For the past few days, I’ve been doing a study on “toxic people.”

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the label. To me it risks being reductive, a crude shorthand that brands one person bad and another good. And too often, it defies accountability. I rarely hear anyone label themselves toxic. Nor do I hear too many of us talk about the toxic traits we carry. It’s more a way we brand others, which can get in the way of examining ourselves. When we do examine ourselves, we often only get as far as identifying the weaknesses that make us vulnerable to predators. So we are still labeling someone else evil, and ourselves merely flawed. Since we can only read our own minds, we tend to judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. So it’s grace for me, and law for you.

That said, I recognize that some people engage in harmful, destructive behavior in relationships. For some it’s a trait. For others it’s a lifestyle. And that’s what I’m considering today.

I read an article on the website heysigmund.com by psychologist Karen Young, called “Toxic People: The 12 Things They Do and How to Deal With Them.” (https://www.heysigmund.com/toxic-people/)

It would take me several posts to explore.

Today I just want to look at one toxic behavior the author describes: Using non-toxic words with a toxic tone. She observes that a person can take an innocuous question like “What did you do today?” and use it to suggest that that you are lazy, privileged, uncaring, or self-centered. When challenged, they can then hide behind the neutrality of the language. It was after all just a question. Why are you so sensitive?

And this practice struck a nerve with me, because I’ve encountered it a lot.

Some people can say “thank you”, and make it sound like “f you.”

They can speak the words of a compliment, and make you feel like you committed a crime.

Others have an instigating gift of taking whatever you say to them and twisting it to make it sound incriminating or scandalous. There are people I learned not to say anything around, because I was simply giving them quotes they could weave into a quilt of conflict, to create division between me and someone else.

Some people have a virtuosic ability to take your words, recontextualize them, and distort their meaning, like a poisonous game of refrigerator magnet poetry, that scrambles your idea into something unrecognizably sinister. It’s a twisted counseling competency. It’s summarizing and paraphrasing in bad faith. It’s reflective listening that doesn’t reflect what they actually heard.

And the heartbreaking thing about these practices is that they are a weaponization of gifts.

Only a gifted communicator can take a neutral phrase and make it accusatory. Finding every way to read a sentence is an acting exercise. Finding the worst way to read it is an exercise in acting out.

Only a gifted listener can hear the spaces in your thoughts where poison can be inserted, and then place it without leaving any prints.

Only a gifted translator can distort your words believably in sharing them with someone else.

Only a gifted counselor can take the words that express your heart and reproduce them to express a different one.

Any gift can be used toxically to do great harm.

Prisons are filled with brilliant people who misuse their gifts.

So are churches.

So are junior high schools.

Every communicative gift has a purpose in community.

Every toxic person could be leading, helping, and healing, instead of manipulating, dividing, and devouring.

My prayer is that we would use our gifts for the purpose they were given.

I pray we would seek the best.

And work to heal the part of us driven to the worst.

Detox can be a powerful thing.

(Photo Credit Linneas Boland-Godbey)