How To Deal With Toxic Friends

One of the more common topics that keeps coming up when I’m Coaching people is the question of how to deal with friends who, let’s just say, don’t treat you with the respect that you deserve.

We all know the type of person I’m talking about, right?  The person who just seems to be all about them.  The one who’s “always there for you”, whenever THEY need you.  But if you ever need them, they’re always “too busy”.  I think everyone has at least 1 friend who fits into this category.

In the past, I was certainly as guilty as anyone of allowing people in my life who were really not worthy of my time and energy.  Over time, as I’ve learned to treat myself with the self-love and respect that I deserve, I've gradually filtered most of these kinds of people out of my life.

The one exception to that was my oldest friend, who for quite some time now hasn’t been treating me with the respect that I deserve.  I've known for a long time that I really need to eliminate this negativity out of my life, and all my other friends keep telling me this as well.

But, you know what it’s like, we’ve been friends for so long and we’ve been through so much together, that you WANT to think the best of them.  You WANT to think that one day she’ll realise the error of her ways.  I keep telling myself that “it’s just a faze she’s going through, and eventually she’ll go back to the way that she was”.  This of course never happened, and recently I had to make the tough decision that I needed to cut this person out of my life.

The whole process of going through this got me to thinking about WHY we allow people like this in our lives when we should really know better.  It suddenly hit me like DOH, of course!  Why didn’t I figure this out before!

I realised, there were 2 basic reasons for me keeping this person in my life.  Maybe you’ve experienced something like this with some of your friends as well. 

The first reason is that I was feeling like I had this massive need for vindication.  Like this person was constantly doing the wrong thing by me, and as humans when someone does the wrong thing by you, you feel like you need a 3^rd party endorsement just to reassure you that it really is THAT person who has done the wrong thing and not you. 

I guess I thought that by keeping this person in my life, they would eventually come to their senses and apologise, and that would clear everything up.  Not only did this not happen, BUT this person would always try to blame me for everything as well.  

Ever since the youngest age, I’ve always been a person of the highest integrity and I felt it was a personal insult, as well as a massive betrayal, that this person would stoop to making up stuff about me.  So then everyone that she spoke to would be thinking things about me that simply weren’t true.  I was suffering from the NEED to feel like I had control over what people thought about me.  I always thought that if I was a person of integrity then no one could ever say that I didn’t have integrity.  That is of course NOT the case.  You have absolutely no control what so ever over what other people think of you.

The valuable lesson that I’ve learned is that you can’t control what other people think of you so there’s no point in worrying about it.  I’ve learned to accept the fact that there will unfortunately be some people in your life who will do the wrong thing by you, use you, have absolutely no remorse, and then go and tell everyone that they meet that it was all your fault!

Fortunately for me though, I’m now in a place of not worrying about those people.  Instead, I focus on the things that I CAN control, which is my own character.  It has been said, “Don’t try to make everyone like you, focus on being your true authentic self and then the RIGHT people will LOVE you!”.

You have to be the SOURCE of what you want to see showing up in your life.  If you want success, money, love, health or whatever you want, BE the source of that.  I’ve learned that integrity is just simply too important to me to allow anyone else or anything external to be the source of my feeling of integrity.  I realised that I had to be the source of that feeling of integrity. 

Until I accepted that, I was always holding on to toxic relationships hoping to eventually get that sense of vindication.  Once I learned to accept that, I was able to effortlessly let go of those toxic relationships and move on.

Being able to move on, the second thing that I had to understand is how I seem to keep attracting these toxic people into my reality in the first place, so that I can prevent this from happening in the future.

The second thing I had to understand is what we were discussing in my last Blog which is that when you place a high importance on a label, such as “Integrity”, you will attract the opposite of that into your reality to give you contrast.  If you haven’t yet, go back and read my last Blog first, what I’m about to say will make much more sense then.

But basically to re-cap, what was happening is that I was placing a very high value on having “Integrity” in my relationships and on my BEING things like “Loyal”, “Supportive” and “Understanding”.  I’m the type of person who’s always there for my friends.  These things were all VERY important to me.  I’d hate to think that anyone would ever say that I was not a loyal friend.  So I therefore attached a lot of importance to that label, and the same applied to a whole host of other labels as well.

As we discussed previously, because it was so important for me to have these labels, The Universe was seeking to prove to me that I was all of those things by bringing into my reality the exact opposite of that.  So the more importance I placed on those things, the more The Universe would bring into my reality people who were the exact opposite so as to demonstrate to me that COMPARED TO THEM, I was a loyal person and so forth.

Now that I have eliminated all of these undesirable influences from my life, I’m free to ensure that I only have the RIGHT people in my life from now on.  And the way to do it is that I’ve eliminated the need to have these labels in my life.  I no longer feel the need to label myself as being loyal for example.  I have internalised the FEELINGS of what it meant for me to be a loyal person.  I no longer need to focus on BEING loyal because I just focus on being true to my authentic self.  If I am ME, I will by default be a loyal person, I will by default be understanding and supportive.  If I just focus on being my true authentic self, then I can’t avoid being by default a person of the highest integrity.

My challenge for you is to do an audit on your life and identify those “labels” that you have been applying to yourself.   Go through the questions below.  Some of the answers will be quite personal for you, so you don’t need to answer these here on the Blog, but go through the exercise of answering these questions to yourself…

1)      Can you think of an example of how having a label to describe yourself has resulted in you attracting the exact opposite of your label?

2)      Can you see how labels have been influencing the relationships in your life?

3)      Do you have any toxic relationships in your life at the moment that you need to eliminate?

4)      If yes, based on what we’ve learned so far, what are the reasons you believe you have allowed these toxic relationships to continue?

5)      What do you resolve that you are going to do moving forward to ensure that you have more empowering relationships?

If you find that this has been beneficial for you, you may be interested in taking your life to the next level by taking advantage of my personal 1 on 1 Coaching.  Visit the website at www.dreamfulfilmentlab.com for more information.