Understanding the Toxic Goal

Why Grey Stoning Works

Now that we understand the Toxic Goal, the counter to this is to minimise your emotive response to them.

Let us separate out the words feeling, emotion and mood. Your brain does a great deal of background calculations about the world and informs the conscious part of you of their results via a feeling. This feeling will guide your in the moment priorities of actions to take, whether that is to enjoy what is happening (joy), act on a threat (fear), prepare for the future (joy), fix a thing (anger), get away from a thing (disgust) or adjust to change (sadness). If we show how we feel to someone else, we are emoting our feeling – an emotion. An average of how we have been feeling is our mood.

What we chose to show can be different to how we actually feel.

Importantly, I can feel sad, but I can emote happy or neutral.

The Toxic Person wants to push you into a feeling, so that they feel in control and powerful, and from that feeling, they feel happy for a few moments. When they have had their fill from your emotion, they will trigger you again when they want to be happy again.

By starving the Toxic Person of emotion, the cost of trying to get happiness from you becomes too high and they find someone else.

Grey Stoning Illusions

We need to be cautious of a few illusions around Grey Stoning

1. You cannot reform the toxic person
   • Once you know that they are harmful, they have shown they won’t reform.
2. It is not responsibility to save others from the Toxic Person by taking their abuse
   • Toxic People will often abuse others as well, so your thought to sacrifice yourself for others is an illusion
3. The Toxic Person will claim you are being mean and hurting them, you aren’t.
   • They are mean to you and hurting you. Failing to give them their satisfaction when they abuse you is not mean, cruel or hurting them.
   • Stifling their enjoyment of your joy is not mean, cruel or hurtful either. While some people will use “positive rewards for positive behaviour, no reward for bad behaviour” to try to guide their Toxic Person into being a better person (with some success), this tactic ultimately fails as the Toxic Person is not going to be reformed – they will just be more careful about how they hurt you, or they now take it out on others behind your back.

Neutral Emoting

Whenever you are dealing with the Toxic Person, it is important to maintain a calm and neutral demeanor. That is, aim for a flattened and emotion starved tone of voice

• Tone of voice: aim for neutral or uninterested tone and inflection.
• Facial expression: be conscious of your facial expressions and aim for a neutral mild smile or no smile. Be careful about the expression in your eyes – avoid wrinkling them up or shifting your eyebrows. Try to keep the tilt of your head level. Practice in a mirror.
• Body expression: a significant amount of our feeling state is expressed in our bodies movements and how we hold ourselves.
  • We want to be neutral in our body language – vertical rather than leaning towards or away from them.
  • We want to be still – suppress fidgeting and stimming.
  • We also want to be able to back away if they become violent.
• Eye contact
  • We are looking for the Goldilocks Zone of eye contact – not too much, not too little.
  • Too much seems like anger or a challenge
  • Too little seems like fear

Decreased Engagement

The Toxic Person wants to get you engaged with them. In doing so, they can better work out the effect they are having on you. As you begin to use Grey Stoning on them, they will seek to pull you back in and regain control of you.

• Minimal responses
  • Limiting your answers to “yes,” “no,” or brief, neutral statements, kind of like dot points
  • Avoid paragraph or essay answers
  • Beware them Sea Lioning you
    • Sea Lioning: “I’m just asking questions because I want to know!”
    • They have had plenty of time to learn what they are doing wrong when you were trying to help them not be toxic. Now that you are pulling away, they will fake being interested in learning and growing so that you will get pulled back in to their control.
  • We cover this in detail in Escaping Abuse
• Short and concise interactions
  • Keeping conversations brief and to the point.
  • As soon as you can, leave. If you need to make a reason for yourself, have one prepared.

Avoid Emotional Hooks

Toxic People fear losing control of their pets. When you begin to use Grey Stoning, they may give you some space to “heal”, before they try to bring you back in. When they do, they will create lots of emotional hooks to hijack your sense of civility.

