Episode 5: Handling Your Frenemies

Episode 5

This is an edited version of a podcast episode. If you prefer to listen, click Make Me Whole Podcast to find this and all my other episodes.

This post is in response to a question that was posed to me after the last segment: “Why We Need to Talk About Bruno!”. In that post, I talked about dealing with close family members and ending our toxic relationships with them. Well, then how do we deal with our toxic friendships? Let me define that a little bit. Toxic friendships, what are those? Well I think first of all, especially now, we value the people that we call friends. They are not people we just casually associate with. These are people that we've let in and usually have a strong emotional bond with.

I was recently watching a TED Talk by Sharon Livingston, and she talked about the same topic: the idea of the toxic friend. The way she presented it was by telling a story about a guy named Joe who was walking down the street one day. As he was walking, all of a sudden all this shattered glass fell from above, right on top of him. Right on top of his head! He brushed off the pieces of glass, but didn't immediately see that he had gotten hurt. Eventually he saw that he was bleeding from a small nick on his neck and got something to cover it up. By the time he got home, the blood had already dried and it looked like this injury was on its way to being healed. Twenty-five years later, Joe was experiencing excruciating pain in his neck and head. He had no idea what was going on. Finally, he got to the point where he ha