How To Deal With Toxic Family Members

So, are y’all ready to stop letting family bring negativity, drama, and trauma to your lives? Ready to stop allowing them to treat you badly, take advantage of you, use you, or disrespect you?

If so, keep reading… but be careful though. If you’re not ready for truth bombs, tough love, and honesty you should shy away from this topic. This is a no holds barred blog article for people who need/want to protect their emotional wellbeing at ALL costs. With that being said, let’s get to it.

Cutting straight to the chase - the bottom line is - Someone being a member of your family gives them no excuse to treat you badly. More importantly, someone being a member of your family gives YOU no excuse to accept and tolerate fuck shit. Our generation has made “FOE (Family Over Everything” a popular buzz phrase, and I don’t necessarily disagree with it. Family is important. Ideally, family does come first and family is over everything - BUT, when family is the cause of pain, trauma, drama, and dysfunction in which they are unwilling to take accountability for or work towards engaging with you in a more considerate manner; they should no longer be considered family that is over everything. “Everything” does NOT include your peace. Period.

So, what do you do when the person/people that’s supposed to be over “everything”, the people who are supposed to love and uplift you; are the ones bringing the crap to your life? Here are a few different options for multiple scenarios.

1. Access the importance of this particular person’s role in your life and decide on how much work you are willing to put into resolving the problem and saving the relationship. This is important. You need to know how much effort you are willing to give and this is typically determined by how important this person is to you. Obviously, a parent would have a different level of importance then that of an uncle. The reason that you start with this step first is so that you create a set of personal boundaries and a set of commitments for working through problems with this family member.

2. Make a list. Write down the things that this person does that causes the conflict from your perspective. It is also helpful to write down the past actions and situations as examples of the family member’s characteristics that cause the problem. Make sure you take adequate time to complete this step. It is important to get your thoughts together so that you are able to clearly identify and articulate what this person does that causes a major issue for you.

3. Have a serious, heart to heart conversation with this family member. Explain what they do that causes a problem for you and provide them with examples of when they did it or said it. Also, tell them how it makes you feel. This may cause you to feel vulnerable (especially if you’ve tried it in the past and the conversation went left), but do it anyway. Lastly, advise them of your boundaries. Let them know what you will not tolerate and what behaviors/attitudes you would like them to work on to accommodate your feelings and needs. Now, I’m going to be honest. This step is where you will truly see IF this toxic family member relationship is one that can be worked on and if the problems are ones that can be worked through. Some of you are going to (or may have already) encounter conflict when you attempt to have this conversation. This is because most toxic people get defensive when confronted about their own behavior. So, if you are lucky enough to have a toxic family member who is emotionally evolved enough to listen to you and have a mature self accountable conversation - GREAT! Work it out and work through the problems. Keep talking and be open to hearing the family member’s thoughts, feelings, and perspective. Ask for and give apologies where you see fit or where you need them. Revisit the topic as needed if you see/feel the person straying back to old ways.

For those of you dealing with a toxic TOXIC family member, as mentioned above, you will likely run into the wall of defensiveness when telling a person how you feel which will result in you feeling like you are wasting your time. Some of you may have even rolled your eyes when you got to step 3 because you’ve already tried this, and it has gotten you nowhere. If this describes you, here’s a few suggestions specific to your situation.

1. Decide if the toxic family member is worth the effort. How important is it to you, to have a relationship with this person. I know this is a repeat of step 1 above, but stay with me.

2. Think about how bad the previous confrontation really was and rate it on a scale of 1-10, one being not so bad and ten being a knock down drag out fight. This will help you determine if you should make another attempt at talking with them.

a. If you rated 1-4 AND you feel that the toxic family member is worth the effort, keep going and try again.

b. If you rated the family member a 5, this could go either way. To make a decision if you want to try to talk to them again, think about how this conversation affected your mental well being the last time you tried. If you were mentally and emotionally ok, then make another attempt to have a heart to heart conversation mentioned above. But, if it disturbed you in such a way that you felt emotionally traumatized, you may want to skip this suggestion altogether.

c. If you rated 6-10, skip this suggestion. Period.

