In our last post for Season 1, we are going to cover two different action items you can pursue to make progress on your journey to determining once and for all if you are the toxic one. 

How badly do you need to know?

To determine once and for all if you are the toxic one requires seeking help from mental health professionals. That is an investment bot of time and most likely at least some money. In order to know if that kind of investment is justified for you right now, we need to take a look at how badly you really want to know the answer to "Am I the toxic one?" 

This activity comes in a three-step process. 

(1) Free Write - Just let yourself stream of consciousness respond to the following prompts. 

• How different would my life be if I had an answer to this question?
• How much peace would knowing the answer bring me?
• Will knowing the answer help me make informed decisions in the future? Do I want to be able to make those kind of informed decisions?
• Would...

In this post, we will explore a couple of things you can do to begin exploring this week's question on your own terms. One of our goals here at Empowerment Through Thought is to help each and every one of you develop your own thinking about this big topics. These exercises can help you do just that! 

First thing to do is to try to identify your own goals in exploring the question "Am I The Toxic One?"

Remember that one of the major differences between Cindy and Jessie in our last post were their goals. Once you identify what your motivations and goals are, we can begin to unpack what it really means that you are asking this question. 

To begin, I want you to do a massive brain dump. Grab some paper and write out ALL of the different reasons you are asking yourself this question. You might have some internal reasons- like you want to improve yourself. Or you might have more external reasons- like you are trying to respond to questions that people in your life keep bringing...

In this post, we are going to cover some things you can do in order to investigate why you might be wondering if you are the toxic one. If you'd like to know more about the theory behind these actions or learn about some examples of what this might look like, be sure to check out our earlier posts in this series! 

The first thing you can do is work on identifying the source of your questioning.

Earlier we covered that toxic people sometimes cause us to worry about our own levels of toxicity as a tactic to control us. Now, if we can identify the source behind our question "Am I the toxic one" we can sort out whether this is a question we need an answer to, or whether this is something the toxic person in our lives is using to distract us. 

The way I recommend doing this is through writing your story. Specifically, write out how you first came to wonder if you are the toxic one. 

Now here I am saying "writing" but you could also record yourself explaining your story,...

This is our final installment of this week's subtopic - Toxic people versus toxic behavior. 

So far we've covered what the differences are between a toxic person and someone who occasionally engages in toxic behaviors. We've also explored a concrete example with Cindy and Jessie's party planning adventures . In this post, we are going to cover some things you can do to begin unpacking the bigger question of the month: "Am I the toxic one" 

Since the major difference between a toxic person and someone who sometimes engages in toxic behaviors is the frequency and severity of those behaviors, you need to get in touch with your relationship to toxic behavior to decide which camp you fall into. 

This week's action items come in two flavors. The first is designed to get you started on collecting some data about your own behaviors. The second is designed to help you get some outside information about your behaviors. 

Track Your Behaviors

Its hard to think back on the...