We are social creatures, needing people for our best fit survival and enjoyment of life. Most people are good people, inspiring us to be better, encouraging us and being honest enough to tell us what we can improve in. Unfortunately, not all people are good people. Some are downright awful. We can use some tools to identify that someone is not a good person, that they are Abusive and or Toxic. The best general strategy for dealing with Abusive / Toxic people is to keep away from them. Sometimes we can’t do that – we have to interact with them. At that point, we need to do what we can to manage the interactions and mitigate harm. That’s what we will cover here.

Identifying Abusive & Toxic People

Toxic people are generally abusive and may be narcissistic (Narcissism and NPD). There are a few easy ways to tell if you are with a toxic person, although working out which kind of Toxic person can be a bit more complex. Either way, testing for toxic allows you to work out enough to know to get away or, at worst, try to manage them.

Definitions

There are various genres of Problematic Person (PP). A person can be a hybrid of all 3.

Abusive: Someone who is causing you harm.
- This may be physical, financial, social, emotional or identity harm.
- It doesn’t matter if they don’t understand that they are hurting you, and it is an accident they can’t seem to stop, or if they do know and either don’t care that you are harmed, or enjoy that you are harmed. They are abusive.
- Frequently people who are:
  - Selfish:
    - Narcissistic, charming but selfish and self centred. Harm is not he point, it is collateral. They generally don’t see the point of changing for someone else’s sake.
    - NPD, charming but selfish and self centred. Very two faced (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). Harm and control is the point.
    - See Narcissism & NPD for a full discussion.
  - Insight impairment such as Intellectual Disorder, cannot comprehend the connection between what they are doing and the effect is has on you. May be a specific lack of insight or pervasive.
Toxic: Someone who is dangerous to associate with.
- It can be very hard to pin down that they are harmful, but everyone seems to be harmed. Often plays mind games to trick or provoke people into actions that they will regret.
Domestic Violence / Cyclic Violence: Someone who uses the cycle of violence, most often a family member, but can be a friend or work college.
- See Domestic Violence for full information.

Quick Tests

The following are fairly quick tests you can run if you are concerned that someone may be abusive, controlling or toxic.

The “No” Test
Reflecting on Your Limits
Trapped Test
Comfort Test
Schrödinger‘s Douchebag

For the full details on these, check our our Testing For Toxic page.

Traffic Light System, not as quick…

For an in depth system to work out if someone is problematic, we also have our four part Traffic Light System.

The Flag System helps you know what Green Flags indicate that someone’s behaviour is good, and which Red Flags warn you that someone may not be.
Trust Zones extends the Flag System into knowing that when someone has earned the Green Zone (comfort / good), Amber Zone (caution) and Red Zone (concern). This helps us know what level of alertness to be for people who have earned these zones, so that we don’t waste energy being over alert around Green Zone people, or foolishly under alert for Red Zone people.
The Toxic People – Mind Toolset is a tool for helping people to better interact with others. It steps through assuming the good in people, letting people make mistakes and learn from them, down to recognising that some people cannot resist being harmful either due to an inability to learn or a lack of desire to be nice. At this point we change the Assumption of Good to an Assumption of Malice.
Lastly the Three Pillars Method helps guide on how forgiving to be for people who are genuinely trying to do better, so that we don’t give our toxic person yet another second try (is that 432 so far?) When is it fair to say “I’m done with you?”

Avoidance, the best strategy

Once you know that someone is problematic in any of the combinations defined above, your tactic is to avoid them.

If you have sufficient evidence and sway with the group, alert them to the problems and encourage them to move the person on. If they do not do so, then consider moving on yourself. If you have given them sufficient evidence and they continue to support them, they are enabling, colluding or part of the problem. If you have not got enough evidence, then distance yourself after you have warned them and see what happens over the next few years.

Work / Organisation

If the person is harmful enough, or your fear of them is sufficiently high, then you may need to consider a new workplace. All workplaces have someone that is not what I would call a good person (green zone), but that doesn’t automatically mean the person is bad either (red zone). If this person is a red zone person, then strongly consider getting that new job, or get out of the organisation and find somewhere else.

Feeling Stuck

Sometimes we feel like we can’t get away. That may be true if there is a criminal justice reason, or you literally cannot get a new job and can’t afford to be unemployed. In pretty much every other situation, when people say “I can’t get out”, they have often blinded themselves to the ways out.

There will be a cost. There is always a cost.

Check out Escaping Abuse for more information.

Managing & Mitigating

When you can’t get away from the person, you will need to manage them and mitigate the harm.

Problematic People will abuse the social contracts, holding you to them while they break the rules. While you generally can’t go straight to aggressive, you don’t need to be polite or honest either. They broke the contract first by their actions, so you aren’t bound by the usual rules either. Just by your conscience.

