I think I won't post more about my experience with toxic people. The one thing I personally find important to say is:

@AzulOscuro I understand what you are saying here and I do agree that such a phenomenon exists, like I said before. This is actually why I do believe that trauma processing is supposed to surpass the phase of simplifying people into negative labels. I've got personal experience with such processing and so I thought mentioning this issue is maybe useful or helpful for this thread's topic.

If someone doesn't process their trauma, then it could look like what you described about labelling and simplifying and I've seen that before. On the other hand, I think that identifying actually pervasive and damaging behaviour patterns - carefully and in a fair, unbiased and accurate way - helps stop us keep blaming ourselves and this contributes to healing. Without blowing it out of proportion either, and without trying to label everyone as toxic or as abusive, etc etc.

And because of this, I think that for your thread's topic it could be a valid and interesting question about how we differentiate between these two things.

1) There is the issue that you pointed out about how some people just label others too fast, which is extra sad when sometimes people feel like they have to do this to feel safe because of unprocessed trauma. (Bonus issue: 1b) Sometimes people may do quick labelling without being traumatised too)

2) And then there is the issue that traumatised people do experience real damage and where it actually helps such people heal if they stop blaming themselves, and instead name damaging behaviour as actually damaging, without putting blame and labels too fast on innocent people either. Without oversimplifying labels.

How do we make the distinction?

How do we move past oversimplifying and move past seeing everything as toxic or abusive even when it's not?

I feel like this is an important question and can be helpful to many people when this type of topic comes up.

It is a complex question so I can't answer it in detail in a short post. After trauma, in my experience, it requires lots of processing and learning and re-learning to recognise what is a pervasive pattern or an occasional behaviour, what is too extreme and what is just a mistake or a fleeting little conflict. Only much learning can help us avoid oversimplifying things.

I hope this thought helps someone, I don't know if I can add more. It's still a hard topic for me in general.