Toxic relationships

What is a healthy relationship?

It's a relationship between 2 individuals who have good intentions towards each other and who are committed to improving themselves and living together.

A toxic relationship is one in which one person asks the other to give up certain aspects of their personality with the sole aim of harming, devaluing, humiliating or even destroying them. It's a relationship of subject to object, of dominant to dominated.

We find these relationships in our friendships, our work, at school, as a couple, in the family.

It's a living, open space of negotiation, where each party can meet in all their dimensions - values, beliefs, needs - and together find solutions and compromises to move forward. It's a space of communication where differences are respected.

If one or other of these elements is lacking in a relationship, love and friendship will be partial or directed towards other interests.

Steven Karpman's dramatic triangle is one of the "psychological games" of communication manipulation. It's a transactional analysis figure he proposed in 1968, which highlights a typical relational scenario, a psychological game between 3 actors occupying 3 different roles or positions: victim, persecutor and savior.

The manipulator presents himself as a benevolent savior, attentive to the victim's needs, whereas his aim is to trap him by falsely listening to him.

So how do you get out of this toxic relationship?

We need to :

React, become aware of the relationship, give yourself the means, understand, talk about it, get rid of the shame or guilt.

Build resilience by getting help, bouncing back, integrating the experience, digesting it and using it as a springboard to something else.

Reconstructing oneself by restoring the lived experience and using it as a foundation for this new construction of a new self that evolves, changes, lives on in spite of everything and overcomes the trauma.

Regain your freedom, your dignity, your self-respect, the consideration and respect that every human being deserves.

Dignity is the principle that a person should never be treated as an object or a means, but as an intrinsic entity: it is an essential value of the human being.

Professor Caycedo, founder of sophrology, speaks of dignity in these terms: "the dignity of the human being is fulfilled when he realizes himself and becomes aware of the responsibility that commits him to himself and to others".

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that "things have a price, a value as a material appreciation; man has dignity which has neither degree nor part".

Dignity for the victim of a toxic relationship could be expressed as follows: "I can look at myself in the mirror, I know what's good for me, I understand the value and meaning of my life, I respect myself, I put myself at the center, I understand myself, I cherish myself and I accept myself as I am, I am now positioned in my life with the will to adopt the right attitude and the right words in all circumstances".

Rediscovering freedom: this is an essential step that takes place when the person has assimilated the cycles of control and isolation, of the toxic triangular relationship, before approaching the notion of freedom as viable for him or her.