Podcast

Toxic friendships can cause harm to mental health and erode trust and respect. Warning signs include boundary crossings, possessiveness, competition, and refusal to compromise. Examples from the movie Mean Girls illustrate toxic behaviors. Navigating toxic friendships involves open communication, setting boundaries, and letting go if necessary. Gossip and rumors can also damage friendships. Overall, toxic friendships negatively impact mental health and should be avoided for self-care and well-being. Have you guys ever been in a toxic friendship? A toxic friendship refers to harmful behaviors, dynamics, or traits that erode trust, mutual respect, and emotional well-being within the friendship. Have you guys ever seen the movie Mean Girls? Yeah. Everybody knows the famous quote, you can't sit with us. And that's like a pure example of a toxic friendship. From our own experiences, we've all noticed what contributes to a toxic friendship. For me, it was impacting my mental health. I'm going to talk about warning signs. In my experience, there were a lot of boundary crossings. I knew that my friendship was toxic from the beginning when it was putting an unwanted amount of stress on my mental health. The big thing being that it caused me a lot of anxiety because when I was hanging out with other friends that weren't her, I would just be worried and work myself up if she was going to text me, get mad at me, stop being friends. So I think that just caused a lot of unwanted anxiety in the friendship that turned it toxic. I had a similar situation where my friend didn't want me hanging out with other people. So I felt really isolated when I was going out to hang out with her. I felt a lot of stress. I felt like I was walking on eggshells around her. Because I never imagined that I would know if she would get upset or something. I felt really lonely when I hung out with my friends because I think she just saw me as competition. And she would try to bring me down every time I did something or said something. If I said something specific, she would just try to nitpick every single aspect of my sentence and try to bring me down in any way possible. So yeah, these are some things that we think had a big toll on our mental health from our toxic relationships. There should have been warning signs that I saw before me and this girl stopped being friends. So she saw me as competition to the point where she would copy everything I do. Like getting her hair dyed when I got my hair dyed. Doing the same makeup as me. Like trying to get the same outfits as me. Even like trying to go for all the guys that went for me. And it got to the point where she would do all these things but then bring me down for the same things that she was copying. Another warning sign that I saw in my friendship was how she refused to compromise or wouldn't give back. Like she would pressure me into extravagant situations that I didn't want to be in by guilt tripping me. And she would expect me to prioritize her feelings over mine when I knew she wouldn't do the same in return. For warning signs, I also can agree with Kiriti about the competition and just wanting to be like you. Because my friend would also just copy me with everything. Like do everything that I did. And even people also started to notice. But I also think the number one warning sign was like just the possessiveness. Just the like them wanting you to be their only friend and not wanting you to have other friends. Just because they were possessive and insecure with their own self. Boundary crossings can be social, physical, or emotional. For example, the social part, my friends would pressure me into doing things that I didn't want to or wasn't comfortable doing just because she wanted to do them. And she would also be upset whenever I did things with other people. So I was really isolated from everyone else. And with other friendships, she would like criticize my other friends trying to like create conflict. So I wouldn't be friends with them anymore and I would just be friends with her. For boundary crossings, my friend used to share my secrets with others. And these were just things that I trusted her with like about my personal life and my family and stuff like that. And she would also just try to humiliate me in front of people by sharing my secrets. Which I just thought was really weird and really took a toll on my mental health. Another physical warning sign that I experienced was my one friend that was really toxic. She would go through my phone and like while we were hanging out, she just would just go through my snapshots, my messages. And I would feel like weird and like threatened to like ask for my own phone back. Which was like obviously really toxic. And I think that really affected our relationship and just like crossing that boundary line. One of my friends had a similar experience where her mate that she's friends with went through her phone. And I think something like that just makes you lose your trust in a friend. Yeah, and I had an also similar experience building off of that with the same friend too. Like while I was sleeping, they went through my phone and they didn't know that I was awake. And I feel like that just totally ruined the trust and the friendship just overall. To build off of that, one time I gave my friend a phone so she could see a picture that she wanted to see that we took earlier. And she took her phone and she looked at the picture and then she just kept scrolling and looking through my texts and everything. And I just, I couldn't, I didn't feel like I could like trust her with my phone or like really anything. Like anything about me ever again. To put these behaviors and examples into perspective, we're going to use the example from the movie Mean Girls. Looking into my friend that was really competitive with me, I see it parallel with Katie and Regina. Katie was this girl who moved from Africa and started attending her first public high school in America. And she had a completely different perspective on just life and her style and stuff like that. But when she met Regina, she started copying her, like wearing the same clothes as her and trying to essentially be her. Because of Janice Ian. But Katie being obsessed with Regina just shows the competitive nature that she started adopting and that role that she played into. Which she previously like didn't have. Another example was between George and the rest of the classics. She was like the leader of them and she fully manipulated them and tried to control them. She would constantly like criticize them and belittle them. So they would feel like pressured to conform to her standards and like they wanted to please her. So they could be complimented by her and like live up to her standards. The last example from Mean Girls that we have showing toxicity in relationships is Janice Ian and Katie. Because from the movie like you might think that Janice is a good friend when actually she was like really toxic. Just of the behaviors that she did towards Katie. Like Katie said, she came to a new school in America and didn't know much. And then Janice came in and kind of like manipulated her and thought that like they were friends. And like kind of morphing her into this person just to get back at people she didn't like. Which ended up changing Katie and like changing her whole personality in the end. So? This is the clip that we were talking about at the start of the podcast where Gretchen is yelling at Regina for not wearing pink on a Wednesday. This shows that their friendship was fake and it was based around their social status. This example ties into all the dynamics that we just talked and gave examples about. This shows how the friendship was more like a friendship of utility than one of virtue based on mutual love and choice. We're now going to discuss some ways to navigate through these toxic friendships. The first way to navigate through a toxic friendship would be to talk about your conflicts like in person. So just discussing healthy ways to address your conflict with each other in the friendship. Encourage open and honest communication while having active listening towards each other. And a willingness to understand each other's perspective. However, if the toxic behavior persists despite your attempts to resolve the issues, it just may be necessary to reevaluate the whole friendship together because then there's no helping it at that point. Another way to navigate these toxic friendships could be by setting boundaries. You should really encourage setting healthy boundaries in friendships like communicating needs and expectations clearly and respectfully. These boundaries can help prevent toxic behavior from escalating and protect your emotional health. And lastly, if conflict resolution or setting boundaries doesn't work out, the best thing you really could do is letting go of the toxic friendship. That really is the healthiest option because when you're in this toxic friendship, you think that it's the best friendship you could ever have as you fail to recognize that it's actually really unhealthy. And letting go of a toxic friendship when you realize that your self-worth and just your being is more important than whatever you have with this friend. Letting this person go can be a difficult decision, but you have to prioritize your own well-being. And if a friendship isn't serving you positively, you should just move forward with self-care and self-respect. A quote we found from reading through of online friends was, friendships can be damaged by gossip and rumors, which spread much faster and farther through cyberspace. Even though this is directed towards online friendships, we could see this in person as well. In conclusion, things that make a friendship toxic is when it overall affects your mental health by causing stress, anxiety, and depression. And that's what I've experienced in my previous friendships. From my experience, another thing that can make friendships toxic are boundary crossings, whether they're emotional, physical, or social. In my experience, there were a lot of warning signs that I could've paid attention to. One such warning sign being that my friend used to see me as competition and make everything a competition. Hi, I'm Kriti. And I'm Bailey. And I'm Allison. And thanks for listening to our podcast about toxic friendships. We didn't have to do so long. Having friends could just change your number. It's the last thing that's wrong. Now you're just somebody that I used to know.