Moving on from Toxic Relationships
Here’s a video about moving on from toxic relationships. Melissa Moore from the podcast “Faith Hope Love with Melissa Moore” invited me to talk about dealing with trauma. Scroll down for a transcript. Follow Faith Hope Love on Youtube.
What is a Toxic Relationship?
I’ll start from what a healthy relationship is and then work backward. If we think about ourselves as images of God, everyone is SO DIFFERENT even though we’re all uniquely created. We’re given reflections of different aspects of God. Some of us reflect back His passion, some of us reflect back His holiness. With each of our differences, it’s not necessarily meant to be opposed to each other. It doesn’t have to be an either/or arrangement. IT CAN BE BOTH. So we think about healthy relationships through that vantage point. These connections are one where there’s ENOUGH ROOM in the connection for each person to be themselves. Have their own needs, own values, own opinions, and still be powerful sons and daughters in the Kingdom.
If there isn’t enough room in those connections for each person, this is how we go down the toxic relationship route. There are two different options (although we tend to see one as an example of toxic relationships more than the other):
APATHETIC Relationships
ENMESHED Relationships
Apathetic Relationships
When there isn’t enough room in our connections for both people to be fully themselves, then sometimes there’s enough “room” in the relationship by both parties going off and doing their own thing. In a marriage, for example, that might be a couple living under the same roof as if they’re roommates, but they don’t spend a lot of time together.
This could also be with other kinds of connections, like family members where there’s barely any interaction throughout the year until the holidays roll around. And when the holidays roll around, it’s super awkward. So that is an example of a relationship where there isn’t enough room for them to coexist at the same time. Because there’s not a lot of interaction, there isn’t really a knowing of each other or revealing of oneself.
That type of relationship is what I call an “apathetic relationship.” There’s a huge wall between the two people and both parties are going off in opposite directions. The main message is, “I am me; you are you. There’s no we.” That is an example of a toxic relationship, but it doesn’t usually get labeled as one because it isn’t usually labeled as a relationship. But when there are situations where the connection is forced, for example, with family, that’s how it shows up.
Enmeshed Relationship
The second example of a toxic relationship is what often gets called an “enmeshed relationship.” Sometimes, though, that word enmeshed gets used to describe different relationships that are more culturally informed and more collectivistic. In certain parts of the world, there’s more of an emphasis on society as a whole or the collective. Through our Americanized/Westernized individualistic lens, that gets labeled as being bad. It’s not bad. I want to make that distinction between enmeshed and collectivistic.
What I mean by the “enmeshed dynamic” is when two people are in close quarters and there isn’t enough space between. There’s not enough space for each of them to be. Think of two circles where one is kind of swallowing the smaller one. A lot of ANXIETY, GUILT, SHAME, ANGER, FRUSTRATION—that’s the emotional evidence that there’s way too much fusing of the two people and there’s a lot of reactivity. Each person is not allowed to have their own opinions, but they’re kind of eyeing at the other person to see what they’re going to do.
Often when people think of toxic relationships, they think of this latter group of enmeshed relationships where there’s a lot of controlling, yelling, screaming, throwing objects. Yet, even within that enmeshed dynamic are things like guilt-tripping or not allowing the other person to have time with their own friends, etc.
So, this is a spectrum; there’s not categorical difference. It’s just that more often than not in a “toxic” couple, it’s likely that one person is leaning more towards enmeshed and one leans more toward apathetic. So in other words, we call this the PURSUERS and WITHDRAWERS. This is a common couple that shows up in couples’ therapy where one person is like, “we need to spend all of our time together,” and the other person is like, “we don’t need to spend all of our time together.” Usually, they come in a set.
Everyone Has Their Own Individual Needs
I work with a lot of healers, and there’s a reason for that. It’s because how they serve others often is a reflection of them trying to do their own trauma work. They just do it accidentally. Because of their own families of origin or childhoods, they haven’t been given a lot of experience of having their needs recognized as valid and being given space and permission to cultivate their individuality.
These individuals find their worth and value being very much connected with how they connect with other people. So, BURNOUT, RESENTMENT, feeling GUILTY about doing self-care—those are the common reasons why people reach out to me. It’s not because they want to be a better healer per se, but it’s because they’ve done that too much to the point of depleting themselves. However, they still have needs, and that might be a rude awakening for them. So, in their work with me, we unpack like, “okay there are some relationship dynamics that have been celebrated in your family of origin or maybe all of society, and that’s not sustainable.”
So how do we go from whatever your relationship dynamic is (enmeshed or apathetic) where there isn’t enough space for both of you, to shifting towards and creating a different kind of relationship where there is space for both of you to fully exist in your individuality. Neither party is inherently good or bad, but when there is empathy or connection, it’s a true connection. It’s not a result of someone having to sacrifice themselves for the other party’s needs.
