I’ve had some toxic friendships in my life and somehow I learned early enough. I do want to say “thank you” to those friends because they thought me how to deal with toxic friendships as I got older.
Somehow we are not able to avoid this types of friendship and so if you plan to keep up with such friends; the drama queens, the shamer’s, the martyrs, etc then you need to set boundaries and here’s how:
Love yourself
If you don’t love yourself first then it's easy to be manipulated. Loving yourself means you have to be “Selfish” sometimes. For example, you want some me-time but your friend wants to hang out, you simply say “NO”. Remember you cannot keep displeasing yourself to please everybody.
Neutral responses
There are those friends who just love to talk about other people and their families and so if you find yourself in such a situation don’t bite the gossip pill rather dismiss or change the subject this would hopefully tel her to stop such behavior but be nice about it.
Acceptance
Your friendship is probably over a decade old already and so you want to maintain it, however, you don’t like whom your friend is becoming. You have to accept that your relationship is changing and that you both are growing in different ways.
Address the Issue
Friends fight and so if there is tension between you too then you have to address the situation. It's hard to get all you want to say out there so the best thing to do would be to rehearse before you confront that friend.
Re-Evaluate
Sometimes even after accepting the fact that you and this person are obviously on different parts (which is okay) when push comes to shove you have to re-evaluate whether the friendship would grow fonder or not and so to do this, you have to take a long break (yes we mean months)
Let Go
Some friendships can’t be saved and that’s the reality. As much as you love that person he/she just gets worse every single time. You’ve tried talking you’ve even done an intervention. The truth is you probably won’t be able to change this toxic person so you have to be strong enough to call it quits and set yourself free.
Have you ever been in a toxic friendship? How did you put that friend in their place? Tell us in the comment section below, you might be helping someone.