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Originally Posted by AzulOscuro
Still I can’t see in which using labels can be of any help other than venting our pain, our disappointment, our frustration, our inability to accept when others’ behaviour or reactions don’t fit our needs.
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The sad thing in my case is that I can't even use this "label" to vent pain or even anger. How can you vent pain at all? I find that releasing anger in whatever ways doesn't remove a lot of the pain. Only a part of the pain was removed by anger and rage for me. Some of it was removed by reworking the memories, by understanding what even happened, how it happened, what these people really were doing, all the cold hard reality, and how I even got into these situations and relationships in the first place. That helped remove some more pain. All that enabled me to actually live the emotions I could not live on the spot originally, and that converted some more of the pain. And me finding positives afterwards also helped remove some more. A lot of the pain was really hard to remove overall, in the above ways, it took time, a lot of time, several years, and I still have some of it left. It's all affected me on a visceral, biological, chemical level. In several ways, not just by giving me lots of pain that took so long to drain. A lot of damage was caused overall.
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IMO, labels says more about the one who uses them than about the person who is applied. In the end, everything we say and do, says a lot about ourselves. About the way we handle our reality at a point in time.
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There are objective behaviours, such as killing a person, that is plenty objective too. It's not just you thinking something that really says something about yourself. It's an actual event and action.
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I’m not denying that there might be people in our lives who we need to put a distance with. If I see that my partner is dangerous for me, I have to distance from him/her and I should be able to count with the entire society to support me.
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Agreed. Except, unfortunately, most of society doesn't really understand the type of damage caused, especially PTSD/cPTSD.
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Originally Posted by Open Eyes
I do think it’s important to understand one’s own emotions. I think what too many parents say to their child as normal childhood emotions emerge is “don’t feel”.
I remember a session I had when I was talking to my therapist and trying to cover a lot of ground in that session. I needed a sense of relief and I did not want the session to leave me feeling worse then I already felt.
At one point as I was talking about a challenging event my therapist gently asked me to stop and he said. “what you just shared is traumatic” and let’s just sit with that emotion. It made me realize how I was racing through bad events and not actually giving myself permission to just sit with the emotions. I realized how much I had unknowingly been encouraged to think my emotions were an inconvenience.
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That therapist sounds good. My last therapist tried to shut down everything that could mean intense emotion.
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I had a discussion recently with a person that had a problem with hate. The desire to want someone dead is bad. What the true hate is about is how a person hates whatever another individual might be doing that is causing them to struggle in themselves.
IMHO the individual that engages hate is a very damaged person. It’s beyond useful anger, yes anger is useful and can provide extra energy to problem solving. But hate is not helpful in terms of problem solving and health resolution.
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I agree. I find hate very draining. I only like "clean anger" if you get what I mean. It's the kind of anger you mention here (i.e. useful for doing things).
You mentioned dark triad..... I'm thinking that toxic stuff often originates from pervasive hate too. Not all of it, but sometimes yes.
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Her behavior got so increasingly disturbing that it triggered me to start experiencing flashbacks. I definitely needed help to understand that. I shared everything I was experiencing. As a result in therapy I began to hear different labels and that I was dealing with a very disordered person. There is such a thing as toxic behaviors or dysfunctional behaviors. I heard NPD and BPD and just very disordered to an EVIL person that everyone was trying to avoid.
What I began remembering was one very angry child. And one thing that angered her was she hated having younger siblings. And while I was too young to know that, I did feel it.
This is something I cannot fix or change. And it’s been just one ugly life experience that had been going on for way too long. Sometimes the only thing one can do is distance as much as possible. It’s hard and yet even though it’s been so horrible I don’t hate her, nor do I care to punish or even wish dead. That would not bring me any personal pleasure. I only feel disappointment and sadness. There is no win either but instead doing my best to reach an end and walk away.
Not quite sure how to grieve it all either. I feel sad for her in that everyone wants to distance from her, everyone.
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This reminds me of one of the toxic people I had in my life.
I also don't know how to grieve, or any of that. And yes, hate is too draining and I don't like it. I'm okay with just distance. Distance both internally and externally. No Contact.
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I may have used the term toxic myself. I don’t think the labeling will just stop. We are always trying to find words to describe behaviors that can affect us badly.
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Yes. I find it very important to be able to describe destructive behaviours in an accurate way. By going beyond just saying it's toxic - that category is good to call your attention to how it's important to deal with the issue, but you need to clarify further as to what behavioural and emotional patterns are going on.
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What is important is to pay attention to how we may contribute to problem relationships. To pay attention to what we ourselves do that may put us in a relationship scenario that will be unhealthy.
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I figured that one out for myself. I used to ignore negatives in people and repressed many of my own negative feelings too (along with too many positives too tbh). That was my problem mainly. When I was 18 was when I started to ignore the negatives to survive a difficult childhood and the positives just went underground together with the negatives. I never recovered from that for a long time and I lost much of my "compass" about people. And then I was also temporarily isolated (long story) and that made it worse, that made me more easily exposed to these manipulative and toxic people.
So basically those two things. Been hard work reversing them. Been working on these problems for almost a full decade now. As part of it, the toxic people stuff too. I've developed pretty good antennaes to sense the bad, overly negative and manipulative things. cPTSD gave me hypersensitive antennaes that sensed even the smallest negative things that I blocked out before (since age 18) and I had to tone down the sensitivity by adding the rational framework for the emotions and behaviours. This rational framework also enables me to set up boundaries asap if I detect problems. Keeping away from dangerous people and from many other negative people too. I feel so much better this way. I learned so many useful things that have already helped me in many ways. I've accepted much more of the bad side in people and in life. I've accepted the existence of these things. It's been very hard work.