From my life experience, I can identify five types of Toxic People:
1. The Lalph Roaren Sociopath (presents perfectly to an audience but is twisted and violent in private);
2. The Ivory Tower Religiost (stokes fires of discontent in the Day Room while preaching repentance to those down below);
3. The Fee Collector (will do anything if it is a billable hour);
4. The Dufus (No facts, please, ADD Arrogant controller, but hey, just a milk and cookies kind of guy heh heh heh);
5. The Us versus Them (social programs should be stopped so the marginalized can die early and procreate less into the next generation).
While each of these types have their own unique brand of manipulation, all of them use others to feed the malice of Ego.
Normal people have empathy. Empathy is the ability to see the perspective of another person’s experience. In particular, the experience you have created for them. This is the pivotal motivator to change behavior. In a normal person.
Normal people make mistakes. But normal people “get it” that the other person experiences something unusually negative from the action that was committed.
Toxic people do not “get it.” They have endless lists of rationalizations, justifications, excuses, scapegoating, and entitlements (“I had no choice, I was the only one who could save the situation for what is was..” “The ends justify the means,” “They’ll thank me later…”).
Toxic people get a pay-off of inflicting their will, their values, their agenda on others. A power rush, a good looking public persona, an income, status, God’s blessing, hero of the day awards, satiation of control needs.
Toxic people can be in our families of origin, our current relationships at home, at work, in the community. We may at one time have been bamboozled into agreeing with their agenda, or buying into their perspectives, or worse, believing the false front they present with.
Toxic people will often use some sort of emotional extortion or fear tactics to gain compliance. They have the ability to create mini-cult cultures in the middle of normal life.
Toxic people usually have a scapegoat at hand to get their own behavior off the hook. (The job, the ex, the devil…the such and such group of people in society…Prophesy…the Other political party…being maligned, misunderstood, mistreated, even persecuted..God help us, someone’s got to save our credit rating…superstition, prejudices, “oh no not more of THEM.”)
Toxic people are usually so skilled at their manipulations that they get away with it. Over and over and over. They slip by accountability and consequences. They believe so stoutly that they are in the Right that no matter how much fact, evidence, Real Time information or education is presented, it won’t have an effect. They are “Right.” Again, zero empathy. Just control.
What to do?
1. Get away.
2. Create a place that they cannot touch, enter in, control or extort. Live in, and create from, that space.
3. Let natural consequences work their way. Toxic people will be rejected by those who have high self-esteem. They will be left with only the loser hanger-oners, and those who are likewise toxic and using them for some alternative agenda. The shallow dead-end of these relationships will eventually be reached.
4. Let go of your own ego need to control, justify, and redeem the sociopath. Find your Higher Self and create a meaningful, expressive, generous life that will illuminate pathways for others without gain in return. Toxic people can’t meddle in that kind of paradigm. They simply can’t understand that language.
5. Associate with enlightened people with high self-esteem.
6. Enjoy and celebrate and procreate the abundance of your garden without the presence of diseased souls.
7. Let them go into the hands of the Universe.
Happy karma,
Heidi
Heidi's Art Life 