How To Identify Toxic Relationships | Journey Principles Podcast 023

Welcome to the Journey Principles, where we show you how to go from stuck to unstoppable with life strategies that work. Now, here's your host and creator of the Transform youm Framework, Stephen Scoggins.

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Journey Principles. Steven Scoggins here, sitting in with my buddy today, Connor Kraft, director of Connections. If this is your first time here, welcome. We give you strategies and tips to help you take your life mastery to a whole new level. Help you go from stuck to unstoppable with things that are actually simple, easy to follow. Every show, we hope to give you three to five things that you can do at the end of the show to actually implement our show topic every time we record a show. So we hope you enjoy it in the meantime. Connor. Dude, what's going on, man?

Not much, dude. Not much since the last time. Just kind of chilling. I will say. My hair is getting out of control.

This is the downside to trying to maintain hair.

Are people still sending you bottles of gel?

People never sent me bottles of gel, but feel free to. Although I don't use gel, so that would probably be wasted.

But what do you use so we can send you the right stuff?

It's like a paste or something like that.

Hair paste?

Yeah, yeah, it's more like that. But. But anyway, so like, no bottles of glue, this coronavirus stuff? I have not cut my hair since the first podcast. So if you guys ever want to watch, like, all the podcasts in order, you'll just see it, you know, I guess, slowly get more and more out of order. I'm hoping it'll be all over soon.

And we're not minimizing the people that have obviously gotten sick and even passed away. We're just. Of course, yeah, it's been tough and strange, I think, for everyone. Ironically, though, one of the benefits that's actually happening is some of the most beautiful weather I've ever seen has been happening all around the country. And they say that's because so many people are not actually driving their cars and doing all the fun, all that stuff. So it's actually the. The air is cleaner. In Italy, dolphins and jellyfish have now actually started swimming now in the canals that they used to put the gondolas in.

You're kidding. And that doesn't happen before?

No, it wasn't there before because there was so much traffic, human traffic. So the fact that all the humans have been locked away in quarantine, very fascinating. The Earth is healing a little bit of its own, which is kind of interesting.

That is very cool.

That means we got to pay attention to it. Yeah, for sure. I've always been kind of on the fence with the whole global warming thing sometimes. Yeah, sometimes. Like, sometimes. So this goes to show that there might be a little more truth to it than you may want. Very interesting. But anyway, moving on. What are we talking about today, my friend?

We're gonna talk about how to identify toxic relationships. Cause last week, we talked about kind of the importance of relationships, and we went into the seven relationships you need to win at life. We kind of talked about how to find and surround yourself with positive people. This is something that we've really had a lot of people request. Like, when we were first starting this content, we were asking people, what do you want to learn? And we were surprised by how many people were saying, like, I just want to learn how to fix my relationships. And so it's a really common thing, and it's one of our top three ways that you transform your life is relationships. So today we're talking about how to identify toxic relationships.

I'm just curious now because I know you. I know that you've had at least one toxic relationship. So what did that experience teach you? Looking backwards? What are the things that you think you missed the subtle hints of?

Well, so without going into any detail specifically about that person, I think that you need to. Honestly, if I had known what a healthy relationship looked like at that point in time, which I didn't, this was, like, one of my first ever real relationships. I really didn't know better, so I didn't. I didn't have the knowledge and the information to be able to really know that anything was wrong. I just thought this was normal. So, you know, we were. Things were great for literally not very long at all, but things were great for a little bit of time. And then things just started to kind of fall apart. And we were arguing about stuff all the time, and I always felt like I was like, wait, that I'm. We're not. We shouldn't be arguing. This is a really stupid thing to be arguing about. And I. But now, you know, I'm in a new relationship that so far is really good. And. And there's nothing wrong with arguments as.

Long as it's not the total existence of the.

I mean, but it was basically like every little thing, like, you know, could have been something as stupid as, you know, just literally like what I was wearing that day, or if I said something the wrong way, then.

