Toxic Friendships can be harmful to you, how can you identify such friends?

A friend is a person with whom, you can share a bond of love and affection, a bond of understanding and care, a bond of sharing happiness and sorrows. Friendship is one of the finest relationships meant for anyone. As Elbert Hubbard said, “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” you can really feel what a friend can mean to anyone. But what if your friend happens to be not very friendly? What if this friend is not the friend you deserve and is someone who is harming you? Well, such a friend can be toxic for you, and a toxic friendship can really harm you as a person. It can harm you and your self-esteem and here is how you can identify such friendship.

1. You feel Pressurised to do things you don’t want to do

A toxic friend might ask you to do things that you don’t want to do, and they might put you in a situation where you may tend to feel stupid for not wanting to do that thing. They will make you question your decisions and likings and make you feel bad about things that you like and dislike.

2. Their problem is always bigger than your problem

A toxic person will always find a way out to grab the attention from your problem to theirs. While commonly, when you share your problem with someone, the response you may get can be that they understand your problem or to show empathy, they might say that this happened to them too, but in the larger picture, they won’t want to gain attention from the same. But the toxic can go one step ahead and tell their story as bigger than that of yours.

3. You start hating yourself when you are with them

If you are in a toxic friendship, your might feel like you can’t be who you are with them. You do tend to do things that you don’t like about yourself, starting from behaving the way you don’t like yourself to behave. They make you feel that you are just not good enough for anything.

4. You constantly feel that you would be needing to hold them because you feel that they will leave

A toxic friend may make you feel that your presence doesn’t really matter to them. But since for you, their presence matters, you often walk on eggshells to hold onto them, bear with them so that they don’t get any reason to leave you. Your staying with them is not because you love them but is because you fear that they will leave.

5. They pull you down

You feel like your friend never really uplifts, in fact, they tend to always pull you down. It is not the case of giving you a reality check but they are constantly in a mood to not appreciate you or not credit you for your success.

6. They cross their boundaries

Toxic people may do things that are not appropriate for you and may even tend to invade your privacy. They would want to know things about you, you don’t want to share with them, they would crash in your house uninvited, they will do things you never asked. But all of it will be to present an extreme sense of possession or their authority over you.

7. You feel like you are giving more than what you are getting

A toxic friendship is a relationship you will find as only the one where you are on the delivery end. You tend to only give and they end up receiving it. You always find yourself on a pedestal where you feel like you are giving more than what you are getting.

Well, these are some of the signs of a toxic friendship. Check out these signs and identify if you are friends with toxic people. If yes, decide for yourself if you need to talk to them about it, or need to walk out of that friendship as there is nothing about you, you should be feeling sorry for. And if a friend makes you feel, sorry, that friend is not right for you.

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