The weapons of warfare in relationships are varied and are difficult to discern. Individuals may experience anxiety, frustration, depression, withdraw, and anger without a clear understanding or clarity on how to pinpoint the source of the pain. For example, when individuals are learning to create healthy boundaries after years of destructive relationship patterns, others may engage in retaliatory actions that are subversive, divisive, and manipulative to cause others to see the accusers as victims. Weapons of mass relationship destruction by toxic individuals include using past relationship failures, current disagreements, monopolizing time, accusations, character assassination, and recruiting others by feeding on any vulnerability displayed by the intended target. Let us dig deeper.
As individuals pursue personal growth and realize the old ways of thinking, responding, reacting, and patterns of behavior are no longer acceptable, others may not appreciate this shift in power, control, and/or self-awareness. As people cease to engage in destructive communication and set new expectations in what is acceptable in relationships, people will experience either resistance, defiant opposition, or respectful compliance. Those people who refused to accept these new "rules" of engagement and develop strong resistance to this requested change, may begin to build their arsenal of weapons to discredit, destroy, or punish the offender for daring to step outside the old norms. An individual's intended quest for a healthy relationship built on trust, mutual respect, forgiveness, and trust is at times met with hostility and contempt. The relationship weapons vary, and all have the same outcome of suffering if the person pursuing growth fails to recognize the tactics.
Blame or Shame: As an example, the spouse of someone with a personality disorder may attend counseling and realize they have been the recipient of a conflict cycle of manipulation, blaming, lies, and emotional abuse. The spouse stops participating in conversations, arguments, and guilt-tripping discussions. The unhealthy person may attempt to destroy the individual by limiting their access to loved ones through time robbing during important family events and organizing exclusive invitations to bring up the past failures of the targeted person by blaming and shaming the other person. The weapon of mass destruction is assigning blame and presenting themselves as a victim of the "mean" person.
Punishment: A person may have an ultimate goal to punish another individual for exposing their own toxicity. The listeners of toxic people have little understanding or knowledge of the "behind the scenes historical" behaviors and communication which eventually negatively impacts the recruited people’s relationship with the target of the toxic person. The most sought-after recruits are those with a close relationship with the targeted individual and may have knowledge of or personally experienced a less than favorable experience with this individual in the past. The weapon they use is the past failures of individuals to cause a break in important relationships of the intended target.
Mental Health Deficits: Another person may have worked through early childhood trauma and learned to set new personal boundaries to develop a healthy pattern in relationships. Those who have been contributors to the trauma may object to the new rules of relationship engagement and begin to malign the character of the target to others by sharpening the tongue sword. The character assassin may make statements such as, the person is "unbalanced, crazy, a liar, ungrateful, or selfish." Words that attempt to diminish the other's mental capacity are weapons.
Warning Signs: New interest in spending time with you, need to "protect" you, bringing up past failures of others in an attempt to divide loyalties, making plans during special plans, making comments about the mental health of others without professional qualifications, and discussing their "hurt" from another person.
Relationship weapons of mass destruction: contempt, blame, shame, guilt-tripping, dominating conversation, dominating time of others, controlling, accusations, damaging reputations, and contempt toward another.
Response Systems: Encourage the conflict to remain between parties involved, avoid being swayed by either side, silence, observe, say no, walk away, love others by not engaging in toxic, destructive conversations, and behaviors. You cannot control others. You CAN control your response and reactions. Avoid trying to defend, discuss, or demand the truth. Engaging in these behaviors will further drive the behaviors further into overdrive which leads to more hurt, discouragement, and division.
Love: Loving others may involve turning away and walking away from destructive relationships. Love encourages restoration and reconciliation of parties. The greatest love can be displayed differently than others expect. At times, the greatest form of love is separating oneself until authentic, heart-changing, and true reconciliation is possible. Remember hurting people will hurt people. Let us be the instruments of healing by encouraging healthy and productive conversation for authentic healing.
Questions? Comments? If you have any questions or comments, please email me at kk@rewirelife.com. I would love to hear your thoughts.
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