A common rule for people recovering from an eating disorder is to avoid conversations about dieting, so when I came home from treatment, I politely asked my loved ones to not talk about counting calories or losing weight in front of me. After all, if I was a recovering alcoholic, I doubt they would talk about drinking around me. It was a simple request really…
and they can’t do it. Every time I’m around my family there’s food shaming, body shaming, and general negativity around eating. After everything I’ve been through…and they just can’t keep their mouths shut.
What’s worse is my six-year-old daughter is hearing all of it. Eating disorders are very much a family problem and I am busting my ass to break the cycle.
One of the most difficult things I learned about in treatment was setting boundaries. I’m a bit of a pushover and people pleaser so stating my needs with confidence can be terrifying. It seems like every time I stand up for myself, I piss people off.
When my family makes comments about dieting, it’s not even the comments that bother me anymore but rather the fact that they won’t respect a boundary I set.
I actually think this can be a common problem for people when they come home from treatment. I’ve grown and I’m healthier but I came home to a family that hasn’t changed. How do I stay healthy among people with unhealthy habits?
After the trauma and pain of going through treatment, I am well aware that others are fighting their own battles, but I can’t let that derail my own recovery.
I hate thinking about how confronting family members might affect my daughter, but at the same time, I want to teach her to stand up for herself. We teach others how to treat ourselves so if someone disrespects you it must be addressed — don’t allow it to continue. This is something I was never taught growing up and I’ve paid dearly for it.
I’m in a fragile state so right now I am choosing to surround myself with supportive people and distance myself from those who are not – even with my family.
So, as always I am looking for your input. Do you have any advice on setting clear boundaries? And what do you do when someone disrespects them? How do you deal with unsupportive people – especially family members?
Toxic People
How do you know when a person is toxic enough to remove them from your life?
I have a toxic person in my life who I’ve endured for a few years and the time has come to weigh my options. Do I tolerate this person to keep the peace in my close-knit family? Or do I sacrifice the relationship to keep my recovery intact?
I really want to think about the benefits and consequences because if I choose to cut this person out of my life, it will have a ripple effect on my relationships with several other people.
How will this affect my daughter? What am I teaching her?
This will make family functions difficult. Is it worth it?
How do I find more supportive people?
I keep coming back to the thought that life is too short to be miserable.
Right now it feels selfish to take a stand because I’ve never done it before. It’s painful now but in the long run, I know it’s best for my well-being.
I know you don’t have to forgive and forget. Sometimes it’s best to just move on. I just want peace.
I would love to hear your input on this as well. Have you ever cut a toxic person out of your life? How did it feel? Was it worth it?
I want you to know that through it all my husband has been absolutely amazing. I am so grateful for his unwavering love and support. My battles have been relentless since coming home from treatment and he has stayed by my side. While I may struggle with the rest of my family, he has always had my back.
I also want to say thank you. I have written about some difficult topics since coming home from treatment earlier this year and you all have been wonderful.
First, I would like you to know that it’s so easy to sit behind a keyboard and say, “you should do THIS” and “you should do THAT”. So weigh anything I say to you with the fact that it’s YOU living your life and you must do what YOU want/need to do. This would be a great topic to explore with a therapist, by the way.
That said, I would ask you to ask yourself (no need to tell us) why this toxic person is behaving the way they are toward you. Do they do this to everyone, or are you the family’s designated scapegoat? The scapegoat is picked because they’re loving and empathetic and the toxic person(s) wants to feel power but is too cowardly to try it with someone who will knock their block off.
Of all the boundaries to set, this one is a good “starter” one and will give you a sense of control over the situation: Let everyone know that your recovery is important to your whole family. You cannot be around anyone who tries to sabotage it. If that happens, you will leave/you will ask them to leave your home. Then stick to it. If you stick to it, this can work! It will also show the others in your circle that you will not put up with that behavior.
Example: I am seriously allergic to cigarette smoke; my eyes and throat swell and my nose stuffs up and it takes a couple of days of smoke-free living to return to normal. Obviously, I keep a no-smoking home and when my first child was born, I put out the word that anyone coming to see the baby would not be welcome if they smoke in my house. Boundary-crossing Relative lit up a cigarette while holding the baby, and I told that person to leave. Immediately.
