How to Cut Out a Toxic Person | Rewind

And if it hasn't changed, then on what basis are you thinking it's going to change in the future? What we're about to talk about can relate to anybody that you're with who has consistently treated you poorly, who has ignored your needs, who has disregarded your happiness, who has been gaslighting you for a long time, lying to you, breaking promises. Someone who consistently lets you down, disappoints you. I want to talk about how.

We.

Come to trap ourselves in these situations and what it really requires for us to break free of them. Because the nature of what Dr. Ramani and other psychologists called the trauma bond, is that we can become imprisoned by that bond. And it can be extraordinarily difficult to break free from it and to finally release ourselves from a relationship like that. And we should say that a relationship like that is tremendously detrimental to our mental health, our well-being, our self-esteem, our quality of life. It is a situation that is maddening. It slowly erodes your confidence in yourself, especially if your needs are ignored, if you are gaslit over things that you would like to happen and told that it's crazy for you to want those things or your high maintenance for wanting those things or that When someone tries to convince you that your version of reality is completely false, it can have the effect of you not knowing which way is up anymore. You stop trusting yourself. And of course, when you're with someone who constantly breaks their promises to you, constantly lies to you, and then if you catch them in the lie, makes it your fault. Somehow, it makes us unable to see what the truth is anymore. It divorces us from ourselves. We start becoming somebody else. We live a life of trying to manage this person. We live a life of trying to read between the lines of what things this person is saying are true. and which things are false. So we pay a price for staying with someone like this. I want to start by just talking about how we find ourselves in these situations and how one of the qualities that we like most about ourselves in other contexts can become our biggest enemy. in the context of a relationship like this, and that is our empathy. We show a level of understanding about this person that allows them to get away with the same thing over and over again. Let's talk about that for a moment. When does empathy go too far?

Well, I was gonna say, if you're with someone who, if you're taking care of them and making sure they're okay, and they're taking care of themselves and making sure they're okay, who's taking care of you? You know, it's quite a common thing that you hear, but in order to be there for other people, your own cup has to be full and your priority in life should always be to make sure that you're okay. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to put yourself first in every single situation, and in fact, you shouldn't. It's really important to put other people first sometimes, and to put those you love before you when they need you more than you need them in that moment. But ultimately, your empathy towards other people cannot come at the detriment of actually making sure you're okay. That's when you're. You have to suspect yourself, I think, as to whether or not is it really empathy or are you just caught in a toxic cycle where it's serving some kind of need for you?

Well, I think that. That's exactly right. And we, what happens is because we're so close to this person, we've heard all of their stories. And people who are really good at mobilizing your empathy get very good at telling stories that make them sympathetic. And by the way, we all have things that we've been through in our lives that could have made us worse people or better people. Everyone has things, but there are certain people who are really good at taking their past and constructing a narrative that creates excuses for really bad behavior. in the present. And if you're somebody who is truly empathetic and you're prone to feeling sad for people or seeing people as sympathetic, then it can be quite easy for someone who's manipulative to use their past as a way to mobilize your empathy. And it could also happen in reverse, by the way. If they know that you pride yourself on being generous, being kind, being empathetic, and then you start calling them out on their behavior and having more boundaries, they can then attack you for that and say, oh, and you're supposed to be, you see yourself as this empathetic person. Well, right now, you've got absolutely no care for what I've been through and the ways that I'm struggling. And you're always playing this empathetic character, and yet right now you're just abandoning me. Now they can weaponize it in the other direction. and get you feeling guilty that you haven't been empathetic enough.

