How Do You Change A Toxic Person?
Have you noticed that some relationships just gorgeously flow and organically evolve, whereas others seem to take up all your time, emotional energy and mental load – yet never improve?
Today’s Thriver TV episode is all about those relationships where we find ourselves endlessly explaining, arguing, lecturing and prescribing – desperately doing everything we can to get the other person to understand how they are hurting us.
Yet somehow things never get resolved – and we even end feeling like we are to blame and are in the wrong!
This is what happens when you are dealing with a toxic person, or a narcissist. If you ask for them to co-operate, take you into consideration and problem-solve to a win-win resolution, then they will only double down on their justifications, excuses, invalidation and blame-shifting.
Whether you are experiencing this with a partner, a friend, a relative or in the workplace, today I explain to you how to get out of this three-ring circus, and make the shift into relationships of kindness, integrity, unity consciousness and teamwork.
Video Transcript
Hey there, thrivers! Welcome to Thriver TV, where I’m teaching you not just about narcissists and narcissistic abuse, but how to heal for real from these toxic relationships.
So before we get started, if you haven’t yet subscribed to my YouTube channel, please do, and also like and share this video with people who you believe it could help. And make sure you hit the notification button.
Okay, so how do you change a toxic person?
Healthy People
First of all, we really need to decide if we are dealing with a toxic person, before beginning to think about how how we can change a toxic person.
In our normal human interactions and healthy relationships, someone may metaphorically step on our toes and cause us to go “ouch”. They may do something thoughtless, neglectful, or even a little bit abusive and we might say to them, “Could you please not do that” or “could I have this another way?”
If you’re a reasonable person who doesn’t moan and groan about anything and everything, and if this person is a decent person, they will hear you. They will have enough care, kindness and unity consciousness of ‘I see you as well as myself, so if you are hurting, I’m hurting,’ to be able to say to you, “Look, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that and I won’t do that again. I realize that what I did hurt you.”
In these types of healthy relationships, you will then see an uplevel and changed behaviour, because the desire is for teamwork and unity consciousness. We can have people like that in our life, where it just works.
Toxic People
But that’s not the people we are talking about here. We’re talking about people who are toxic, who when you say “ouch,” refuse to take any personal responsibility.
They’ll twist and turn it back on you. They have every excuse and justification for what they did. They won’t validate you and they’ll make it your fault. Then you find yourself lecturing and prescribing, and trying to force them to get it, in the hopes that they will finally wake up, change, and not do that behavior anymore.
Nobody likes being told that they’ve done something wrong. It takes humility, maturity, a desire to evolve and a desire for unity consciousness, to know that life works better if you’re cooperative.
If a person lacks maturity, humility, the ability to be wrong and the ability to be sorry, then they don’t have unity consciousness. What you’re dealing with is a narcissist, a toxic person, or a deeply wounded person who is not doing that inner transformational work. They are probably going through the same patterns in their life over and over, and nothing is changing for them.
You Cannot Change A Toxic Person
So how do you change a toxic person? A toxic person is never going to change for you.
It doesn’t matter how many times you say, “You hurt me,” “I need this from you,” “could you please?” “this is what I’m going through as a result of the behavior that you’re doing” and so on and so forth. They are never, ever, going to change for you. They will only ever change for themselves – if they have the capacity and the desire to change.
This never happens by you saying to them, “Well, this is what I need and want from you,” because they’re still going to justify and explain away their actions. They will blame-shift, make excuses and take you into word salad and the narcissistic three-ring circus, which just goes around and around and around with no resolution.
So this is where we have to get very clear about our self-definition.
What are your values and what is your truth? What is the life that you want to live? What is it that you will accept, and what is it that you won’t accept? What in your life feels healthy, safe and sane in your body – in your emotional self – and what doesn’t?
You Can Change Yourself
It can be really confusing when you’re doing this dance with somebody who’s toxic. If you try to get them to change, you can only ever get confused, gas-lit, triggered and traumatized.
So we have to pull away and we have to change ourselves. Stop trying to change somebody else and change yourself instead – because that’s where your only power is.
To change ourselves, we have to change the conversation from, “You are or you aren’t” or “you do or you don’t,” to, “This is who I am and this is what I will accept.”
We then have that bar and that truth that we are living by. That’s what’s known as coherence. It’s integrity. It’s the definition of self.
When we get to that place, it really is a case of, “If you would like to work with teamwork, care, kindness and unity consciousness, come with me. And if you’re not interested in that and that’s not you, that’s okay. Then we’re not a match – because I’m not going to lower my vibration to be in a relationship that is not my truth, which is confusing and yucky to my inner self, and doesn’t make sense to my emotional truth and my alignment. It just doesn’t.”
If you are willing to lose it all to gain it all, and if you really mean it when you say, “This is where I am, this is who I am, and this is how it is, ” then that other individual has a choice. You’re not getting them to choose for you – you’re getting them to choose for themselves. Their choice is, “Do I want a life with this person or don’t I?”
It’s back on them now.
Of course, people can say anything. When we choose our own soul and our own truth, we do it knowing that actions are what’s real. Words are nothing and excuses, justifications, word salads, and twists and turns don’t cut it anymore.
The action has to be real. It has to be clear. It has to be true, and it has to be what you are looking for. Kindness, care, integrity, unity consciousness, team – because that’s what relationship is, it’s team.
The truth is that a narcissist or a toxic person who doesn’t want to evolve into a unity consciousness, is always doing a relationship by themselves. They are always single no matter who they’re in relationship with because they don’t do team.
In Conclusion
I hope that this makes sense. I hope that this speaks to you.
Please know that if you want team, unity consciousness and true relationship, it starts with you being true to you, and getting very clear on how those things are a necessity in your life. “I won’t accept less because if I accept less, I’m choosing you at the expense of me, and that’s never a healthy relationship”.
To do this authentically, you need to be really solid in your values, truths and self-partnering. There was a time when I would not have been able to show up in this way, and that is why I created the Quanta Freedom Healing modules of the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP). This is how I stepped up to become true to myself – so I know it can bring you to that same empowered place!
I so look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below!