How to Nix Toxic Behaviors in a Relationship

Unless you've chosen a highly enlightened mate, you'll probably deal with some bad behavior sometimes in relationships. If you've chosen someone who's a little more 'special', you may have more of these to deal with than others do... but almost everyone has to deal with toxic behavior at least occasionally.

Most strategies you'll see for dealing with toxic behaviors are based around withdrawing, closing yourself off, giving the other person space, and so on. This can be an effective approach. It's especially useful for people you decide you just want to wash your hands of.

However, "withdrawing into your shell" isn't so useful a strategy for an ongoing relationship... things like the 'Gray Rock' strategy are really for people you want to out of your life, not those you're entangled with by choice.

So let me give you a couple of more assertive strategies you can use to nix toxic behavior in your relationships.

 

Confronting Toxic Behavior Is Positive Punishment

Before we dive in, I want to point out a difference:

• Withdrawal strategies like 'Gray Rock' (where you make yourself as dull and uninteresting to someone you want gone as possible, so s/he loses interest in and hits the road) use extinction to effect behavior change

• However, the strategies we'll cover today use positive punishment

If you're unfamiliar with the different flavors of Skinnerian behavior shaping, see my piece on operant conditioning first.

READ MORE: Operant Conditioning in Your Romantic Relationships

For now, the long and short of it is both strategies we'll introduce today respond to toxic behavior by creating discomfort in the individual responsible for it.

However, both also contain within them the solution for avoiding this discomfort. This makes these two strategies quite effective at changing toxic behaviors -- more so than anything else I've tried.

Both work by placing you in the more 'meta' state in a challenging situation... and the more meta individual is the one with the stronger frame, and will generally assert the real power in the relationship. Often when you use these strategies, it will be so jarring to the partner engaging in toxic behavior you will see her stumble, stutter, or halt altogether and plunge into thought.

What qualifies as 'toxic behavior'?

Here's a good rundown of the various types of toxic behaviors you'll see in your relationships.

You may want to check that article out. You'll almost certainly recognize behaviors you've dealt with before, which you disliked but may have slipped in under your defenses. That's part of what makes such behaviors 'toxic' (rather than calling them, say, 'blunt force behaviors').

 

Toxic Behavior Relies on People Going Along with It

One of the first articles on this site was about not being a social ladder climber.

Social ladder climbing sucks because it is a slow, arduous process of attempting to sneak stealthily from one rung of the ladder to the next, climbing over and knifing people in the back as you go, meanwhile trying to guard yourself against other ladder climbers aiming to do the same to you.

If you don't engage in this, and rather comport yourself the way leaders do, then respond to people trying to tear you down by jiu-jitsuing their take-down attempts, you will easily out-rank them (assuming you have your fundamentals and social skills in order), and do it a lot faster and with a lot less wear and tear on you for the trouble.

That's because every attempt to do you harm or push your position down, whether in a social situation or in an ongoing relationship, is a reach, which makes it also a risk; it is the other party throwing a punch which, if you know what you're doing, you can sidestep, then grab, and use to take him down.

Every time someone engages in toxic behavior with you in a relationship, it is a relationship 'punch', and you have a few ways to react to it.

1. You can stand there like an idiot and get punched. This is what guys who say "Yes dear" and "If that's what you want, then okay sweetie" when their wives or girlfriends are haranguing them are doing. Expect the punches to keep coming, because this behavior pattern in the other party is not getting corrected, and instead is being reinforced.

2. You can step out of the way and retreat from battle. This is the Gray Rock / withdraw method. Great if you want that person out of your life, but not so useful if this is an ongoing relationship. Again not ideal in an ideal relationship because the bad behavior is only being gently corrected, through some manner of extinction, but for blatant behaviors extinction is often not forceful enough. Furthermore, toxic behaviors often happen as a result of the other party not having better tools to use, and this strategy does nothing to help give those tools.

3. You can engage in the fight and punch back. This is what I discuss doing in my article on the blame game, and it can work, but some years on I'd now say this method is often counterproductive -- it will resolve the specific situation, but it does not resolve the underlying behavior, and the behavior reoccurs. It also does nothing to help the other party gain better tools for dealing with conflict.