Not gonna lie; there was pushback and snarkiness from the whole family–“HOW could you HURT Boundary-crossing Relative’s FEELINGS?” (notice it wasn’t “HOW could Boundary-crossing Relative endanger your health?” ) But it subsided and most important, the health of me and my family remain intact.
Let me repeat: setting and holding boundaries is a wonderful thing to discuss with a therapist and it’s very much a part of your recovery.
“How do you know when a person is toxic enough to remove them from your life?
I have a toxic person in my life who I’ve endured for a few years and the time has come to weigh my options. Do I tolerate this person to keep the peace in my close-knit family? Or do I sacrifice the relationship to keep my recovery intact?”
Unfortunate circumstances. But I offer some feedback from someone who is objective:
My advice is to suggest that you’ve first got look after yourself so that you look after your family as best as you can. This is not selfishness, it’s pragmatism.
That aside, given you write you’ve endured because you want to keep the peace, I think you already know your desire (to not have to endure), and that you think the reason why you don’t seek it is that it would cause conflict within your family.
Generally known as selflessness. Opposite of selfishness.
Question becomes: can you really not avoid that conflict whilst achieving your desire to be free of having to endure the toxic person? Would your family be so lacking in understanding and support?
I’m not in a position to know.
Anyway.
Maybe the alternatives are not that good, but even so, perhaps they would still be not as bad. And, from the other stuff you’ve communicated, your close family do support you, and would whether or not you set a line about this person.
Maybe you can try this first? Allow the person/people their one short comment per get-together. At most once per day. Remind them that you love them, but they know how it makes you feel and this is their only warning. If it happens again, either they are leaving or you are. And stick to it. Your choice has already been made. Sorry I wont do it again or sorry I didn’t mean it or you are too sensitive or its Christmas! doesn’t change things. Someone’s leaving. It can reset the next day so they have an opportunity to be better, but at some point cut them off completely if they continue to disrespect you.. Hopefully others will start to police the toxic person as they know what will happen and they want to avoid the conflict. At the least, they might start to better police themselves if they see there are consequences.
I know this might not help, but I wish you the best.
So, I have had to do this, both to a brother and to a formerly close friend, and it isn’t easy, although in both cases physical distance helped. I think the first thing you need to consider is, as Katydid asks “is it just you that gets mistreated or is it everyone?”, because the answer will affect how you go about either stopping the behaviour or refusing to put up with it.
If it is just you, and in my brothers case it was just me, it is more difficult, but it can be done. However as I said I had the benefit of physical distance which meant I could control the access to me. For me this meant initially sending him a letter explaining my position – which was something a therapist encouraged me to do as a clear marker of intent. From then on I didn’t talk to him on the phone, and I only went to family events that he would be at if they were large enough I could walk away if I needed to, and I did 🙁 Most of the rest of the family do not understand why I have “fallen out with” him, because in a sense I haven’t, I just don’t try to talk to him, if he comes over to talk to me I will respond and can chat in an apparently friendly manner, but if he brings up a subject I don’t want to discuss, I warn him then if he persists I walk away. He has not followed me to carry on the conversation so that does make this easier and, as this all happened a good twenty something years ago now, he has also got better at not touching on the areas I will not talk about on the rare occasions I do see him.
I too was lucky in that my partner was fully behind the decision, but then he’d seen me crying after the phone calls so …
What I will say is that in neither case do I have the slightest regret about the decision I made, and that I am mentally the healthier for having done so. You have the added incentive of not wanting to model wrong behaviour for your lass, and this is wrong behaviour – it isn’t healthy to put up with being bullied.
Good luck.
Do you have any advice on setting clear boundaries?
State your boundaries, out loud, in unambiguous language, ideally in company. How the person pushing those boundaries reacts is on them.
And what do you do when someone disrespects them?
Depends on the situation, but my favoured tactic is usually simply to leave. “I told you not to do that. You did it anyway. See ya.” You can always come back later – an hour, day, month, year – up to you. Don’t be browbeaten into staying to take abuse. There is no law that says you have to. Just… leave.
How do you deal with unsupportive people – especially family members?
Present them with the choice of being supportive or being ignored, potentially permanently. Don’t do so angrily, if possible – be matter of fact. “Me, or them – your choice. Hope you pick me. Go ahead.”
Have you ever cut a toxic person out of your life?
