker in mind, and done at the expense of the dance then it is toxic. And the opposite statement is just as true.
The Nature of Draining – the Dark Pool
As discussed, taking involves a direct inwards transfer of energy where the individual feels better about themselves at the expense of the dance. Draining is different, because while it also requires an audience and also happens at the expense of the dance, it does not have the desired effect of making the individual feel superior. Rather, draining can be seen as the unloading of negative energy onto those around them. Many interpret this behavior as a childish indulgence in negativity, but it’s better to conceptualize it as a reflection of an internal state of dissatisfaction, frustration, sadness, anger, etc., that the individual may be unaware of, or unable to address constructively. That is, they insufficiently possess the emotional capacity to handle their own negative feelings, so they must release them outwardly like an overworked machine lets off heat. Once again I will reiterate that this set of behaviors is completely normal and healthy and should not be avoided in social interactions. The problem, as always, arises when this behavior is indulged in to the point that it starts throwing people out of their equilibrium for the worse.
We will use another theoretical case study of Stacy. Stacy has had money problems all her life. She grew up in poverty and never had the opportunity to attend college as she opted to become a mother at an early age instead. Eventually she wound up single and her kids grew up to take on their own lives. This left Stacy with the realization that she never quite focused enough on herself, and as a consequence will likely live the remainder of her life poor and disenfranchised. And while she may fight tooth and nail against this reality, she knows she can only keep the wolf at the door for so long before ultimately succumbing to her fate. Stacy has also lacked an emotional support system her entire life as her family has been out of the picture for as long as she can remember. Ultimately, she is left on her total lonesome to handle the overwhelming reality of her circumstances. If Stacy were to attempt to suppress these emotions, they would knot up inside of her body and cause mental illness (such as with personality disorders), physical illness, or chronic and acute pain. So her subconscious takes the initiative and finds a few key ways for her to let out her negativity instead. Stacy consequently develops the proclivities to:
– Cut people down a peg when they’re happy.
– Feel deep envy for those who have the things she desires.
– Be incapable of controlling her mood, especially when she is angry or sad.
– Always complain about her financial situation in hopes that people will take pity on her and help.
– Fly off the rails when people criticize her even a little because ‘they don’t get it’.
– Etc.
Again, considering her circumstances and her lack of support in any capacity, it’s completely understandable for these behaviors to emerge. And simply telling her to stop would be like instructing a beaver to not build a dam, such that she cannot just whimsically stop feeling the things that are causing the behaviors in the first place. Because, to clearly reiterate, these actions are not chosen but are rather desperate attempts to manage overwhelming emotional burdens. But… Be that as it may, to everyone else around her these things are in fact a total drain every time they talk to her. You see, they want to talk about things that interest them, problems of their own they may have, or things that lift their spirits. But time and time again, the conversation invariably comes back to Stacy and her woes and her unwillingness to partake in the positivity that others are seeking to foster. And while Stacy may be capable of holding these behaviors and feelings off at bay temporarily, there is always some trigger topic or situation that brings her right back into her negativity. So if people want to have a continued relationship with Stacy, they must learn her triggers and avoid them completely in order to have any hope of a pleasant interaction. But even still, there is no guarantee that Stacy will not simply bring them up anyway because she had a particularly bad day. Most people have a low tolerance for this.
Stacy’s issue is that she refuses to take responsibility for the deep dark pool of emotional pain within her. Stacy herself is no fool either, and there is no doubt that she is keenly aware of her pain on a near constant basis, and has been aware of it for as long as she recalls. She is similarly aware of what thoughts and circumstances cause this pain to rear its ugly head and when she is entrenched in a ruminating cycle. And it is exactly this implicit understanding that makes her incessant negativity unacceptable to the people around her. Because from their perspective these are certainly problems that Stacy must tend to, and it is not fair for her to make these problems everyone else’s problems. Which they are right in their assessment. However, what they do not understand is that despite Stacy’s implicit understanding, the very notion of diving into this pool of terrible emotion is completely and utterly overwhelming to her. That if she were to swim in there for too long, some dark and nasty beast would swim up and swallow her whole. It is far, far easier to drain than to confront this pain.
