- TOXIC PEOPLE, STALKING AND FLIPPING OUT -
(En Français)
(Em Português)
This morning, I woke up to the above meme on my facebook feed. Since I live in a place where I receive on a regular basis incredible and improbable signs from Life, I decided to write something about it: this meme is not just timely for me, it is also a very real and personal challenge. For several reasons, the main one being that I need to both clarify and relieve my consciousness.
I attempt to cut through the chase when I write, and get to the marrow right away and make every sentence count. Every one. One of the reasons I write as well, is that I am constantly a victim of a type of thinking that goes much faster than my conscious awareness, and I am left to pick up the pieces on the follow, and theorize a good narrative after the fact.
Let’s finish this introduction with a true story:
A few years back a man that I consider like a brother in arms, and who I have a certain type of admiration and respect for, told me the following : “Sometimes I flip man. Like… I flip. I really flip. And when I flip, it gets ugly”. When someone tells you that, he is giving you the manual. He is opening himself to you, and letting you in on some serious intimate stuff. If you don’t value this type of confession and do not factor it well in your dealings with this person, then you are betraying them. If you use the material that they painstakingly admitted to you (in an offering of honesty, transparency and appreciation) against them, you are evil (or under influence). Period.
I certainly was not evil with my friend, but I did not value the ‘secret’ he let me in on enough, somehow betraying his trust, to my great disappointment. Until it was my turn to flip. Big times. Again. Thinking I was now above it….
set up
I am going to set the stage quickly, to facilitate thinking about the issues raised here. I have the privilege to live in a place where very little happens externally, and lots happen in small to medium group dynamics. This comes with the tremendous advantage of compressing time and making one go through emotional hoops and circles at a rapid pace. In other words, you evolve quickly where I live, or you are left on the sidelines now.
framework
I live by the Ocean with an “incestuous” group of people who spend almost half of a year in a type of temporary autonomous zone, doing yoga, surf and creative activities. This is not only an amazing life experience, but also the richest, most complex, most unpredictable environment I have ever been in.
Because this environment is a bubble, it is actually easier to shift to an Advaita Vedanta/Wetiko type of worldview where one considers that everything that is happening to them is simply reflections and rearrangements of their own subconscious processes. Certainly easier than in highly complex environments like megalopolises where the mechanisation and apparent complexity severs all links with the spirit, and where the illusion that the material world is real, that death does not exist (it does not in our western societies) are prevalent.
So to rebound on the meme above, having to be embedded in dealings with a toxic person is simply reflecting my own toxicity, externalised in the form of a person I decide to abhor instead of really looking at my own toxicity. Equivalently, developing an unhealthy attraction mostly imagined (a more attractive name for stalking) for another person is a way to put all the weight on the other person of stuff I perceive I will not graduate to.
I use the pronoun “I” because I am writing about personal stuff. Yet I am hoping that I am touching on generic and universal issues.
definitions
The definitions given here are not meant to be universal, or dictionary definitions. They simply point to archetypical energies that clarify and articulate the ideas presented.
toxicity
Nobody is 100% toxic, and we all have some level of toxicity. However, I will use the expression toxic people as a shortcut here.
A toxic person is characterised by two features: envy and lack of imagination. Very often, the envy is also a result of the lack of imagination. They are easily recognised by their sole focus on money and material resources as well as social status and power dynamics, and a total lack of creativity regarding anything linked to aesthetics, humour and the arts in general. It kills them and they covet it in others. They covet it at any price, and they will lie and steal to get it, especially if gender issues come into play on top of it. If they can’t get it, they will try to destroy it in others. In India, beautiful women have acid thrown in their faces by their “friends”. In the West, your “friend” might take great lengths explaining to your male friends how you are a slut for example…
Their world exists solely in the realm of transactions and power plays. Because that is all they have in their life, they will go to infinite lengths to secure resources that will allow them to buy friends, luxury goods and artwork. Those resources will be secured against a majority opinion of “good taste” (meaning magazines, lifestyle websites and richer friends), never against knowing their inner tastes and sensitivities. Bullying, lying and stealing are their 3 weapons of choice. Their most intelligent legal weapon is corruption and they use it all the time, with money or all kind of ‘status gifts’, the most vicious being gifts to the target’s children. I suppose poor Sharath Jois understands this by now…
The only way to move from toxic to non toxic, and develop self-esteem since at core that is what we are talking about, is to cultivate everything that cannot be priced/quantified in oneself: health and a strong and supple body, intelligence and humour, culture and elegance, courtesy and politeness, and a strong aesthetic taste based on culture. Quite a program that money will never buy.
An easy way to spot a toxic person is to see how addicted they are to: alcohol, food, sex, drugs. When you let lack of self-esteem reign in your inner world without admitting it to yourself, you are an addict. You can pretend that this is a choice, a decision. That you really need it. It is not. Addiction to work or exercise is only slightly better.
As a rule of thumb, the toxic person is also refractive to hallucinogenic substances, though I would count this more as another indicator than a strong pointer.
stalking
A stalker is a person who is letting their toxic side develop a very unhealthy attraction for someone or something that they don’t completely understand: it can be an ability, a feature, a beautiful physique...
Let’s say you are the target of a stalker. Once you let them in on the “secret de fabrication” (trade secret) as we say in french, or if you give them the opportunity to really get to know you, depending on their awareness levels, you will become the best friend or lover, or you will be discarded as an immature individual if they have their own self esteem at level zero or close. This is why somebody who loves you or does everything to love you once you have shown your worst is the best asset you can ever have in life. Most people can’t, out of their own insecurities.
Let’s say you seem to have some attractive features or magical abilities. More often than not, it will easily be linked to improbable upbringing conditions involving abuse or trauma that will make you different to totally different.