• They will create situations for you to defend.
  • When you begin to feel like you have to explain, or defend a point, be very careful – it’s a trap!
  • Give a bullet point answer “that is not correct”, but try to avoid explaining because either they already know, or they don’t really care. The purpose was to make you talk.
  • Refuse to engage in arguments or debates
• They will use Crocodile Tears (faking being upset) to hijack your nurturer
  • We cover this in detail in the Pursuit Phase of Domestic Violence.
• They will create a situation for you to save them
  • Most Toxic People are quite poorly capable. Generally they are the Reactive NPD type, claiming greatness, but needing everyone else to do things for them. Even so, it is hard to know if they really are incompetent or wilfully incompetent as a tool.
  • It isn’t your job to fix their problem. It is likely a trick to bring you back in.
• They will try to find a financial aspect or prior obligation to trick you back in
  • Getting out of any relationship (intimate, friendship, workplace etc) costs.
    • Work out how much you are willing to pay to get out, and allow that to be lost
  • Once you have recognised they are Toxic, you are no longer bound by the Social Contract to them. They broke the social contract by being Toxic, so you are no longer required to continue your end of the obligation they claim.
    • They null and voided the obligation when they revealed their Toxic nature to you.
• Beware of:
  • Empty Gestures (gifing and services)
  • Hollow Words (the words that are meaningful to you, but not to them)
  • False Promises (promises of change, but with no real intent of change)
  • We cover these in detail in Domestic Violence, Pursuite Phase.

Neutral Actions

As we have covered, Toxic People push you to have feelings, which they then feel good about. A significant part of our decision making is based on how we feel about something, and those decisions lead to actions. Toxic People want to control us – our Feelings, our Actions and our Thoughts.

We have covered using Grey Stoning to mask our Feelings, and we have also covered avoiding arguments to conceal our thoughts in Avoid Emotional Hooks.

We need to look at the Actions we make.

The term Action is a bit ambiguous. If can be the behaviour we are doing at the time, which is mostly covered in the above 3 section Neutral Emoting, Decreased Engagement and Avoid Emotional Hooks. Action can also be the plans we make and how we enact them. That is what we will cover here.

The Toxic Person wants us to doubt ourselves. When they can make us doubt our own ability, identity, knowledge, and attack our confidence, we will seek their assurance or permission to do actions (enact plans). This can be hard to work past as a very common component to being targeted by Toxic People is either an Anxiety disorder, or struggling with social. Even when you don’t have these issues, they will seek to isolate you from authority, support or potential escape routes.

External Reality Check

Until you can reclaim your confidence in yourself, it is helpful to get a reality check by an external person – external to both you and the Toxic Person. This can be a friend, a family member and or a therapist (like us). It is important to check that the person isn’t also toxic (use the Toxic People Mind Toolset or Testing for Toxic pages to check), and your therapist has speciality in relationship abuse.

While it can be interesting to see what the Toxic Person thinks you should do, be careful how much credence you put in their opinion. Generally, avoid it. However, it is important to note that the Toxic Person sometimes gives good support, good advice and can see through other toxic people who are misleading you – they don’t like others playing with their toys. Don’t mistake them being occasionally good to you as signs that they are good people – this is a tool they use to control you.

Because Toxic People can be occasionally being right or helpful, It is also important not to just do the opposite of what they want you to do.

The opposite to bad is often just another bad.

Instead consider what is good for you and not directly harmful to others. This is a good marker for what is wise to do.

Keep in mind that Toxic People will try to redefine “your wise decision is reducing the control I have on you and I don’t like that” as “bad / hurtful / toxic to me”.

Toxic People don’t like losing their toys (you). They will try to push you into being back under their sway, and when that doesn’t work they will escalate.

Sometimes that can become direct physical violence or stalking violence.

It is important to make plans that lead you to safety. A great way to do that is with the help of a therapist versed in relationship abuse.