It seems that everyone knows a toxic person who is making life difficult for everyone around them.  Some may call them a “hater”.  Others may have heard them described as “narcissist”, “passive aggressive,” “manipulative” or “frenemy” (someone who pretends to be your friend but is really your enemy), “gossip,” “back stabber,” “shy,” or “introverted” Regardless if your toxic person is young or old, rich or poor, has a successful (appearing) career or a menial job, the characteristics and the damage they are causing to you and their fellows all come from the same barrel of toxic waste.

 

While any person could experience one of these attitudes at some time, if your toxic person sounds alarmingly like the examples below, you are likely dealing with a convincingly “normal” person who is actually psychotic.  They may have as one of their purposes in life to ruin yours because they have found that you are a good person who needs to be stopped and eventually made into nothing.

 

The definition of hater from Urbandictionary.com includes the following:

“A person that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.”

It’s one thing to have a fleeting moment of jealousy over a friend who took an amazing vacation or a co-worker who bought a luxury car.  But it can be hard to fathom why a best friend or spouse, parent or child, business partner, boss or co-worker doesn’t want you to be successful.

If you are sickeningly familiar with the following patterns, then you may very well have spotted a toxic person, someone it’s time to detox from!  Getting away from the toxic person may give you a fresh start at a new life with people who GENUINELY want to see you succeed and encourage you to do things the toxic person always prevented you from trying or experiencing.

 

Signs you have a toxic person trying to secretly ruin your life:

• Secretly want you to do poorly, thus guiding you towards destructive decisions that seemed reasonable but ended in failure.
• Dote on you when you are sick and doing poorly.
• Give you “advice” in the name of “helping you” really designed to make you doubt your capabilities or creations.
• Minimizes successes you are having.
• Encourages or insists you take psychiatric medication.
• Holds you back from pursuing your dreams for “very good reasons”.
• Guilts you into doing things their way.
• Causes you to constantly calculate how you can avoid invoking their wrath thus frequently resulting in not doing what you want to do.
• Causes you to do things you don’t want to do because you are worried they will hurt themselves or commit suicide.
• Causes you to do things because you are afraid they will spread secrets you believe will ruin your reputation or will get you in trouble.
• Stay in a relationship with them because they have convinced you that no one else will love you like they do
• Convinced you that no one could possibly love the likes of you and that you are lucky that they keep you.
• Convinces you to not leave them after you work up the courage to break off the relationship; they throw you a crumb of hope that things will be better yet conditions immediately revert to the misery you were hoping to escape.
• Alienates you from friends and family, including your parents, kids and relatives for “good reasons”, resulting in having no friends to lean on, making it even harder to leave the relationship.  They don’t directly tell you to not see your friends, rather they put inordinate pressure on you to spend time otherwise.
• Always critical of anything good you have accomplished to convince you it was not worthwhile.
• Constantly critical that you are not meeting their expectations, leading to extraordinary measures to please them or make them happy, yet never achieving it.
• Accusing YOU of being manipulative when you try to assert yourself against their injustices.
• Constantly carping on you that any little thing you have done to them was a heinous act.
• Drug users who continually break your heart with repeated promises to quit but continually revert to using. 
• Physical abusers.
• Accusations from them that you are moody and uncooperative, making you feel guilty so that you will try to be more accommodating of their desires.
• Secrecy about their personal affairs including limited access to their social profiles, if they even have one (most don’t or only maintain the most minimal information if they do.)
• Secrecy about their communications including texts, emails, phone and email passwords, personal appointments with “friends” you have rarely or never met.
• Having a bad feeling that you are being lied to but completely unable to prove it.
• Feeling in a constant state of confusion about things that “don’t add up”  when you question them about their whereabouts or are unable to reach them.
• Experiencing anger at invading their personal space like seeing their password, phone, email, texts, using their car or looking in their briefcase, purse, trunk, glovebox etc.
• Experiencing anger or threatening you into not talking to their co-workers or parents, etc. without their knowledge.
• Claiming you are an embarrassment to them for some imagined way you have slighted them, especially if you go around by talking to their “friends” without their permission.
• Experiencing anger or retribution from them in response to putting something about them on social media.
• A feeling that you can’t quite pinpoint, but noticing you continually have “bad luck” like accidents and illnesses, job troubles, money or legal issues.

If you were unlucky enough to be married to a toxic person, but now are lucky enough to be divorced, good on you!  But if you are unlucky enough to have kids with them, be warned that they will be on a mission to make sure you become NOTHING to your very own children, despite all protests and attestations otherwise. 

 

What does this all mean?  What if you were reading this and a lightbulb went off that this is YOUR life??   Then it is time to assess what you can do to disentangle yourself from this person on an immediate basis.  You may need to make some preparations.  You will need to be secretive while you make your plans.  There is no such thing as fairness when it comes to dealing with manipulative, toxic people.  But don’t delay.  Your sanity, your life, your safety and your integrity are at stake.  It will take courage.  You may not know how you could possibly survive on your own.  That is the program the manipulator has been running on you!  They want you to believe you are nothing without them!  

 

The fact is once you are disconnected from someone who essentially wants you weak, sick and unable, your true abilities to find survival for yourself in the way of an income,  a place to live, a new mate and a new way of life will be better than you dreamed for yourself in a long time.  Try to find one person you can really trust who will be on your side and get their physical help and emotional support. If you don’t have any friends, contact a minister at a church.  Contact the author of this article and they will guide you!  You may really need another person to keep encouraging you.  The manipulator’s mind games can be VERY difficult to shake off.  If you don’t have kids, then consider yourself lucky.  Get as far away and keep all of your personal information secret from them and never contact them again.

