Jordan Belfort, Chuck Bass and Edward Cullen are all popular fictional characters that have one thing in common. Apart from being ridiculously attractive, they’re unbelievably toxic. If you find bits and pieces of yourself in their characters and want to take a step towards becoming a healthier person, then your first move should be to identify what exactly makes you the way you are. Recognizing these traits however is not a particularly easy task because of how much we’ve romanticized toxicity in pop culture. We’ve been conditioned to think that being toxic is in fact cool and is what will make us popular. This makes it all the more important to sit ourselves down and pin point those traits that actually do more harm than good.
Listed below are common things toxic people tend to feel and do.
- They always want to be the centre of attention so it’s very common for them to do and say things just to want to be under the spotlight. Wanting some good ol’ validation isn’t a bad thing until you despise other people that seem to get it as well.
- The most toxic people are the most insecure. Tearing other people down is a way of reassuring themselves that they’re in fact relatively better in all aspects. They’re usually more comfortable and confident in their environment after passing a snarky remark on somebody else’s appearance or personality.
- A toxic person will find it incredibly hard to be happy for other people’s successes. They’re subconsciously worried whether this third party success will take away from the attention they’re getting and potentially re inforce the fear that they’re probably incapable of such a success.
- The world is a battlefield. They are always viewing other people as competition and find it hard to collaborate. They refuse to believe that people might actually want the best for them and therefore most people seem like a threat.
- Communication is an arduous task. In a relationship, it’s particularly hard to get them to communicate their insecurities. The path of least resistance involves distancing themselves until their partner has to make double the effort to bridge this gap. Watching their partner put in relatively more effort makes them feel like they’ve got the upper hand.There is no upper hand in a healthy relationship.
Since we can’t go around trash talking every person with disagreeable traits, it’s important to distinguish between what makes people toxic and imperfections that just make us human. But if you’re able to find yourself within these lines, then it’s time to sit yourself down and revisit these parts of your personality. This list is most definitely not exhaustive. There are as many ways to express toxicity as there are to combat it. While striving for a healthier persona, it’s paramount to be kind and deflect the blame away from yourself.
But the most important thing is to unconditionally accept all parts of yourself toxic or not because at the end of the day accepting what scares us is what sets us free.