Well, I've said a hundred times, if not a thousand Both on the podcast on YouTube and all the content we've done. I've written entire ebooks about how to avoid or how to learn or know about toxic relationships. We did face to face videos on it. I think we've even done some whiteboard stuff on it. We've done a lot of stuff on toxic relationships. And the primary reason why I think that is is because the toxic relationship side for me was a huge, huge problem in trying to get my life together. I, for whatever reason.

Was bent on acquiring or attracting people that had a toxic level in their personality at the time. Now it's entirely possible to be a toxic person today and go through, like, stuff like what we do and to come out more refined and to kind of eliminate that. So it's entirely possible for a toxic person to heal from being toxic. Okay. Because they're toxic for a reason. No one comes out of the womb a toxic person.

Well, we're not needing to necessarily, you know, call people names or anything like that, say you're a toxic person, but, you know, there are certain people that obviously. Exactly. You exhibit certain traits that are not healthy in relationships.

Exactly.

And so anything that doesn't contribute to the health of a relationship is essentially contributing to toxicity.

Yeah. I found that you actually had something you said early that was actually really important. I had a brief aha moment because I was asking myself the same question. I asked you, like, hindsight being 20 20, when you look back, how could you have identified the toxic relationship before it became a toxic relationship?

And. Yeah. And I told you I didn't know if I could have because I didn't have anything. That was the first thing you said.

That really stood out to me because I experienced the same thing as I wasn't really sure what a healthy relationship looks like.

Right. I didn't know any better.

Right. My parents were divorced. They weren't around a whole lot earlier in my upbringing. So I think they were together until I was like three. And then pretty much all my memories from there to like 9 or 11 are with my grandmother now. I could have been my grandmother from 6 to 11, or 5 to 11 or 7 to 11, no pun intended. Right. I could have. I don't remember. But my memories. I have more memories of my grandmother raising me, my nanny. Right. And I don't remember her seeing her with men or hanging out, you know, Like, I don't. She was just, from what I remember, she just took care of us from what I saw.

And you talked about a little bit about that backstory in Episode eight of the podcast, while we entered into your story.

Yeah. So, you know, so I had that, and then, you know.

I couldn't. I'm literally thinking to my health, myself as we're speaking, because I think it was a pretty pivotal. Aha. Is. I don't think I ever had experience what a healthy relationship looks like in my family. On both sides of my family, there was a high rate of divorce. Not everybody got divorced, but there was a fairly high rate of divorce.

Yeah. So I guess step one we're learning today is the first thing to do is define what a healthy relationship looks like now. Now that I've got one, you know, I got a great relationship with Karen. And we do argue and fight and it's not perfect and stuff from time to time, but we have far more good times than we have bad times. She like, you know, when I went through the whole embezzlement thing, when I was trying to basically salvage one of my, you know, trying. That's not salvage. Because Rebuild one of my companies because of some stuff. Any other one, any other person that I had been with prior would have cut and run because the, you know, the faucet of funds would have stopped. Right, right. Not Karen.

She's not there for that.

Nope. She just dug in deeper and kept.

Going, which is amazing. And what I like about this is two podcasts ago, we actually went into the five traits that you really want to look for in your inner circle, which is essentially what you want to look for someone in a healthy relationship. And then in the last podcast, we went over the seven relationships you need to win. So in this podcast, we're going to focus more on the toxic relationships and how to identify those.

Yeah. So there's. And there's five. Give you five offsets. I came up with five areas when I went back and looked back at my toxic relationships because they played such a large part in my life. What are the attributes? Some of them are combined, meaning they had multiple parts and pieces of this. And some of them, hey, look, they were just really hardcore in this area, and that should have given me, like, an indicator. So when we give you these things, you need to take an. On, like we've been telling you before, take an honest assessment of your relationships. Okay. I'm not saying that, you know, if someone tells you a white lie one time and they repent for it, that they're a toxic person.

And that's why I like that we do 1 to 10 for everything because you can literally give yourself a scale and really See how bad it is. Because if one of the things is trust, then if they told you a white lie one time, it might not be that they're a 10 out of 10 horrible trust. It might be like, okay, this person's like a three. We're working on it, or something like that.

And that's what you're going to look like. So let's go ahead and jump into the. Cause I want to jump into that. The only other thing I want to mention before we do that is a toxic relationship. Okay. Is the semblance of the standards you accept for yourself.

