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...

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...

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...

Here in Season 1, we are exploring the question "Am I the Toxic One?"

For our first subtopic, we are investigating the differences between toxic people and toxic behaviors. 

In our last post we explored the theoretical differences between these two. In this post, we are going to illustrate some of those differences with some real-world examples. 

We are going to look at two different folks: Cindy, who is a toxic person, and Jessie who is not a toxic person but does engage in occassional toxic behaviors. Both Cindy and Jessie are going to be independently planning parties for the friends and coworkers.

To plan the party each of our characters will have to complete three major tasks: 

1. Select a date, time and location for the party
2. Get decorations and food for the party
3. Tell party-goers about the party and collect RSVPs

Let's take a look at how Cindy, our example toxic person, manages: 

Cindy begins selecting the time, date, and location by reflecting...