The common recommendation to this dilemma is to go to therapy, but if you have built a framework around accommodating this overwhelming pool of emotions, then going to therapy and resolving it also involves tearing down this framework. This might involve tearing down delusional beliefs about themselves and the world, or bringing down stalwart defense mechanisms that have brought them safety since childhood. That is, diving into the pool to find the plug at the bottom involves a significant amount of pain, acceptance, and a paradigm shift towards their outlook on life. This, being an incredibly daunting task, causes a secondary mechanism of defense to activate—which is to rationalize the ‘uselessness’ of therapy away. Indeed, it is a tragically common occurrence that those who seem to need therapy the most are oftentimes the ones who are the most dismissive of therapy in the first place. They come to not only accept the monster living under their bed, but even mistake it as a friend and an integral part of their identity.
But unfortunately this part of their identity simultaneously manifests as obnoxious draining behaviors, and before long they are roping everyone else around them into their negativity. At this point Stacy will see a definitive lack of social success like in the earlier example with Neil. And just like with Neil, instead of Stacy recognizing that it is her simple inability to participate in the dance that is causing her steadily increasing isolation, she conflates her lack of social success with her inherent perceived lack of self worth. Her social (emotional support) circle tightens, and she becomes that much worse at dealing with her internal negativity on her own. Then as the negative loop intensifies, she feels compelled to double down on unloading her distress to anyone who will listen, amplifying the intensity of her negativity and driving others even further away. Add in the comorbidity of taking behaviors to shore up self esteem, and before you know it Stacy will have no one in her life. Eventually this will result in her losing the ability to calibrate her sanity against the common populace and she will become strange and unsocialized.
Again, all draining behaviors can be interpreted through a similar lens. Anger issues are often a reflection of an inability to handle sadness and a frustration with themselves in the world. Trauma dumping or trauma competing are symptoms of overwhelming hurt from childhood that cannot be resolved, and so forth…
The Nature of Neutralizing
I wish I could elaborate on this section with the level of depth I’ve done for the other two, but either because neutralizing is just so much simpler, or simply because I don’t understand it well enough, I will have to be brief. There is no gain to be had with neutralizing, and no direct goal either. Rather, there is the anti-goal of disconnection. I firmly believe that this itself stems from an inability or unwillingness to be vulnerable. Much of the time with neutralizing behaviors this encompasses a level of proactive shame as well. Proactive meaning that it is anticipatory rather than reflective. The thought of uttering an opinion that others don’t agree with, making a joke that others don’t find funny, or saying something that others find dumb, is so petrifying to them that they would rather erect a wall of indifference and use it as a shield. Of course this aloofness while appearing cool or ‘high status’ on the outside, is nothing more than a sophisticated defense mechanism against deep insecurity. Even in less extreme cases we see this sort of thing frequently. Students don’t raise their hand in class from fear of asking a dumb question. A young man hangs out with friends and hears something that he strongly disagrees with but says nothing. It seems to be a ubiquitous social behavior learned in early adolescence that for many does not dissolve until much later in their life.
It can be painful to interact with these types of neutralizers because it feels like you are getting so little in return for what you’re putting out. In bad enough cases, you may even think that you are being the weird and socially awkward one by offering opinions and making jokes that seem to never land. But try to remember our analogy of the venn diagram in this instance as well. You are stepping to the middle, and they are refusing to partake. Once more, this has nothing to do with you at all, and rather is a mere reflection of the neutralizers extreme discomfort with expressing their true nature. This is a sad thing because the opposite of expression is shame, and so you must remember that your inability to reach through to this person is merely your energy conflicting with their inner firewall of self unacceptance. For them, the unfortunate result of this safety barrier is that they become a total bore, and by their own doing preclude the possibility of any meaningful exchange with others. They become a third wheel to their own interactions, and by never engaging on a deeper level, live their lives without knowing, or ever being truly known by others. The solution on its face is rather simple: learn to accept yourself and accept the outcome of all of your social interactions. It is by attempting to please everyone and never rocking the boat that the neutralizer gets so entrenched in their ways. Remember the old saying—you could be the ripest peach in the orchard, but some people don’t like peaches. As is the case in most interactions, polarization is a desired outcome because it will only serve to eliminate people from your life who are not compatible with your inner nature, and draw people in who are.
