Poisons And Antidotes - Relations

"Toxic" is most often called a relationship that leads to "wear and tear" of the psyche of one of the participants. It is assumed that your partner has some kind of flaw - addiction, narcissism or psychopathy. And since the relationship is "toxic", they should be avoided. There can be no talk of any restart or preservation of the pair. Is it really?

The facets of codependency

A great many articles are being written urging readers not to get involved with "toxic" characters. And everything would be fine if the authors did not proceed from the premise, strange from a psychological point of view, that relations are a one-sided matter! That is, on the one hand, there is a certain “poisonous” partner, and on the other, I am all so healthy and positive.

The problem is that any relationship is the interaction of two people. And "toxicity" is definitely the result of your joint efforts. For example, in dependent relationships, this reciprocity is reflected even in the name. So, with an alcoholic or a drug addict for a long time, only a “codependent close” can coexist, that is, one whose psychological organization allows to withstand such a life. By the way, in a "normal" relationship, such a person may feel bad and uncomfortable.

No wonder one of the difficulties of addiction therapy is that after the recovery of an alcoholic or drug addict, psychological problems often begin in his environment. Still would! People were busy with the noblest cause - saving a relative from the clutches of the "green serpent" - and not without reason found in this struggle the meaning of their lives, and at the same time a form of expression of their love for the "lost soul." And suddenly it was over! What is it like for a person who was immediately deprived of both love and meaning? Very often, the strict recommendations of psychologists regarding the termination of all financial assistance to an addicted person are broken precisely by the love of those around him.

Flowers of life

A separate story with the myth that having children strengthens the family. The newborn makes the entire family system of relationships so globally rebuilt that not all couples are able to withstand this pressure of changes. At this moment, the parents' lifestyle changes, priorities and values begin to change. And if a young mother concentrates exclusively on the child, and the man tries to keep the relationship with his wife in the same volume, problems are inevitable.

If the parents unite in a team that brings up the child, the prognosis is positive. If a child and a mother begin to form a tandem, and the father turns out to be aloof from problems or generally in the role of an aggressor who encroaches on their time together, then most likely such a family will not last long.

So it is better to have children with the partner with whom the margin of safety in the relationship allows you to withstand their most unusual transformations.

Narcissists, psychopaths and other decent people

It is now fashionable to refer to “toxic” as relationships with people who have not the most pleasant personal or character traits. Recently, "narcissists" and "psychopaths" have been hitting especially hard. However, there are not many people in whom pathological personality traits reach the level of the disease in the general population, to put it mildly. So the stories about the fact that there are crowds of people, normal relations with whom, in principle, it is impossible to build, are an exaggeration. But practically every one of us can, if desired, find narcissistic traits or character accentuations, very similar to psychopathy.

Fortunately, in real life there is a concept of "tropism" - that is, the "craving" of one unhealthy person to another. True, this phenomenon also has a reverse, not so optimistic side: if it suddenly turns out that you have been living with a mentally unhealthy person for a long time, it will not be superfluous to check with a specialist for your own adequacy.

If you are attracted to psychopaths or narcissists, this is primarily a story about you, not about them.

Normal relationships: what are they?

The main criterion for the normalcy of relations is their open and voluntary nature. That is, if you consciously choose a “problematic” person as your partner, this should be your conscious choice. The question is most often not what we are initially, but how we act in a particular situation and what we allow ourselves to do in it. And just by this criterion, people are very different, regardless of their psychological "type".

It is not for nothing that in the consulting practice there are many examples of how the owners of deliberately "pathological" character traits behaved much more noble towards their former partners than "normal" participants in the relationship.

Love has passed, tomatoes wilted

There are many types of relationships that are truly destructive, but not because one of the partners is a "fiend of hell." Circumstances can develop in such a way that almost any person begins to behave in a way that he did not expect from himself. This type of "toxic" relationship may well include a situation when partners in the process of living together have lost not only love, but also respect for each other, and they do not have enough courage to admit this to themselves and to disperse in time.

This can also include all kinds of "hindrances" to parting in the form of a single home, mortgages, young children, unwillingness to lose social status and other objective circumstances that firmly bind people. This is where mutual destruction begins! In such fights, both sides, as a rule, hit without missing the most painful points of each other, because they know perfectly well where they are located.

Breaking up on time is also about taking care of your psychological well-being.

Family communal apartment

Another type of potentially toxic situation is the forced living under the same roof with the parents of one of the spouses. Here such a tangle of all kinds of "role" intersections immediately forms that not everyone is capable of extricating themselves from it with a surviving psyche. Meanwhile, this is a common situation for young couples. Renting an apartment is expensive, and earnings do not allow you to think about buying your own home. And problems begin at all levels - age, role, value, status. Here the devil himself will break his leg, understanding all the twists and turns and difficulties.

The correct solution to this problem is to move out as soon as possible.

Value conflict

Sometimes an atmosphere develops in a society that sharpens the issues of value orientations or religious faith to the extreme. What was not very important yesterday is becoming important for some people today. Recent years have been full of stories of the breakdown of the strongest family and / or friendly relations precisely because of a mismatch in values.

About the root causes

In conclusion, I would like to note that in recent years, the perception of a happy life as an unobstructed and problem-free life has been formed. Any difficulties that require change on the part of both partners are often perceived and interpreted as abnormal. And the only "adequate" response to difficulties in relationships is considered to be their termination. With such a philosophy, one should not complain about the lack of "suitable" partners, and even more so about the "toxicity" of the relationship. Because the main property of a person, which allowed him to become the dominant biological species, is an almost unlimited ability to change even in the most "poisonous" conditions.