5 Reasons You Need To Cut The Toxic People Out Of Your Life

I’m not one to make decisions lightly. So when I decided I wanted to leave my home and my family behind, I did just that. Allow me to explain. My Mother is a 37 year old, 3-time divorcee who was accidentally “blessed” with her first child (i.e. me) when she was 17 years old. She married my father because she felt like she had to. She married the man after him because she thought he was a normal person. She married the man after him under the same assumption. She was right about him…he was not right about her. Every time something went wrong in her life she turned to me. Over the years I had become her personal punching bag. She, like her mother before her, is absolutely insane.

My Father is a 39 year old abusive, bipolar, alcoholic. He had been in and out of college the entirety of his adult life trying his hand at an array of useless things. He finally settled on truck driving to pay his bills. A few years ago, he married a 24 year old girl without telling anyone. Tragically, he divorced said girl shortly after. Most recently, he met an ex-girlfriend at a bar, drank a little too much, got accused of beating this woman near to death and got away with it all because Daddy’s a big-shot lawyer.

There are a select few members of my family who aren’t bad, but for the most part, the trend of out of their minds and absolutely terrible is carried throughout.

These people, and others like them, are what I like to call “Toxic People”. These types of people do nothing but drag you down in every way possible. They belittle you in any way they can, they take their frustrations about themselves and their lives out on you, they try to convince you that you are worth absolutely nothing. The list goes on for miles, but it all amounts to the same thing: these people are not good for you. They are not there to support you or help you become the best person you can be. They might even be your family, but if that’s the case then they are simply your family by blood. They are not your family in any other sense of the word.

Cutting my family and any other toxic people out of my life was the best thing I have ever done and here’s why you should do it too:

1. You’re much, much happier. When you make the decision to rid your life of toxicity you feel better. You’re no longer being put down by people who claim they care about you, but never do anything to show it.

2. You are able to deepen your connections with the non-toxic people still in your life. Suddenly, you feel better about yourself. You have no reason to keep belittling yourself because the people who belittled you are gone. You feel freer. This helps you build stronger connections to the people still in your life because you’re no longer afraid of constantly being judged for the things that you do and you feel confident enough to totally be yourself.

3. You are healthier. When I was around my family, I suffered from depression, self-harm and eating disorders. When I was with them I didn’t know they were the reason I was suffering so much, but when I left and cut them out of my life I became much healthier. After a while, I was no longer depressed. I stopped cutting. I got my eating disorder under control and was able to begin bettering mysself. You never know what the toxicity is doing to you mentally and physically. The only way you will ever truly know how it’s negatively effecting you is by ridding yourself of it.

4. You will think more highly of yourself and accomplish more because of it. Have you ever wanted to be a poet? An actor? A singer? There’s a good chance the toxic people in your life are telling you those things just can’t be done or telling you that you aren’t good enough to do the things that you want to do most. When you cut people like that out of your life you realize you really can do anything you set your mind to once your mind is rid of all of that negative energy. Your self-confidence will skyrocket. You will accomplish things you never thought you could because you no longer had people constantly bringing you down.

5. Ridding yourself of toxic people all but guarantees you won’t become toxic yourself. If I had gone on with my mother in my life I would have turned out just like her. However, by cutting her out of my life and leaving her and all of the other toxic people behind, I am free to become who I know I should be. I won’t turn out the same way she did because I will not have her sitting on the sidelines of my life telling me that if I don’t do something a certain way I will be a complete and utter disappointment.

Leaving people behind is never easy, but that’s exactly what you’re doing. Leaving them behind and moving forward onto the life that you deserve.