How to recognize toxic people – tips from a writer
Writers have to know every character, their flaws, their habits, their deepest thoughts. If you think about it, it is natural that we will notice some things that reoccur in negative characters. Such a revelation came to me a while ago.
While writing a bad friend for one of my characters I noticed something in her: she spoke exactly like a friend of mine. It occurred to me that even though actions speak louder than words, words can still be a pretty good indicator of what is in someone’s heart – call it a by work injury of the writer life.
The thing is, the phrase is about empty promises, in which case actions do speak louder. But everyday language, the things we don’t think about, they can show plainly the things we would rather keep secret – same way body language can betray us.
This is the kind of language we will be going into here, the subtle, subconscious kind.
WARNING: Every pattern mentioned here can have multiple meanings, often opposites (the same language patterns can indicate selfishness and selflessness for example). Therefore I warn everyone to not take just one of the mentioned patterns and go from that, but rather get a picture as a whole and use that as guidance.
1: First-person pronouns
First-person singular pronouns (I, me) are used commonly among all people. Most people actually use the first person singular pronoun about 70 or 80% of the time. What can serve as an indicator in terms of whether someone actually wishes what is best for you vs is just using you is when they overuse the first-person pronoun or use it in sentences that could easily have been rearranged to include another pronoun. This can indicate that their first thought is generally always themselves.
Take these examples for one
They might seem harmless, you might even think I am going too far in saying you can recognize toxicity by one word, but I spend years with a person who would always do this, and once you learn to recognize it a lot of things suddenly become clear. But, as I said at the beginning, you can’t take just one of these and roll with it – and therefore, we will go on to the next point now.
2: Frontloading
This ties in really well with the first one, and what it means completely boiled down and distilled is that we put the most important “thing” first in our sentences. Take a look at the second example from before for a second, and notice that “I” comes before “you”.
Here the first thing, the most important thing, is not the accomplishment, it is what the speaker thinks of it which is the focus of the sentence.
Which leads us to the next point:
3: compliments
I say compliments, what I really mean though is sentences phrased like compliments that are not complementatory at all. Such as
Yes, this sounds like a compliment, and it doesn’t even use a first person singular pronoun, but what it really is is unsolicited advice disguised as a compliment. This is manipulative, down right. People can choose not to take advice, but if you choose to not take a compliment (especially one based on skill rather than physical appereanca) there is something wrong with you (at least that is how most people will see it). Since this is in one sentence you cannot accept part of it and ignore the other part, meaning it becomes sort of a “you can have this compliment if you also follow my advice”. Also notice the word “should”, which could have easily been exchanged for “could” or “might”. This is a really toxic compliment, beware of anyone who gives you this type of praise.
4: Tone
If something only sounds good because of the tone it is said in, then the sentence is in itself bad. And yes, I know a lot of friendships have a loving mockery in them, and I am not saying that this is toxic, not at all. It only becomes toxic if it repeatedly one person being mocked, or if only one of the people enjoys it and the other one doesn’t notice this.
If you imagine these being said between two girls laughing and having fun they are harmless, but if you imagine the scene as a grown man towering over a little girl and saying these lines it becomes awful.
My point is that some sentences, when removed from context or linguistics, become mean or even evil if the words are left to stand on their own.
tone, action, and body language all have their merits and have to generally be taken into account, but they should not always be allowed to outweigh the actual meaning of what is said. Not every word can be excused with “it was friendly meant” or “you know I didn’t mean it that way”. You have to take into account that this person, whoever is speaking these words, chose those words for a reason. They chose potentially hurtful words, they chose words that would need tone or context to not be mean. Reasons for choosing such words can be many and varied, some completely benign – but if you were in only healthy relationships I doubt you would have made it this far into this post. If someone is saying things like this to you in the expectance that tone and context will excuse the words, you have to know that it is okay to still be hurt by those words. It doesn’t always have to be up to you to not let it get to you, sometimes it has to also be on the people in your life to not do the things that might harm you.
No matter the reason you came to read this post today, I want you to leave knowing that words do have power of their own and that it is okay to take a person’s words or speech patterns into account, it is okay to cut someone from your life even if all they have ever done to you is hidden in “merely” words.
It is okay to stand up for yourself against toxic people or toxic relationships, and you don’t have to feel bad about it, even if “all” they ever did was having negative speech patterns. You don’t owe anyone to stick around if they treat you poorly or speak to you in demeaning and negative patterns. You can leave them behind.