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Living Toxic

How Toxic Relationships, Friendships, and Family Members Shaped My Life

By shiney poetryPublished 5 years ago 4 min read
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Dealing with toxic people is apart of life sometimes, you can't avoid them. They will show up in your life one way or other at some point, but what happens when those toxic people come in the form of your relationships or friendships or family members? How do you handle that? How long does it take or how much do you have to go through, until you see the toxicity in someone that you are close to? That is something I am still trying to figure out myself.

The one thing about the toxicity in a person is that it makes you feel stupid. You put all your time and energy and worth into this person or people because you thought you were doing the right thing, or doing it for love, or doing because they're family, and then they talk about you behind your back, blame you for everything wrong in they're lives, cut you out of important events, want everything to be your fault and make everything your fault, turn people against you with lies, false accusations and intimidation then they leave you alone and broken and hurting, wondering what you did wrong and how you can fix something that you didn't know was broken while they move on with their lives.

Until they need something. That is the other thing about the toxicity in a person is how easily they can make you forget who they really are when they pretend that they need you, or how easily they can make you forget all the poison they fed you the first time around with a simple "i'm sorry." Isn't it amazing how just a simple "i'm sorry" can make everything disappear when you care for someone? How all the mental, emotional, verbal and sometimes physical abuse just magically gets wiped away, and we don't see what kind of narcissism we are dealing with until its too late.

Narcissism is like toxicity's twin sister, you never see one without the other. Sometimes a toxic person is defined by how narcissistic they are and how manipulative they can become but we never see how dangerous they are, because sometimes we look over these very brightly colored Rudolph the red nosed reindeer type of red flags, because we care too much to believe that these people would ever hurt us in ways that we think we will never be able to heal from.

Or that you think you have healed from until one day you are sitting on your couch crying your heart out to your significant other thinking that you did something wrong or that your mother hates you when she won't answer your calls because she is the only family member in your life that still wants anything to do with you and if she leaves you too you'll have no one.

Or when laying in bed staring at your phone wondering what you did this time, wondering how you screwed up when your father says he wants to make things right and have a father, daughter relationship, but then disappears and doesn't contact you for months, or when you see your family hanging out five to ten minutes from where you live and you don't cross their minds.

Toxicity, Narcissism, victim shaming, and abuse are just apart of the package when dealing with these types of people, but how does it shape you? How does it effect you in the long run? I don't know about anyone else but I know for me it broke me. In the course of one year my father left us with nothing, family abandoned us, I broke up with my boyfriend and my best friend fell off the face of the earth. As far as family was concerned in the course of one year everything that I knew my whole life about family was a lie.

I had to deal with this new normal that I didn't even think existed. Looking at the toxicity and narcissism in people that raised me, that watched me grow, that used to encourage me, that used to make me believe that family would always be there no matter what we went through. Its amazing how much you can hide behind the word family, its amazing how much you put up with because of the word family because these people who were supposed to protect me, I have to protect myself from.

I'm still very broken and that scares me for my future child, because I don't want them to ever have to feel this type of pain, or to have a childhood they have to heal from. I don't want them to ever feel like their family hates them, or that they are messed up, or that its their fault because of people's choice to walk away.

But at the same time I am finding ways to love myself, and slowly healing from things that I thought I would never heal from, and accepting apologies that I am never going to hear. Slowly but surely I am building a life of love and happiness and hope and dare I say it, it never would of happened without losing the life I once had.

So no, I am not going to sit here and say that toxicity took everything away from me, i'm not going to give that kind of power but I will say it ripped off my rose colored glasses and pushed me to find myself and to know the true meaning of the word family.

humanity
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About the Creator

shiney poetry

Hey guys I'm Cheyenne and I'm a inspiring writer and photographer. Between the Chaos and the peace is where you'll find me. can follow me on Instagram: @shiney.poetry

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