How to handle toxic family members, identify them and leave them in peace.
Who is a Toxic family member?
Toxic family members are the members of our family who bring nothing but displeasure and unhappiness.
Basically, they always emphasize our wrongdoings and compare us to others. Our memories of them are crippling emotional experiences, which may affect our growing lives.
Also, the people whose words hurt our self-esteem. Even when we’ve grown up. It’s hard to shake the feeling of inadequacy, guilt or fear. Those elements altogether made our self-perception foggy and negative.
These are toxic family members. Anyone who identifies as your family but has made you feel all these and more is a toxic family member.
In my personal opinion, the idea that family is family no matter what they do to you is certainly a slavery mentality.
It’s wrong for you to want people to accept those who have robbed them of happiness, intentionally, through words and actions.
Family is a very important agent of socialization. In fact, they are the first agent of socialization which can qualify them as the most important.
They basically teach you the first knowledge of the world. Of yourself, other people, life, living, thinking, feeling, expressing feelings, body image, self-esteem, morals, relationships, communication etc.
I can not signify how much family goes in affecting your childhood, teenage life and adult life. Evidently, it affects your ability to make friends, the kind of friends you make, and the character you exhibit as a friend.
Furthermore, family influences your partner-choices, and your behaviour in relationships with respect to many things like communication, emotional management, etc.
Family is that important. So you can see why it’s very necessary to filter through the family members you significantly open up to, and those you should avoid or reduce contact with.
How to identify toxic members of the family
Sometimes, identifying a toxic family member can be hard because you may be staying with them or they are your biologically closer family. After all, you don’t live in constant analysis of their character.
However, when you get put into a negative mood after encountering some members of your family, you can spot a toxic family member. To identify toxic family members, they often possess one or more of the following characteristics.
They are unable to control their emotions.
Babies wail a lot but this doesn’t make them toxic family members.
A family member who is evidently throwing a fit of overwhelming emotions is a toxic family member.
In so many ways this affects your mind, thinking process and feelings. And the worst part is that you have no idea when you absorb these bad behaviours from them.
I grew up in an explicitly abusive community. Members would get into very heated arguments and the next thing you know, they’re throwing punches equally. And end up bruised and injured all over.
I had to live with it, just watched them with great curiosity. They also poured out their frustrations on me a lot. The children obviously became a common ground for a heated outpour of frustration from several ends.
When I became a teenager, I had absolutely no control over my temper. I just know I had so much anger and hatred in me and most of it was directed at myself, it was so consuming, and I felt very helpless and scared of my emotions.
Related: What is emotional exhaustion?
They always point out your flaws.
My family members fuelled my insecurities the most. My mum especially never spared me the insults of how seemingly ugly I was.
Sometimes, children may just have an attention deficiency problem but my parents almost destroyed me for that.
They would say the meanest thing about me. Mistakes I made, comparisons that cut deep. Expecting me to be the perfect ideal child who wasn’t ugly, dumb or slow.
Toxic family members will always be the first to tease you for your differences, pick on you for your looks, your behaviour, etc. They are insecure themselves so they just project their personal insecurities onto you. This can affect you even till your adult age. I know it took me a long time to accept myself, I even developed a pattern of finding flaws in myself, in situations, people, etc.
They blame you for their inconsistencies
For some reason, you are always to blame for their mistakes. They have expectations of you to be responsible for their inconsistencies. If they drank too much, it was somehow tied to you. Or they failed to accomplish something for themselves, it has to do with you. It’s your fault.
They expect you to take responsibility for things beyond your control. Toxic family members want you to take responsibility for their own lives, and their own duties.
Need I talk about how this ripples down into negative tendencies as you grow up?
You find faults in yourself too. When other people are inconsistent, you’re wired to think that you have to be responsible for irresponsible people. It’s because wired into your subconscious from being exposed to such an environment.
They heavily criticize everything you do.
What you do is never good enough for them. They always see something wrong, even in your best deeds. Some parents were guilty of this.
You grew up feeling like you were not good enough. Becoming a huge critic of yourself because you learnt from the best.
Criticized and always feel like what you have to offer isn’t good enough. These stem from the primary community.
Toxic family members can have you feeling like you are the lowest and the worst. What you do is very flawed and doesn’t deserve to be acknowledged.
They punish you by denying you basic necessities.
One of the worst punishments I received as a child was being starved by my parents whenever I did something wrong.