We accept the love that we believe we deserve type of thing.

Exactly right.

When we go through this process and you uncover the fact that you may have one or more toxic relationships in or near you or around you, okay. The easiest way to correct it is to raise your standards, increase your boundaries, and hold firm. Okay? I know we're supposed to give you the action items at the end, but that's. They just came in my head while I'm sitting there talking, so I want to go ahead and throw those out there. All right. In the meantime, let's go ahead and jump into what some attributes of a toxic person. First of all, there'll be a pretty strong lack of trust in two forms. In other words, they're coming to you on a regular basis and they're telling you falsehoods on a regular basis or.

They themselves are not being trustworthy. I'm sorry, let me say that again. I said the same thing twice. The other way is that they are trying to convince you that you're not trustworthy. Like, you're the crazy one.

Okay, I see.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. No.

Sorry about that, guys. I've experienced that, you know, like, you're lying to me on a regular basis and, you know, to yourself, you're like, I haven't. I'm not lying.

I'm trying to be perfectly reasonable.

And we're not perfect. We're not saying that you could have not made a mistake and not realizing yourself. But what I'm saying is there's a high likelihood they're trying to convince you. So, perfect example, in my first book, The Journey principles, 10 simple principles for Life Journey. That matters. I tell a story of one of my toxic relationships, and I never mentioned the girl's name. I'm not going to barbecue the barbecue girl.

Barbecue girl.

Okay. The reason she was called the barbecue girl is because she worked at a barbecue restaurant and that's where I met her.

And you're making Me hungry now, man.

I have to order something.

But one of the things that she used to do on a regular basis is she would try to convince me that I misheard her or whatever or that I gave her permission to do something that was totally inappropriate for any relationship.

Yeah, she's experienced that. Yes.

Right. Or. And essentially she wanted to try to convince me that I was crazy.

Yeah.

Right, right. And when and until you're going into a toxic relationship, until you know about this stuff, you literally will stop. And like, did I say that?

I always fought fire with fire? I was like, no, I didn't. And it just started big fights and debates and stuff.

So anyway, so there's a lack of trust on two sides. They're trying to convince you that they're trustworthy and they're not. And they're also not allowing you to be trusted. Right. There's a weird. It's a weird. I guess that's why they call it toxic because it's a really weird oil and vinegar kind of like sneaky behavior. Right. The next area is going to be safety.

Safety.

Okay. The lack of safety. Are you actually safe? And when I say safe, I don't mean just physically. Even though physically is like really important as well. Mentally, emotionally and physically. Okay. Toxic people, on a rule of thumb will start historically with the mental abuse, into the emotional abuse, and then eventually into the physical abuse.

So it's usually a progression.

It's definitely progression. Wow.

Because I've never experienced any kind of like physical or anything.

Yeah. So I unfortunately I got to some stages where I experienced some stuff leading into that one time the barbecue girl raised up to hit me a couple times. Now fortunately, I was obviously caught the hand and held it and we just ended in a bad fight.

But not a good idea.

No, it's not. But that's what happens with toxic behaviors. Toxic behaviors are all about control. The person. Historically, that is the toxic person, if you will, spend a lot of time not having a lot of control and therefore they're overly controlling.

I was gonna ask you, like, why they. They clean the control so much, but I guess it makes sense that they have a low self worth.

They've got to control their environment in order to control the variables due to.

Insecurity and their past hurts.

Insecurity can be prevalent. A lot of times it's because they had a very, very tumultuous season of life upbringing, if you will, early childhood development, stuff like that, or a prior.

Relationship that was really toxic to them. Because toxic relationships can create more Toxic people.

Exactly. If you think about the influence lesson that we did a few weeks ago, parental influences. Right. Relational influences. You could have. I find that toxic relationships, as a rule of thumb, bring the worst out of everybody.

Where healthy relationships tend to bring the best out of everybody. With arguments and disagreements that just happen along the way as you're trying to navigate.

Yeah, they're gonna be disagreements, but usually you can defuse them.

More quickly, I would think, than in a toxic one and with more control.

