Toxic Friends? When friendships is no longer healthy

Assalamualaikum...

GOOD FRIENDS

All of us agree that we need someone that we called as friends to be there with us instead of family as they play important role in our emotional and physical well-being. Having true friends besides us that we can count on them, facing the difficulties and joy together, and accept us just the way we are is truly hard. According to the survey, 84% of women struggling with so called ‘toxic friends’ who are self-absorbed, emotionally draining, critical or backstabbing. 

Toxic friends only know how to stress you out mentally and physically. However, many of us still keep them in our life without the reasons. Sometimes we like them sometimes not. We just don’t know how to end the friendships even though we always complain or talk about these thing with our parents. It’s just that we are not brave enough to talk in front of toxic friends. Sometimes we can’t stand with their irritated behaviors, but we never talk about how we actually feel when they behave in that way. In fact, we choose to keep silent because we thought that they would change and grow up. But, sometimes they won’t and they never want to change. They think that by being a toxic can give them more benefits, why should they change?

There are thousands of reasons why you should end your friendship with them?

They take and you give. We should realize when time passed on your friendships, are you the one that always giving and receiving and rarely focused on your needs? If it is, you should starts do the talking with your friends. When you tell your friends that you want an equal relationship, automatically you become the caretaker towards your ‘friends’. Still if you can’t handle them, you can charge the professional fees or you can just walk away from them.

They do not support who you are. A good friend will always accept you just the way you are. However, this kind of friends wills always criticism and put down your emotions and not making your emotional health. In fact, they will always make you feel down as like you are losing your self-confidence especially in the public. When facing this kind of friends, you should speak up your voices to them by saying that you need to be treated with some respect just like your friends done to others. If you decide to still go on with this friendship, give them some time to changes. If the responses that you want are more criticism, then you should move on with your life.

They cannot be trusted with your secrets. Trustworthiness friends are hard to find as you need to monitor them time to time and also based on your experience.  Least of people have least of trusted friends that they can share their knowledge and even their biggest secret in life. Those who could hear your ‘secrets’ are the one that have your trust and also trust us with their inner thoughts. However, always bear in mind that human beings are imperfects and always slip up something incidentally.  If your friends always do something like this more than twice, you should express your disappoint and hurt to your friends so that they know about your inner feelings. If you can’t handle your friendships anymore, you can just end them.

Based on the point above, it shows that ‘toxic friends’ is very dangerous as they can kill a bit on ourselves without we even realize it. But, we can just pretend not to know it since it is hard to face them or they do not want to take any step by changing their behavior just for the sake of your friendships. If yes, end your relationships and stay away from them!