What Happened When I Realized I Was Attracting Toxic People
The lesson I learned when I saw the patterns in my life.
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If you’re dealing with toxic people right now, this may be the underlying reason why you tolerate them.
Depending on how long it’s been, you may have a challenge to overcome or a lesson to learn. But it’s in the patterns. There might be a main person you deal with, but toxic, narcissistic people come and go.
Yet, they always come back. In some form or another, and it’s quite disturbing what I’ve realized over the last few weeks in my own life.
Childhood
My grandmother was extremely neurotic.
She would yell, curse, demean us, and blame us for everything.
Like the family computer freezing or crashing. Or some random tool that was missing; she would expect young children to prioritize their weekends for yard work.
There was constant blame, projection, silent treatment, and disrespect for things we shouldn’t have been blamed for. Any therapist or family counselor would see this family dynamic as a dysfunctional, abusive, and toxic home environment.
In short, she was not a pleasant person to be around. There was a lot of “tip-toeing” to make sure grandma wasn’t upset about something.
My brother’s reaction was to deal with it and retreat into himself. When comes to “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” situations, I would usually fight.
This didn’t go well with her. All it did was cause a huge conflict and make the situation worse. As I got older, I realized that I had to become more passive-aggressive to make sure things didn’t escalate.
I never got the chance to truly say what was on my mind and how I felt about her. She died of cancer right before I left for Navy boot camp.
That closure was never given to me. I never got my power back.
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