In my previous installment, I clued you guys in to 6 signs your best friend might be an asshole. And as I noted in that post, there are, in fact, way more than 6 ways to do it. Some assholes are a lot sneakier about their behavior, and won't be quite as blatant about the motives. At least not at first.
Some Toxic Assholes are more like Special Forces than first-line infantry. They use a much less overt strategy for extracting supply so as to avoid detection, because we're generally familiar with the more boisterous narcissists. But once you know the pattern, you can figure these people out before they have a chance to do you real harm.
So I'm presenting to you 6 more signs of a toxic friendship, with a lot more subtlety:
1. Their Sob Story Brings Everyone to the Yard (Damn Right, It's Always Better Than Yours)
Some people really are the fire hydrants in the dog park of life. But like actual dog parks, those fire hydrants are exceedingly rare. For the Toxic Asshole, life is just that; they are a special and uniquely abused person such that absolutely nobody can understand their pain because they have suffered more than your puny mind could ever imagine. Whatever problems you may have, they have more. If you had a bad day, they had a worse one. At all times there is an Olympic-level contest for Most Shat Upon Person On Earth, and they always take home a gold.
Guys? Real people who have had actual shitty lives don't do this, for a very simple reason; those experiences were fucking awful and they don't like talking about them for literally no goddamned reason. There is shame, vulnerability, grief, and bitterness in spades, and people who have experienced these events don't want to relive them. They certainly don't view them as bragging rights.
The Toxic Asshole, on the other hand, sees having a shitty life as a status symbol. Something that makes them better than everyone else in the room. They will use their supposedly Dark and Troubled Past to gain your sympathy and to shield themselves from criticism, and as a bonus, they get to make you look like the asshole while they wear the Holy Halo of Victimhood. It's a perfect setup to milk all the attention until they're like a weepier, whinier Jabba the Hutt.
Now of course, nobody decent wants to assume that a person is lying out their ass when they talk about awful shit that happened to them, so that kind of puts us in a tight spot; if they're telling the truth, we'll feel pretty guilty for dismissing it as attention-grabbing, and frankly it'll make us no better than the people who defend actors and athletes instead of the people they assault.
Which is why it's important to remember that what distinguishes an actual fire hydrant in the dog park of life from the puddle of piss at the base of said fire hydrant is the person's behavior, not their history. If they're talking about what happened to them in order to make you feel less alone, and to reassure you that it's possible to face something horrific and still come out okay the other side? Not an asshole.
If, on the contrary, they talk about what happened to them in order to dismiss and downplay whatever has happened to you? Definitely an asshole. That's a dick move, no matter how you slice it.
2. They Constantly Inform You of Their Virtues
Genuinely empathetic, caring, generous, sensitive people don't have to tell you how empathetic, generous, sensitive and caring they are; they'll show you. Toxic Assholes will do the exact reverse. They'll tell you, every chance they get, how they're such honest people and how much they care about everybody and put themselves last, but their behavior will not line up.
They'll claim to love honesty and hate fakers, but when you give them your honest opinion and it's something they don't want to hear, they will absolutely lose their shit at you. They'll claim to be empathetic to a fault, but they can't seem to tell that their behavior is hurtful to you. They'll claim to be sensitive and always aware of the mood of a room, but for some reason they're unable to determine when you're stressed the hell out and need them to shut up for a while. They'll claim to be generous and giving, but you find they beg for gifts and money far more often than they bestow them.
They do this so you'll have a harder time believing what you see and experience, and so that other people are less likely to believe you as well. Particularly if they didn't witness anything shitty. It's a much more subtle form of gaslighting, in that you'll remember what they've said they are and internalize it through constant repetition, so that whenever they do something cruel, you'll blame yourself first. I mean, you know they're such nice people, they wouldn't do this without a reason, right?
It's a far sneakier technique than people realize, and some assholes are so frighteningly good at it they can keep the charade up for years (the one in my life, fortunately, wasn't the sharpest spork in the drawer, so it didn't take as long as it could have to figure out her game). But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. If they're constantly informing you of virtues that their actions don't support, you're dealing with a Toxic Asshole.
3. They "Hate Drama" (But It Follows Them Around Like Nancy Drew)
Like #2, this goes in the "informed virtues" column, but deserves its own entry because the way it plays out is slightly different. It's perfectly possible for people who aren't toxic to get embroiled in drama all the time because they have lousy taste in friends (particularly if they were raised by Toxic Asshole parents, so they don't realize that that level of drama and chaos in a circle of friends isn't normal or healthy). But again, somebody who actually hates drama at the very least doesn't try their damnedest to make it worse.
A Toxic Asshole is the eye of a perpetual shitstorm. Drama doesn't just happen to them; it follows them, envelops them, and tears up everything around them while they remain that calm, smugly smiling center complaining about how they're always getting caught up in other people's shit. When in reality, they're the ones holding the spoon.
These types of assholes will invariably have a string of friendships and relationships that crashed and burned like a Michael Bay movie, and all you need to do is look at the common link between every single one.
