Maybe this has been asked a million times (I didn’t find it… links and useful search queries are appreciated). But how should I deal with a toxic friend in a group?
I’m sure this situation is very common.
More details below, you could just skip it :)
We are a large group 7-11 friends ages 20-30 (group A). The group is very nice, and I am the common friend with all of them. After the summer the group will be 5-7 friends (the others return home after 6 months), with the toxic friend and his girlfriend in the group. The rest of the friends were friends for longer.
The toxic is very subtle. I know him for 8+ years, I didn’t like him at first but I don’t remember why. Recently I have seen his subtle manipulative behavior with another circle of people (group B), somewhat larger and “less friends”. He took the lead a long time ago, decreased meeting frequency by a lot.
[Edit: This paragraph is hard to understand, try to improve it]
This is an unsorted list of things (very broad) that I recently noticed:
- He is blaming others for things not going well.
- He blames other people for his own actions.
- Instead of working as a group, he works only with a friend and he does not report any kind of progress, we are “guilty” for not taking initiative.
- When a task has to be done, he asks very open-ended questions that nobody can answer in the chat. One of the persons that could have answered was outside the group because she was his ex and he didn’t want to be in the chat with her. We had to forward messages back and forth between them, communication was a big issue, we hardly met in person this year. Then he blames that nobody answers his questions.
We said everything in the previous paragraph to him, we are “personally attacking him”. The person that he blames the most for things not going well is her ex.
For rest of the group (except him and his friend), the bad atmosphere is his fault. We work well together, if someone doesn’t have time to do something, someone else does it. We meet regularly, etc.
From now on we will be taking the lead so hopefully thing will go better. (He resigned willingly, as everything is falling apart from his point of view).
The issue remains with my group of friends, I’m good friends with the others, but I don’t want to find myself in shitty situations with them.
Some time ago, in a smaller group 3-5 friends (group C), ages 20-25 I detected toxic behavior with one of the friends (always wanted the group to follow his plans). I didn’t know how to handle the situation, so I showed up less with them using working on (group B) as an excuse, as I didn’t want him to feel bad.
Just seeing the group less backfired with him being a very active member in group B just to keep the friendship with me… Luckily he improved a lot recently, but we are still not so much friends as we once were.
Now talking about the toxic guy I’m currently asking:
I thing he is not ok and I’m a bit worried. Maybe he needs help, and if something like this happened to me, it would feel very bad if friends just vanished.
There is a lot of advice in the line of “you are not responsible for others feelings” and to avoid toxic people, this is what I followed the first time that I found myself in this situation. I’m not sure anymore how to deal with this.
I’ve you have read so far, thank you a lot :)
I think your first course of action would be to bring this up with other members of your friend group and see how they feel. Have they also noticed this behaviour? Do they have any ideas how to deal with it? It will be easier to help this person if you work together. Just make sure you don’t seem like you’re ganging up on them. Maybe you can approach them with your concerns and then another friend can bring it up separately some time later. If you want to help always approach with kindness and love.
Thank you, this seems reasonable.
Since my focus was mainly on group B, apart from his actions on group B, I didn’t notice anything and I don’t know how to check if he is really ok or not. If I ask him he says yes, and when he says no, he blames his ex and group B.
I don’t want to criticize his work on group B, I’m very uncomfortable talking about people that are not present.
I’ll think how to do it, but it is hard since there is no “red flag” but a lot of tiny ones.
Heads up toxic people often used peoples kindest traits against them. Your worry for his well being, so he’ll forever be miserable enough for you to worry about it but never donanything to get better. It’s just to distract your from your own discomfort. your uneasiness talking about his behavior to other people, that means you’ll not get a second opinion and stay isolated in your confusion, and it works you already wonder if you’re the problem.
Your kindness is probably why he follows you to other groups and starts belittling and criticizing you. He knows you will do what he wants and give and give as much as he wants to take. You did start to talk about it tho and start to break out of the role he assigned you.
Guy seems to be big on emotional abuse. I see plenty of red flags there but they are hard to see if you don’t study up on how emotional abuse works.
So the first question is what do you want? Do you want projects done with the group? Do you want to help toxic person? Do you want friend group without toxic guy? What do the non toxic people want? The advice will change a lot based on what the priorities are.
I think the nontoxic friends just want to keep the group as a whole. We do an activity together that takes place every week. When the group increased we started doing more activities together, playing games, celebrating birthdays, etc.
Until last year we were only 3 friends. In the last 2-3 years I showed up in that activity very rarely (maybe once every 2-3 months) since it became time-consuming and repetitive.
Last year I made new friends that came for some time. They were very interested in that activity, so I invited them, and they became friends with my friends there. Since they had to commute from another city to do the activity, I felt somewhat “forced” to attend more frequently.
I think I just want to be able to occasionally hang out with my friends of group A, without generating tension with that guy. I want to go back to doing the activity every 2-3 months, and sometimes meet only with the 3 friends from the start.
I do not want to be called out if I distance myself from them a little. (They already blame me for not attending the activity very often).
With group C I had too much when the toxic in that group started criticizing me for not meeting them every week. This time I started to worry when the same pattern repeated… Maybe I’m the problem
The thing with toxic people is that they by definition create tension. No matter what you do, they will find a way to manufacture drama. You’re NOT the problem, the problem is the toxic person and at a stretch your lack of putting firm boundaries in place. You could meet with the new friends in the other city and not tell toxic person. And let them rage and blame and whatever when they find out.
You could ask to meet with the initial 3 friends one on one and maybe work on excluding the toxic person but there’s going to be plenty of tension. You have to decide if you can weather the tension or if you want to slowly have your friendships poisoned. You sadly can’t have both.
