How Do You Deal With the Toxic/Negative People in Your Live?

150poundsofme wrote: »

Give him telephone numbers for housekeepers. Let him call and make an appointment to clean his house for every other week. If he can see well enough, he can make the phone call himself and also pay for the cleaner. Also I am sure there must be transportation for him to go to the doctors - many towns have it for the disable or even for just seniors. Give him the phone number for these transportation places and have him make the reservations whenever he has a doctor appointment. Then you can just visit him whenever. The transportation is usually free or maybe like $2.00. Give yourself you back. Tell him you have plans, work, your own doctors etc. Hugs

Ya, if he has money for escorts, he can afford to pay someone else to clean his house.

I eventually found out that the only way I could deal with toxic people was to just cut them out of my life.

I fully appreciate that it's a lot harder to do than it sounds.

All thorough my childhood, my two sisters (one older, one younger) were really unpleasant to me. They used to gang up on me and were cruel. I spent a lot of my years at home by myself, as it was preferable to being anywhere near them. It got slightly better when I moved out as I saw less of them but things were always tense, and being with them wasn't my preferred choice of things to do. Visits were short.

I'd always been taught that family came first and foremost so I carried on the relationships, even though one sister felt that the world owed her something, and the other only cared about herself and what she could get out of others.

It all came to a head when I had my third child; my older sister started sending me really nasty texts because I hadn't told her that my son had arrived. There was a reason for this. I told my mum first, because, well, she's my mum. I also told my younger sister as she'd arrived at my house during my labour (I had a homebirth) with Christmas gifts for my other two children and I'd had to tell her to go away (as she was irritating the hell out of me, not that I told her that part). Just after I spoke to my younger sister, I had a major post-partum bleed (literally just after the midwives had left) so that took a while to sort out. I was also worried about my son as he wouldn't feed and his breathing rate was off the scale, so a doctor was called in. He took one look at my son and called the paramedics, along with a call to a neonatal unit warning them to expect us. I was bundled into the ambulance with my son, leaving my husband and two children at home, none of us knowing where we were going (it could have been any one of four hospitals). So, I had no time (or inclination) to contact my older sister. She took this personally, even when I explained about the problems, saying that my mum had told her about my son's birth but hadn't mentioned the bleed, etc. I told her that was these things happened AFTER I'd spoken to mum but she just went off into one. So I told her to have a nice life. I haven't seen/spoken to her since and that was 13 years ago.

My relationship with my other sister ended shortly afterwards (within a couple of years) when she was trying to organise some party for my dad or mum and I said that I wasn't getting involved if my older sister was going. She then ranted down the phone at me, so she was also told to have a nice life and that I was hanging up the phone, which I did. I haven't seen/spoken to her since then either. My mum did tell me that my sister had rung her in a high state of irritation that I'd hung the phone up on her. I found that rather satisfying

I don't miss them. I don't want them in my life. I don't need them in my life. They were a complete pain to me, my entire life. My life is better without them. Getting rid of them was liberating.

My older sister has accepted my decision and has never tried to get in touch since. My younger sister, on the other hand, actually dared to send me a birthday card full of "I really miss you" and "I want to see you" rubbish and other pathetic cliches. The card went in the recycling and a message sent via my mum that it wasn't going to happen. Ever.

My mum has since acknowledged that my sisters made my childhood/adolescence awful and understands (although it upsets her) why I want nothing more to do with them.

My relationship with my dad is barely cordial. He's not a nice man. He's like my sister, wants everything done according to his needs and everyone else can pay for it. He loves conning people. I used to fall in with it all, and do whatever he wanted, until I realised what was going on. Then I stopped doing everything he wanted. And he did not like it one bit. One day I woke up to it all and worked out that he didn't love me, actually he didn't even like me and that was because I could see right through him and would no longer dance to his tune. That realisation was painful, very painful but once I'd accepted that, it was easier. I'm polite to him and that's it. And that's only because he still lives with my mum and I want to have a proper relationship with her. If she needs help with something for my dad then I will be the first to volunteer, but I don't do it for him. If it wasn't for my mum, I would have cut my dad out of my life years ago.

And if they died, I really would not care in the slightest. I certainly wouldn't attend their funerals as I don't care that much about any of them. I barely think about them at all now, that's how little they mean to me.

I also worked out that life is too short to spend it listening to others constantly moaning/mopping up after them. You only get one shot of life, so make the most of it, even if that means cutting people loose. Best thing I ever did (after marrying DH and having children).

My heart goes out to you. I've had somewhat similar experiences. Please consider going to therapy, perhaps someone who specializes in childhood trauma. I know that sounds funny and overly dramatic but even if your dad never laid a hand on you abusively, I don't think your Dad suddenly turned into the person he is now after giving you a lovely childhood. People with that level of damage almost always traumatize their children (and anyone else they're close to) on an emotional level. But for kids it's worse because they don't have a logical filter, so they often take it all in, and make it part of their world view. It may be that one of the reasons you're having so much trouble setting boundaries now is because of some really nasty messages you got from him as a kid, and internalized.