And it's so interesting, right? Because it has no limit in terms of if you want to extend a sympathetic or a compassionate or kind of understanding lens towards a person, you can do that with a serial killer. You can say it's not their fault. They're born this way. They went through these different things in their childhood. That's why they ended up being aggressive and killing people. or even just they're a psychopath, they don't feel empathy, it's not their fault, they're not born with that. You can actually have compassion towards anyone for anything. And the kind of, what's really interesting is the duality between this over compassion you might extend towards somebody who treats you badly, but this total lack of compassion you extend towards yourself as you put yourself repeatedly in harm's way of that person. And for some reason, your well-being and the way that you feel isn't being prioritized by you in the same way that you're prioritizing being understanding towards them.

Yeah, I think Jack Cornfield said something along the lines of your compassion for people is incomplete if it doesn't extend to yourself.

Yeah, I think that's right. I do think there's a big difference between giving love to someone and having love for them. and sacrificing yourself, sacrificing your needs. And I think a lot of people just conflate them together. Like, if I love this person, I will sacrifice my happiness to just fulfill whatever their thing is or help them because they're whatever, a narcissist, an addict, a different whatever. But I do, I think there's a real difference between loving them and completely sacrificing yourself, your happiness, your well-being and I think some people get addicted to that role a bit.

The thing that scares me about empathy in the context of a relationship like this is it can really, if that empathy becomes a proactive kind of forgiveness for that person and a forgiveness that leads to you constantly letting them back into your life, not a distant forgiveness where you say, I forgive you, but I can't have you near me. There really is no limit to how far you can fall in that relationship. As you say, Audrey, if you excuse them on every level, they're like, well, it's their past. Well, even if it's not their past, it's their genes. They can't help it. It's just the way they're built. You can always find a justification. And by the way, Those things are true. They're actually true. But the danger of saying that's true, therefore I should forgive this person and be involved with them romantically, that's the non sequitur. And the danger of that is that if you continue to use your empathy as an excuse for forgiving someone and letting them back in, there is no limit to the level of destruction that someone can can impose on your life. You are letting them into the house where they can wreak havoc. And you have to, at a certain point, say, I cannot trust you. I cannot trust you with my heart. I cannot trust you with my time. I cannot trust you with my energy. I cannot trust you with my future. And therefore, I can't let you in the house. Because if I let you in my house, so to speak, you will predictably wreak havoc. So I can have a distant compassion for you, but I cannot have.

A.

Kind of proactive close degree empathy where I constantly let you back in because you will destroy my life. And I think part of what people struggle with is this, this hope that this person will change that, yes, they've been terrible. Yes, they are still wreaking havoc in my life. Yes, they are still making me unhappy. But if this one thing could change, then we could actually be so happy.

I also think it's a duality between the good and the bad times. Because I think if you've ever been with someone who is either a narcissist or narcissistically inclined or, you know, selfish or toxic or whatever you want to call it, they're not like that all the time at all.

But even in that, I think there is embedded in that idea is a kind of hope. The hope for the good times to be more, the hope that the bad times will start to be less.

Of course. I suppose what I mean is that people who are like that are very good at being really, really charming. So the good times feel better, both because of the bad times being so bad that in contrast they feel better, but also because they are so good at making life Even better than a healthy person can because they're not playing a role. So people get addicted to the highs.

For sure.

Because of that, and that's then in turn very difficult because you're almost turning your back on, when you think about it rationally, you end up feeling that you're turning your back on the happiest moments of your life. It's just that they happen to come in conjunction with the most terrible moments of your life.

I mean, when someone makes your life so miserable, the good times don't even have to be that good to feel like they're incredible. If you're in the middle of the desert starving and someone puts like a Wendy's cheeseburger in front of you.

Oh, that's ruining our chances of sponsorship for Wendy's.

Oh, I thought Jamison was gonna say, you know, Now you're talking, 'cause I feel like that's the kind of Jamison meal.

Okay, well, this is hurtful.

No, you love Taco Bell.

But I think Matt's point is it could be Del Taco. In the desert. It could be something atrocious out there and it still feels like it's better.

Than... Let's at least criticize a lesser brand like White Castle or something. Something smaller.

Oh, there goes White Castle.

