5 Ways Toxic People Will Trigger You
The people you trust the most (your inner circle) have the power to trigger you the most, because you are most vulnerable with them.
But sometimes the people we allow in our inner circle are or can become toxic to our mental health.
When people realise they can “trigger you” as a way to insert dominance over you, they begin to use your vulnerability against you.
It’s called emotional manipulation!
Here are 5 ways that toxic people will attempt to trigger you in order to keep manipulating you.
1. CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
One of the most painful way to trigger someone is to use their childhood trauma against them.
Usually people would use your childhood trauma against you when they are angry and they’d like to pass on some of the anger to you.
Toxic people don’t like to suffer alone (misery loves company).
This is a very brutal way to hurt someone close to you and it will certainly leave an imprint on your consciousness as you continue your relationship, long after the apologies.
Forgiveness heals all wounds, but if a toxic person is not willing to take accountability for their words and actions, often hiding behind the excuse “This is just who I am”, you will continue to experience disrespectful behaviour as long as you put up with it.
2. INSECURITIES
Manipulators like to use your insecurities against you to make you feel smaller, so that you become co-dependent on them (“Hey, I know you’re broken, but I still love you — aren’t you lucky that you have me!”).
Emotional manipulators often befriend people with the idea of establishing dominance over them, because they need to feed off someone else’s presence to feel a sense of confidence. They cannot sustain the emotional manipulation on their own.
This toxic behaviour stems from one’s own insecurities that the toxic person is not willing to examine and accept as part of their identity.
People who use emotional manipulation as a strategy in relationships struggle with their own self-image and as a result they like to disrupt other people’s view of themselves.
If you spot an insecure person in your inner circle who’s not willing to do the inner work, they will eventually try to bring you down to their level of constant comparison and poor mental health.
You cannot help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.
3. PROJECTIONS
Master manipulators tend to play mind games with you to confuse you, because they are unsure of their own life path.
People tend to project onto others when they’d like something about their identity to remain hidden.
Paradoxically, people who use projections as a coping mechanism would often accuse others of the toxic actions they are doing (e.g. cheating, stealing, jealousy, envy, etc).
While emotional manipulation is rooted in the desire to create co-dependency, because the person who’s doing the manipulation doesn’t want to live alone, projection is a strategy from master manipulators to test your ability to withstand their bullshit.
Master manipulators like to test people around them to see if they can “measure up” to who they portray themselves to be. Essentially, they’re looking for their match!
In the process, they create alienation, because they never truly reveal who they are in their connections with others. As a result, they “prove to themselves” that others “don’t deserve” to see their true identity, because they are not “trustworthy enough” to earn their trust.
The mind of a master manipulator is a mind field — they’ve got lots of inner child healing to do and most of them never really do it!
4. GUILT TRIPPING
Emotionally insecure people will use guilt tripping to make you feel bad about your actions, because deep down they’re scared you’re going to leave them.
This is another form of manipulation tactic used to create co-dependency.
Some emotional manipulators try to lower your self-esteem by attacking your insecurities while feeding you with sentences like “No one will ever love you more than me” (so please don’t leave me).
Other emotional manipulators turn to guilt tripping to embed in your subconscious mind that you should always let them know what you’re about to do before you do it to gain their approval and therefore their love (otherwise they will attack you by shaming you for your actions and creating a sense of guilt in you for simply existing without them in situations).
People who use guilt tripping cannot stand the idea of people leaving them, so they try to condition them to be overly reliant on them and as a result their relationships are very dysfunctional, because they’ve not matured to level of being self-sufficient.
5. SOB STORIES
If you’re dealing with a person stuck in a “victim mentality”, they will always have a sob story to tell: the whole world is against them.
They have learned that the way to gain other people’s attention, care, love and protection is to portray themselves as victims.
This will, of course, trigger empathy in others, but after a while it becomes exhausting to “parent” people who are the same age as you, sometimes way older than you.
We are social creatures and love being part of friendships, but when a friendship is not equal — one person will keep giving and giving while the other is taking and taking.
A victim will portray themselves as a “giver”, because they’re always giving you sob stories, but in reality they are a “taker”, because they keep taking your attention, your care, your love and appreciation — and by the end of every story they will remain the victim, even if you’ve generously offered your help.
If you’re dealing with a victim, they are not likely to change unless a life event triggers an awakening in them that makes them re-evaluate their whole operational system.
