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 are going to walk alongside Shannon's journey to determine once and for all if she is the toxic one. 

Shannon is a fictional character I created based on my own experiences and the experiences of the folks that I have worked with. Shannon is a 35-year-old elementary school teacher. 

Shannon has been having a lot of tension in her personal life. She keeps trying to become closer with folks, but things always seem to go wrong. She is beginning to wonder if the reason things keep going south might be because something is wrong with her. 

Shannon is really eager to figure out why she can't seem to find the peace and fulfillment she longs for in her personal life. She turns to her typical haunts on the internet- YouTube, and Instagram, to try to find some answers. In her research, she discovers that some of her problems line up with the way folks discuss toxic people. She begins to wonder if she might be a toxic person. 

Shannon begins to see that...

To close out our exploration of the question "Am I the toxic one?" we will tackle exactly what you can do to determine once and for all if you are the toxic one. 

In this post, we will cover some of the theoretical answers to this question. In the next post, we will make that theory a bit more concrete and explore the story of Shannon. Finally, Season 1 will close out with two different action items you can do to start your own journey with answering this question once and for all. 

To begin, we need to revisit what it takes to be a toxic person. Back in the first week of this season, we explored the differences between sometimes engaging in toxic behavior and being a toxic person. In this week's topic, we are going to focus on your status a s a toxic people. 

I use the term "toxic people" to refer to folks with personality disorders. So we can reframe the question "Am I the toxic one?" as the question "Do I have a personality disorder?" The way folks are determined...

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 will explore how our two fictional characters Cindy, a toxic person, and Jessie, a non-toxic person, navigate the question "Am I the toxic one?" We'll show how the theory from our last post comes to life through the experiences of these two characters. 

Let's start with Cindy. Cindy has heard through the grapevine that some colleagues, let's call them Jeremy and Lydia, have begun describing her as "toxic." Immediately Cindy recognizes that this is an unacceptable situation. She wants to do everything she can to regain control of the narrative that these colleagues are crafting. She believes that the best way to do this is to paint herself as the victim of these coworker's vicious attacks. She accomplishes this by expressing to everyone who will listen that she has been worrying and thinking about whether she might be toxic. Her goal is to portray these coworkers as bullies who have no evidence for their claim that she is the toxic one. 

When Cindy...

Today's exploration of this question requires pulling on some of the BIG IDEAS from the last two weeks of this season. 

For your ease and comfort, I will briefly recap on the pieces we need to accomplish today's task. If you need a refresh on any of this stuff, I've gone ahead and include links back to those earlier posts, so feel free to click around if you find yourself feeling a bit confused. 

First off, we need to touch base with who the heck are these "toxic people." When I use the term "toxic people" as a blanket term for folks who have cluster b personality disorders. These include folks with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. 

Some of the key features of toxic people include 

• very insecure
• cannot tolerate crticism
• dedicate much of their efforts to avoiding criticism by trying to control others
• focus on creating a narrative where they are the perfect ones and everything that is bad is because of others

Check out our ...

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,...

In this installment of "Why We Wonder If We Are Toxic," I'm going to walk us through a concrete example. I've created this example based on my personal experiences and from the people I've worked with.  

For this example, we are going to have Cindy our stand in toxic person and Jessie our non-toxic person. Jessie has been in a relationship with Cindy for two months. Jessie has recently learned some about toxic people and is wondering whether Cindy might be a toxic person. Jessie decides to gently have a conversation about toxicity with Cindy. 

Jessie brings up the topic of toxicity over dinner one evening. Almost immediately, Cindy recognizes that Jessie is suggesting that she is toxic. Even before Jessie gets too many words out of his mouth, she starts to interrupt him.

Cindy begins to tell Jessie that he doesn't know what he is talking about. She then begins to give a bunch of reasons that everything Jessie just said actually applies to Jessie. Cindy is careful to...

Welcome to Week 2 of Season 1. Our topic this month is "Am I the toxic one?" and today is our first of three posts on why we might be wondering if we are the toxic ones. In this post, we are going to cover the theoretical answer to this question. In our next post we will look at a concrete example to help make the theory stuff make a bit more sense. Finally, our last post will cover some action items you can do in order to start unpacking this question for yourself. 

To begin, we need to get in touch a bit with some of the major goals of toxic people. Toxic folks are generally very insecure. Exactly what they are insecure about varies, but in general they are not authentically confident folks. As a result, a major goal of these folks is to soothe their own insecurities. 

How do they accomplish this? Well they typically have a bunch of tools in their toolbox. Some of the most important methods include exercising control over others, asserting themselves as more important...

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...