Why toxic relationships are so draining. And when to break them off. | Shaka Sengor

I think the thing that causes relationships to become toxic are many-fold. I will start by saying: pessimism. Being around people who are pessimistic about life is to me one of the greatest obstacles that stands in the way of greatness, success—whether it’s in the workspace, whether it’s in your personal life.

Self-pity; people who tend to wallow in self-pity are to me some of the most toxic, especially if you have close proximity to them—intimate relations or work spaces—because that energy begins to translate, and it dims the room, and it’s just really unsettling. To me, I think it’s one of the things that we don’t evaluate enough in our lives, are the people that we allow to share our mental space.

And when you’re allowing somebody to share your mental space, you have to think of it like a pristine house. So, you have this beautiful home, and when you welcome people to your beautiful home, you will want them to treat it the way that you treat it and care for it. So you wouldn’t want them to walk in with some muddy boots and just come in trashing the place.

But we don’t think about that when it comes to welcoming people into the interior of our minds and our hearts. And so a lot of times, we’ll have people in our lives who wear those mental muddy boots, and they’ll just come in and trample all around our mental space, and we don’t even think nothing of it because we want to be a “nice person,” and we don’t want to say things that may come across as mean.

But I think it’s important to recognize the people that you welcome into your life, recognize the quality, the shared value systems, and realize when they’re being hurtful or damaging to your own sense of peace and confidence and mental well-being. I think toxic relationships are some of the most time-consuming relationships.

You’re constantly trying to correct behavior; you’re constantly assessing yourself based on those relationships. I grew up in an abusive household, and the abuse that probably had the biggest impact was the things that were said to me and how I replay those things over and over in my mind. So you spend so much time in your own head second-guessing yourself, doubting yourself, and you can't be as productive and as successful as you're capable of as long as you're allowing that energy to take residence in your mind.

And it impacts every aspect of your life; you’re not showing up as your full self; you can’t be happy. And even with the idea of happiness, I think that we are delusional about what happiness is. It’s not this sustained thing, but it’s access to a part of ourselves that allows us to have joy.

And so, when you think about what do you need in order to have that, it has to be fulfillment. And you can’t have fulfillment in your life and in your workspace as long as you have toxic people occupying those spaces. So I think the way that you prevent a relationship from becoming toxic is you have to set real boundaries.

Those boundaries start with: what are the expectations? What are the rules of engagement? What is acceptable behavior? What is acceptable treatment? And that starts with you setting the standards for yourself. How do you show up in your own life? How do you treat yourself? What do you expect from yourself? And that extends outwardly.

And what I found is that when you’re dealing with people who are toxic, sometimes they don’t even realize they’re toxic because they’re just repeating the cycle of hurt people hurting people. And even though all toxic relationships don’t show up as necessarily intentional hurt, it can be intentional hindrance or unintentional hindrance.

And so to me, you have to set those boundaries very early. And once a relationship has already become toxic, you have to make a choice in terms of what do you value more: do you value your peace of mind and sense of purpose more than you value the relationship? And once you recognize what you value, then you have to share that with a person that may be toxic in your life.

And what I found is that it is very hard for people...