A Nifty Approach To Space Out Toxic Connections
Altering life-course requires you to shapeshift
“I don’t like the phrase toxic connections. For me, it’s a myth.”
Everyone should take responsibility knowing that they choose what’s happening in their life. When we talk about toxic connections, most often it’s about “friends,” “colleagues,” or even certain family members.
Being able to control how you respond to reroute your path is important. It’s not all that obvious, and it takes willpower and commitment to steer a precise heading in life.
To Do So
You might have to undertake drastic measures like letting go of other (toxic) relationships. This is about spacing out.
When you “space out” the relationship with certain friends, colleagues, or even family members you can feel like an asshole. But when you do this with care (space out) it provides you with two positive things:
- You’ll prioritize important time with family (the best investment you can make)
- You’ll automatically restructure the social connections that are the strongest and most meaningful in your life.
Friends
In most cases, these will be older friends, friends who we’ve grown up with, and people who you choose to hang out with for some reason as a kid. Some new people suddenly pop up in your life, who are often connected to the direction of the path you walk.
In a way, you’re always choosing these people by a certain law of attraction linked to your path.
So, although “older friends,” and “new acquaintances” might have appeared rather random to you, they are there for a reason whether these are to disrupt things in your life or to learn lessons from. In the end, it’s always your choice to engage or not.
The difficulty lies with older friends.
Every time you wink back to your past life, you’ll find a different version of yourself, a less developed version (at least I hope), a version that operated differently, a person with different views and different values.
The longer certain friends are in your life, the harder it becomes to release the strength of the connection you have with them. (If that would ever be needed)
When you read on the internet about cutting toxic social connections, it seems rather radical. But when it boils down to achieving a certain lifestyle, it’s inevitable to make such a choice.
Lifestyle decisions aren’t made solely for yourself. Sometimes the hardest decisions in life lead to the greatest outcomes.
Colleagues
Perhaps this is the easiest group to space out since most likely this relationship will be hugely job-evoked.
Shifting the workspace will lead to the best and most mature possible outcome in terms of personal growth. With colleagues, most people will agree that spacing out will here, require you to endure the least amount of emotional effort.
Toxic colleagues can inhibit your development if you don’t watch out. Cutting away your energy from them will lead to professional progress.
Family members
You don’t choose your family.
Family is family. Does this ring a bell?
When I start to have deep conversations with people, most often it doesn’t take long before someone brings up that there exists an issue within the family. Things aren’t going well with everyone, they don’t get along, and often even money troubles are at play.
In terms of family, spacing out isn’t all that easy, but still.
From what I saw, when struggle within the family arises, spacing out means more like spacing out the frequency of visiting rather than spacing out entirely. it’s a double-edged sword difficult to define which approach is the best one.
Yet, from what I understand, reducing the frequency of visiting one another, seems to lead to the most preferred results as per the “spacing out method.”
Spacing Out — How?
We are hugely influenced by our environment.
On a quantum level, your subconscious mind absorbs so much from the environment you behave within consistently, that it’s so deeply entangled within your thoughts and behaviors.
What I found was, that you’ll be best off spacing out with a subtle approach. Don’t be deceived by that subtitle approach! The intention is that it’s perceived as subtle by those toxic friends, but for yourself, it can require radical alterations in your life.
The best way to accomplish this is to move location.
You want to put yourself and your family in an entirely different vicinity. I’m not talking about moving a house two blocks further. Moving to a different village or city, perhaps even another country. It can be the best thing you did.
Don’t see it as an escape plan per se. Here’s the thing, when you’re satisfied about your life, and you’re happy where you are, there is no reason to shift. Although staying in the same spot for a long time in life might evoke unhappiness for some.
However, when you reflect on your present life, and you’re not happy with it, chances are that this has a strong reason. Chances are that if you analyze your life, you’ll detect toxic connections that might induce unhappiness.
It’s only when you shift, and live differently, become subjected to different impulses from a different environment that you’ll start to unfold into a different self.
People are often scared of different, but different does mean worse or bad.
How We Spaced Out And What It Did
Space out the distance to space out time.
In the first house, we lived as young adults (Still kids to be frank) we were renovating for about five years, we lived in a construction yard for most of the time.
At that time we were working a lot and didn’t have much time, also the party lifestyle was interfering with personal growth for both myself and us as a couple.
The house we lived in was located a few houses away from the house where I grew up for about 10 years. Both houses were average row houses with a small back garden.
Within this same neighborhood, my friends whom I went out with a lot lived as well.
My wife has a strong connection with her mother, but she lived about 30 km away, and all the back-and-forth driving was a huge hassle. One day she asked me the move.
I’m a creature of habit.
For me, moving away from the place I grew up in wasn’t something I ever planned to do. Nevertheless, I decided to do it for my wife, because it would be ignorant of me to keep ground when I was at that time 75% of the year working at sea.
Here’s the catch,
Since we moved to the other city nearby, my parents-in-law:
- We bought a house with much more ground for a similar price as a row house in my previous village
- We’ve converted the house into the workplace for my wife and her good friend
- Real friends still pass by (but less than before and in a mature way)
- We rent another house which we otherwise couldn’t afford
- I’m much happier (I almost don’t drink anymore)
- Kids are really happy with the space we have
- My wife is happier
I experienced a tremendous shift in our lives. All the impulses from our surroundings contribute to the lifestyle shifts we have undergone over the last 8 years or so.
“We’ve spaced out time with so-called toxic connections because we spaced out distance.”
Across the internet cutting down on toxic connections is easily said, yet in 99% of the cases you’ve created that toxic connection yourself or at least you’ve agreed on connecting with them.
It’s you, yourself!
You’re as toxic as the connection you call as long as you don’t act to change.
It’s your responsibility to do something about it, you can sit still and let your surroundings feed the poison you don’t like for the rest of your life, or you can take drastic measures and do something about it.
Your choice!
Take This
Toxic is an excuse word. Don’t buy it.
And throwing people overboard doesn’t mean they’ll drown. But trust me, the ones overboard, when they are strong enough, when they really choose the same direction as you, and their energy levels meet yours, they’ll swim back to you because they’ll know you taught them what it takes to swim.
If you want to take control over your life, you’ll have to eliminate excuses from your dictionary, and take responsibility.
Step up and become a man, a woman, a parent, a boss! Take control over your life, that’s the result of spacing out.
Change of direction requires to change your current program. To achieve real changes in your life, most likely you’ll have to override the program you’re most used to.
Changing yourself takes a huge effort, often led by the emotional influence of other people. However, when you want to change you’ll need to change, otherwise you’ll never change.
Understand this well.
Change isn’t always needed, and isn’t all that simple. How badly you want to do something about your life will determine how your life will initially change.
Many people aren’t happy with the life they live, but they can’t force the effort on them to undertake life-changing measures. Often these behaviors are driven by the emotional dependence or connection between other persons.
In the end, it often leads to depression, sickness, or addiction.
“Make sure that’s not you! You want to put in the effort to change radically.”
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Thanks for reading this post!
What is stated here has been written with respect. I have no intention to demonize anything or anybody, these writings are merely brutally honest thoughts extracted from our lives. Sometimes life requires changes, willingly or not, predicted or not, intentionally or not. Yet, the lessons were presented, and writing about them offers to reflect on them usefully.
P.S.:
I’m a firm believer in building a prosilient mind. I like to inspire and energize my readers by writing.
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