How To Identify A Toxic Relationship & Why You Always Want To Save It.
Psychology can be incredibly useful in teaching you about yourself, your interactions and relationships. It can also be particularly beneficial in helping us to deal with toxic relationships that have become controlling and manipulative. Psychological theory and practice can provide us with tools to help us develop our coping and communicative skills, as well as how we manage our emotional and practical responses in such difficult situations.
Transactional Analysis (TA) explains that if you find yourself consistently engaging in destructive-patterns with someone, that a key reason may be due to your state of mind. Eric Berne explained that ‘ego-states’ are the centre of TA and that they enable us to understand how we think, feel and behave. The ‘ego-state’ is a consistent pattern in how we feel and experience in relation to another person. You may recognise when in conflict-situations with a toxic person that you both may consistently be taking on either a child or parent ego-state (Berne, 1964).
For example, a situation may have occurred where your ‘friend’ dominated your birthday by dictating what you and your shared group of friends should do and where you should go with no consideration to your thoughts, wants or feelings. You may have tried to explain your frustrations with this, to which your friend from a ‘controlling/critical parent’ ego-state may have responded with rage for you daring to question them and for having a problem with it. Such a response may have been something that is characteristic of their parent, which could have influenced the way they have grown up in thinking that certain behaviours/interactions are normal and acceptable. In such a situation in response to your friend, you may have felt hurt, awkward and small – transitioning from a confident, neutral and balanced minded ‘adult’ ego-state to an ‘adapted child’ ego-state, where you may have become passive and compliant to the other person.
This friend may also guilt or plead with you to do what they want by pressuring you or by using emotional ploys to evoke attention and sympathy. Berne (1964) explained that in such situations, a set of social ‘games’ are being played. These ‘games’ consist of a number of hidden transactions at social and psychological levels containing duplex transactions. These games are fixed processes with particular patterns and hidden unconscious motives which are only felt in the final moment when the roles change. This friend – who in this situation is in a ‘rebellious child’ ego-state - may complain and be defiant against your wishes or boundaries so to make you feel guilty and ‘bad’. Consequently, you may transition into a ‘nurturing parent’ ego-state where you find yourself reassuring them, justifying yourself, sympathising with their tantrums and negotiating your own feelings and needs in favour of theirs.
If you find yourself in these kind of scenarios, you and the other person are operating in a ‘Drama Triangle’ (Karman, 2014). Initially you were the ‘victim’ in the situation, being railroaded, scolded and bullied, whilst the friend was the ‘persecutor’ being unfair or cruel to you. When the friend then switches tactics from pressuring to sympathy-evoking, you both change your positions in the ‘Drama Triangle’ in something called a ‘cross up’. The friend then becomes the ‘victim’ due to having their ‘fun’ denied and you become the horrible persecutor that is “causing the problem’”. The friend suddenly becomes the poor victim and ‘whiney child’ and you somehow become the ‘persecutory parent’ ruining their day and then having to care for the fall-out. This is a classic situation when you are dealing with a controlling and manipulative person and operating within a toxic relationship.
When people transition between these ego-states (such as in the example given), interactions can align as ‘complementary interactions’ where the new roles may remain indefinitely (Berne, 1964). You could now always remain as the horrible person and them as the victim, even if in reality the situation is quite the opposite. To stop this dynamic from persisting you should consider using ‘reflection-on-action’ (Schon, 1983) to assess your options. Reflectively, you may recognise that your behaviour in response to your friend comes from being raised to be respectful, calm and to look for reasons for others behaviour. Oppositely, your friend may have grown-up in an environment that used conflict, aggression and routine psychological games to handle social situations.
To ameliorate this dynamic and to develop your interpersonal-skills, you should maintain in an ‘adult’ ego-state to communicate your issues. This state allows expression of awareness, assertiveness, and equality and forces the other person to either change their behaviour or to move on to someone else (Berne, 1964). You could do this by expressing your issues to the friend, by communicating only reality-based points and by remaining confident but open-minded. Assert within yourself that you are not going to feel responsible for whatever negative reaction that other person may have. In response, this person should hopefully respond positively and apologise, and perhaps even explain why they react the way they do. Perhaps their parent treats them the same way which consequently influenced their behaviour and relationships as an adult. This positive outcome may ease the tension in the relationship between you and your friend as you are able to reconsider the dynamics and empathise.