4. You can jiu-jitsu the punch into a takedown. That's what the two strategies we'll talk about today do; they use the momentum of the toxic behavior attack and pass that momentum right along so the person using it falls flat on her face (verbally speaking, of course). As a bonus, the way we'll do them we also help train the other party with better conflict management skills to make things smoother as you go.

What makes #4 so great is that it frames you as the authority, shuts the attack down, punishes the attack, and serves as a pattern interrupt because the other party was expecting you to either take it, flee, or fight back, not to end up metaphorically sprawled on the ground.

Remember, toxic behavior relies on you not fully recognizing what it is (a reach/punch), and it loses most/all its power when you do recognize it and don't fall into its frame.

Jiu-jitsuing an argumentative joust is you NOT going along with its frame, which blows the whole thing right up in the jouster's face, handing you a tactical win while better positioning you to teach better ways to deal with conflict with you.

Let's talk about how you do that.

 

Method #1: Naming & Refusing It

First off, you have to be familiar with the different kinds of toxic behavior people will use on you.

Earlier I linked a piece from PsychCentral that lists out seven common toxic behaviors. I'll put them here:

1. Gaslighting: when someone makes you think you might be crazy
2. Humiliating: harsh criticism / insults / dismissals
3. Isolating: trying to cut you off from friends and family
4. Stonewalling: refusing to answer/respond; walking away mid-conversation; silent treatment
5. Threatening: someone menacing to do harm to you (or, alternately, to herself)
6. Blame shifting: blaming you rather than accepting responsibility
7. Forcing dependence: controlling; taking matters over from you

That article is a quick read and has great examples for each of these behaviors, so read it for a nice clear picture.

Anyway, our strategy here is simple: when someone uses bad behavior on you, you call it out and refuse it.

I've talked about calling out and naming behavior to get people to change it before.

In a long-term relationship, that will look like this:

Her: That's not what happened at all. Are you sure you're okay? You keep forgetting things. Maybe you have a mind problem.

You: Don't gaslight me. Clearly our memories differ. That doesn't mean we need to question each other's sanities. I could easily do that to you too. Then we're just a couple of idiots calling each other nuts.

Simple, right?

Simple on the page, at least. But how do most folks react to an attack like that? They start explaining and defending themselves, or they get angry and attack back. Both 'normal' responses resist the micro frame ("you have a mind problem") but fall into the meta frame ("we're in an argument")... rather than doing what our example does, which is to establish an alternate and more compelling meta frame ("I can see you want to argue with me, using toxic behaviors, but I don't want to do that").

The challenges to pulling this off in real time are:

1. Remembering what the different toxic behaviors are, so you can recognize when subjected to one

2. Having the presence of mind to go meta when someone uses one on you

The easiest bad behaviors to remember are those you've encountered most. If you're in a relationship where you see one or more of these frequently, you'll start to recognize it a lot more readily than you will others you've been less exposed to.

It's much easier to learn these from direct experience than it is just studying definitions (where you may make the 'rookie mistake' and start calling a bunch of things something that aren't it. e.g., you just learned about gaslighting, and now everything anybody does that you don't like is 'gaslighting').

Being present enough to recognize what another person is doing to call her out on it is our other challenge.

How do you reach that point?

The way you do it is any time you deal with drama, take a step back and ask, "What tactics is she using?"

Even if all you can see at first is "she's really mad and shouting" or "she's acting all cold and withdrawn" or "she's crying and weeping like I took her toys away" that's enough.

Focus on that, call that behavior out, and as you get experienced calling the obvious behavior out, you'll begin to notice the more micro-level tactical behaviors people use with you, too.

For instance, she's not just shouting, she's also insulting (humiliating) you. Now you can tell her not just that it's obvious she wants to fight with you, but also to stop being rude and quit with the insults.

Or, she's not just cold and withdrawn, but she's stonewalling and trying to isolate you, cutting off communication after you refuse to cancel an evening with your pals. Now that you see it, you can do more than call her out on being cold and withdrawn; you can tell her not to stonewall and that it's wrong to try to isolate you from friends.