There is another type of neutralizer, and this is the chronically bad communicator—or more broadly, he who perpetually creates distance with others for no good reason. This is another form of insecurity, but rather than fear of perception, the distancer fears connection. The vulnerability that comes with forming close bonds with other people is simply too much for them to handle. There is a door of emotion within them that, if opened, risks radically transforming their psyche, and consequently uprooting a life-long identity that they have come to strictly operate by. This identity could be many things. That they are different than everyone else, that they are uniquely special, that they are subject to a life of loneliness. They intuitively sense a deeper inability to form connections and spontaneously erect an intellectualization for why that is. This explanation will generally serve them, but even they know that it is flawed in a capacity that is just beyond vision. Oftentimes the distancer will be able to form very intense bonds on one of two ways: they will either engage in all-consuming relationships where their partner becomes everything important to them. Or they will engage in all-promiscuous relationships where they will be capable of forming an emotional connection right up until they hit a wall, in which they will abandon their current partner and find a new one to start the process anew. In either situation, it is crucial to point out that the distancer is not particularly connected to anyone, but is rather hyper-connected to their relationship model. That is, they are in love with their relationship to their relationship. In an all-consuming relationship for example, it is not that their partner possesses some profoundly alluring or special quality that sucks the distancer in. Truly, the partner could have been replaced with just about anyone who was willing to engage in this magnitude of passionate co-dependency. This quality of interchangeability is much more obvious in the all-promiscuous relationships for reasons that don’t need justification, but it is definitely worth pointing out that both relationship styles are engaged in the same relational paradigm.
Either way, regardless of whether the distancer is in a relationship or not doesn’t matter, because the problem stems entirely from within. It is hard to say exactly where this type of damage arises from, but it’s my observation that a distancer is created by means of a dysfunctional relationship with one or both parents. Everything within them seems to mature and grow at a regular pace, except some critical and unknown function of emotional maturity. This blockage appears to bottleneck the further maturity of the pysche, and so from the outside looking in, the distancer exhibits a form of arrested emotional development where their psychological profile seems to be frozen in time for years, decades, or in some tragic cases, an entire lifetime. Their inability to engage or recognize the damage caused by their parent(s) shuts them off from a deeper, more sophisticated outlook on their life, and emotional self-understanding. Indeed, the fear of connection with others seems to in fact be a fear of connection with themselves.
Sadly, forming close relationships with these people is impossible unless you are their romantic partner. If somebody wishes to keep things on a superficial level with everyone, and you constitute ‘everyone’, then they will insist on maintaining a level of superficiality with you forever–even if they themselves don’t understand how or why they do this. There is nothing you can do either, because it is the life they feel most safe and insulated living. Through their illusion of emotional control they wind up turning their emotional valve off, and to turn it back on would threaten to completely annihilate them. Or more accurately, it would threaten to annihilate their understanding of their romantic relationships, which in turn dominoes into a destruction of their understanding of parental relationships, and finally their understanding of themselves. Simply phoning them more or texting them more or grabbing a beer every now and then will not push them to commit to such a radical upheaval. They must first yearn for something deeper before something deeper can be attained. Until then, it is usually advisable to maintain a relationship with them where you can interact as superficially as they like and it does not affect you negatively. Because attempting to grow closer with them only to be burned over and over will ultimately result in resentment and a total dissolution of the relationship.
Our Attitudes Towards The Social Black Hole
So we have discussed how unfortunate life circumstances and emotional damage lead to a self-perpetuating downward spiral of negativity and poor social position. Taking, draining, and neutralizing behaviors, reflections of profound unmet needs and unresolved emotional pain, emerge from a young age and through their continued action further diminish the individual’s ability to engage in healthy social interactions. This causes their social circle to dwindle, exasperating their isolation and entrenching these destructive, maladaptive coping mechanisms deeper. Ironically it is the very behaviors that were generated in an effort to assuage their suffering that also push people away. This cycle if left unchecked will result in critical isolation, from which a breakage with society is inevitable—as seen with the homeless, bullied, disenfranchised, outcasted, and mentally ill. Then by nature of these people being put into a box, they become preemptively discounted by members of society and thus turn into social black holes—Don’t get too close lest you get sucked into their orbit and become like them.