No, wait, I think there is something really important in what you're saying, Matt, which is actually like you can have just a normal day finally after just a week-long fight with this person that's been making your life miserable. And you have one nice day where it's like, oh, yeah, we went and we had dinner together and no one fought. And the waiter wasn't rude. And suddenly, I'm in love again.

You're grateful for civility.

Grateful for civility. What a nice way to put it. Yeah.

What keeps people there, whether it's a hope for the next good time or whether it's a hope for things to just fundamentally change. That hope is the most misguided thing we have. What I want you to think in terms of is empiricism. Empiricism is basing what I do or what I believe on what my actual experience of this person is. Have they ever truly changed in this area? You may have experienced spikes of change after you had an argument or after you threatened to leave, but if ultimately it just always returned to the same baseline, then you know that those changes weren't real. They were just a tactic, more of a manipulation. Empirically, you have to ask yourself, has this person ever changed or has this been a repeatable pattern throughout my relationship with this person? And if I'm still talking about it now with my friends, with a therapist, if I'm still ruminating about it constantly, then it's still happening. And the answer is no, it has not changed. And if it hasn't changed, then on what basis are you thinking it's going to change in the future? and the truth is, if you really relate to this episode right now, you've probably been through every kind of emotion with this person there is. You've cried, you've been angry, you've been depressed, you've been guilty, you've been frantic, you've despaired, you've been through everything you can go through with this person. You've begged. for change. What emotion have you kept up your sleeve that you're going to bring out next year that's suddenly going to change this person? I have to know. If you're telling yourself that they're going to change, what's the reaction that all this time you've been storing? to suddenly get a different result. Because the chances are you've already cycled through all of them many times. You have to assume that this person is never going to change because the stakes are way too high. What are the stakes? you don't get your time back again. So, staking your life and your happiness on the idea that this person who has never changed will one day change is just about the worst bet that you can make.

It makes me really emotional just hearing you talk about it because I just think of the amount of people who are currently stuck and I think the word really is just stuck in the quicksand of that kind of relationship and how much it just destroys people because it destroys their confidence, it destroys their self-worth, it destroys, it warps reality, as you said, in a way where they just feel like they don't even know which way is up anymore and you end up having no kind of bearing on what a proper relationship should feel like and a proper connection and being treated with respect and having your needs met. You forget, you lose sight of what that even feels like.

Just look how much empathy Audrey has. See how dangerous it is?

It's interesting you say that, Jay, because do you remember there was that book, I think it was Paul Bloom who wrote that book against empathy or the case for empathy?

I was just about to reference that. Yeah, I was just about to reference Paul Bloom. He literally wrote a book called Against Empathy because it is, he's trying to call out the fact that it is actually a baser emotion. The same way, like anger is just a baser emotional reaction. He argues for a rational compassion, which is very similar to what you're saying with this distant compassion, which is you realize, you understand intellectually what happened in that person's past to explain it. But you don't take that extra step of like, well, just because it explains it doesn't excuse it and doesn't mean that I have to emotionally invest in this situation or their of their past. You can take a step back and understand without needing to go that extra emotional journey. Just intellectually understand it rationally. have compassion for their situation. You don't have to make it your situation.

Yeah, as you were saying that, I was thinking just because it explains it, it doesn't mean you have to choose it.

Oh, yeah. Or justify it.

Thank you so much for listening to the episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you go, make sure that you do this today. I promise you every week you are missing out by not doing what I'm about to say. I am sending a private email to a group of people who have registered for it every single Friday. The email is called the Three Relationships and every email is packed with advice on how you can improve one of the three relationships that I believe determine the quality of your life. Your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with life itself. It's a super valuable email. People really look forward to it. This is not the kind of email that you don't open. It's the kind of email you can't wait to see in your inbox every Friday. Go over to thethreerelationships.com to sign up for that email for free and I will see you in your inbox this Friday. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Be well and love life.