Yeah. Another one. That number three that I think kind of really falls on the list is a lack of accountability. So these people that are toxic want all the responsibility and accountability to fall on your shoulders only. So if they make a mistake, if you catch them in a lie, it's your fault. It's your fault. You're the reason they did it. You're the reason they decided to step out of the relationship and go hook up with somebody else. You're the, you're the reason why they lost their job or kicked their dog or whatever. It's your fault. Right. Toxic people. You're smiling. It's like you've. You lived some of this stuff. Toxic relationships or toxic people have a total lack of accountability. Right. Okay. Total lack of accountability. And these are all symptoms. Again, use them with scale of 1 to 10. Like on a scale of 1 to 10. Oh, well, like for example, my wife Karen, from time to time if she makes a mistake, she'll come and say, hey, look, I'm sorry about that. I know I haven't been the best to be around because I'm, you know, because she's, she's got a chronic illness and. Right. You know, physically and stuff like she struggles with now. So someday she's more grouchy than others. Right. And. But she'll come to me every now and again, say, look, I'm sorry, I'm just, you know, I don't know. I don't know.

So that's a sign of a healthy relationship. That's a sign of a healthy relationship. You can take responsibility and accountability for what?

Toxic relationships, on the other hand, would.

Be pointing the finger.

I honestly don't care how you feel. This is how I feel kind of thing. Right. There's no balance.

Right.

It's all one sided. One thing you'll notice about toxic relationships is if you're looking at it like a scale, it's very heavily weighted one direction.

Now what if you have two extremely toxic people in one relationship who's just beating each other up?

Then explosions happen on a Regular basis and happens all the time. I hate to say it, but it happens all the time. Again, I mentioned earlier that toxic relationships tend to bring the worst out of everybody. Toxic relationships bring the worst out of everybody. And because they bring the worst out of everybody, they're really hard to break. Which is why we're saying, hey, look, these are the five things you keep an eye out for. And if you're, if you're going, I got a 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, then, oh, my gosh, it's time to create a lot of distance. Right.

Okay, so you're so on a scale of 1 to 10, you're saying like a 1 is a 1 on trust is a big lack of trust.

Yeah.

Okay.

And 10 is they're totally trustworthy.

I guess it doesn't. Either way you do it, you're gonna know what your scale is. But if a 10 is a big lack of trust or a 1, it's a big lack of trust. I don't know if you understand what that is.

The other thing that I see a lot, especially when toxic things are happening, there's communication is always at the heart of it.

Right.

And remember I told you that the scale, the weight is always typically weighted one direction. Right. There's not a balance. There's not a 60, 40 split, a 50, 50 split or something like that. It's like 90, 10. Right.

That's why I was asking, because I was like, how can the scale be like, it's equal, but both of them are, you know, all me, all me, all me. Does it just go like this all the time?

With a tactical relationship, there's definitely a yo, yo process that makes you feel. When you're in a toxic relationship, you feel like the relationship is completely unstable. You don't know what to expect. You always feel like you're walking on eggshells. Yeah.

Having to watch what you say, watch what you say in order to not offend them. Yeah, for sure.

Right. So the right person for you is going to understand some of your quirks and are going to be willing to help you kind of walk through.

You should be comfortable with being yourself completely with all your quirks with. You shouldn't be thinking at all times, oh, how are they going to perceive what I'm doing? You should be able to just be authentically you. And when you mess up or when you act a goofball, then they'll laugh at it with you. Not again, not.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm a huge believer. Especially walking out. Gosh, 30 plus years of relationships. I'm a huge believer, huge believer in knowing yourself before you involve yourself in a relationship to begin with.

I'm a huge believer in once you have a relationship, you give yourself six to 12 months before you go into another one, right? Because there's just not enough time to heal. There's not enough time for self discovery. There's not enough time to really assess what the good was, what the bad was, what the good takeaways were, what the things that you need to like. There's just not enough time.

It takes time of self discovery and self reflection, right? So that being said, listening step number four is toxic. People don't listen. Right. A lot of times when you look at toxic people, a lot of toxic people, unfortunately express a lot of narcissistic character traits.