How miserable does that sound? Honestly, it is an easy thing to unburden yourself of someone simply because they are unpleasant to be around. Easy to forget about their suffering. To forget what it means to be them. You constrict your worldview in an effort to ignore everything that isn’t sunlight and rainbows. Going ‘no contact’ with someone close to you imparts a fleeting sensation of loss, but is quickly forgotten because I can only have positivity in my life. To you, they are a transient specter of unwanted emotion who pops up in your life story every now and again. But to them they are horribly alone. There is no end in sight to their loneliness. They don’t know why they are the way they are, or why people don’t like talking to them. They socialize through computer screens and fake stories, hoping desperately to clip a morsel of the love they will forever be seeking.
An injured animal lashes out in desperation at everything that comes near, yet we exercise compassion and understanding anyway. Why then do we seem to be so incapable of exercising the same thing to these emotionally wounded people? Let me tell you that the root of all immaturity is a singular and ego-centered perspective.
But of course I would like to set something straight. It is the job of the sufferer to ease their suffering. Social toxicity should not be accepted because it is the good and empathetic thing to do. In fact, I encourage people to fully rebuke and challenge it. So let me make something clear in plain terms to the socially afflicted:
If you see a toxic behavior within yourself, you must rein it in like a wild horse and venture to understand it entirely. Accept that there is nothing outside of you that will ever ease your pain or make you feel whole. Finding this peace within yourself will take longer than you are likely comfortable to admit, and it cannot be rushed. You must become a passive observer to your own tendencies, without judgement and with empathy for where this negativity comes from. When you catch yourself in a socially toxic behavior, simply nod your head, acknowledge it, and say ‘I see that I am doing that thing that I don’t like, interesting. I wonder why I did it just now’. In the interim your goal is to salvage your current relationships and prevent the spiral of isolation from getting any worse. This involves you stepping fully outside of yourself and reframing your social interactions through the lens of the dance or the venn diagram. It is not about you or what you can get or what you can release. It is about building something together like two kids making a snowman. Your objective is to find the unique quality of this person and how it interacts with the unique quality of you. Err on the side of giving and catch yourself when you are falling back into old habits. Anyone who has stuck around up to this point should be cherished and guarded, for they have owed you nothing and never will. When things must come to you, when you must be answered and loved and tended to, you have failed to see your own role in the world. If you find yourself alone, truly alone, it is because you have refused to open your eyes.
And a message to everyone else:
It is the case that many people are not clear on how to set a healthy boundary or even what one is. Let me simplify it. A boundary is nothing more than the declaration of what terms you are willing to engage someone on in a social interaction. People seem to feel subjected to whatever socially toxic behavior they are confronted with. If their sister constantly complains about her credit card debt, they feel that they must listen and meekly wait for her to finish before changing the subject, even if that takes 45 minutes. Otherwise they blow up with an out of proportion emotional reaction, which in turn elicits a defensive emotional reaction and a fight ensues.
This is how simple setting a boundary is: “Hey sis, you know that I love you, and you know that I love hanging out with you, but every time you bring up your credit card debt it makes me want to end the conversation. You know it’s something that I can’t help you with, and at this point I feel like it’s just bringing up negativity every time we talk when we could be having a good time together instead.”
Establishing such a boundary for the first time will usually get you an extreme reaction of irritation, anger, confusion, or dismissal. Your boundary will all but likely be ignored, or treated like a suggestion, and the same behavior will be repeated. This is where the significance of consistency comes in. When a boundary is set, it must be enforced every single time it is crossed. This may take four, ten, or thirty times before the message is received loud and clear by the other person. Eventually you may even find yourself being as blunt as “You know I don’t like talking about credit cards, I’m changing the subject” or “If you don’t respect my unwillingness to talk about credit card debt, I’m going to leave.” The point here is that you are establishing your sovereign participation in the conversation. You are establishing that what you want from the conversation is just as valid and true as what the other person is trying to seek.