Using Outside Information to Understand the Self
The healers who reach out to me tend to be depleted because they’re doing two people’s work instead of just their own and having their partner or family member or friend do their own respective work. That part is super hard because their bodies have been trained to OVERLY take on responsibility. That’s a conversation in of itself, but it is a way for the person to feel in control in some sense, but they accidentally end up stealing the other person’s opportunity to do their own work and grow.
We tend to connect with other people in the way that we're used to in life, so it’s really hard to change ourselves and our ways when we’re using ourselves as a reference guide. It’s not going to work because the reason why we got to where we are now is because we got here by consulting ourselves.
Often, anything that involves a person learning or gaining information from the outside—books, podcasts, seminars, therapy, other relationships, etc.—are all fantastic ways by which we get to learn about ourselves.
To give you an example, I am a first-born, second-generation Korean American, meaning my family moved to the States from Korea, and I thought for the longest time that it was totally normal for dads to live part-time in the States and part-time in Korea. In Korea, there’s a word for this, it’s called “albatross dad.” A lot of it happens to be when the father is like a traveling professor or based on work. I thought that was super normal until I was in college, Thanksgiving was about to come around, and my friends were telling me what they were going to do with their family. It was the weirdest thing hearing them say they’re going to hang out with their dad. I was like, “how does that make any sense.”
Sometimes we learn more about ourselves when interacting with other people or gaining information from the outside.
Resources to Help You Move on from Toxic Relationships
There are some books/resources I recommended. The two favorite ones are called Safe People written by Henry Cloud and John Townsend (the same people who wrote the book on boundaries) and Radical Candor written by someone who worked on a lot of companies in Silicon Valley.
Radical Candor is when a person is able to have HIGH REGARD for BOTH themselves and others at the same time. And when one is missing, you get one of the other three arrangements. Those three arrangements are:
Obnoxious aggression—when there’s only room for one’s own needs and not for others.
Insincere manipulation—when a person is neither particularly caring about themselves or the other person.
Ruinous empathy—where there’s a high regard for other people, but very low regard (fi at all) for themselves. This group is mainly the people I work with.
All three of those don’t fall in the radical candor category. Part of the work that they do in therapy is to learn how to balance out how to regard for themselves just as much as they do for other people. Often the fear is “if I take care of myself, I’m taking away from other people. No, you’re taking care of yourself JUST AS MUCH AS you do for other people.
There’s some retraining from messages they’ve picked up growing up or from their own churches or society at large. A lot of women and minorities fall into that category. It is an example of empathy is not always a good thing in the same way that hope is not always a good thing. There are healthy ways of doing it; there’s an unhealthy way of doing it. In the same way, there are definitely unhealthy ways of doing guilt and anger (which is how most people know them), but there are instances where anger and guilt are absolutely necessary.
Rounding out the full spectrum of emotions, considering oneself as just as important as the other person, it’s not EITHER/OR, it’s BOTH/AND—Safe People and Radical Candor are my go-to resources for that.
Process of Cultivating Healthier Relationships
Transitioning from toxic relationships to cultivating healthier ways of maintaining connections is a very gradual process. If people could simply choose healthy relationships, they would’ve done it already. It’s a very gradual process because our own bodies resist sudden changes. It’s the reason why dieting programs don’t work.
It’s an equilibrium point where healthy people are not drawn to unhealthy people and unhealthy people aren’t drawn to healthy people for very different reasons. Healthy people aren’t drawn to unhealthy people because it’s too chaotic; unhealthy people aren’t drawn to healthy people because it’s too boring. People have a very visceral reaction internally, where sometimes—even for people who lean more towards unhealthy even though they’re wanting to grow—their bodies RESIST something that would be more lifegiving because the nervous system has been so trained to object that upfront as a way of preventing an even deeper, scarier, pain.
I work with a lot of ruinous empathy, a lot of healers, a lot of compassionate responsible types. A lot of people have opportunities to choose a healthy relationship where the other person really cares about them, but they turn that down because it’s scarier for them to be an actual healthy relationship because what happens if it falls apart? That means it confirms that “nobody is going to love me.” That happens on a very subconscious level; it’s not something people deliberate, but that’s the degree to which there’s such deep physiological wiring within the brain.
In the last episode, we talked about how the brain isn’t just one brain, the thinking part, but it’s also the emotional and reflexive part, all these parts are interconnected, so you can’t just pick and choose what to focus on. Some people will have very visceral reactions where they push away good things. This probably shows up in the way people do their own faith relationships with God. God is trying to give them all these good experiences, but the person is like “no, I’m unworthy” and reject it upfront. So you can take the relationship with God as a significant attachment relationship, so the stuff I’m talking about applies there too. It’s fascinating especially with Christian circles how much that ruinous empathy piece kicks in. It’s not healthy y’all. There is something that’s far, far, greater and deeper, but we’ve assumed that that is what is healthy.