3. If your conversation confrontation rating suggests that you should make another attempt. GREAT! Contact that person and try again.

If your conversation confrontation rating suggests that you abort the verbal

conversation mission, you can try this:

a. Write the toxic family member a letter instead of trying to talk verbally. This will allow the person to ingest your thoughts and feelings privately and independently. Sometimes, reading prevents a defensive response and prevents undue confrontation and arguments.

Communication is the nourishment of all relationships. The reason that I am providing you all steps that lead right into communicating with the toxic family member is because it HAS to be done in order for the problems within the relationship to be resolved and worked through.

I also want to be sure that, before we get to the next set of suggestions and steps, you have made a true and committed effort to try and talk with your loved one. Remember, family relationships ARE important. We should want them to work and not easily discard them just because they may be difficult to maneuver. So, to be confident that you have made 100% effort to work with your toxic family member, I have created a checklist of things YOU should do to try and make this work. Click here to download it.

Now, if you feel confident that you have done what that checklist suggests, and STILL there is no change or resolution for you and your toxic family member’s relationship, I provided some tips on how to deal with these toxic people in your life.

1. Don’t.

2. Block.

3. Delete.

4. Cut off all communication.

Or if you don’t want to be extreme and completely cut the person out of your life, here are tips for you.

1. Disconnect your emotional bond and tie to this person.

2. Distance yourself from dealing with/seeing them regularly.

3. Do not engage with their negativity and drama.

There are two sides to dealing with toxic family members. One side is they are family and you love them, and we should make efforts to work through problems with people we love. Working through problems is normal, good, and healthy relationship stuff. I do not condone giving up on your loved ones over silly things that can be resolved with a conversation. Sometimes, it is our lack of (or fear of) telling a person how we feel that prevents problems from being resolved. This is why I walk through the steps above, encouraging you to talk with your family and be open and honest about your feelings. Don’t underestimate how many little misunderstandings turn into family not speaking for years. It happens EVERY day. Don’t be one of those people who cut off family because you weren’t mature enough to TALK like an adult. Oftentimes, people are not aware of how something that they are doing is hurtful to others, so if you just tell them and set some boundaries, they may oblige and apologize out of sheer lack of awareness of your feelings. So, give it a chance. TALK. Try to make it work if you love your family.

Here is the second side. Some of you try tooooooo damn hard to maintain the “family” relationship loyalty and are allowing family to get away with treating you poorly while you continue to have their back in a crunch JUST because they ARE family. This is unacceptable!! Some of you have genuinely, humbly, and respectfully tried to talk to your toxic family member and have been gaslit, manipulated, accused of being a liar, refused an apology, argued with about YOUR OWN feelings, and some mo shit!! And yet, y’all STILL allow these toxic people in your life. This is emotional abuse. It is traumatizing and self esteem crushing. Just because someone is family, it does not give them a pass to treat you like shit. I don’t care who it is - mother, father, sister, brother… I don’t care if you shared the womb with the person, if they are causing emotional distress, either they have to stop IMMEDIATELY or be cut out of your life (or one of the alternatives above) EXPEDITIOUSLY.

The two sides of dealing with toxic family members is, some of you give up on your loved ones too easily and others of you deal with their nonsense too much and for too long, and then make excuses for why you allow their crappy behavior.

Bottom line - no one, and I mean NO ONE should be able to take or disrupt your peace, mental stability, self esteem, emotional well being, or physical well being. If someone you love is tap dancing on any of these, try to have a straight forward (no sugar coating either) heart to heart conversation to resolve the matter and come to a compromisable set of changes between the two of you. If that person is willing to do the work to maintain the relationship then you should work with them. All relationships take effort. But, if this person is incapable or just flat out unwilling to resolve AFTER you have made genuine attempts to work through it. Chuck ‘em. That’s it.

Love y’all, mean it.

Breezy Phoenix