Your ability to form healthy and loving relationships with the socially toxic is entirely contingent on your ability to form these strong, consistent boundaries. These boundaries can be applied to any situation in which your emotional energy is being sucked into the other party’s negative abyss. That you will not participate in a relationship with anyone who feels that is okay to: ignore, use, insult, disregard, command, or otherwise do any other negative behavior to you. If you can commit to this, while emphasising that you are coming from a place of love and respect and that you want to keep this person in your life, but at the same time are unwilling to participate in a relational dynamic that makes you feel worse, then you can begin to not only heal the relationship with this person, but also teach them what a clear and honest boundary looks like.
Because if you simply nod your head, wait for them to finish, and go along with the status quo that you are not to be respected, then not only are you keeping yourself in a position of weakness, but you are also robbing them of the opportunity to see the error in their ways and change. Because if you’re not willing to set boundaries with this person, then who else will? If there was anyone else, then they likely wouldn’t be this way in the first place. You both, in essence, remain in an unconscious relational dynamic that affects zero change on both parties involved. And that is one of the core seeds of societal dysfunction at large.
And so we can see that not setting boundaries, letting negativity fester, or outright abandoning the person in question is actually an incredibly cowardly and weak move. It’s relinquishing your own strength to dictate the way you want to be communicated to and how you want your relationships to develop. If you think that a relationship cannot be salvaged, really take a deeper look within yourself and see if this mentality stems from a place of weakness or strength. Are you running away? Do you feel small? Do you feel angry or defensive? There are many ways in which weakness can take on the guise of strength, but you are only fooling yourself, and abandoning those who need you the most.
But if someone absolutely refuses to accept your boundaries no matter what, then it is perfectly acceptable to remove them from your life for an extended period of time, if not permanently. Though I would recommend trying to set boundaries at least ten times over the course of a few years before finally settling on such an extreme solution. Or at least, what I consider should be extreme in our society of flippant disconnection.
The issue with taking:
Setting boundaries with takers is tricky business. While drainers are implicitly aware of their negativity, takers are generally completely unaware of the hole in their cup. When pointing out taking behaviors to them, you will often be met with total denial, or an accusation of you doing the same thing that you’re pointing out. Usually they will have ‘always thought that about you’ and mention how ironic it is that you of all people are telling them that they do X or Y taking behavior. This is because taking stems from low self esteem, and so pointing out a taking behavior is the same as pointing out their low self esteem which is equivalent to a deeply personal attack. Admitting weakness in this way and taking a solemn look at your state of self worth is a task that the vast majority of the population is just not capable of doing. These admissions must happen in a safe, loving space, and even then may take the course of years or decades to finally be looked at and then resolved. As with every aspect of the human psyche, getting into the nuts and bolts of low self esteem and how that manifests as personality traits is so complex that I could probably write fifteen blog posts on the topic and still not cover what needs to be covered. For now, I would say that the correct protocol is to show people the love that they are trying to garner when engaging in taking behaviors. You do not have to be their cheerleader, amp them up, or even go along with their big fish stories. Just give them what they are looking for, in the way they were not expecting to receive it.
Self esteem and love as the ultimate social virtue
We as humans are fundamentally oriented towards taking. Always wanting more than we have, always striving towards some hazy future of desire. We are consequently oriented towards the self and allow this perception of the world to shape our interactions with those in it. To truly give, you must first step wholly outside of your own understanding of reality and see it from the eyes of others. This requires that you need nothing, seek nothing, and hope for nothing outside of yourself. There is nothing to release. Your glass is so perfectly full that there can be no more room for anything else. When water is added to your cup, it overflows and pours into the cups of those around you. You lift spirits with ease. The journey to this place may take a lifetime, and for most it is an impossible standard to strive towards. But is it not better than seeking to gorge yourself on anything you can, only to fill an impossible deficit for the rest of your life?
