The problem with labeling people as toxic
Dehumanization is defined in the Oxford dictionary as “the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities.” When we give humans the label of “toxic” we are participating in dehumanization. I have witnessed that “toxic,” is often used as a scare-word used to insight fear. Anti-vax propaganda spreaders seeking internet fame and multi-level marketing purveyors of "alternative" cleaning products use this word to sell us their expertise and goods. But things are not toxic. Toxic is always a matter of dosage. Even water, which we would die without consuming, is toxic when we’ve had too much, as demonstrated in 2007 when Jennifer Strange, a mother of three, died from water intoxication after winning a radio competition called, “Hold your Wee for a Wii”. Another example to understand toxic dosage is sunlight: humans need Vitamin D, which we absorb through our skin's exposure to sunlight. It’s an essential nutrient for our health and survival. However, sunlight is also a known carcinogen, linked with skin cancer, which can kill us. The right dose here is important. The amount of water or the amount of sunlight that is healthy and the amount that is toxic is key.
An aside on dehumanization: the word and concept
I notice in this graph of use over time that the word "dehumanization" wasn't being used until 1900 and wasn't being used widely until about 1950. We we not thinking about this concept or did we have other language for it? (If you know the answer, please let me know.)
The holocaust of the 1930 and 1940s in Nazi Germany, which brutally singled out and executed Jewish people, those of other ethnic minority groups, and those with mental and physical handicaps are most certain what was being discussed at this time, but why was humanity ready to see it and discuss it? In preparing to start my Master of Public Health program during the summer of 2018, I devoured every public health book I could before the program started. I read about the history of the Black Death in Europe in the book The Great Mortality by John Kelly. I learned that Jewish people were arbitrarily blamed and persecuted for the Black Death, and I’m sure the same dehumanizing techniques were used in the 1300s as in the 1900s. So why in 1950 did people start to care about the idea of dehumanization?
Do we humans have better morals and improved ideas about what is right and wrong? A lot of cynical people would argue no but Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker takes 832 pages in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature to make the case that humans are getting less violent over time due to the spread of logic, reason, and information. Why our brains continue to evolve is a spiritual discussion beyond the scope of this writing. Just know that despite all the violence and injustice that still horrifically exists all over the planet, it seems that, even though humans are the perpetrators of all this violence, we also have been expanding our awareness of nurturance, love, and kindness. It’s animals and it’s the animal parts of our brain that kill and fear being killed without reason or emotion. It’s the human part that attempts to understand violence and seek solutions to end it.
So labeling a whole entire human being as "toxic" is...problematic. Brené Brown wrote in her 2017 book Braving the Wilderness, “Dehumanizing and holding people accountable are mutually exclusive. Humiliation and dehumanizing are not accountability or social justice tools, they’re emotional off-loading at best, emotional self-indulgence at worst.” Labeling a whole person as "toxic" is not only ignorant about the relationship between dose and toxicity, it violates our highest morals to treat every person with respect and dignity.
I implore you, reader—no matter how much a person has hurt you—please don’t call them toxic. When we do this, we are using our words to spread hate and fear. Every single time we speak with love and choose to see the good in people and the stories behind their hurtful behavior, we create a more loving world. We then encounter more love as a result of being the recipient of the ripple effect we have helped to create.
Instead, label the behavior as toxic or if it’s a lot, and I know it can be a lot, label the pattern of behaviors as toxic. We are moving away from phrases like, “Joe is a toxic asshole” and moving towards language that goes like this: “Joe has some behaviors that are toxic to my happiness, therefore I’m staying away because I care about my happiness.” Do you FEEL the difference? No matter how angry you might be at Joe, and no matter how he may have dehumanized you, tell me—which world of feelings do you want to live in, the former or the latter? The way you speak about people is part of the solution if we want to be the recipients of love and nurturance. We have to also create it.
