08-04-2026
Toxic persons are those persons who try to diminish you, gaslight you, fight with you and
generally do whatever they can to make you feel bad about yourself. It continues to surprise me in my work as a longtime psychologist and also as a person meeting people as I walk the road of life how many people have toxic people in their lives that they stay connected to that they say they wish were not in their lives. When I ask them the obvious question as to why they continue to maintain the relationships, they sometimes seem surprised I would ask it. They then often say they cannot end it because they could be spouses, partners,family members, friends of friends, neighbors, church members or whoever else. When they honestly discuss their toxic relationship, they admit how much happier they would be if they were no longer in their lives or if they would just change. They also admit that the person most likely will not change because that is just the way they are and they have refused to change over and over again over the years in spite of the emotional pain they know they cause. Once the person realizes that the person is not going to change and they determine to detach the toxic person from their life, regardless of who it is, then positive mental health progress and healing can occur for the abused person. In some cases, this is very hard to do and persons may even decide to continue at least for now to maintain the relationship for one reason or another. Regardless of what you do, it is important in all your relationships to have boundaries, focus on self care as an absolute priority, focus on self-worth improvement, demand mutual respect, do not allow anyone but yourself to define who you are, and keep track of how you are doing in all relationships once your toxic relationship has ended. Once it is clear that you are with a toxic person in your life who is weighing on you emotionally and certainly impacting self-esteem and problems with anger, my general experience has been when you have had a long-term relationship with someone who is toxic to you and you have attempted to change things over time and they do not change, that you then need to detach yourself from the toxic person from your life. I am fully committed to making a marriage work and having relationships with parents and friends. With that said, I also realize that some relationships become so toxic that they are totally destructive to the person and it is best they determine to detach that person from their lives. When someone decides to do this, they generally will need friends who they can count on to support them, maybe a pastor or priest, and potentially a therapist experienced with helping persons deal with extracting toxic persons from their lives. Even if it is very difficult, the emotional self-esteem rewards when detaching the toxic person from your life will greatly outweigh the difficulties.