An entire family branch (my dead uncle’s wife and her four adult children, my cousins). Not all at once, but when I made the final cut it was complete and permanent. I still hear about them from my mother, but I have made it absolutely clear I have no interest in doing so and do not react, ever, in any way, to such news, so reports have now become extremely sparse.
How did it feel?
Horrible, at first. There was anger, and blame, and so on. But I held firm.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely. I feel so much better for it now, many years later, and crucially it was the catalyst for realising that my time is valuable and should only be spent on people who deserve it.
if I choose to cut this person out of my life, it will have a ripple effect on my relationships with several other people.
Good. You may profitably remove those people too, if they prove flaky. Life is too short to waste on people who aren’t good to you.
How do I find more supportive people?
Two answers:
1. you’ve already found at least one. Kudos for your husband for being that guy. And to anyone else in your life who is being your friend.
2. How? Use the time you previously wasted on the toxic people. When I cut out the family branch, that left a lot of time to be more attentive to the people I valued who valued me back, AND freed up time I could spend on activities that brought me into contact with others.
I hope some of that is helpful. It sounds like you owe these people nothing. Move on and don’t look back.
There’s some problem with markup on this site, which is why I’ve taken to using plaintext instead. I’m confident you used blockquotes, which show up fine in preview.
I offer support and admiration, and a couple simple pieces:
You don’t have to answer questions. Respond with nonsense or with redirection.
You don’t have to change your answer if a question or comment is repeated.
The thing I’ve had to learn is that you don’t have a lot of say in whether or not people git pissed off at you. In fact, “standing up for yourself” is super likely to piss the other person off because you’re calling them out on doing something wrong, and nobody feels good about that. It’s easy for them to get defensive even if they mean well, just because it sucks having to face the idea that you’ve done something wrong.
So… basically, whether or not they’re pissed off vs handling it well is mostly on them rather than you. Long as you aren’t going out of your way to be nasty, which I doubt you are.
I’m speaking as someone who’s essentially cut a family member out of their life specifically because of their toxic behavior. The general rules I try to keep in mind are; communicate the boundary as clearly and neutrally as you can, never threaten anything you don’t fully intend to follow through on, and actually follow through when needed. For this sort of thing, saying you’ll leave if the conversation gets around to dieting is a great idea, but to do that you need to make sure that any time you do meet you always have a planned escape route that doesn’t depend on one of the family members. If this means only ever visiting in a public restaurant, and making sure you always take your own car over, so be it. Might be worth stating you’ll ignore phone calls for a day as well if that’s what you want and if they try to call you to convince you to come back.
No harm in meeting again in the future, in fact you probably want to give them a couple chances to get used to you actually following through on leaving. I don’t really think you need to set a hard line, like three-times-you’re-out, since people aren’t perfect… but I guess keep it up while you can and scale back as you need. If you need to just not speak with them for a while, go for it. Nothing has to be forever, it’s just for your own health.
This sort of thing is awkward and painful for them just the same way it is for you, so they might react badly at you actually leaving… but that’s kinda just how it goes. They’re processing a consequence of harming you just as much as you’re processing being harmed. Once they calm down, they might start rethinking their own priorities. What’s more valuable, talking about diets or seeing you? Either answer is informative for you. I hope they choose you over a random conversation topic!
To me, for this method, it doesn’t really matter if it is a family member or a stranger. A family member is just more likely to know your contact info, or you’re more likely to meet them in a private setting. The idea is the same though, always meet knowing what your escape route is, and follow through on what you say you’ll do. How they react is up to them.
Thank you all for your insightful comments. They really mean a lot to me. I know my blog is no replacement for my weekly visits with my therapist, but I do find it helpful. My blog gives me a voice and reminds me that I’m not alone. Thank you for your support.
I feel I just need a little space from my family — which is painful — but I really feel I need to calm down, gather my thoughts, and think about my priorities.
“After all, if I was a recovering alcoholic, I doubt they would talk about drinking around me”
eh, you would be surprised.
I cut my partner’s toxic parents out after my partner’s death. No regrets. I am sad that they weren’t able to support other and decentre themselves enough to be supported by our community who were grieving, which would have been very hard for them. But that’s what they get for being dickheads for the entire 4 years I knew them.
On clear boundaries: my experience is no matter how clear they will cross them. So as Chris J said; have a clear consequence, explain it, and follow through.
I hope it goes ok with them and at least some of your family are supportive