Or, she's not just crying and weeping, but she's threatening, saying things like, "Maybe I should just throw myself off a bridge and drown myself!" Once you realize it, you can go past simply calling her out on using crying to get what she wants, and now point out she's threatening too: "Don't make threats; it's nasty. Just tell me what you're trying to accomplish here please."

I use extreme examples here to make it obvious these behaviors are bad. Most of what you'll see from women won't be this bad (unless you're dating some real harpies... I hope they're hot!). In a way, that can make it more challenging to learn to recognize when a behavior is toxic, since it will be subtler... the best advice here is, "Go with your gut" -- but try to verify with logic as well (the gut's often right, but not always).

 

As You Practice This, You Get Better at It

When I started being present during drama / toxic behavior, at first all I could do was point out the most superficial level of it: "Okay, I can see you want to argue with me." "All right, now you're going to go act all pouty. Fine."

This is a very important stage, because this is how you train yourself observe a behavior in the moment it happens and call it out. As you practice this, you become better at peering through the layers of someone else's behavior to notice what she's doing, and become better at verbally articulating it.

I progressed from there using things like, "I can see you want to fight. I'd prefer not to, but if you want to, we can. I'll win, though," if a girl is being a hothead. What I'm doing with that is telling her that fighting with me is not going to get her what she wants, and will be counterproductive, but I'm ready for it if she can't control herself.

In my experience that response gives you a ~50% chance to deescalate things with a hotheaded girl then and there, so it's not a bad tool. Obviously you wouldn't use that with a girl who's pouting or being distant; that one's just for blow-ups.

From there I progressed to being able to call out the superficial stuff, then the stuff the next level down:

"Obviously you want to fight. Because all you're doing now is being rude, blaming, and threatening. I can do that too if we need to. Would you like me to do that?"

That's more effective than the method just before it, because you call out specific toxic behaviors she's engaging in, and those are, well, embarrassing to be caught using.

When you are caught in the act of reaching like that, it makes you look weak.

Have you ever had someone pick apart an argument of yours and call you out for specific tactics you used?

It's humbling.

It's also humbling, to the other person, when YOU employ it on someone YOU'RE in a relationship with, too.

These days I will often directly call out the tactic someone's using on me and tell her not to use it.

Her: [eye roll] You don't know anything. I don't know how you've survived in the world.

You: First off, don't roll your eyes at me, it's bad behavior. Second off, don't insult me. I can easily do that to you as well. You think I can't roll a list of insults off my tongue that ground your pride to dust?

Then, generally, I will append an appeal to her to resolve things in a more reasonable way:

Her: [eye roll] You don't know anything. I don't know how you've survived in the world.

You: First off, don't roll your eyes at me, it's bad behavior. Second off, don't insult me. I can easily do that to you as well. You think I can't roll a list of insults off my tongue that ground your pride to dust? We can either sit here and trade barbs with one another or we can resolve the issue. What's it going to be?

If she still can't help using toxic behaviors, that's when, having called it out and meta framed the drama, you tell her you're going to give her some space to cool herself off, then get away from her for a while.

While you're gone, most people will think about what was said, and once they calm down you will have given them a very different, new, more aware insight into their own behavior they did not previously have. Almost no one is fully consciously aware of the various tactics he uses, especially not the harmful ones, nor the full negative effect those tactics have on his relationships or the other person. Being granted awareness of it is often the first step in that individual choosing to begin mollifying bad behavior and using more constructive behavior.

Does this seem like something far beyond your ability?

That's why you start with the small stuff.

Begin by calling out the superficial behavior she engages you in.

Even telling her, "I see; causing drama again, huh?" is enough to begin. It won't do much (it's only rookie level noticing/calling out), but it will start training you to be aware in the moment and call stuff out when you see it.

Everybody has to start somewhere.

The more you learn to recognize and call out what you see, the better you get at drilling down to increasingly more nuanced elements of what another person is doing.

 

Should You Guess Her Rationale?

When I was younger I used to try to guess the reason a woman was causing drama and address that.

Sometimes I'd tell her; other times I'd just file it away.

If I told her, it'd be something like, "I suspect you're doing this because X."

