Toxic relationships with other people indicate a toxic relationship with yourself

If you are attracting unpleasant interactions with others into your life it’s almost certainly because you are behaving in a toxic manner towards yourself. Maybe you lack self-confidence, maybe you feel insecure, maybe you feel like you need to do a lot to prove you are a worthy human being. People who are struggling with similar issues may be triggered by your behavior and may attack you or subtly try to undermine you and you may do the same to them. You can’t love other if you don’t love yourself and it’s hard to be loved by others if you don’t love yourself first. A person at ease in his or own skin will – simply by the way he or she is – trigger fewer people and will tigger them less often. Water flows where it can and negativity locks on to other negativity. A bully will attack the person who is already bullying himself. A bully finds an ally hidden in his victim. People who don’t bully themselves will not so easily show up on the radar of bullies. That’s just one example. A person completely at ease with himself or herself will either put others at ease or will make toxic people so uncomfortable they will shut up or leave, because they recognize on an intuitive level that their seeds of negativity cannot grow in those self-loving, self-accepting people. Toxic people need the toxicity already in you to react to and with. The reverse is also true: if we are bothered by something in the behaviour of others there is a good chance we ourselves also display this kind of behavior. What bothers us about others shows us what is far from optimal inside ourselves.