The gurus of light psychology tell us that . Its harmful potential, according to its alerts, can range between radioactive waste and a slight petrochemical spill, but the message coincides: there are individuals who, inherently, emanate toxicity. Manuals proliferate to learn to recognize them and escape their terrible influence. Those traits that supposedly give them away make up an anthology of evil in its most twisted version: energy vampirism and chronic envy, subtle manipulation and seamless egotism, systematic negativity and cynical Machiavellianism. The term is happily applied to partners, bosses, parents or friends, with the supposed diagnosis . Apparently, we can all be victims of toxic people. And we can all, of course, be classified as such.
Despite its popularity, the category completely lacks scientific basis. Talking about consensus regarding its characteristics is meaningless, since it is not a phenomenon of empirical research. Its vagueness is closer to medieval accusations of witchcraft than to the rigorous study of the human mind and behavior. Even so, without analytical observation or stable criteria, they have spread by word of mouth until they have become a social mantra.
“We live in a time of pop psychology that generates banal and very dangerous fashions,” estimates Oriol Lugo, clinical psychologist and author of Cut to the chase!a work in which, after arguing the non-existence of toxic people, it addresses what underlies harmful relationships, which states that they are undeniable. Fabián Ortiz, psychoanalyst at the Barcelona firm Vida Plena, points out that “we are sick of labels and this is one more that we launch indiscriminately based on certain readings.” In an internet search, the opinion of these two experts is diluted among dozens of writings—many signed by mental health professionals—that take it for granted, as a dogma of faith, that toxic people live among us and wait for us to return. around the corner to drain our self-esteem or undermine our peace of mind.
Although it is difficult to trace it, it is likely that the expression was coined by the American author Lillian Glass, . His work became a global bestseller and lit the fuse of an irresistibly evocative term. On his website, Glass, who has no psychology studies, says another book of his goes one step further in detecting threatening subjects and offers a guide to identifying terrorists by eye by analyzing their body language. In Spanish, there are authors like Bernardo Stamatea who have made toxicity in people their editorial brand. And Marian Rojas Estapé has conceptualized the antithesis of toxic people: people vitamin. “They are labels that work very well as a marketing strategy to sell books,” says Lugo.
According to Buenaventura del Charco, psychologist and author of the book Full of positive thinkingthis discretionary labeling responds “to the logic of the consumer society in personal relationships: that person contributes or sets aside, the one who gives you good things and the one who gives you bad things, without grays.” In addition to a Manichaean simplism, Del Charco considers that calling someone toxic implies a moral authority that “inhibits self-criticism.” Lugo adds that “blaming others is very comfortable.” And Fabián Ortiz emphasizes the idea of bond as: “When I don’t like something about someone, maybe I could question what happens to me with that other person; The other questions me, questions me, worries me.”
Instead of stimulating an inward look, according to Ortiz, the toxic metaphor pushes us to attack or flee, the logical responses to a perceived danger. Without denying that there are relationships—sentimental or otherwise—in which it is best to step aside because they are eminently bad for you, this psychoanalyst warns that we must not “forget that the problem occurs in the relational sphere and is not appropriate.” of something ontological that occurs in certain people.” In the infinite diversity of human interactions, collisions and couplings—the harms and benefits they bring us—are always contextual. “There will be behaviors that are harmful to someone and not to others,” emphasizes Del Charco.
Narcissism and other personality disorders
Frequently, the lists of toxic traits are intertwined and confused with the symptoms of the so-called personality disorders, a diagnostic typology commonly used, although not exempt from controversy, as stated in the respective manuals published on the matter by the academic publishers of the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. This category of disorders includes everything from paranoid thinking to antisocial patterns, including marked histrionics. Assuming their validity, the descriptions of toxic people would in this case enter the domain of the pathological. But the alarmist messages that accompany them do not usually distinguish between illness and what, colloquially, is called having a bad mood. They rarely encourage, in Del Charco’s words, “to understand why some people behave in a certain way.” The focus is, almost always, protectionist, with one moral in unison: run away from them like from the plague.
Having attitudes of an unredeemed narcissist is a fixture in the multitude of robot portraits of the toxic person that swarm the Internet. Once again—and paradoxically—Ortiz perceives in the label and its generalized use a tendency to look after one’s own needs exclusively and throw the ball out at the slightest setback. “In order not to be projective, to not insist that everything is the other person’s fault, I have to put narcissism aside and do my personal work, take charge of my discomfort,” he maintains. Furthermore, Lugo observes, in the fashion of massive labeling of the surrounding human toxicity, symptoms of an infantilized society: “We come from a past in which violence was normalized and now we are at the other extreme: everything can be offensive.”
With the accusing finger that points to toxicities hovering everywhere, Del Charco laments that the fear of her stigma can lead to “emotional repression, to pretending to be better than we are so that others do not distance themselves from us.” In the opposite sense, he continues, the fear that is instilled in us about the abrasive power of toxic people causes feelings of excessive fragility, “as if we were porcelain figures.” This specialist proposes moving through the world with confidence, dealing with people who are not always to our liking and defending ourselves when the situation requires it: “There are people who are a pain in the ass or who are bitter, and, except in extreme cases, it is not that serious. ; “We can tolerate it, we do not have to eradicate it from our lives, but rather learn to set limits when necessary.”