Then, by applying ‘attending skills’ by actively-listening, making positive eye-contact and body-language with a kind and tempered-down voice and use of open-ended questions, you may be able to deepen your conversation and for it to become more meaningful, productive and satisfying. This should hopefully enable you to over-come your conflict and to encourage your friend to reframe parallel situations they may come across in future. It may also help them to better understand and respect your boundaries as well as how better to deal with future disagreements. It is important to communicate in this conversation to them, the importance of this change in behaviour and what the future goals and expectations should be in your relationship. This type of ‘informal helping’ reflects aspects of the ‘Micro Skills Approach’ (Ivey et al., 2010), an approach used in formal helping such as counselling and various talking therapies.
It is not uncommon that you may want to save your relationship with someone who can be a bit toxic. You may also want to help them to overcome their own issues and reasons for being the way they are. If this is the case, you may want to reflect on your own motives for wanting this. If you have a general tendency to want to understand, relate, improve the lives of, and be there for others, research suggests that your motivations may be due to a developed level of psychological resilience born from previous hurt(s) experienced in your life. This comes from a concept called ‘The Wounded Healer’, where your ‘power’ (as the helper) comes from once being a ‘cultural outsider’ or from experiencing conflict in family-life. You may significantly identify with this and may feel that your past experiences are what have influenced your motivation to want to understand various people and situations, relationships and consequential behaviour. Growing-up, you may have been involved in, or been the bystander of, many situations of conflict or may have been in situations where you felt ostracized and therefore have learnt how to observe, predict, empathise, understand and mediate many different situations and challenging personalities.
The type of ‘informal helping’ discussed in this articles example scenario relates most to the ‘Role Identity Theory’ (Finkelstein & Brannick, 2007). In such a situation, you may identify yourself as being in a helping role and feel that the more you help someone, the more likely they may see you as a ‘helping’ person and may then feel more comfortable in opening-up to you again. This may make you feel positive and reinforce your identity of being an empathetic helper and a “good person”. In such a situation you may want to help your friend overcome their problems, to become stronger from their fraught relationship with her difficult parent and to become kinder, more empathic and reasonable in how they communicate. You may also have had the aim to save your friendship and your own happiness. If this is the case, the ‘Social Exchange Theory’ (Cropanzano and Mitchell, 2005) may also reflect your nature of helping.
Informal helping differs from formal helping, as a professional therapeutic relationship concerns a working alliance requiring the client to have a positive emotional connection to the therapist and the two having a mutual understanding of the tasks and goals of therapy (Bordin, 1979). There is also a lot of safe-guarding and training that is involved in formal types of helping. It is important to remember this when trying to help or ‘save’ a toxic person and your relationship. It is important to remember that you may not be a therapist and so are not emotionally or mentally equipped to deal with certain behaviours from controlling or manipulative individuals and that they may have real potential to cause you some lasting psychological damage to your mental health and confidence.
It is important to recognise when you are out of your depth and when it is time to call a relationship quits. Even though sometimes you may feel it is your ‘role’, it is NOT your job to ‘fix’ someone, and it is never their right to abuse you mentally or physically, no matter what their past was like or their reasons for being a certain way. If toxic behaviour repeats itself and it is starting to wear you down, it is important that you respect yourself and your boundaries and free yourself from their grips. Detaching yourself from a toxic relationship however can be incredibly difficult. If you feel you need support in getting control and your freedom back, please see the attached links:
Resources for victims of narcissistic abuse (click here)
Support for you (click here)
Toxic relationships (click here)
How to Leave a Toxic Relationship, According to a Psychology Expert (click here)
Overcoming the Aftermath of Leaving a Toxic Relationship (click here)
References
Berne, E., 1966. Games People Play. New York: Ballantine Books.
Bordin, E. S., 1979. The generalizability of the psychoanalytic concept of the working alliance. Psychotherapy: Theory, research & practice, 16(3), 252.
Cropanzano, R., Mitchell, M. S., 2005. Social exchange theory: An interdisciplinary review. Journal of management, 31(6), 874-900.
Finkelstein, M. A., Brannick, M. T., 2007. Applying theories of institutional helping to informal volunteering: Motives, role identity, and prosocial personality. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 35(1), 101-114.
Ivey, A.E., Ivey, M. B., Zalaquett, C. P., 2010. Intentional interviewing and counselling: Facilitating client development in a multicultural society. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Karpman, S., 2014. A Game Free Life. Self-Published.
Schon, D., 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.