How To Deal With Toxic People

How To Deal With Toxic People

Channeled by David Gregg

We prefer not to use the term "toxic" in our description of difficult
fragments, but would rather describe challenging personalities as
souls who are simply in need of more love. Difficult fragments are
often desperate to fill a hole in their soul that was either torn
during an episode of physical or emotional abuse, and/or damaged by
an irrational fear that has fed off their energy like an emotional
cancer. Challenging personalities, of course, lash out at you as
a cry for attention, but they do so in such a dysfunctional way that
they drive away those people whom they hoped might fill their void.
In most cases, giving attention to their pain only solidifies their
illusion.

The conundrum faced is that the more you try to help the fragment,
the deeper they will slide into their own self-inflicted exile of
fear. They are usually incapable of seeing the illusions they have
erected, and attempts to change their behavior rarely results in a
positive outcome. The prevailing new age wisdom is then true: you
can't change people who are unwilling to change, but you can,
however, change yourself.


The solution, as we see it, is to examine your own feelings about why
you experience a charge around a difficult fragment. Is there
anything about the person that somehow mirrors a darker dungeon
within? Challenging people can be a gift in disguise, for they alert
you to areas within yourself that cry out for more neutrality. On the
other hand, having to interact with a difficult fragment on a daily
basis can be a daunting task, so we offer three suggestions to assist
you.

1) Identify Your Triggers

To learn about your negative reactions you must become aware of the
subconscious triggers that other people set-off inside of you.
Triggers act like ambassadors of your fear that lobby on behalf of
your chief features. Your triggers, then, provide an excellent way to
spot those nagging doubts and insecurities that lurk just below the
surface of your psyche. To remove these triggers from the shadows,
you only need to shine the light of truth on their distortions.

Identifying a trigger, however, is only the first step in the
process. To release the negative charge of a trigger, you must first
consider the emotional attachments you've nurtured to cultivate and
sustain the fear for so long. Your attachments, in this case, relate
to the emotional security you've derived from clinging to beliefs
about yourself that bare no resemblance to reality.

Take, for example, a nagging doubt you've had about your ability to
speak in public. You fear such a scenario because you are convinced
you will fail, so you create an emotional attachment to this because
it protects you from the shame of having your flaw spotlighted in the
public arena. The insidious part is that although you believe you are
protecting yourself, when your fear is triggered by the action of
another, it often reacts like a trapped animal and lashes out
inappropriately. The irony, of course, is that in many instances you
were fighting against something that wasn't real in the first place.
When you harbor emotional attachments you only increase the
likelihood that when another fragment triggers your fear, the vicious
circle will continue. We suggest that you identify your triggers,
shine the light of truth upon them, and ban them from your
domain. There are many healing modalities available to assist you
with this task, but identifying your triggers is the important first
step.

2) Create a Neutral Space

Similar to the way the Earth's atmosphere protects all life on your
planet from harmful radiation, when you create a neutral space, you
are protecting yourself from the toxic energy of others. The idea is
to develop the confidence that toxic energy directed your way will
harmlessly bounce off your protective shield. This is not so much a
force field that you are erecting, but a state of mind. It's a way to
subvert the negative offerings of challenging personalities, and
learn that, with the exception of karma, if you allow any individual
to disempower the vitality of your spirit, it is a choice.

There is great power in learning how to control your reactions in
negative situations. To create a neutral space, all that is required
then, is a willingness to trust that you have the inner strength to
do so. Although your centering can certainly add its own set of
challenges to this objective, choosing to react to antagonism in a
negative manner is still a choice.

Being in a neutral space is not dissimilar to sitting in a seat at a
theater. On the stage there may be a cast of characters all vying for
your attention, hoping to lure you into the dramatic arc of their
story, and indeed, you may choose to become emotionally invested in
the tenor of each scene. But you are also able to detach from the
events on the stage at any time. Why? Because the events happening on
the stage are an illusion; they are not real.

Your life, of course, is not make believe, but if you teach yourself
to observe that the people around you are just actors on stage trying
to play the roles they have been assigned in their script, it will
become easier for you to detach from the inappropriate behavior of
others, and possibly see your world from a perspective that's less
annoyed by the melodrama in life.

We are not implying that you should go through life utterly devoid of
feeling, but once again, like the choice you have to get involved in
the drama of a theatrical performance, you can also choose the level
of involvement you wish to give to the behavior of a challenging
personality. Remember that these fragments are reading from a
different script than your own. And since you are the director of
your own life, you have the final say if you want to act in their
play or choose to audition for another.

3) Use the Technique of Mirroring

Another tool that can be used when dealing with a challenging
personality is a technique we call "mirroring." This technique can be
used to deal with the negative pole of any overleaf, but since the
attitude is often the first thing you see in a person, we will use
that as an example.

If you can identify the negative pole of the attitude projected by a
fragment, an effective response is to mirror a reflection of the
positive pole from their complementary attitude. For example, if the
fragment is in the negative pole of skeptic, try to reflect the
positive pole of idealism. The intention is to become a mirror of the
most appropriate behavior. This, of course, is a variant on the hands-
across technique, but in this case, you are doing the work for the
other person. By practicing this, you are employing a fundamental law
of social conditioning, where the most consistent pattern of behavior
is eventually adopted. If the individual is not completely shut down,
this technique can be surprisingly effective.

Questions may arise concerning the manipulative nature of this
technique, but we see the technique as a means to help move the
energy of another fragment in a positive way. It is, after all, a
choice, if someone chooses to adopt the patterns you are modeling.
On the other hand, mirroring is most effective when it is given with
a sincere interest in assisting another soul on their journey. Using
the technique to simply "get something" from another person, is not
good work, and not the purpose we envision when using this tool.

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