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    Take Back Your Power! How to Stop People Who Are Toxic from Manipulating You.
    Take Back Your Power! How to Stop People Who Are Toxic from Manipulating You.
    Take Back Your Power! How to Stop People Who Are Toxic from Manipulating You.
    Ebook292 pages3 hours

    Take Back Your Power! How to Stop People Who Are Toxic from Manipulating You.

    By Lorna MacKinnon

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    About this ebook

    If you’re reading this it is likely that you have a toxic person in your life and that for foreseeable future you are stuck with them. You have weighed up your options and feel that the only option is to tolerate them until you can get rid of them or you may feel that life would be perfect if they would just treat you right. Their behaviour may be the only thing that stops your life from being perfect.
    If so, then this book could be just what you are looking for. In it you’ll learn about the different types of people who are toxic, their ‘toxic traits’, whether you profile as a classic victim (and what to do about it) and how to deal with your toxic adversary before you are in a position to banish them from your life for good.
    Take Back Your Power! How to stop people who are toxic from manipulating you is written with the express purpose of providing you with workable strategies for dealing with master manipulators, toxic and abusive people. It also provides you with bullet proof methods for stopping yourself giving off victim vibes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLorna MacKinnon
    Release dateApr 13, 2018
    ISBN9781370972616
    Take Back Your Power! How to Stop People Who Are Toxic from Manipulating You.
    Author

    Lorna MacKinnon

    Who is this Lorna MacKinnon and why should you care? Because she knows her stuff and everything she writes is about you, about your Sun sign and how you can understand all that you need to know about it. Know yourself as Socrates said, right? If you don't know yourself and what you want, how can you possibly be expected to get it? Your Sun sign is about eighty percent of your astrological profile. So if you can master your understanding of this and take the appropriate action to obtain your desires, only you know what you can achieve. Given this knowledge and how you apply it, you really can write the narrative of your own life. Work out your strengths and how to really maximise them. Understand your weaknesses and determine how to transform them into strengths. Make your perceived weakest link your strongest. Rewrite your past history and reshape your memories into things that are positive and empowering, so that everything really works out for you. Create a powerful, motivational self-fulfilling prophecy that encourages you to move forward, shaping events as opposed to being their slave, getting what you want instead of accepting what others think you should be content with. These books are about you, not about the author. The only 'writer's voice' you will hear is the one that informs, entertains and encourages you. It's now time to write your own script and act out the drama of your own life, not ones that you previously thought had been chosen for you. Predestination is passe and karma is callow, right? If you feel that this can spur you to think, strategize and act, then follow the blog, buy the books and take action. Become your best, who you really want to be. Nobody else will do it for you.

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      Book preview

      Take Back Your Power! How to Stop People Who Are Toxic from Manipulating You. - Lorna MacKinnon

      Take Back Your Power! How to stop people who are ToXiC from manipulating you.

      By L. F. MacKinnon

      Copyright © 2018 by L. F. MacKinnon

      All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away in any form without the prior written consent of the author/publisher or the terms relayed to you herein.

      The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment without the advice of a physician. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature in your quest for well being. In the event that you use any of the information in the book for yourself, which is your right, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

      Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

      Introduction

      Is This Your Everyday Reality?