Now, here's a question, because I feel like I've exhibited that a little bit myself, I naturally do struggle sometimes with listening. So the reason why I ask is basically, what if, Is there a difference between listening and validating? What I mean by that is, like, I've had situations with people and even friends where, you know, they'll say, you're not listening to me. And I'm like, I am listening to you. I just don't agree with what you're saying. Does that count as listening or does that not? Am I wrong there?

Well, it depends. If you're listening with the intent to respond, you're not listening, okay? If you're listening with the intent to understand, then you're listening, okay? So if you're listening with the intent to respond, you're not listening.

So that means that.

And if you're listening with the intent to understand, you are listening, okay?

So it's in the way that you handle the information that's coming through your ears. It's whether you're like, willing, ready to debate and disprove them, which is what I did, which I'll take accountability for. That was one of my toxic traits, personally, is just I would always be, if I didn't believe you or we were in an argument, I would try to debate you on it and essentially, you know, drag it out of this thing. Instead of saying, let me try to understand where you're coming from and put myself in your shoes genuinely so that I can respond and share where I'm coming from so that we can maybe come together rather than, no, you're an idiot, you're wrong, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, okay, cool.

That's exactly right. And that's kind of what I'm talking about. And within a toxic relationship, it's actually one level higher than that. There's just. There's a complete removal or interest in listening to your perspective.

I see.

Okay. And your perspective could be totally wrong.

I wasn't quite there, but.

Right. Your perspective could be wrong. Their perspective could be wrong. The truth could be in the middle. Like there's. But when it comes to listening, toxic people have zero interest in listening to what you have to say. It's only based on what they want to say and what they want to see happen. And again, it all comes back to control. Right. You think about people that are actually getting into an abusive relationship, there's a lot of yelling going back and forth. Well, when that person feels like they're losing, the toxic person feels like they're losing ground. They become physical. You see what I'm saying? So it could. That's why I said there's a typical escalation path.

I've always wondered this and I'm pretty sure as I've learned, as I've begun learning, you know, your methodology and the things that we teach, I'm starting to kind of get the answer. But I've always wondered if you're in a situation where you're being abused and really beat down on just a daily basis, why do people stay with that person? Do they feel like they can't get anyone better? Is it a self worth thing?

It actually comes down to several things. So one thing it comes down to is there could be a self worth. There could be a self worth issue. That's. That's definitely a possibility. This is what I. There's a. If especially they grew up in a physical household or abusive or household, and that's all they've ever known, then to them it actually in some cases could feel like love, as strange as that sounds.

So they're not, they're not actually cognitively telling. I feel like very few people, I'm sure there are some, but I feel like there's probably not that many people who are telling themselves the actual words, I deserve this, because.

No, no, no, it's definitely subconscious. The other thing that happens is there's a fear. There's a fear of what if they catch me when I leave? There's a fear of where would I ever go? What would I do? How would I support myself? So fear is a huge part of staying in a toxic relationship. The other thing that we'll talk about in a later episode, but it's important to know about toxic relationship is they don't start out bad, right? Yeah. Toxic relationships, a lot of times start off with this massive. Pass it passionate, just like, oh my gosh, where have you been all my life? And within about 30 days, you start to see weird behaviors. Like. Like, when are you coming over? Well, I'm not over. I'm not. I can't come over tonight. What do you mean you can't come over? You. Does that mean you want to break up? Like, it, like it goes to some weird, pretty weird places. Right. And it starts early. Right. So toxic relationships start off super passionate. And it's because there's a. And I can't remember what we talked about this. It was a face to face video or an ebook or something I've already. That we haven't released yet. But I talk about this anchor phase, right? There's the passion phase, there's an anchor phase, there's a control phase. Right. There's. There's three phases that a toxic relationship begins to manifest itself.

Yeah.

So first of all, it's like with a fishing line and you hook somebody and you start reeling one of our.

Face to face videos.