Here are a few rules that my therapist taught me:

-- A competent (meaning not demented) adult is always responsible for his or her own behavior. They may not want to be, and they may well want others to enable them to behave badly, but *they* are always ultimately responsible, whether they admit it or not;

-- Corollary: Other people's behavior is always about them, not about you. They may try to throw their stuff at you, but that doesn't mean you have to accept delivery. Don't take responsibility for their stuff, just work on yours;

-- Corollary: If someone else tells you that their bad behavior is your fault, they're lying to you (and possibly to themselves) and that still doesn't make it your problem. Even if (and in this situation that is a big if) your behavior was also not good in a given situation, you are just a catalyst. They have a choice as to how to respond, just as you have a choice about how you respond to them;

-- Corollary: The only person you can "fix" is yourself, you can't change anyone else;

-- Just because you feel sorry for someone is no reason to put up with their bad behavior.

-- Finally: These rules are true for *everyone* you aren't an exception because you're related to the person, because you think you're horrible, because you think you're responsible, because you have accepted it up to this point, or for any other reason. You are a good person with the same right to be happy, and the same responsibility for your own behavior that every other competent adult has. Until you believe this, the other rules will sound like they apply to everyone but you.

My problem was that I had internalized so much of what I had been told, I really believed that I was the problem -- I just wasn't good enough, kind enough, compassionate enough, and that if I just worked a little harder, my toxic person (people) would be happy. It took a lot of time and therapy to realize that this is just bunkum. My toxic person had saddled me with an impossible task--one that I could never do right, and one that was making me feel like an absolute failure as a human being. I'm not, and you aren't either. The fact that you care at all is pretty good evidence that you are a very kind person, but that doesn't mean you have to keep taking *kitten* from your dad. Your Dad's behavior has nothing to do with you, it's a product of his own trauma, his own issues, and his own choices. He is the *only* person who can fix it, and sad to say, he probably won't. But just because he's older or ill doesn't mean that he is entitled to poison any more of your life. He really isn't. Your dad isn't a helpless victim of anything but his own choices, he can make better ones, but he will keep making bad ones as long as you enable him (and probably after you stop, if you stop). That isn't your responsibility.

lucypstacy wrote: »

The best way to describe Dad is someone that lacks the empathy of a small child. He can't see someone else's point of view at all. If I say I'm hurt, either he's hurt more or it's my fault I'm hurt. Saying no to Dad is tricky.

Ignoring the fact I'm too passive (been working on that), he tries to 'punish' you if you don't do what he wants you do when he wants you to do it. Last December, I was very sick. I had a kidney transplant 2 years ago and I'm on a lot of immune suppressants. I somehow caught viral pneumonia, and I was in the hospital. I had just gotten out when Dad called. He had dropped a pizza in the floor and wanted me to come and clean up his house. I told him I didn't feel like it, and he pouted. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. The next evening he calls and says he's in the hospital. When he cleaned the floor he had a hernia pop out. Now, this is really ironic considering I have to have hernia surgery (see the surgeon again on the 27th), but I didn't say much. He also said he was turning off his phone because he had forgotten his charger. All of this was fine.

The next evening he calls to say he had been discharged and had tried to drive home, but he had gotten sick. He made it sound like he had passed out on the road, but had woke up enough to drive to a rest stop. He asked if I would come and drive him home.

I got Mom to go with me. We drove down there and he did look as if he had passed out, but when I checked on him, he was only asleep. I drove him home in his car and Mom followed in my car. While we were driving, he asked about the bruises on my arm, and I explained that they were from I.V.'s. He had no such bruises. He also let it slip he had eaten a big breakfast at Denny's, which I thought was odd after getting out of the hospital. Anyway, we get to his house and he asked us to find a receipt in the car because he had bought a pair of pants he wanted us to return to the store.

While looking for the receipt, we found the one from Denny's which showed he had purchased two meals. We also found a receipt from K-Mart one hour after he had called and said he was in the hospital. It was clear he had never been in the hospital. I didn't say anything though. He wanted me to fix his phone, so I did a quick look. There was a number he kept calling while in Lexington. A quick search revealed it was the number for an escort service.

My father had been upset that I wouldn't come and clean up a pizza he had dropped that he had gone to Lexington to meet an escort while giving me a story about the hospital so I would worry. When he was done, he had gotten tired and had basically tricked me into giving him a ride home.

I never confronted him. Either he would yell at me for mistrusting him or get mad that I was snooping. However, that's classic Dad right there.

He was able to drive out of town and go to multiple stores restaurants ect. It is possible that he is manipulating OP into doing ALL the errands she is doing. Does he really even need rides to his appointments? It looks like this is all a scam that he's able to pull off somehow by taking advantage of OP's guilt and sense of duty.