Thing is, a lot of women will then insist that no, it's not that at all!

Then later they may admit that actually yes, that was a big part of it. Or they may still say no, that wasn't it.

But sometimes when they say that wasn't it, it actually was. Other times when they say actually yes, that was a part of it, it really wasn't, but looking back they associated the two in their minds after you drew that connection for them.

This is the problem with trying to fathom someone else's intentions. You can often get close, and sometimes hit it dead on, however you will still also sometimes partly (or entirely) miss the mark.

That said, why do women say it isn't X when in fact X was a part of it? Partly because during drama, they're not trying to resolve the issue, they're trying to accomplish something else (venting the emotion out, waking up the man's attention, seeking comfort from the man, causing the man to focus on dealing with perceived problems in the relationship, etc.). Talking candidly about motivations for the drama sucks air out of the drama, which defeats the point. If she wanted a candid discussion, she'd have asked you for a candid discussion.

Much of the time too there are multiple 'strings' underlying the drama a woman causes with you.

The thing you think is the likely major reason may just be a minor string, while some other thing you thought was insignificant or didn't even realize was a problem at all is actually the major thing.

It might well be she's under a lot of stress from other areas in her life, and ended up releasing all her pent up frustration on you in a crying/sobbing binge or an angry tirade, when actually you had very little to do with it.

Nowadays I usually save myself the bother of taking stabs at what a woman's motivation for causing an upset is.

Even if you know what the TRIGGER is, often the reaction is an overreaction to that specific trigger due to other emotions built up inside, and you may not even know what those are until after she calms down and lays that out.

I find it's generally more helpful to remain philosophical about intentions.

She's causing drama; there's certainly a reason; but while she's in the drama, you aren't really going to know what it is. Even in things that seem obvious, there's often shades of other issues underneath. She gets upset because you forgot her birthday, but she wouldn't have been so upset had she felt like you were attentive in other ways. Thus, forgetting the birthday was the trigger, and that was a problem, but really her upset was the result of a larger pattern of problems in the relationship (her feeling you aren't attentive enough).

During drama, a woman will tell you things she dislikes, but they'll be twisted all out of proportion during the drama. The real truth you usually won't know until she calms.

(then of course, once she's calm, her perspective often changes. A good rule of thumb is to take what she's saying during drama, then take what she says while calm, and find some middle ground between the two of them. If she says something's a huge issue during drama then says actually it doesn't matter once calm, then odds are it DOES matter, it's just not as huge an issue as she made out before... but you probably ought to find some way to resolve it before it triggers more drama again at some point)

Now let's switch speeds, leave aside our talk about naming and calling out toxic behavior, and talk instead about dealing with one particularly insidious type of bad behavior... one which you will need a different strategy altogether to deal with.

 

Method #2: Refusing to Defend Mischaracterized Positions

No one can read your mind.

Some people will ASSUME they can, though... including some you have relationships with.

The thing about someone mischaracterizing your position is as humans we tend to react instinctively and defensively when we feel attacked. Part of how we defend is by defending our positions as 'correct'.

Yet, if someone takes your position, and twists it around a bit, strawmanning it, or completely misinterpreting it, then gets angry at the mischaracterized position, you may find yourself defending a position you don't actually hold.

Here's a hypothetical example: let's say you have a wife or a live-in girlfriend. She's not a very neat person, but you are. You tell her you want the home to stay clean, but you don't have time to clean it yourself. You offer to get a maid, but she doesn't want strangers in the home. You say well then we can talk about some other solution but she says no, it's fine, I can keep the place tidy.

Some months later she unleashes a bunch of drama, complaining that you expect her to always keep the place clean yet hardly any cleaning of your own.

What will you do?

The common thing to do here is to start defending and explaining yourself: you don't have time to clean, but you can't stand an untidy home. You asked her if she wanted a maid and she said no!

Then she will argue that you know she doesn't like strangers. And so on and so forth.

Has it occurred to you that you NEVER told her you expected HER to keep the place clean?

You said you could look at other solutions but SHE volunteered to be the one to keep things clean.