Yeah, face to face videos. We're start reeling them in slowly, right. Over time. Well, once you get far enough in the thing, they're gonna take the net, try to put you in the boat, right. Well, once they got you in the boat, you're gonna have a hell of a time jumping back in the water. You see what I'm saying? And toxic relationships are a lot like that, unfortunately. Now, I will always say that if you are getting harmed physically or whatever, you need to get out and get as much distance between you and that person as possible and get as much protection between you and that person as possible. Restraining orders, you take whatever legal measures you can possibly take. If you're not sure where you go, then what you do is you quietly for 30 to 60 days. And I hate to say this, but I don't know any other way to say it. You start planning your escape.

Yeah. And I feel like if anyone's wondering at what stage that it gets that bad, we have a really, really great lesson that we did, actually. I'm not sure, I think it might come out tomorrow. We have a pretty complex content holder, but. Yeah, exactly. We have the eight levels of toxic relationships. It's a whiteboard lesson, so stay tuned for that on YouTube. By the time you're watching this, it's probably out. But essentially it's eight different levels of toxic relationships. And typically they'll progress if you keep in them. And there's a point where you essentially get completely dominated and controlled by this person. And it reaches that point, you really need to escape.

Yeah. And you. And you need help. And you know, again. Well, we're gonna, hopefully in the near future. We don't have the capabilities yet, but in the near future have a network that we can help people escape. Right. So that is, that is a long range goal of mine. We don't have it today. Yeah. But I'm. It's something that I really hope to build to help people. Oh, yeah.

I think we were at listening.

Right. Well, we just. Accountability.

Did we dive into value?

We haven't dialed in the value. Okay. The last one is total disregard for your personal value.

A lack of value.

Right, right. Total disregard for your personal value.

You become more like a possession rather than a person. Okay.

They want to know where you are, when you are. They want to always be in your thing. They always are. And by this time, they're probably already accusing you of being unfaithful and some other weirdness that they're probably doing themselves. It's called projection. And there's a completely devaluing of you as a person. Right. Your identity, your authenticity, who you are, the strengths and things that you bring to the table. A relationship, especially a romantic one, is supposed to be built on mutual value being brought to the relationship. Right? Now, everybody's got values, everybody's got strengths, everybody's got blind spots. Right. Nothing shows your blind spots like a relationship. Okay. But it shouldn't be all blind spots. In other words, it shouldn't be, you know, I'm the one that carries this relationship. If it wasn't for me, then you would never like. It shouldn't be any of that stuff. Right. It should be none of that stuff. So there's a completely disregard for personal value in the fifth category. And again, there can be a 1 to 10 ranking in any of this stuff. Right.

Well, and that's, that's one of the ways that we recommend you practically actually go about this is if you're in a relationship and you want to identify, you know, if it's toxic or its level of toxicity, then you can essentially go rate each of these five things that we've gone through, these five traits, essentially, and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 for how much they ring true.

So here's three big mistakes that I personally made. Okay. And I'm gonna read these from a piece of paper because I, again, I was trying to think about how I would, how I would share this because it was such a difficult season of my life. The first biggest mistake that I personally made that I think a lot of people make is thinking you can change someone else. Wow. Or thinking it's your responsibility to change someone else. Personal development is personal development. It's not meant for you to do for others. Right. You're responsible for making sure you maximize the best of you. Right. And then you get to a level of mastery and then you can teach. But at the end of the day, even if I gave you all the steps and laid it all out like steps, so step one, step two, all the way to step 300,000, 50, or whatever number you want to pick out of the sky at the end of the day, you have to take the steps.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, we actually have a whiteboard lesson that we did very early on. It was either the first one we ever did or the second one. And it was the seven stages of life. Master. I think it was the first. And it basically goes into the stages of life, mastery, all the way up until mastery. But there's several steps leading up until.

Yeah, there's lots of steps to take in that journey and you know, and we could break those out. But again, personal development is personal development. Right, Right. Your responsibility is not to attempt to change someone else. I see a lot of this a lot of times with parents who love their kids so, I mean, like, incredibly, desperately bad and accidentally enable those children to continue on with drug addictions and things of that nature. Right. Unfortunately, the longer you leave the safety net attached, that person can't hit rock bottom. And nothing teaches you like rock bottom. Well, what if they die while they're going through stuff? It's a very real concern and I empathize with that. But I'll also say that if you don't remove the safety net and if you don't focus on your best interest, you'll end up bankrupt. They'll end up still addicted or dead. And what the intervention that should have happened was is like, I got to take care of my life. You got to take care of your life. I love you. I'm here for you. I want what's best for you, but you've got to be personally responsible. I've seen far too many families go bankrupt because they're trying to.