Photo by Davide Baraldi
The healing part that is so appealing about labeling people as "toxic" is that once we cancel them, they can no longer invade our boundaries, abuse us, and treat us poorly. Many of us have been the victims of toxic behaviors since we were born. In my family, we have heard the horrifying stories passed down about my grandfather who was forcibly removed from his mother as an infant and was sent to be raised by an aunt and uncle. The story in our family includes the rumor that he arrived at his auntie’s home with cigarette burns on his little soft, new body. Imagine putting a cigarette out on your baby. I don't know about you but the thought gives me chills and brings tears to my eyes. My grandfather grew up to be an abuser of his children and grandchildren (me!). The legacy of suffering on this side of the family goes way back. In my childhood my mom had to make a hard decision to cut him completely out of our lives, due to his toxic behaviors and the toxic memories of childhood that being around him would invoke for her. But when we cancel him as a person, we cancel his own story of having been the victim of dehumanizing, toxic behavior; we cancel his own story of pain and suffering. We can’t cancel others and expect a world to exist in which we are always treated with love, dignitiy, and respect. We have to show up for everyone in the exact way we want to be treated. This isn’t mutually exclusive from holding people accountable for their actions and preventing them from hurting others. We can do both: hold people accountable, punishing as necessary, while acknowledging every human’s worth and dignity, despite how toxic their behavior might be.
As we become trauma-informed, it’s a lot harder to put labels on human beings, which is inherently dehumanizing. We want to move away from labeling humans as objects and calling them “good” or “bad” and instead look deeper, asking “what happened to this person?” and “What have they experienced or suffered to make them this way?”
If I were to make the discerning label of “toxic” vs “not-toxic” here’s what I would say: people who appear toxic to us, that is, damaging to our well-being, are people who have not done their emotional healing, family of origin trauma work, and who have not done their reparenting work. They are people who have suffered so much trauma in childhood that their protective shield went up in full force and nothing short of a sledgehammer, usually in the form of a significant illness, accident, or life crisis, is going to break through it. This is sad because these protective forces were the forces whose creation was imperitive to survive childhood.
In Michelle Esrick’s film profiling Saturday Night Life actor and comedian Darrell Hammond, beloved to us children of the 90s for his portrayal of former President Bill Clinton, we follow his awakening to the truth of his childhood trauma. The film starts with the problem: why is Darrell Hammond in and out of pscyhiatric hospitals? Why does he seem so numb? And even...why is Darrell Hammond so funny? [spoilers follow] The audience sits rapt as we discover the sinister reason Darrell Hammond is so numb, so funny, and so emotionally unhinged in adulthood: he suffered severe intentional torture by his mother as a child in which she would cut his body parts with knives and insert his fingers in live electrical sockets, watching him suffer, devoid of her basic parental instinct to care for her offspring. This abusive behavior by his mom and the neglect of his father to initially intervene (he does eventually) is the literal opposite of the kind of nurturing a parent is supposed to provide their children. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who made "trauma" a household term with his 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score, is interviewed in the film and explains that it’s impossible for a child to feel unloved and reject their caregivers even in cases of extreme abuse because feeling so unloved would can actually kill a child, so what the brilliant human brain does to survive is that it concocts elaborate rationalizations that make the abuse equal love. The mind goes to extreme lengths to rationalize pain and betrayal in order to feel loved by the parent, explaining away the abuse, giving it fair reasons and causes, and normalizing the abuse and neglect.
People who exhibit toxic behaviors are people who had endured such betrayal and such a deficit of the nurturance required to develop a normal, healthy human brain, that they’re not able to even acknowledge what they didn’t get, and what they’re now not giving others. Their mind is too far down the betrayal rationalization rabbit hole. 19th Century German philosopher Fredrich Nietzche, in advance of our modern knowledge of human development, said, "Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed." For the child, the illusions protect from death. As adults, we can cling tightly to the illusions that kept us safe and alive, even if the danger is no longer there.
Even as we move away from dehumanizing language and judgmental labels, it's so important for our own sanity, growth, and healing to stay away from people who can’t see their own illusions and the work required of them to heal, ending their toxic behaviors. We send them love but we cannot be responsible for their healing. We can both treat people with dignity and respect and set firm boundaries about the type of behavior we will or will not tolerate.