      ToXiC Kryptonite

      Twenty Traits that Show Someone is Toxic

      1. Abusive and Bullying

      2. Boring and Banal

      3. Cowardly

      4. Depressing

      5. Destructive

      6. Dishonest and Deceitful

      7. Emotional and Energy Vampires

      8. Guilt Inducing

      9. Hoovers

      10. Ignoble and Unprincipled

      11. Judgemental

      12. Malware

      13. Manipulative

      14. Martyrs

      15. Narcissistic and Needy

      16. Pity Party Junkies

      17. Self-destructive

      18. Solipsistic

      19. Undermining and Undesirable

      20. Victims

      Toxic Taxonomy – The Dirty Dozen

      Taking Action - Identifying and Fighting Off the Dirty Dozen

      1. Necrotic Narcissists, Total Takers and Perennial Parasites

      Dealing with Necrotic Narcissists, Total Takers and Perennial Parasites

      2. Black Clouds, Foul Weather Friends, Professional Victims, Guilt Trippers

      Dealing With a Black Cloud

      3. Flagrant Fault Finders - Triple Fs

      Dealing With a Flagrant Fault Finder

      4. Desperate Dissers

      Dealing With a Desperate Disser

      5. Chronic Catastrophizers

      Dealing With a Chronic Catastrophizer

      6. Dream Destroyers

      Dealing With a Dream Destroyer

      7. Volatile Volcanoes

      Dealing With a Volatile Volcano

      8. Serial Saboteurs and Toxic Enablers

      Toxic Enablers

      Dealing With a Serial Saboteur

      9. Magnetic Manipulators/Consummate Controllers

      Dealing With a Manic Manipulator

      Establishing Relationship Boundaries

      Combat a Controlling Partner

      10. The Mission Creep

      Dealing With a Mission Creep

      11. Toxic Vampires

      Exorcising the Toxic Vampire

      Voodoo Doll

      12. Meta-Toxic

      Dealing With a Meta-Toxic

      Combat a Controlling Partner

      Twelve Toxic Tactics

      Hopelessly Addicted

      Disguised Putdown

      Undisguised Putdown

      Gaslighting

      Backhanded Compliments

      Distraction/Dismissal

      Phishing

      WTF! You’re even worse than me!

      Trivializing

      You asked for it

      Cat and Mouse

      Inheritance Blackmail

      No More Toxic Excuses

      What’s your excuse?

      It’s Better Than Being Alone

      Hopelessly Addicted

      It’s All About the Money, Honey.

      You Don’t Want To Hurt Anybody’s Feelings

      All People Are Users So I Might As Well Stay With the Devil I Know

      Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

      You’re Having Fantastic Sex

      You’re Scared of Change

      You Don’t Want To Admit That You Were Wrong

      He’ll Change

      ToXiC Balance Sheet

      Toxicity – Face On, Face Off

      Five Ways to Manage a Toxic in the Workplace

      1. It’s Business

      2. Stick to the Point

      3. Don’t Share

      4. Don’t Spread

      5. Contain Them

      Age and Addiction

      NeuroToxic

      Pimp Your Brain – a Neuroplasticity Primer

      Brain Primer

      Use Your Mind to Drive Your Brain

      How Toxic Individuals Affect Your Brain

      Toxic Thinking

      Post-mortem Toxic Thoughts

      Pimp Your Brain – Executive Summary

      Terminating Toxicity is All About Attitude

      The Terminating Toxicity Mindset Quadrant

      1. Think Assertively

      2. Equanimity

      3. Eudaimonia or Flourishing

      4. Act As If

      Four Additional Anti-Toxic Attitudes

      1. Smile

      2. Trifecta of Being

      3. Arête

      4. Pattern Interrupt

      It Takes Two to Toxic

      Ten Types Who Attract Toxics

      1. Mouse

      2. Martyr

      3. Appeasing People Pleaser

      4. Rescuer

      5. Worthless

      6. Parent

      7. Defender

      8. Drama Diva

      9. Inquisitor

      10. Impulsive Over Sharer

      Life Lessons or What the Toxic Teaches You

      The Zen of Friendship

      Six Ways to Choose the Right Friends

      1. Be Selective

      1.1 Ten Criteria for Choosing People

      2. Friend Ranking Quadrant

      3. Train Your Friends

      4. Establish Relationship Boundaries

      5. How Many?

      6. Ending a Friendship

      Happy Endings

      About the Author

      Introduction

      This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.

      ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

      The mission of this book is to enable you to identify, deal with, and reboot the people who are toxic to you and add little or no value to your life. These manipulators and abusers go out of their way to actively sabotage it.

      You can read ‘Take Back Your Power! How To Stop People Who Are Toxic From Manipulating you’ as an instruction or combat manual, with a clear call to action. It draws on neuroscience, psychology, genetics, epigenetics and philosophy, repurposing proven techniques to empower you to deal with toxic influences in your life.

      A ToXiC is defined as someone who is continually and persistently bad for you to be around. They regularly manipulate and undermine you, taking great joy in your misery whilst pretending to be your friend. Their presence is pernicious and injurious to your psychological and physical wellbeing. They think they have an inalienable right to provoke, pry and interfere in whatever you do. ToXiCs delight in breaching any boundaries you have drawn in an attempt to deal with their unwanted presence or behaviour. They also delight in dishing out verbal and emotional abuse.

      They do not respect you – not at all, no matter what they say or appear to do to convince you otherwise.

      There is obviously a difference between a wilfully malignant toxic individual (hereafter referred to as a Toxic) and a person who temporarily exhibits toxic behaviour. Toxicity won’t be what the second person normally exhibits. They may be in a state of anger, depression, all-consuming despair or grief when they behave in a toxic manner, and will simply be expressing how they feel at that point in time in an uncensored and unmediated way.

