Relationships. You and another person get to bond over similar interests and grow together. Not only romantic relationships, but friendships as well. They’re great, until they’re not so great. Sometimes, certain relationships can not only be toxic, but also have a negative impact on your mental health. Recognizing the signs of toxic relationship early on will not only help your mental health, but it will also help you to recognize the red flags with future relationships. First, focusing on romantic relationships, many of the toxicities in a relationship are verbal or emotional. More serious toxic and abusive relationships are ones that include violence. Verbal toxicities include, but are certainly not limited to, calling your partner offensive pet names, constantly bringing up your partner’s past mistakes, or undermining your partner either intentionally or non-intentionally. Undermining a partner can include parenting them because you are creating a situation where your partner may not feel comfortable to have open communication with you because they fear getting lectured on why they’re wrong. Another major red flag in a toxic relationship is when your partner always plays the guilt card. What is the guilt card, you may ask? The guilt card is a tactic of manipulation against your partner to cause them to feel guilty or like they owe you something. The guilt card can have serious impacts on a person’s mental health, including lack of positive self-esteem. If you constantly feel guilty in a relationship, you will dread being in that relationship and could potentially dread future relationships as well because you will harbor those insecurities. Friendships can also be extremely toxic on a person’s wellbeing. A common example of a toxic friendship can include lying or stretching the truth. For instance, if a person lies to you
about the reason they backed out of plans is not because they feel ill, but because they would rather hang out with someone else, that is a sign of a toxic friendship. Another major red flag with a toxic friendship is also when a friend plays the guilt card to create a reaction out of you. For example, let’s say your friend just had a birthday and they show you the new shoes their other friend bought them. They then go on to say that the friend who bought them the shoes spent $80 on them and then proceeds to ask you what you got them for their birthday. This causes you to not only feel like you have to buy them something either as if not more expensive, but it also makes you feel as though you are in a never-ending competition to better than the other person, which leads into my next red flag. If your friend either intentionally or non-intentionally into a competition to see who the better friend is then that demonstrates a major red flag. Instead of focusing on what your needs and your life, you have this constant fear that if you are not around your friend, you will lose them to the other person. This not only causes stress, but it also causes unnecessary worry and fear that if you are not better than everybody else, you will lose a friend. Don’t ever forget how much you are worth it. You are worth being loved and being appreciated in any and all relationships. If a romantic relationship or friendship becomes too toxic, then maybe consider cutting off that relationship. At the end of the day, your needs come above the needs of other people, and the sooner you realize that you are better off without those toxic relationships, the sooner you can get back to living the life you were meant to live.