Hidden Toxicity in Friendship - Part 2: Toxic Beliefs

The Roots

I think the irony of this series is ultimately going to be that none of the toxicity was actually hidden. The fact of the matter is --a fact that I will keep coming back to--it wasn't the abuser who hid their abuse. I think that, more often than not, people will show you exactly who they truly are pretty early on. I read a statistic somewhere that a person can't keep up appearances or keep their true intentions hidden for longer than about 3 months before it begins to cause cognitive dissonance in them.

Disclaimer: That statistic, or my use of it, might be quite wrong or inaccurate, but I don't think that has any bearing on the truth of it. People can't hide for too long.

So again, the fact that I didn't see the toxicity in my abusive friendships wasn't because it wasn't being shown to me. It was because I kept explaining it away. And I kept doing this because I didn't know it was toxicity.

Like I stated in part 1, the primary reason I feel that I was in harmful relationships for as long as I was is because no one ever taught me what to look out for. Neither school nor home nor church really taught me what a good, healthy friendship would entail, and so I believed that any friendship could be and would be a good one, regardless of how I or the other person behaved in the relationship. This made it almost imperative for me to accept any behavior as just "how they are" and if I loved them I would abide it.

So what's the root of staying in any toxic relationship? The way I see it, it was me. It was what I already believed that determined how I behaved and what I received for myself.

Toxic belief number 1: Unconditional Love means accepting people how they are.

I identified at a really young age that I wanted to love people. I really have a lot of love to give, and I always have. Growing up, the idea that God loves us unconditionally was something that I resonated with, primarily because I felt like I could understand that. I could relate to it. I desired unconditional love, and I desired to love people with that same love. However, what should have been an opportunity to learn what true, healthy unconditional love looked like was horrendously fumbled by the adults and guides in my life.

Unconditional love, as it was taught to me and as I internalized it, meant this: People are how they are, and if you love them you won't require them to change. You won't place a "condition" of altering behavior on them in order to love them.

This belief, unchecked and untested —and most importantly, unguided—led me into some pretty unsavory waters and experiences, and it was only after years of learning the hard way what "love" truly means, that I began to even scratch the surface of why this belief is harmful.

First, how is this belief actually correct?

Unconditional love is "free" love. It is a gift: a gift of self. Love in all its forms is essentially unidirectional. It can come from you, but you can never guarantee or control that it will come back to you. so there are no assurances with it. So in order to truly give it and not be slighted by the consequences of unrequited love, you might do better to practice an unattached or uninvested love. This is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls "disinterested" love, which is a love that is generous with itself and is not interested in what it can gain from the beloved. It is first and foremost, love that is other-oriented, focusing more on what it can give versus what it can or does actually receive. It is love that is virtuous rather than vicious.

It is also a love that allows the other to be the other without attempting to control, coerce, manipulate, stifle, or otherwise diminish the other person.

Now, how did this belief harm me?

Simply put, I believed that asking someone else to adjust their behavior for my benefit was in some way diminishing them. I believed I didn't have a right to ask someone to change for me, and I believed that if I did ask them to change, that made me an unloving person --and therefore, an unloveable person.

Unlearning Unconditional Love

Unlearning my notion of unconditional love took time and it took mistakes and it took pain. A lot of pain that came in the form of discomfort and anxiety.

Most of the time, we see things like discomfort, anxiety, heartache, fear, etc. as bad emotions. They're scary and they're foreign and they don't feel good at all. They make us feel out of control and confused and uncertain. What I didn't know at the time is that having those emotions was totally normal --and even expected--given the situation I was in. Those emotions were supposed to be tools. The big, scary feelings were alarm bells trying to tell me that something was incredibly wrong in my friendships, but I didn't know how to listen to them -- I didn't even know that I was supposed to.

Toxic belief number 2: Bad feelings are bad.

First of all, mental health issues run in my family. To be brief, typically psychological issues and emotional issues go hand in hand, so it isn't a surprise that sometimes these two distinct parts of a person get conflated into one thing. Many times, well meaning professionals (in my experience) will come to the conclusion that "you are feeling this way because there's something wrong with how your brain works." In other words, something is deficient or missing. Something is not wired correctly. Something is causing you to react in a way that a "normal" person, with a properly functioning brain, wouldn't react.

Give information like that to someone like me and guess what? We learn to dismiss our feelings pretty easily. In my family (as in most West Indian households), mental and emotional health was not something that was discussed in a constructive way. The situation was the same in all the other institutions where I was gaining most of my worldview and information: school and church. There was hardly any discussion on how being in tune with one's emotional state actually contributes to a "wholeness" of the person. There was a general attitude of shying away from the topic. Mental health was, and in many cases still is, taboo.

As a result, I learned to never take my emotions seriously. They were ultimately seen as just disruptions to life that could be dealt with through medication or some form of prayer. Bad feelings were bad.

How did this play out in my toxic friendships? Well, I learned to disregard any negative feelings I was having. Feeling discomfort was often dismissed. My internal commentary sounded something akin to: maybe I'm misinterpreting what he means. I'm overreacting. Maybe I'm not giving him enough benefit of the doubt. I'm not being loving enough. I'm not being understanding enough. I'm not accepting this person for who they are.

None of that was true, in retrospect. It was all a fulfillment of the toxic beliefs I was already holding which were causing me to diminish myself and ignore my internal alarm system --the very thing that we're all given to keep us safe and healthy and whole.

The beliefs I had surrounding unconditional love directly contributed to how I reacted to myself and my feelings, and ultimately played a major role in the continuation of my own abuse. While these are only two of the many I had accepted as true over time, they are probably the ones that caused the most havoc in my life, and so they deserve to be addressed.

In a large part, this post is laying the groundwork for what is to come: In the next segment, I'm going to focus on the process of trading these toxic beliefs --ultimately these lies I had accepted--for the truth about love and the truth about the feelings and emotions I was stifling. Stay tuned.