      Possessed by whatever is consuming them at that time, they will do things that normally they wouldn’t countenance. They won’t always use that behaviour in a purposeful and exploitative manner.

      The Toxic, however, is characterised by a consistent and purposeful series of behaviours, all of which are designed to manipulate and degrade you. You might call them toxic traits if you were looking for a way to identify or label manipulative, abusive people who are totally toxic. A normal individual will usually see the error of their toxic behaviour, often be mortified, and will invariably apologise and attempt to make things right with you.

      A Toxic will do none of these things and will ‘get off’ on trying to manipulate you by whatever means they can, only ‘apologising’ if it’s part of their grand scheme to dominate you. They pride themselves on being master manipulator

      This book is practical and examines the realpolitik of dealing with a toxic context and/or a toxic individual. You can use it as a combat manual, where appropriate. It’s not about trying to be good, compassionate and doing the right thing for everyone, no matter how they treat you, especially when that doesn’t work out to be in your best interests. It’s about behaving and acting selectively, being focused and effective where you need to be.

      Sometimes people need to be told exactly how you want to be treated, and inevitably, that may temporarily upset them. Better that than them continually hurting you.

      Is This Your Everyday Reality?

      Have you received a phone call and got that sixth sense that the person on the other end of the line is someone you would prefer not to have in your life? Do you let the phone ring or grudgingly, out of a sense of misplaced duty and being sociable, answer the caller? Then collapse into a profanity spewing jelly the moment the call has ended?

      Your Toxic is winning. You answered their call despite your reservations and now you’re suffering the consequences.

      Ever been in that situation when you’ve been contentedly breezing along the pavement, smiling away or whistling merrily, all being right with the world? Then you notice someone in the distance who makes your heart spiral into the gutter; so potentially dancing with death, you cross the busy road to avoid them.

      Once again the Toxic wins. They’ve got to the point where they’re controlling your behaviour even though you’ve avoided their physical presence. It’s gone beyond the stage of not wanting to meet them – now you can’t even tolerate the anticipation of meeting them.

      Walking into work, are you filled with a sense of impending menace and negativity as you worry about the effects your bullying boss or corrosive co-workers are having on you? Is insomnia now your norm, as you dread the poisonous workplace environment that dominates most of your waking hours? Waking up with your stomach in knots and a feeling of nausea and despair, perhaps you sometimes call in sick just to avoid them.

      Do you ever receive an email and decide not to open it, as you just oh-so-do-not want to read the stream of banal, pedestrian and predictable vitriol? You are under the influence of a CyberToxic, who thinks they can attack you anytime, anyplace, and anywhere.

      When you log onto your social networking sites, do you detect that a certain individual has been grubbing around, trying to find out as much about you as they can, so they can use this information to threaten or manipulate you later? Do they have a blog and do you ever check in to see what lies they are spreading about you just for malice, or to big them up; or how they are publically emoting about you because of some perceived relationship that only exists in their mind?

      At Christmas, are you filled with dread and nausea as you receive the inevitable invitation to the annual family bash, where you know retribution, argument and bad feelings are the order of the day as the alcohol flows and everyone, inhibitions long evaporated, decides to tell the rest of family what they really think about you?

      Do you attend these festive events because it’s expected of you and you want to stake your claim to your inheritance, or because you genuinely enjoy pressing the flesh with your corrosive kith and kin?

      Perhaps the thought of someone who adds no value to your life makes you realise how obnoxious and vile their behaviour can be and that you’ll tolerate no more of it.

      You are now reaching the turning point, the point of no return.

      The only ingredient missing is you taking action.

      ToXiC Kryptonite

      We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

      – P.D. James, The Children of Men

      Welcome to the world of the toxic individual, someone who you would prefer to avoid at all costs as they drain your energy and potentially make you feel awful about yourself. This may or may not be their intention. That’s not the issue here, as their motivation is irrelevant when all that matters is the final outcome – the negative effect they continue to have on you.

      A toxic person is a cancer of the soul that metastases the longer you allow them to remain in your life.

      Sometimes they can progress rapidly from simply being background noise level irritation to demoralising harassment and stalking, both of which are criminal activities in many jurisdictions. The longer you let them get away with their behaviour, the more intense it becomes and the more difficult it is to deal with them. The longer they get away with their behaviour the harder it will be for you to get them to treat you right.

      Bad things can happen to good people and exposure to a Toxic is a salutary example. That this has taken place is not necessarily your fault or any reflection on your character. It’s just something that has happened and, like any disease that can get worse, has to be dealt with in a forthright and effective manner.