Toxic Relationships in the Bible
I think there are many more examples of toxic relationships in the Bible than there are healthy ones. I do want to quickly touch on the fact that toxicity doesn’t mean the same thing as abuse. There is a kind of toxicity in relationships, and it’s called neglect. Oftentimes abuse and neglect get lumped together in one, but they are very different. Abuse is the PRESENCE of a BAD thing; neglect is the ABSENCE of a GOOD thing. We must consider both of those things at the same time.
Let’s consider the first book of the Bible, Genesis. I think the bulk of that book is about Joseph. We cover several generations of his family—Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Joseph at the end. I think that’s one of the clearest examples of there being so much drama between family members. There’s lying, cheating, favoritism, exclusions, rivalry, competition, all kinds of stuff. That happened because each generation didn’t do their personal work.
Now, these are the fathers of the faith, Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, people will speak very highly of them, but actually, the chapters that describe what happened in the subsequent generations is because the previous generations didn’t do their work. There are patterns in these dynamics, like lying, cheating, etc. So when it comes to Joseph, I think his experience shows why it’s so important for people to do their own personal work and what happens afterward.
We see Joseph after he has been sold by his brothers and spent all this time completely cut off from his family. His parents thought he was dead, but in seeing and reconnecting with his brothers as the second in command in all of Egypt, I think if I was in his position, I would’ve made some very different decisions with all that power. There could’ve been moments of retaliating and punishing, and I wouldn’t blame him. But there is one particular section where it talks about how he sent his brothers out, and he just cried. I would say he probably wasn’t crying solely because he was sad, crying isn’t just about sadness, he was probably full of rage, full of hurt, feeling hopeless and powerless, and he wrestled with God when he was thrown into the hole in the ground and into the prison, he had a really rough life. In each of those moments, he struggled with God like, “how do I make sense of this awful thing that happened” that he had no control over and nothing to do with. The worst thing he did was maybe brag to his brothers that he had a cool coat. There’s nothing that he’d experienced that was warranted from what he did when he was a child.
By the time we get to the end of Genesis and before we read about his sons going forward, there’s that scene that’s so moving about how he was so struggling internally while he was trying to do the right thing. If I were to choose any Bible story to highlight why therapy is so important, it would be that. It’s saying that you have a responsibility to shift how things go going forward. It is not your fault that you experienced all this stuff, but you technically have power and influence in what happens going forward, so will you take that shot or not? That’s the big question a lot of people are presented with, especially for parents.
Tools for Understanding Your Relationship History
A big part of helping people through toxic relationships is helping them understand their relationship history. Most people will be able to recall certain events that have happened in their life, but they will probably consider those events in isolation and unrelated. There are a few exercises I do for this. One is the Top 10 list. They write down their top 10 best memories and top 10 worst memories. They put it all on a single sheet of paper, and after they’re all done, they zoom out and see if there are any patterns between those different events. Because sometimes, when we’re stuck in our ways, it’s hard to tell how those things influence us.
They put those things on a Life Timeline, positive memories above, negative memories below. It gives them a bird’s-eye-view. It helps people draw connections that were always there but just didn’t show up in the same way as they do in these exercises.
Similarly, there is another exercise called the genogram, which is a fancy family tree. Instead of writing down names, there’s information regarding different individual traits—each member of the household, parents’ generation and grandparents’ generation, any big events that any of the family members went through, things like immigration, wartime experiences, traumas of actual events or growing up in a very harsh neighborhood, etc. All those things get added onto this diagram that reveals also the relationship dynamics between individuals. It’s a very visual image.
I have one for Ross Geller to see how there are so many things that are going on between different members that are not always visible. It’s not always a physically explicit event, but when grandpa shows up, everyone turns their heads elsewhere. Those things, when we see it in visual form, it’s like, “okay now I can take my genogram and next time I see my family for Thanksgiving it’s like, oh yeah, there’s a lot of stuff happening that never occurred to me because this is the air that I breathed growing up.”
These are the exercises are super helpful so instead of me telling people what to do differently, unless they know how they’ve been up to this point, it’s really hard to change what you don’t know. The other two resources, the Safe People and Radical Candor books are other frameworks for people to locate themselves and know what to do going forward.
In the last post, I talked about the Enneagram, which people may have mixed feelings about, but it’s one of the ways by which I’ve supported people connected with their core needs, fears, experiences, it’s also what happens in our physical bodies on a nervous system level.
The second week of every month, I do Instagram Lives about relationships and I have a blog page filled with posts about relationships. So, if you’ve connected with some of the things in this discussion today, check out those resources.
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JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT
Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.
Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect
The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:
“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”
“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”