I've had girlfriends do things like this, where they took on more than they could handle, voluntarily (and not because I pushed or led them to), then later on caused drama telling me I'd put too much on their shoulders. You need to be able to recognize when you're being accused of wanting / having done something that you didn't actually do.

If you can recognize this, then you can tell her, "Wait a minute, I never said you needed to keep the place clean! I said I want the place clean, and I can't do it myself. Then I said we could talk about different ways to do it, but you said no need, you'd do it yourself. I never said 'You need to be the one to do all the tidying up'."

When you can have the presence of mind to do this, it unravels the mischaracterization she'd formed in her mind, which removes the resentment she's feeling.

She'd probably mulled over the unfairness of you making her do all this work she isn't suited to, and completely forgot she took that on herself -- it was never a thing you told her to do or even implied she had to do.

Realizing that, "Wait, he's right... he DIDN'T say that. Or even try to lead me to it!" defuses that resentment and allows her to talk with you openly: "Okay, well what are some other ways to take care of the apartment?"

(at which point, hopefully you do have other solutions that do not lead her to conclude that "well for all practical purposes it still has to be one of us and you're still saying you can't help")

Blaming you for things that aren't your position at all is a toxic behavior of a different sort -- often one where the picture in someone's mind has warped and distorted over time as she's returned to the memory of how she got into a situation or why you have to do something you do that she dislikes.

What you call out here specifically is the mischaracterization of your position.

How do you gain the presence of mind to do this though?

It's not easy!

It's quite different (and rather more complex) than the others, too.

You need to simultaneously be able to hold her picture of your position AND your actual, original position in your mind at once, meanwhile observe the disconnect between her imagination of your position versus your actual position.

The way I learned to do this was by training myself to notice a few 'giveaways' that a mischaracterization is likely happening:

• I get told I wanted/expected something of a woman she didn't like or want
• I get told I always insist on doing something without consulting her
• Basically any situation where I'm being told I'm inconsiderate or stubborn

That's not to say I may not be insensitive or stubborn at times. Nobody's perfect.

However, usually when I'm being accused of it, there's some key mischaracterization of my actual position in there.

If she's deep in her drama and you can't get her to hear you out, the thing to say in that case is, "You have no idea what my position is and you're arguing against a position I don't hold. I'm not going to argue for a position I don't hold, so you can find someone else to argue that with."

This is also helpful when you haven't figured out the details of the disconnect between what she is saying and what your real position is yet, you just know you feel like you're being accused of stuff you didn't want or say or do.

That for me has a basically 100% success rate in getting women to calm down, snap to, and tell me, "Well what ARE you saying then? Tell me what you're saying."

Then you get to clarity.

 

YOU Must Be Willing to Communicate

If you're negligent (or manipulative... and you can be either of those unintentionally as well as intentionally, I might add), you might see these tactics and say, "Great! More effective ways to defuse drama," then use them with no intention of resolving anything, only getting the drama done and over with.

The thing with that is this: these tactics can only continue working so long as a relationship partner knows she has another outlet (i.e., reasoned communication with you) through which to resolve problems.

If you jiu-jitsu her toxic behaviors but DON'T give her a better way to solve her problems, you're just going to cause an even bigger problem for yourself, as her resentment builds up while you've removed some (or even all) her go-to tools to express it.

You must always give someone constructive ways to resolve issues.

Well, assuming you intend to maintain an ongoing relationship with her, of course.

If you're breaking up, I guess you can skip the constructive ways then.

But hey, even then, it's just good form to have a constructive, positive breakup. No need to make things harder on yourself (or create an enemy).

Assuming you are remaining together though, you need to always be willing to communicate.

It's a big part of how you train out toxic behavior: you're not just removing a tool, you're also guiding her toward a better tool.

Don't blame, insult, or stonewall; instead, talk, and I will listen. We will achieve a resolution together.

Look for toxic behaviors of your own, and wipe those out too. Most people have picked up behaviors they've found useful for getting their way, but that get their way at a cost to the other person they may not even be aware of. You need to become aware of which of your behaviors exact costs on a lover, and modulate or eliminate those behaviors.

Then, you can have truly constructive conversations -- as it gets easier and easier to weed out toxic behavior from those around you.

Chase