 

Here is a program for “de-toxing” from the manipulator, small but effective steps to take so you can begin your new life:

• Do not act like ANYTHING is different, continue to treat them the way you always have.  Otherwise they may get suspicious and may step up any spying efforts they are conducting without your knowledge.
• Don’t do malicious things!  That is, don’t rack up joint credit cards or do something that will cause major embarrassment to the manipulator that can recoil or backfire on you— he or she will turn any of those actions on you to make you look crazy or cause you extra money or legal problems.  Don’t lay any more thorns in your road than are necessary. If there are legal points, then handle those professionally with legal advice as you make your preparations.
  
• Do not conduct ANY of your secret business on your regular phone, text line, email or computer from home.  Those who keep secrets like to spy on others through any means possible and your manipulator may have methods of spying on your emails, texts or voicemails without any knowledge on your part. Do not do ANY internet searches for this program from the home computer or your regular phone.  These are easy to trace and will raise suspicion.  Erasing the browsing history and the cache may also raise suspicions.
• Set up a UPS mailbox or PO Box and use that for all of your mail and your address for any new accounts you need to setup, especially while you work out a new place to live.
• Get a new phone, a new number and a new phone account and do all of your new business from that phone.  Continue using your old phone for your “normal” life so that it won’t raise any red flags if incoming communications were to stop.
  
• Set up a new bank account with money that you are entitled to from the joint finances. 
• Change over your direct deposit for work or any other payments that are legitimately yours to your new account before you leave.  Don’t do anything unethical by diverting payments that are legitimately the manipulator’s.
• Apply for a new credit card or two with only your name – get it approved and mailed to your new secret PO Box.  You can still use your joint income legitimately to qualify.
• Do not give out your new phone or address to anyone who is not 100% on your side–you don’t want someone feeling sorry for the toxic waste you are about to dump and give out your new information.
• Locate your birth certificate, passport and important legal documents and make copies of things like marriage and divorce certificates, legal agreements, wills, trusts, insurance policies, last 3 years of tax returns.  Use a thumb drive to copy files if you don’t have a printer. Secretly take files to the copy store to make hard copies if they aren’t on computers to download.
• Consider hiring a private investigator before you leave to follow the manipulator or investigate your finances if you believe you need some evidence of their misdeeds prior to getting a divorce.  It is a fact that they are committing acts that are damaging to you and definitely would be damaging to their reputation. They will become much more careful after you leave – easier to catch them beforehand because they may change their patterns (temporarily) after they know the gig is up.  Let’s be real, there are usually mistresses, prostitutes, extra marital partners, stealing, hidden assets, ad nauseum.
• Secretly begin moving out your personal possessions and mementos while the manipulator is out of the house.  Try to ensure things at home look as normal as possible.  You could mock up you are repainting a room and need to cover things up or move them around or box them up if necessary.  Put other pictures in frames or re-arrange to make it look like you have re-decorated.  Don’t leave filing cabinets messy.
• If you don’t have any local people to help you, get a small storage unit if you need a safe place to keep things.  Make sure to use your new credit card to pay for it.
• Figure out how to head off any situations with your financial accounts that the manipulator may use to get revenge against you once you leave — i.e. credit cards that have your name on them that could leave you responsible for their bills.
• Talk to an attorney and make any preparations that may be needed legally or financially i.e. if you have a prenuptial agreement or significant joint property and finances or if you think they might get physically dangerous as well as how to initially handle things with your kids so you don’t get accused of kidnapping.
• Once your preps are as complete as you can handle, leave without fanfare and WITHOUT confronting them.  There is nothing to gain from the confrontation. Leave a plain note without explanation, blame, reaction or drama.  Leave with as clean of a conscience as you can.  Do not cause damage on the way out.  Use your own judgment on doing your normal “duties” for the household before you depart. Leave an instruction as to what to expect for next steps.  Grab the last of your belongings and GET OUT while they are away.

 

After you leave, do NOT contact them.  Conduct any business through third parties so you do not get pulled back into the drama.  If you have kids, save yourself years of headaches by insisting on using a third party software application to track all communications.  Do not allow any direct emails or texts to come to your personally.  The manipulator will NEVER be the “co-parent” the courts insist on.  They will make your life a misery on every scheduling item, decision and financial disagreement from now until the kids reach adult age.  Third party software can create an ethics presence and hold them in check and prevent so much drama and it provides an EXACT trail of documentation without dispute.  Insist on this at the very beginning.

 

By making your preparations, ensure you have NO reason to go back.  Household possessions can be easily re-purchased.  When the manipulator realizes you have left, they will be very angry but will likely pretend to be very hurt.  They factually need you and are vampires sucking your life force from you.  They will try to be VERY convincing and will make you doubt your own reality about living life without them. They will play the same “records” you have heard many times; they will slime you with the usual toxic waste.  Do not let this deter you or doubt your decisions to detoxify from their drama and manipulations. 

 

Take the advice of others who went before you — getting out with your life and your sanity is the most important thing of all.  While it may be the hardest thing you have ever done, if you dump the toxic waste, you will finally have a chance to achieve true happiness, real love and success that you would never attain with the manipulator.

To find out more about toxic personalities, known formally as Suppressive Persons, take this free course online, called The Cause of Suppression, to learn more about the true nature of Suppressive Persons and ALL of the damage they do to normal people.