Steering the Conversation

We may not be able to alway able to avoid the person. Sometimes we go to a party, and there they are, or we can’t get out of the workplace that they are in for various reasons.

When this happens, we are looking for short-term solutions to minimise the risk to you, by Steering the Conversation. Most of this is by keeping information about yourself minimised and avoiding their invitations to either over share or to fight.

Deflecting & Distraction

A good way to manage the conversation is to deflect the person away from any topics that may be sensitive or risky. You want to either give closed answers rather than open, or redirect them, that is just shift the topic to something else.

Eg: PP – “Are you still with Jack?”

Possible deflecting responses.

Closed answer – “Yes.” or “No.” depending on the answer you want to give them.
Redirect / distraction – “I hear the eagles lost their last game.”
Blunt response – “I’m not talking about that.”

Prompting Self Talk

Problematic People often love to talk about themselves. If you can trigger their special interest topic, which is often them, then they’ll focus more on that than you.

Pregenerated Answers to Sensitive Topics

There will be some things that you don’t want to talk about. You may be feeling anxious about what you will say if you get asked.

Work out the most likely things you don’t want to be asked about.
Work out a statement you are willing to make if cornered into saying something.
- Try to keep these short, closed and consistent.
- If they ask you more about that same topic, repeat yourself.
- If they accuse you of being rude, mean or evasive, shrug and ask them about themselves.

Avoid Depth, Complexity and Fighting

Problematic People are often trying to push you to feel, act against your interests, or divluge information.

To avoid this, keep the discussion shallow and simple. If they push you to feel something, using emotive language or hijacking social norms (“I just want to understand why you hate me” or “you are being unfair” etc), then shut this down by deflecting, closed answers or distracting (as outlined above). If they don’t respect that, leave (as below).

If the person invites you to fight by saying inflammatory things, making accusations or false claims, then you can elect not to fight or give any oxygen to that fire. If they keep pushing, leave. The Problematic Person is trying to provoke you to fight / defend yourself, and that makes you vulnerable. The thing they don’t want is for you to be immune to their provocations (Grey Stoning) or leave (Exit).

The Problematic Person isn’t the only risk here though. You may have a strong desire to understand why they have done what they have done, or to try to fix the problem even after you have reasonably established that they are a Problematic Person.

Don’t.

You Can’t Fix Them. They Aren’t Ignorant.

Part of figuring out that these people fit the title or Abuse, Toxic, Perpetrator of Domestic Violence etc is that they had problematic behaviours pointed out to them, a reasonable explanation of why it is problematic and despite this they have not changed their behaviours.

While they may claim that they don’t understand, it doesn’t matter anymore. They have shown that they either can’t comprehend the effect of their actions (lack of insight), or dont care about the consequences (malice). You don’t have to understand that what you do is a problem to respect that the person doesn’t like that behaviour and try something different – yet these people do so anyway. This concept is Grey’s Law, “advanced levels of incompetence are indistinguishable from malice”, covered in the Toxic People Mind Toolset.

You Can’t Understand Them.

Unless you are also a Problematic Person, you can no more understand why they do these problematic behaviours than you know what it is like to be a bat and use echolocation to navigate. The reason why they do what they do is so alien to you that it is impossible to understand them.

All you can do is avoid them where possible, or manage them where not.

Grey Stoning

“Grey Stoning” also known as “”Grey Rocking” or “Going Neutral”, is a strategy used to disengage from toxic or abusive individuals by becoming uninteresting and unresponsive, aiming to make them lose interest in engaging with you. Toxic people, often some variant of narcissistic, crave emotional feedback. Grey Stoning effectively starves them, de-identifying you as a source of their emotional food. Grey Stoning requires you to work out how to give a Grey kind of emotion back to them – not happy, angry, disgusted, sad or scared – which is not how most people interact with others. Grey Stoning is a learned skill.

We have a full page dedicated to explaining Grey Stoning.

Pedestalling

When someone says that you are honest and fair just prior to discussing a problem, you have just been primed (prompted and set by default) to be “honest and fair” in what you are going to do about that problem. The other person placed you on a pedestal that you would like to live up to. Someone might say “after I tell them this, people don’t want to interact with me”, which may use a reverse psychology trick, because you don’t want to be one of those people. Again, this tactic is making use of placing you on a pedestal, but this time you have been put in an uncomfortable one and so you wish to prove that don’t belong.

Pedestalling is a manipulation tactic. All interactions, at their inherent root, are manipulative. The difference between good and bad manipulation is choices that you give generally good people, and if the target is a generally good or bad (toxic) person. Pedestalling can be used for good or ill.

When interacting with a known toxic person, you use this skill by opening up with something along the lines of “people like and respect you, because …”. The next part is the kind of behaviour you would like to promote the toxic person to conform to, such as “helpful”. Once you have set up the platform, you can now tell them the thing you would like them to do. “Jake and I were hoping to get this things done, but we can’t do it ourselves. Can you help us?”