      This extensively researched book will assist you with identifying, targeting and dealing with whichever of the Dirty Dozen Toxic Types is ruining your life. If you have already tried every method under the sun to get them to morph into someone who is a joy to be around and their behaviour still sucks then one of my other books (How to Deal With People Who Are ToXiC, How to Get Rid of People Who Are ToXiC or the ToXiC Combat Manual) would be more appropriate.

      In Take Back Your Power! How to Stop People Who Are ToXiC From Manipulating You. You’ll learn about the Necrotic Narcissist, whose insistence on their own importance at the expense of yours can wear you down, leaving you demoralised and disempowered by their continually wailing ‘me, me, me’ at the expense of ‘you’ mantra.

      You’ll encounter the Dream Destroyer, who can’t wait to tell you why anything you try to achieve will end in the ashes of failure and that it will all be your fault. The Black Cloud will be dragged into the light, the type of Toxic who’ll spend all their time and energy leaching the life out of you, enshrouding you in their own misery and depression, never being happier than when you are down and demoralised.

      Which leaves nine more noxious Toxic Types for you to explore.

      These people could be your colleagues, bosses and fellow students, past friends, acquaintances, and ex-lovers, even members of your family. Or simply someone you’ve recently met who's already crossing all of your boundaries and giving you that icky feeling of impending unpleasantness.

      The common denominator is how they make you feel and if you really want their presence in your existence to continue. Remember, it’s your life and it’s getting shorter by the second. It’s your choice who you allow into it, and also who you don’t want, if they provide no pleasure or support and undermine your wellbeing.

      Being your ‘friend’ is not a basic human right – it’s something you extend to those who deserve it. Toxics will sometimes try to justify their behaviour by getting emotionally incontinent and gushing about having their ‘needs met’ or ‘avoiding getting upset’. Well, your needs are paramount and they are best served by getting this toxic influence out of your life for good.

      When people persistently and deliberately step over the line and become Toxic, you realise that you owe them no duty of care whatsoever, no matter what manipulative entreaties and behaviour they come up with. They’ll try anything they can to stay in your life, from low level manipulation sometimes accompanied by psychological or physical threats, to trying to get your friends or family on message, thereby tainting existing relationships with their neediness and attempts to make you feel guilty.

      So do you want to waste any more time on toxic individuals? Maybe you should consider adopting a different and much more proactive strategy.

      Why wait and passively surrender control to them? Negotiate with them – make them understand the error of their ways and how they should change their behaviour. Clearly and dispassionately, outline the consequences if they fail to act on this. You will be shown bullet proof strategies for doing this. In an ideal world you could eject the toxic individual from your life but sometimes this just isn’t an option, which is why you need to negotiate until you are truly free to move on. There are times when you may have to buy time before making your final break free.

      The objective of this book is to inform you how to identify the toxic individuals that compromise and contaminate your life. It outlines strategies for communicating your concerns to them and telling them exactly how they need to treat you if they want you to remain part of their life.

      Once you’ve done this, you free up vital energies for doing things that you want to do, and no longer need to pay any attention to them.

      It’s also clear that a Toxic may leave some psychological baggage even when you have discharged them, so strategies for destroying any lingering toxic residue in your mind and brain are discussed. A working appreciation of neuroplasticity, the means by which you can destroy toxic neural networks within your brain whilst making positive, lasting cognitive change, is outlined.

      Toxic family members and career or academic colleagues, the types you currently can’t escape being physically exposed to, are dissected. Traits and types of people who are toxic are covered. It doesn’t ,matter whether you meet them in the workplace, hang out with them socially or date/live with them, their behaviour is still toxic and needs dealing with.

      Once you are a Toxic-free zone, it’s important to ensure that you spend your time with supportive people and ensure that another Toxic does not sneak into your life. So this book discusses the matter of choosing the right friends, and working out when one may go rogue and turn toxic.

      Although Toxics are rarely a laughing matter, a significant portion of this information is presented in a humorous light, which helps you to enjoy, remember and act. As is required by the subject matter, some of the tone is sardonic, satirical and pitch black. This can also put things into perspective and helps you remember that there is a world that is much richer and more interesting than many of us think.

      This assists in putting the Toxic in their rightful place – reformed and repentant or permanently out of your life.

      Twenty Traits that Show Someone is Toxic

      I’ve learned that people will forgive what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

      – Maya Angelou

      Toxic people will exhibit a few or a substantial mixture of the following traits. It’s very likely that you can add many

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