A personal observation that I came to with time is that all stalkees can have stalkers tendencies themselves and they often do. They develop those tendencies after being the victims of stalkers and getting to know the game better, or they also had them in the first place. The reverse is not true.
So all stalkees have a potential for stalking. But most stalkers will never be stalked. They are the most dangerous. Especially when they justify their stalking by: A God given mission, a virtue mission, defending loved ones against imagined threats, or a spiritual validation of their love…
flipping out
Once my brother in arms friend, who I had developed a level of stalking for flipped on me, my world collapsed for a moment. There is a possibility that the stalking was reciprocated. This makes for the best relationships, friendship or love, once we learn to graduate to each new disappointment by honouring what we have always liked in the first place in the person, and not being disappointed in the revelation of the magic trick, i.e the immature part of the personality that makes all this possible.
Only energetically equivalent people hang out together for a while and exchange emotionally. This is the reason why blaming anything on anybody is the biggest mistake we can make: it usually leads to more reasons to be toxic and stalk, to be indignant and angry etc…
A person, especially a person who has some integrity, like the friend I am referring to, can only flip in the face of a strongly perceived injustice or malpractice/behaviour. They are connecting to the part of them that stayed stuck at 5 years old +/- 3 years. Children have a strong sense of equality, fairness and justice. You could almost say that it is one of their defining features. The flipper has a part of him/her stuck in the trauma of infancy and reacts exactly with their frozen age behaviour.
Very often, the flipping comes at a great cost and is exhausting for the person flipping and his victims. It destroys a lot and appears to be completely immature emotionally. And in the adult world, it is. But in my opinion, certainly now, after having observed my friend’s flipping and mine: you only flip if your partner/opponent uses weapons that you will never use yourself. As a result you feel entitled to let the dogs out, with a level of conviction unmatched.
This the reason why most flippers have psychopathic tendencies that they have to keep in check all the time. Once the conviction of wrongdoing is established, the flipper is ready to go with guns blazing. And some toxic people are simply terrorists, so the only weapon to oppose them is…. terror. It is unfortunate because you then see the emperor without clothes, in full cowardice, as with most professional bullies.
flowing from there
The following set of points is a list of suggestions to move on from situations where energy got stuck, or a balance has been broken etc…
Once you have flipped on a stalker, if they persist in their obsession, don’t seem to want to evolve, and you pulled yourself out, the best policy is to consider them like a non playing character in a computer simulation. Because their lives are mono-dimensional, heavily toxic people turned stalkers will simply slowly unravel. You don’t have to do anything.
Example: a woman incapable of making male friends/lovers because of terrible early circumstances "smells" and surrounds herself with other damaged women, and cultivates personal power by constantly exciting the deeper fears of her "friends", or validating their doubts about masculinity, marriage etc... instead of dealing with her own deep trauma. Slut shaming other women is also a favorite sport of theirs, since they never get any action and are green with envy. It is only a matter of time before things appear for what they are.
Always reserve a possibility for change in a toxic person’s psyche: after all, we are all toxic. If they do a lot of bad horrific stuff, it simply means they hurt like hell. Their hurting comes as a false sense of control, pride and “Do you know who I am” type of energy. If they make you angry, it simply means you are equivalent to them energetically. If you flip, they are more vicious than you. Either they re-evaluate, or you cast them out until further notice.
THE USE OF THREAT AND VIOLENCE: A bully only understands force, since pure power or intimidation is their operative tool. As a result, they only respond to that. My personal response is to use calibrated threat of symbolic (adult women and men) or literal violence (adult men).
Example: two years ago, I was operating an AirBnB in my house in Portugal. A woman I was hosting scratched her car on the way out. Because she had asked me once to park her car for her, she tried to imply with bullying and intimidation that I had made the scratch, so she could 1. engage with me with an (invented) valid reason 2. rob me. The level of conviction she displayed in accusing me was second to none. She was getting high on her bullshit. Only after terrorizing her with stares and shouts (with righteous indignation, since I knew I had not done it), did she explode crying and thoroughly excused herself (for purely fear-based reasons, not because she was convinced).
If the stalker has a sense of self awareness and understands/knows how to move away from his own toxicity, he will admit that the crystallisation of an imagined personality (especially an over idealisation) is just a manifestation of his psychological problems and will take it into account in everything he does. Those idealisations are far from being limited to lovers. They happen a lot between same sex friends. If you feel a person is over idealising you, allow them the credit of knowing that about them, and dealing accordingly, especially with age.
The best examples of Love stories I have seen so far are based on initial “reasonable” reciprocal stalking by two individuals with a handle on their toxic sides, which yield to regular reality checks each time the object of the Love disappoints, a small grieving process, and resuming the bigger picture. The reason for that is that since the unhealthy attraction informs us about super intimate stuff concerning us, it gives us a chance to further our understanding, fortify our capacity to love and forgive, and possibly “use” the other person as inspiration to improve our lacks, rather than as a prop to elevate us artificially.
The idea of a bigger picture is fundamental to avoid toxicity/stalking in established relationships as well as with separated partners, where very often the level of passive aggressive stalking and violence explodes and persists for years: the bigger picture can be building a family, a home, creating an artwork, or any type of activity involving directing energy outside of the relationship to create goodness.
To know if you are toxic/stalking, notice if with time your only focus is the people and the relationship, as opposed to any creative pursuit outside of it. If a creative/positive pursuit does not take over pretty quickly, you remain toxic.
If your sole motivation in Life is to make money, for a hypothetic life that will never come, you revel in toxicity and stalking. That pretty much defines you.
Smoking pot, drinking alcohol, having sex, eating, to wait it out… works. But at an unseen invisible huge price.