Episode 36: Ending Toxic Friendship and Building Healthy Ones

In this episode,

Lizzie covers friendships, communication skills, and how to know if you need to end a toxic friendship.

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Post-pod questions to consider

Do you have any friendships that don't feel great? What are some boundaries you can set to help them feel healthier in the future?

Episode Transcript

Hey, you're listening to Midnight Philosopher with Lizzie. Thanks for tuning in. 

Today, I am going to talk about healthy versus toxic friendships. Simply put, a toxic friendship is one that feels off kilter to your health, happiness, or well-being. No friendship is going to be 50/50 all the time. However, if you're always doing errands for your friend, but they never return the favor, that might feel less like a fulfilling friendship and more like you're a DoorDash driver working for free. I discussed this in Episode 33 about People Pleasing if you wanna check out that episode after this one and How to Set Boundaries in Episode 21.

Toxic friendships make you feel sad, used, or unsafe. I would like to preface that no relationship should ever make you feel physically or emotionally unsafe. That is abusive, and you deserve to feel safe and have fulfilling relationships. If a relationship makes you feel unsafe, it has gone further than just toxic and is dangerous. If you feel you are in a dangerous relationship, I recommend reaching out to a domestic violence hotline or a therapist. Your safety is extremely important. 

A toxic relationship isn't necessarily a safety risk, but it doesn't make you feel very good about yourself or the world around you. I've both been a toxic friend at times and had toxic relationships. I'll first talk about the times that I've had toxic friendships and then wrap up by talking about times I've been a toxic friend. Because toxicity doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just often means you aren't equipped with the skills you need to handle a given situation. 

I had a friend once, let's call her Maria, who drained my energy. I just felt the energy leaving my body when I was with her. I also felt tense in my neck and shoulders around her. But the thing that I think was a bit toxic was that she criticized my decisions a lot. One time we went out for ice cream. I asked her where she wanted to sit, and she told me that I could pick. When I chose a table, she said that I had picked the wrong table. 

It was interactions like these, which left me feeling uneasy. I was in a stage of my life where I wanted to give everyone a chance to be my friend. So I often overlooked Maria's behavior in moments like those when she criticized me. However, she ended up sending me what felt like a five paragraph essay over text about how I'm a bad friend. I tried to tell her we could talk about it and try to fix our issues, but she called me a bunch of names, so I decided to end our friendship, as had she.

I'm sure, to Maria, I was the one who was toxic, and I'm sure I had qualities that contributed to the toxicity in our relationship, but that friendship didn't feel good to me, both in my body and in my mind. And that was a detail I needed to pay attention to.

Another time that I felt I was in a toxic friendship was with my friend, let's call her Megan. Megan and I had gotten what I thought was close over grad school, but at times I felt more like her therapist than a friend. She often told me about her childhood trauma. I was willing to listen because Megan had a fun side to her too, where we covered water balloons and paint and threw them at a canvas, for example. And we hung out quite a lot. 

However, once the pandemic happened, Megan moved away and I called her about once a week. I think she felt that was too much communication, but did not tell me that directly. Instead, one day, she just stopped responding to my texts and phone calls. At first, I was worried something had happened to her, but I talked to a mutual friend who said she still heard from Megan. So I realized it was personal to me and that she was ghosting our friendship. I know I played a part in this dynamic too, but it didn't feel very great to be ghosted, and with better communication skills, maybe we could have worked things out. 

A time that I was a toxic friend was a friend right before the pandemic. We hung out outside a lot with masks on their deck and played a board game on an app on our phones together. This friend, I'll call them Jack, I texted them too much and expected them to reply to me too soon. I told them that it hurt my feelings when they didn't respond to a text within a couple days. They informed me that this wasn't their texting style. I told them that they could reach out to me instead of me reaching out to them, and then they never did. 

This hurt my feelings, but perhaps I was the toxic one and wrong one in this case. I didn't have the emotional regulation skills to handle what felt like a rejection to me of them not responding to my texts. And so I texted them even more when they didn't respond and not less. 

How can you tell if a friendship is toxic or you're in a toxic friendship? I think in toxic friendships, the people in them often lack the communication skills they need to set boundaries or say what they want and need. And sometimes those poor communication skills compound and spiral and lead to people growing resentful. 

So what can you do if you're in a toxic friendship? Start by setting boundaries. If your friend doesn't respect your boundaries, then it might be time to take a little space or even end the friendship. I have a really difficult time ending friendships, even if they're not good for me, and I think this comes from my caretaking and people pleasing tendencies. I don't want to hurt people's feelings and I don't want them to be angry with me, but also it is important for me to stand up for my self-respect. Sometimes cutting ties with someone is the most respectful thing you can do for yourself because you deserve to be treated with respect and kindness. Everyone does. 

So why should you end toxic friendships and why do some people stay in them? Time is a limited resource, and sometimes you need to end unfulfilling friendships to make more time for fulfilling friendships and for yourself. And it can be hard to leave a toxic friendship. It can be really hard. And people sometimes stay in them for various reasons. 

Sometimes people stay in them because they have lowest self-esteem and they think this is the best I can do, or they think that they somehow deserve to be treated badly. But, for a side note, no one deserves to be treated badly. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect. And sometimes people, maybe they don't wanna leave those friendships because they don't wanna be lonely, and they think having a toxic friendship is better than having no friendships at all. 

However, I would argue that toxic friendships often lead you feeling lonelier because you feel unseen and unheard by someone who is supposed to care about you. Toxic friendships are some of the loneliest relationships of them all, and so it comes to a point where you have to make a decision, and it is scary to take that leap of faith. It is scary that you might be lonely, but there's also a chance that you won't be lonely. There's also the other side that if you give up that friendship, you're making way for maybe a beautiful friendship that would fulfill you and make you feel less lonely.

In this episode, I talked about toxic friendships and how lack solid communication skills can lead to feelings of unbalanced and toxicity. I talked about how setting boundaries is a good first step for a friendship that is feeling off-kilter to you. I also talked about how sometimes cutting ties with friends is the next step in order for your self-respect. And just because people may be in toxic in one friendship doesn't make them a bad person. People are extremely complicated. 

However, I would like to reiterate that an abusive relationship is never okay. An abusive relationship makes you feel physically or emotionally unsafe and is dangerous. If you an abusive relationship - and yes, friendships can be abusive - please call domestic violence hotline or talk to a professional counselor. 

Well, thanks so much for listening tonight. I'm gonna go work on honing my communication skills now. Have a good night.