It's particularly easy to tell because the Toxic Asshole won't ever shut up about it. They will rehash the story over and over and over again, often "remembering" embellishments they'd never mentioned before (especially if they're telling it to a new source of narcissistic supply). Because they hate drama the way a heroin junkie hates needles. It's a mildly annoying tool they use in order to get their attention fix.
4. They Swallowed the DSM Whole
I need to add a disclaimer to this part: mental illnesses are very much a real thing (street cred: I was diagnosed with major depression two years ago and am on medication for it). And being interested in psychiatry as a hobby is also a real and very harmless thing. These by themselves have nothing to do with being a Toxic Asshole.
This point is again related to #1, but deserves its own special mention because the way it plays out may be slightly different. It's very, very common for Toxic Assholes to be armchair psychiatrists and diagnose not just themselves, but their victims. Ironically, they will often accuse victims who have seen through their bullshit and walked away of being narcissists or "crazy."
This is, of course, a combination of projection and gaslighting. It's their attempt to make you doubt yourself and take the blame, and make you wonder if you're really the problem. If this has happened to you? Let me assure you right now that if you've thought about your behavior for any length of time, combing through your actions and motives for traits of narcissism and feel sick at the thought it might be true, you are not a narcissist. Narcissists don't have that level of self-awareness or ability to examine their own behavior, since the crux of the entire disorder is that they are infallible, perfect beings.
Toxic Assholes will also self-diagnose, and the more alphabet soup labels they can pile onto themselves, the better. They do it for a couple of reasons: 1) uniqueness, specialness 2) it gives them something to blame for any shitty behavior they get called on (the asshole in my life who inspired these posts diagnosed herself with bipolar, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, and at least two others that I forgot). But funnily enough, they'll never self-diagnose with narcissistic personality disorder.
On the surface, they'll even seem very knowledgeable on the subject. But their understanding of the material is shallow at best; they can only draw superficial correlations, and they refuse to pick up on the nuances of any of the disorders they claim they or others have. They're only interested in regurgitating information to sound smarter than you. An intellectual smokescreen to hide the fact they know they have no idea what they're on about.
5. They Fish For Validation
Because Toxic Assholes have no idea how friends, people and emotions work, they are constantly pushing you to see how much you can take. One of their favorite little tests is false humility: putting themselves down in order to get you to disagree and praise them.
Now, there are people out there who have self-deprecating tendencies and aren't Toxic Assholes; again, the difference is pretty telling. Someone who genuinely thinks horrible shit about themselves is not likely to scream it from the rooftops the way the Toxic Asshole does, and somebody who uses self-deprecation strictly for humor is going to smile and laugh when they do it to let everyone know they're not serious (because in order to use it as humor, these types have learned to laugh at themselves).
The Toxic Asshole, by contrast, does the very weird combination of being totally humorless about how terrible they are while at the same time laying it on thick to the point of farce. And being the empathetic, wonderful people-pleaser you are, you fall right into the trap of counteracting their Woe Is Me with praise and reassurance of how great they are and how lucky you feel to call them a friend. Just as they planned it.
This accomplishes two goals. Goal the First is that it lets them draw their supply from you with very little effort, because you're all too eager to give it up. Goal the Second is that it builds the narrative of them being such a put-upon mistreated victim, and when the going gets rough they can claim you're Just Like All the Others and skip off into the sunset with their next schmoe.
Maya Angelou put it best: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." When the Toxic Asshole starts going on and on about how they're a shit friend and everyone eventually figures that out and leaves them, take it as the giant double hurricane flag it is and get the fuck out of there. Because there is literally no reason that someone who isn't a Toxic Asshole would say that (see #3).
6. They Make You Apologize For Calling Them Out
This is the granddaddy of all moves in the covert Toxic Asshole's playbook. A kind of confrontational judo where you bring up a grievance with their behavior, and before you know it you're apologizing for hurting their feelings. And you don't even realize it because they've thrown your footing off so hard you forgot what your own complaint was about. The hardest-to-spot Toxic Assholes are fucking masters at this particular brand of bullshit.
If there is one thing that will make the mask slip and the Toxic Asshole lose their shit faster than 0.5 past lightspeed, it's being called out on something they did. And the easiest way for them to restore the rightful order of their bizarro world is to make you say you're sorry for disrupting their delusion.
There are many ways of doing this, and they're all carefully honed from observing your own weaknesses over time. Some of the most common are sulking/silent treatment, agreeing with you in an over-the-top manner and declaring themselves unworthy of friendship, threatening self-harm or suicide, and dragging a third party into the crossfire. No matter the method, they all play on the same thing, with the same goal: making you feel guilty for speaking up.
That's really the aim of the covert Toxic Asshole. They want to make you so guilty and afraid of upsetting them that you stay and do their bidding because it's less painful than the consequences. As with their more easily detected counterparts, the strategy is the same.
Walk away. Block on social media. Do not engage. No Contact.
Once they've shown you what they are, believe them.
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