To make this a good use of the pedestalling skill:

Set the positive public image that the toxic person wants to be seen in.
Define a problem that needs someone to do something.
Ask the person to do the thing.
If they do the thing, afterwards, thank them for it, ideally in some kind of public setting.

Step 1 is the pedestalling, appealing to their ego and fears of negative public regard. Most toxic people very much want to be seen as good, but don’t see the need to do so if they won’t get credit for it.

Step 2 is clearly specifying why there is a need for someone to do something.

Step 3 is a request for them to do the thing, with a strong implication that they would succeed at Step 1 if they do so. This is the choice bit, where they have the real option to say “no”, and thus this is not bad manipulation.

Step 4 is giving them that public image where possible, or at least private positive feedback when it isn’t.

Knowing When to Leave

Ideally, when we have to interact with a problematic person, it is smart to pre-set a time limit for the interactions, before you either run out of energy to maintain the safe and pleasant seeming interactions or before the problematic person escalates (eg predictably reaching intoxication); know when to leave when the situation changes (you run out of energy, they escalate unpredictably, some other external factor causes problems); and to ensure you have a safe way to get out and away (your own transport or a method to get a lift etc).

Limiting Time

As stated above, we are assuming you can’t avoid the problematic person and need to interact with them. This could be that you go to a social gathering and they are there, or you are required to interact with them for a work related reason etc.

Ideally you want to not do actions that will empower them to state that you are the problem and they are innocent. It is best to avoid arming your problematic person with materials that they can use to deflect suspicion away from them and on to you. As such, we want to try to maintain safe, pleasant interactions. See above for Steering the Conversation for the verbal side of this.

This is expensive. Avoiding traps, commitments, maintaining your composure and being very present to the conversation is not our usual behaviour and thus takes a lot of executive function. That means it is costly compared to talking with trusted friends.

If you run out of energy, you run the risk of going up Stress Mountain, where you will lose choices, behave poorly and become vulnerable. Before you become fatigued, you need to leave.

If you know ahead of time, that is when you want to do your assessment of your current abilities. If you are low in energy, or feel compromised in any other way, do your best to postpone the interaction. Unless there’s a huge consequence for not going ahead (eg court or losing your job), you always have the right to refuse. If you can’t do this interoception check prior to the meeting, then do it as soon as you can when you find out that this is happening now.

Work out your current inner energy level (spoons) and estimate how long you might maintain safe pleasant interaction with the problematic person. Halve (or quarter if you historically find half is risky) that as when you should do another manual interoception check in to see if your energy is where you estimated so that you can adjust the time. Leave before you run out of ability to maintain the safe and pleasant you.

Exit Strategy

When we have to interact with problematic people, it is important to have our exit strategy in place.

Logistical Exit

How are you going to leave when you plan to, or if you have to leave early? Will you be walking, driving your car, getting picked up by someone?

The less direct control you have in how you are going away from the place, the more you may need to ensure that you have a back up plan. For example, I could ask my friend to pick me up from a specific local park, so that if I need to leave early, I can hang out there until the designated time, if I can’t contact them to let them know that things led to me leaving early. I may have enough cash on me to get a taxi or similar if I need to. I should always ensure that I have a good charge on my phone, ideally have a portable battery charger and cable so that I can hopefully charge my phone elsewhere. I may also want to write down a phone number I can call for help with and keep that in my pocket if I am concerned that the problematic person may confiscate my phone.

Pregenerated Reasons

It is handy to start the meeting with a stated time limit, and or warning that you need to leave if X happens. Then you can always pretend that X happened if you are not able to just say “Oh, I need to go.”

Do not engage with them demanding to know why. You are allowed to just repeat “I need to go” and leave. You don’t owe problematic people the peace of mind to explain why, or have a good reason.

Often, a good way to feel more comfortable is to say you are catching up with someone else, perhaps your lift person, or just a friend. Make the arrangement with this friend specifically to avoid lying if you want. Do not succumb to the problematic person trying to incorporate the friend into the interactions / meeting – mostly by not telling the problematic person who it is who you are seeing. They don’t need to know, and you don’t need to tell them. Just the simple “a friend” is enough. If they start listing who so that you will tell them, practice your poker face and just repeat “a friend”. If they keep going, that’s your cue to leave.

Cues to Leave

You feel in immediate physical danger, or you have been physically harmed
The person is pushing you to feel emotional.
The person is being repetitively demanding and not respecting your clearly stated “no” or in the example above “a friend”.
They have become somewhat intoxicated.
- They do not have to be fully intoxicated. If you suspect their chosen behaviours are now impaired, that is enough to cut the interaction short.
You have reached your time limit or are running out of energy to maintain the interaction.

Any of the above are fair reasons for you to cut things short and exit. You don’t have to explain why at all. You may chose to say “I need to go now” before leaving. You should avoid giving more details than that.