In fact, I got one family in my mind now that used to live in like almost a $3 million home. And one of the children got heavily involved in drugs for a huge number of years, and they now live in a 2,000 square foot home. Now they're happy.

It means, well, what happened? Like, how did they.

Well, essentially, the situation. Well, essentially, the child got into the money, so the child started either borrowing or stealing the money. The child also began to have substantial litigation expenses, from everything from selling to using to.

My bad. I don't want to go into detail or anything, but.

But what I'm saying is, is the mistake. I feel like the family. This is an opinion. The mistake that I feel like the family made in this particular situation was is they didn't let the person go out and actually experience the consequences of the bad decisions they were making because they were scared that the person would never come home. And I understand that and I empathize with that. Unfortunately, prodigal sons can only discover their prodigal sons when they leave their inheritance behind. Right? So you have to create an. You have to create a methodology, and then you spend. Then I just. I would. I mean, I've done this myself in a different scenario, not with drugs, but something like that where I just prayed my butt off. I just kept praying, believing that, you know, that was all going to work out. And lo and behold, in this particular. This particular situation, the person came back repentant. Now, granted, they had been through a lot of struggles and they experienced homelessness and some other things that I've been through. And they're like, hey, this isn't fun. I don't know what I was thinking. And that's what you want, right? You want someone who's like, I want more for my life than that. But I thought that was going to be cool kind of thing. So those are some different things that you can kind of think about. But don't focus on changing someone else. Focus on developing yourself, period. The second biggest mistake I made is believing that an apology is real when there's no evidence to support it.

All right? My barbecue girl would go on stints where she would call me and she would say, I'm so sorry I missed you. I don't know what I was thinking. And all this different, like, sugar coating stuff. We'd meet to go have dinner or something. So she could. And she would cry in front of me. Like, come to be, like, emotional and.

Pulling out the water.

Look, look, like she's being completely. And she looked like she's being completely repentant only to find. Only to basically discover that nothing really ever changed. Right.

Experience that, too. There's some people that are really good at looking like and saying all the right things and saying, hey, look. Yeah, I just. Right. But but they don't take the action to actually change well.

And that's. And so this is why it's important. It's because. And it's one of the biggest mistakes that I made. The way you know, someone's sincere when they apologize is the behavior follows. Right. If someone betrays you and they come back and they say, look, I'm repentant, I've got this mess that I've made. I'm so sorry. And they can share all the tears and all that kind of stuff, but the only truth is, did their behavior change the next day? Did they stop doing.

Have they shown a genuine effort and actually made progress? They probably don't need to be overnight completely different, un. Really unhealthy. I don't know if that's true or not.

Well, let's put it this way. There will be a noticeable change, and the noticeable change will happen over time. Meaning. All right, so the change is noticeable, but their behavior changes from that moment moving forward. Not that behavior for a week and then the two weeks and then they're back to the same crap.

Right?

Right. So always be cautiously optimistic when someone is moving back that direction. But if they're.

Do they have to be perfect or is it okay if they.

No one's perfect. Right. Right. But they've got it. But they've got to know their stuff and be willing to admit their stuff. Right.

Like, and I guess it's kind of a boy who cried wolf situation. Like if they just keep saying, like, you can only give someone so many chances.

I mean, I've got a three strike rule and then it is what it is. I've got certain things that I have a one strike rule with. You do this and you can't even be close to me, let alone in my inner circle. I'm just, I'm. And I've done that from experience and those, those boundaries and those principles have served me well. You know, you got to figure whether. Figure out what those are for you.

Yeah.

But anyway, so the third thing that I. That I think was probably my biggest mistake is giving others my presence, even though they didn't deserve it. Wow. Wow. Giving up. Yeah. So being present, knowing that it wasn't deserved.

Giving them your time.

