Literary Pixie

Below you’ll find a list of toxic relational strategies, which I have copied from Unfuck Your Friendships by Dr. Faith G. Harper

• Anger as a Means of Control: When we use anger to control and manipulate the behavior of others. The difference between this kind of anger and impulsive anger is that the anger response is turned off the minute we get what we want.
• Authoritarian dominance: When we hold rigid boundaries and expectations that things be done “our” way
• Belittling: When we treat others (or their feelings, concerns, point of view) as comparatively unimportant.
• Black-and-White Decreeing: When we term everything in extremes (“I can never trust women,” or “All men are players.”)
• Blaming: When we place blame elsewhere or insist that others are responsible for our behavior. Also could be termed a refusal to accept responsibility.
• Compartmentalization of behavior: When we compartmentalize our behavior to keep from feeling guilty, to justify our actions, or minimize the seriousness of them. (“I only cheat when out of town for work, never when I’m home”)
• Credit seeking: When we want credit for good behavior or credit for extremes not in engaged in rather than accepting accountability for our behavior in question.
• Criminal pride: Feeling a sense of identity and accomplishment from hurting others (“This is just how I am” or “This is just how I grew up”)
• Diverting: When we change the subject to something more comfortable, intentionally redirect the conversation, bring up another problem, or intentionally miss the point of the conversation at hand.
• Entitlement: When we think someone owes us something or the world owes us something because we are special, different, or have been through more than others have.
• Fact Stacking: When we arrange facts in a way to explain our behavior, while omitting other facts that don’t work in our favor.
• Fairness Violation: When we believe that everyone is treating us unfairly and/or when we keep a mental scorecard regarding “fairness” in the relationship.
• Fight instigating: When we encourage others to fight, then we stand back and watch.
• Frequency minimization: When we minimize the behavior based on frequency. (“It didn’t happen five times, it was three times at most!”) This is a form of “playing defense attorney”.
• Gaslighting: When we deliberately obscure or twist facts to make others question their reality, memory, and ultimate sanity.
• Grandiosity: When we make little things into huge, important things so we can shift the focus of attention.
• Harm Discounting: When we insist that our actions did not cause the level of harm that others say they did (“I did it, but it is certainly not as bad as you think.”) This is another form of “playing defense attorney”.
• Helplessness: When we act incapable or helpless and unable to do things for ourselves, needing others do them for us.
• Impulsiveness: When we can’t wait for what we want and do not want to delay our desires, and pursue these desires at the expense of others.
• Intention Denial: When we deny our intention for harm. It may be true that we didn’t intend to be harmful or didn’t plan a way to control someone else, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of our behavior and it is another way of diminishing our responsibility for our actions. (“I didn’t mean it” or “Things just got out of control”)
• Justice Seeking: When we punish or control others and frame it as punitive toward others because of their behavior toward us. This is another form of “playing defense attorney”.
• Justifying: When we justify our behavior so we don’t have to take responsibility (“I wouldn’t have hit you if you hadn’t made me so angry”.)
• Keeping the score: When we explain or justify behavior based on the past actions of others or ourselves (“I’ve always done more than you, so it’s not a big deal that I didn’t do what I said I would do this week.”)
• Lying: When we intentionally state that things are not true, or do not include all details in an attempt to deceive.
• Making excuses: Similar to justifying, in that we use it to explain away our behavior rather than hold ourselves accountable (“I was depressed that day.”)
• Making Fools of: When we exaggerate the mistakes and weaknesses of others to intentionally demean them and lessen their voice and authority.
• Minimizing: When we try to make a behavior seem like it has less impact on those around us (“At least I only made out with them and didn’t sleep with them”).
• Mind reading: When we think we know what other people are thinking and make decisions based on these assumptions, rather than asking.
• Ownership: When we feel a sense of ownership of other people, and feel entitled to control their behavior.
• Phoniness: When we communicate and apologize insincerely, without fully talking responsibility and without intent to change (maybe just intending to stop getting caught)
• Playing dumb: When we act confused about a situation to avoid responsibility for our behavior, or continuously ask questions that imply we don’t understand what others are communicating.
• Projecting: When we presume what others are thinking, feeling or doing based on what we are thinking, feeling, or doing.
• Pushing buttons: When we intentionally use information about another person to get them upset in order to distract from our behavior.
• Secretive Behavior: When we hide our activities and omit information to keep people from knowing what we are doing.
• Selfish intent: When we think and act in terms of our needs only, and not the needs of others.
• Self-pitying: When we use statements decrying how bad we are in order to get attention paid to us (“No one cares about me” or “Everyone would be better off without me around”)
• Spiritual/Philosophical Bypassing: When we invoke religion or spirituality over personal responsibility in an attempt to ascribe different meaning to a situation or to avoid doing the work around uncomfortable emotions.
• Uniqueness: When we believe that we are unique in such a way that consideration of others (and sometimes rules and laws regarding conduct) do not apply to us.
• Vagueness: When we respond vaguely or unclearly in order to distract from the truth or the content of the conversation.
• Victimization Reversal: When we present ourselves as the victim in a scenario, rather than taking responsibility for our role in any events that occured.
• Wearing down: when we continuously challenge others to give us what we want until they acquiesce out of exhaustion over the continued fighting.
• Zero state: Feeling worthless, like nothing, a nobody, and or/empty inside and behaving in ways to help fill that void. This is often where narcissistic behavior stems from.

Some questions to reflect and consider! Feel free to comment below:

• What is one strategy that you have noticed in yourself that you want to commit to changing? How will you do so?
• What is one strategy that you have noticed in your current relationships that you are committed to no longer accepting? How will you do so?