Toxic

The person in the photo is my father. Obviously if I'm including him in a blog entry on things Toxic  there isn't a good relationship....in fact there isn't a relationship at all. However, with that little piece of family history out of the way, let's return to the main point.

Toxic Things are something that we all have in our lives. Some of the most toxic things can be people. Toxic people are tough, often they're hard to identify and because of emotional attachments often harder to remove from our lives. I guess in a way that I was lucky. My relationship with my father never really happened. There are no happy memories of the man, and in no way shape or form can I describe us as ever being close. Rather the exact opposite. This made him easy to identify and in my 30's easier to remove. One of my brothers on the other hand adored my father and spent almost his entire adult life trying to please him. My father on a good day is a self centred, self pitying, hypocritical, racist  bully.

Toxic people are the ones who undermine you, which is what my father spent 55 years doing to my brother, and then spent the same amount of time telling everyone what a loser my brother is. Yet every time my brother tried to make a move towards overcoming his benzodiazapine addiction my father undermined him by buying him more benzo's or providing excuses when what my brother needed and now admits this quite freely, was a serious kick in the bum and being made to get his shit together and deal with the addiction. These days apparently he is "supporting" another brother of mine who amongst other things had incest with his 10 year old daughter and took a shitload of drugs for his adult life.  Toxic people are the people who encourage addictions, who mistreat you, who make you feel bad about yourself, who cause obesity and keep you fat. They can be people who treat themselves appallingly with drug addictions, bad relationship or simply bad attitudes. Toxic people can be our parents, our spouses and even our friends.

By one measure my ex-wife was a toxic event for me. I reached 130 kg at my heaviest...up from 80 kg when she met me. Now the ex isn't a toxic person...she has no say in my life. There were "friends" at the time of my first marriage who in retrospect were clearly toxic. They were the ones who spent 20 years basically patting me on the head. They also were the ones who when the marriage was clearly sinking insisted that my ex was wonderful and my remarkably "on message" complaints were nonsense....people who knew more about what my ex was like when we were alone than I did. Because I respected them, I listened and the marriage lasted five unhappy years longer than it should have.

Then when I began my relationship with Selina, these "friends" were openly hostile to it. Making predictions about the likely outcome. Rather than embracing my happiness, they ended the friendships because in one case I had the audacity to not only ignore his advice, but when given the exercise of making up a list of the pro's & con's of staying with my ex and another one of being in a relationship with Selina, of actually producing the "wrong" lists.

Yet another engaged in some serious projection. He had been in a relationship for 20 years where his boyfriend had climbed the academic ladder and achieved the not unexalted status of professor at the Australian National University. He'd also bled this guy for every cent he could, been seriously in love with cocaine and party drugs, been fucking his drug dealer...and shared a house with him which my friend had been paying for and then to complete the joy, he dumped him on Christmas Day.  I was, of course, engaging in exactly this behaviour with my ex and Selina was not only wrong for me, but was going to be a brief event that I would regret dumping my ex for. You can understand where these people were clearly toxic.

Another "friend" from that period is comprehensively bullied by his wife. He's a professional in the mental health care field and she utterly dominates him to the point where he couldn't resume a friendship with me "because Jessie wouldn't like it".  Mind you, I had ended the friendship precisely because he wouldn't stand up to the cow and have a spine.

I use these stories  to provide examples of toxic people. With the toxic we have to accept that letting them go will often hurt. We have to make the first step of sober self evaluation and acceptance. The acknowledgement "this person is bad for me" has to happen. As Tantrics, we have to do this. We need to create lifetime where only the positive exists. We need to look at every person in our lives and see clearly their place in it. If someone is being toxic and thereby preventing you from being your best, then it is time to show them the door.

There are also toxic places. For me the simplest example of this was the Theravadin Buddhist scene in Melbourne. Once I had won my fight with depression, the scene became toxic. It is seriously conservative, dominated by the Sinhalese and almost imagination free. I outgrew Theravada. The frustration at being denied what I felt was my rightful place in the leadership grew and when they reacted badly to Selina, I had my final straw. It was toxic because it prevented my growth as a person. I was pigeonholed and when I no longer fitted, they refused to accept the change in me. To deny or to actively prevent spiritual and emotional growth is to be toxic.

For you, your toxic place could be a pub you go to. It could be the footy club you play at that refuses to embrace your sexuality, or it could be the group of friends you've always had who haven't really grown up. Whoever and whatever is toxic to you....it's time to leave.