And many believe that if you act this way that it is tantamount to being this way. But consider that the pretending of virtue is just another form of moral grandstanding. It is nothing but the symptom of another hole, making you feel that you must declare your specialness in just another way. Anyone can act virtuous and can choose to give in every single social interaction without fail, such as with the false priest but by doing so will find himself taken advantage of by others, and repressed by themself. So rather than resolved, their needs will be sequestered where they will eventually transform into resentment, bitterness, and worse. Dostoevsky told us to “be bad, but at least don’t be a liar!” And I could not agree more. It is infinitely better to indulge and investigate the negativity within you than to pretend that it does not exist. Beware that false virtue always slips between the cracks and reveals itself horridly as hypocrisy.
Indeed, we all have our insecurities, deficiencies, and problems that we cannot handle on our own. Our emotional health and self esteem will never be perfect. There is no amount of external validation, no amount of money, or assurance that can plug the hole that is draining your cup, or that can release you from impossible circumstances. It must be found within, through self-compassion and understanding, and then healed. This takes time, humility, and an abundance of self love. Most importantly, it requires radical honesty, and honesty is the hardest thing to practice when confronting feelings of deep inadequacy. As Jung said “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” I will leave that statement to stand on its own.
Bonus reading: Talking to children
Our interactions with children tell us much about the dynamic we’ve been discussing, mostly because of how little our time is spent in equilibrium with them. You see, children do not understand how to achieve equilibrium. They have no sense for when it is the appropriate time to give or take, and that’s a good thing. A healthy interaction with a child involves giving nearly 100% of the time. When a child shows you their new drawing you do not in turn show them the portrait that you drew last week as a comparison. You congratulate them, amp them up, and make them feel good about their talent and hard work. Most of us intuitively understand how messed up it would be to rattle off about the horrible day you had or the troubles in you’ve been having in your dating life to a seven year old. That is, most people understand how unhealthy it is to use a child as a receptacle for your draining and taking tendencies because they simply don’t know how to defend themselves. Very easily we could make an argument that to do so would constitute a form of emotional abuse.
Children learn what a healthy social interaction is from their parents(!) It is through the unconditional giving of the parent that they learn what it means to be loved and thus what it means to love. They are concurrently incapable of establishing—or even understanding—what a boundary is, and this is what makes taking/draining a child so destructive. They are incapable of disengaging from social toxicity, and so if they are only exposed to that, they learn that social interaction must happen by means of socially taxing others, or being socially taxed. The child’s needs become forgotten in the face of the parent’s needs and so their healthy emotional development is sacrificed in the name of the parent’s emotional demands. Not only will they grow up with an incredibly skewed idea of how socializing works on a fundamental level, but they will also fail to learn how to make emotional connections or even establish a proper sense of self. Issues with self esteem, addiction, emotional regulation, feelings of belonging and worse are naturally soon to follow in adulthood. Oftentimes the child will grow up to either have zero boundaries where they fully adopt the role of social placater and doormat at the expense of their own health (what they were taught) or if they are lucky they will learn to completely detach from any emotional connection due to fear of manipulation. They will learn to set very strong boundaries but this is a double edged sword as their boundaries will lead them into the realm of zero empathy. And make no mistake, this is just as a severe and real form of self-detachment as the doormat, only it appears stronger. Their capacity to socially give will be greatly diminished, like a tortoise retreating into its shell, and by nature so will their capacity to express love for themselves and others.
It is never appropriate to use your child as an emotional receptacle. Your emotional capacity, however limited, as an adult eclipses their emotional capacity tenfold. It is your inherent responsibility to be the river that carries the boat, not vice versa. Of course it is important to note that the parent in question is not evil either, because this behavior is learned from their own parents. One of the true and depressing realities that we must understand is that the fate of a social blackhole is decided in a period of time that they cannot remember or understand. They grow up in isolation with this critical need that can never be satisfied, and then they have kids and repeat the exact same cycle by imparting the same pain that was passed on to them by their own parents. One person must end the cycle by showing their children unconditional and unending love, despite their own broken spirit.