Is being toxic your hidden relationship trait?

Your toxicity in your relationships with others could be an extension of your relationship with yourself

Growing up in Pune in the late 1990s, Arshad (name changed) had it all—an unlimited stash of comic books (that he considered cultural currency growing up), pocket money (much to the envy of his cousins), and expensive gadgets that his father would buy him on work trips to the United States and Europe. His mother would dote on him, was highly protective, and never chastised him for roughing up boys his age when he didn't get his way.

Arshad admits growing up with an inflated sense of self, an ego he says “grew out of hand as he matured.” He realised early on that he exhibited common traits of a narcissist. And his partners, over the years, have made their feelings about him abundantly clear. “I've always been labelled as ‘toxic.’ Initially, I would brush it off as if it were their problem, not mine,” he says.

Arshad always entered a relationship, hopeful that this new person was “the one.” "I think I start almost every one of my relationships deeply in love with my partner. They call it the 'idealisation' stage because we literally idealise everything about our partners. I guess the reason why relationships with narcissists are deemed toxic is that there is a constant struggle, not just between partners but also individually; inside the narcissist’s mind, there is a struggle in terms of trying to hold on to the idealisation phase longer and the constant denial in our head that this person albeit all their flaws can still be good.

The narcissist 

Arshad hates feeling second best in relationships. And so, if the attention he is accustomed to from his partner wanes, he will make it his mission to let them know that he isn't happy by throwing tantrums and making them feel they're not making him feel good about himself. "It makes me miserable that I make them miserable! I know that’s not what most people who have fallen victim to narcissists feel, but this is true. I've also been removing myself from toxic relationships, even though I know I am causing it. No matter how much we try to talk things through, my brain is already dead on thinking, 'This is not the one for me. The one for me is out there, and I need to find her.' When I start thinking this way, the relationship is dead—no matter how long I drag it on," he says.

How do we become toxic?

Many negatively connoted personality traits (“dark traits”) have been introduced to account for ethically, morally, and socially questionable behaviour, which we call the Dark Factor of Personality (D). The fluid concept of D captures individual differences in the tendency to maximise one’s utility—disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others—accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications. 

Therapist Asha Saxena believes some people become toxic due to learned behaviour that causes maladaptive coping skills in society and relationships. "One way to utilise uncomfortable feelings of inadequacy is through unhealthy behaviour developed from a weak ego or an unmet developmental stage essential to one's emotional and psychological growth. The internal struggle between an individual's unmet needs and compensatory methods to meet those needs are incorporated into their behaviour and their behaviour towards others," she says.

In Arshad's case, his therapist was quick to point out that he was, indeed, dealing with narcissistic personality disorder. While nobody is sure what causes NPD, it’s said to be a combination of both nature and nurture. The nature aspect says that someone is born predisposed to need more validation, reinforcement, and support. However, when such a predisposition combines with an environment that provides excessive praise or is marked by trauma and/or abuse, the outcome can be quite devastating.

Saxena says those with NPD tend to constantly desire more care and attention from caregivers and are “reared in environments where they’re constantly reinforced for everything or traumatised, or abused at an early age and left without the ability to process their environmental deficits.”

The many shades of toxicity

For 32-year-old New Delhi native Mrinal Jain, a teacher by profession, nice people can be toxic. Specifically, the overly nice people she's come to know in the staff room who have been extremely passive-aggressive with her over the years. "They act okay when you say something that unintentionally sleights them or that they have misconstrued. They maintain a facade when they don’t want to or feel like it. They turn every kind gesture into a duty or obligation, only the recipient isn’t aware that this gift is handed over with a grudge or an expectation," she says.

Mrinal has always wondered, “How can this person be so nice? Certainly there’s something that bothers them. Then suddenly, they turn on you. And your every little infraction is blown up because they’ve been sitting on it for so long, letting it all fester. That kind of faux niceness is the worst type of deceit.” she believes. 

Nice people are also conditioned

In the early 1960s, American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a study of obedience to authority figures that impacted social psychology to a large extent. In Milgram’s original experiment, participants participated in what they thought was a “learning task.” This task investigated how punishment—in the form of electric shocks—affected learning. Volunteers thought they were participating in pairs, but their partner was a confederate of the experimenters. A draw to determine who would be the “teacher” and the “learner” was rigged; the true volunteer always ended up as the teacher and the confederate as the learner.

The pairs were moved into separate rooms, connected by a microphone. The teacher read aloud a series of word pairs, such as “red–hammer,” which the learner was instructed to memorise. The teacher then read the target word (red), and the learner was to select the original paired word from four alternatives (ocean, fan, hammer, glue).

If the learner erred, the teacher was instructed to deliver an electric shock as punishment, increasing the shock by 15-volt increments with each successive error.

Milgram was horrified by the results of the experiment. In the “remote condition” version of the experiment described above, 65 per cent of the subjects (26 out of 40) continued to inflict shocks right up to the 450-volt level, despite the learner’s screams, protests, and, at the 330-volt level, disturbing silence. Moreover, once participants had reached 450 volts, they obeyed the experimenter’s instruction to deliver 450-volt shocks when the subject continued to fail to respond.

The moral question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience was argued by Plato, dramatised in Antigone and treated to philosophic analysis in every historical epoch. Conservative philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, and even when the act prescribed by an authority is an evil one, it is better to carry out the act than to wrench at the structure of authority. Hobbes further stated that an act so executed is in no sense the responsibility of the person who carries it out but only of the authority that orders it. But humanists argue for the primacy of individual conscience in such matters, insisting that the individual's moral judgments must override authority when the two are in conflict.

I am the problem

Akanksha (name changed) realised unrelenting pessimism was one of the telling symptoms that she had slipped into a destructive routine pretty early on in life. She would turn even the most happy and hopeful moments into negative ones. "When you find yourself in a toxic pattern, almost everything in your life is a cause for worry—getting ready to celebrate a milestone birthday? All I could think about was the fact that I was growing older. When I learned my best friend was getting married, I obsessed over the idea that I would end up alone for the rest of my life. When I was promoted last year with a hefty pay raise, I complained endlessly about the longer work hours and higher taxes," she confesses.

What it comes down to, Akanksha learned in therapy, is unhealthy coping. “I was told that when I struggle to deal with life's challenges and feel powerless in the face of stress or hardship, my defence mechanism is to dwell on them. It is almost like if you fixate on the problem, you can take away some of the power it has to hurt you—or at least to catch you by surprise,” she says. 

But all Akanksha did was give those threats (real or imagined) her power, letting them control her joy. “In the process, I became toxic.”

Saxena believes control is everything when looped into a toxic pattern. “What better way to deal with uneasiness and worry than to control everything and everyone in your life? And that typically means dominance by any means necessary, which explains the constant drama.”

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