They would literally skip at least 2 meals and only give you dinner at the end of the day when you’ve “learnt your lesson”.
A toxic family member will also starve you emotionally by completely shutting you out. Ignoring your emotions and especially doing things to hurt you emotionally.
If someone is comfortable with inflicting hurt on you, physically and emotionally, they’re toxic to your well-being and they are definitely not to be considered “family”.
Toxic family members depend on you emotionally
Sometimes I wonder if my mother ever realised that she was emotionally dependent on me. In such a way that I felt responsible for her even before I learnt to be responsible for myself.
I would receive the tears and cries of her troubles with her friends, family and anyone else. Sometimes I genuinely didn’t know what to do with the information but as I grew up, I began to feel attached and responsible to protect her from friends and family with bad intentions.
She never listened and I’d always end up emotionally frustrated. I had to make a choice to take care of myself and unwind from all the negativity and overwhelming emotions I absorbed.
No one should have to involuntarily or otherwise burden you with their emotional baggage. It’s not good for your mental health. You’re not the Teddy bear for absorbing unhappy tears. You’ll get soaked in them and they will seep into your body too.
They physically and verbally abuse you
Sometimes, family members don’t realise that they’re being verbally or physically abusive. Because they mask the abuse with discipline.
There is a fine line between discipline and physical abuse. A family member who enjoys inflicting physical pain on you, and saying very gut-wrenching things to you, is a toxic family member.
It’s crazy how this can lead you to become immune to emotional and physical abuse. Simply because of the kind of family you grew up in and your primary community.
Related: what does it mean to love yourself?
Toxic family members are very comfortable with disregarding you
And they never hesitate to say negative things about you to other people and even to your face. They’re obvious with their nasty emotions towards you and they don’t try to mask it.
A toxic family member just wants you to know how much they hate you and hope that information makes you suffer.
Dealing with toxic family members can have very damaging effects on your mental health. The actions especially from a young age affect your life choices, your partnership choices, your friendship choices, etc.
The more you accommodate toxic family members, the more you’re likely to subconsciously adopt traits of toxicity as well.
Subsequently, you find yourself in a spiral of being the exact same family member you dreaded the most.
How to Handle toxic family members
It may not always be easy to handle toxic family members. Some of them even share rooms with us, share our roofs and our daily lives.
- Create a kind of mental identification log of family members. Classify those who fit into the characters of a toxic family. It’s easier to identify what you are dealing with to help you create a winning strategy.
- You can identify if these are nuclear or extended family members, and this can affect the plan you create to deal with them.
- The farthest they are from you, the better you can erase them from your life. The nuclear ones tend to be sticklers, so you can limit your interactions with them. However, Know when to completely cut ties with the people who are unwilling to come around or make compromises.
- You can learn to detach yourself from them emotionally. By learning to control the kind of information you give out to them. Information is very powerful and can bring out strong emotions. Some family members don’t mind playing dirty and using the information they have against you.
- Establish boundaries with your family members. Don’t be afraid to talk to them about how their actions affect you. Further, depending on how they respond, you can decide to completely (or not). Avoid anything that would lead you to encounter them.
- Some relationships should be kept at bay. With no crossing lines beyond certain actions. If hanging out with a family member is uncomfortable, you should limit physical contact with them as much as possible. You may decide to keep in touch once in a while, through social media or not.
- Remember the choice is yours to make depending on your judgment of their characteristics and their effects on your mental health.
- You are not a shrink, walk away from toxic family as soon as you can. Trying to stay to change them can take more toll on your mental health.
- Seek professional help yourself. Especially if you grew up with a toxic, dysfunctional family. Your subconscious is actively watching and learning things from your daily activities and especially from repeated patterns. Sometimes it can’t tell what’s good for it and what’s bad for me, it can’t differentiate what’s right or wrong. This is where you put in conscious efforts to unlearn toxic behaviours you might have adopted over the years or time of living with toxic family members.
- Say no when you should, and don’t break yourself for toxic family members. Protect yourself from negativity, and protect yourself from negative people, and emotions.
In learning to handle toxic family members, be honest with yourself. Make sure that you’re doing what favours you best. Also makes sure you’re not the toxic one. Ensure to make conscious choices for your journey of personal development, and self-love. Family is not perfect. And you owe it to yourself to protect your heart and mind from negative factors.