Yeah. I mean, and that's where, like I said, we've been talking a lot about, okay, Move away from bad relationships, Move into good relationships. Assess your relationships. Be honest with yourself. Be objective. Don't lie to yourself about where this relationship's at and all this kind of stuff. And we've done that with good intentions and from experience.

I have spent so much time cleaning up behind broken people that weren't at a season of life with their level of healing was at my level or greater. So I spent time with toxic people because I wanted to help them. I wanted to serve them. I wanted them to get better. I believe I could see their inner potential. I wanted to help them realize it all this kind of stuff, only to have them repetitively do stupid stuff and do toxic like behaviors over and over and over and over again. So the fruit didn't change, the behaviors didn't change. Right. I would then pour myself back into it, but with another level of emphasis and drive.

Because you were so committed to changing them.

Yeah.

Wow.

Right? If you have enough evidence to say that this person does not deserve your presence, your presence, cut them out, cut them out. Or bare minimum distance yourself.

Yeah.

Like, I've got people that I wouldn't consider like.

Even 100% toxic people. I've got people that are.

Having difficulty with self awareness or emotional intelligence or emotional awareness themselves that I'm okay with seeing once or twice a month, or once or twice a quarter, once or twice a year. Okay. That's the amount of distance I've created between certain folks in my life. I got other folks that I won't pick up the phone if you call me.

Yeah.

Like you've broken that bridge. And they could be walking in complete wholeness and healedness. It could be completely whole and healed at this stage in their life. But certain boundaries, once you break them, it's like in order to protect yourself, in order to protect your overall self awareness, your overall emotional intelligence, can't trust that person anymore. You can't trust them. And those people don't have my phone number. They don't have access to my social media. They don't have access to look up and see what I'm doing and what I'm working on. And it is what it is. It's like you're not healthy. And it is what it is. So those are the three biggest mistakes of thinking I could change someone. I couldn't. Believing an apology was real when I had no evidence to support it. Okay. Which means you're gonna have to hear the apology and then you're gonna have to watch the behavior. And within, gosh, 30 days, you'll know if it was sincere or not. You know, the next one is giving others your presence when it's not valued. So making sure you're spending your time where it's valued most Essentially Right. There's an old quote that actually took that last one from says, give others the gift of your absence when your presence is not valued. And I totally stole that. So what do you do? Step one, two and three. Alright, we gave you three steps early in the thing that came out of nowhere. So go back for those for sure. Rewind or whatever if you need to. But the ones that I actually had in my notes are the same ones from the last podcast. Assessment your relationship. Remove toxic people from your relationships and acquire people to backfill for those people who are not toxic themselves.

Those are your action steps.

Those are my action steps. Step one, assess. Step two, remove. Step three, acquire.

What else is awesome regarding action steps is this podcast has been about identifying toxic relationships. But the next podcast we're gonna do that'll come out Thursday is going to be how to deal with toxic relationships. So if you're in one and you want to like a whole podcast on, essentially, what do you do? Yeah, that's what we're planning to give you next.

Yeah. So if you guys enjoyed this podcast, we're gonna wrap it up for today's show, but love to hear from you. Questionsjourneyprinciples.com Feel free to connect with us on all the different social channels. Instagram, Facebook, you name it, we're pretty much there. I'm not on TikTok. I'm not on Snap. Well, I am on Snapchat, but not for this.

Not yet. Not yet.

Snapchat.

Once we grow a little bit, when you guys give us some love and we're getting some subscribers, we're gonna be everywhere. We want to help everywhere but Snapchat.

Because Snapchat is for my wife and I. That's where we like to play our like baby voices and stuff. That's just our, that's our thing.

So you always make a public account?

Well, I guess I could, but anyway, not that that any of that's important. If you have questions that we want answered on air or answer privately questions@journeyprinciples.com.

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So stupid. Anyway. All right, guys, that's going to draw us to a close. We'll see you again on the next journey. Principles. Take care, guys. See you. I'll see you in the next video. And please, if you don't mind and you enjoyed the Life Mastery content we're building, consider hitting the subscribe button and also hitting the bell so you'll be the first to get notified anytime we release new content.