The term “toxic relationship” was beginning to be heard in the United States approximately twenty years ago. Recently this author came across an amazing chart included in Rorie Raye’s material “Have the Relationship You Want.”
A questionnaire in Rorie’s material asks about the actions of the person with whom you are involved identifying whether you have a “good” person, a “clueless” person, a “difficult” person, or a “toxic” person.
A good person is described as someone who can play ball with you. If you throw them the ball, they catch the ball and throw it back to you and you catch the ball and throw it back to them.
Reciprocity is present. The relationship works smoothly.
The “clueless” person is someone that is aware they are playing a game of catching ball with you, but when you throw the ball towards them, they are looking the opposite direction. When you inform them that you threw the ball their direction and they missed it, they immediately apologize and begin looking for and retrieving the ball.
They find the ball and throw it back to you and you both resume playing ball with one another.
The “difficult” person can be described as one wherein the previous scenario occurs. Instead of “catching on” to how the game is played, however, you spend a lot of time teaching, reminding, and reviewing how to play the game on frequent occasions.
A “toxic” person is one who looks directly at you, sees you’re about to throw the ball, stands there looking blankly at you, you throw the ball, the ball drops to the ground, and the toxic person looks at you like you’re ridiculous and says, “Didn’t you see I wasn’t ready?”
You respond by going over and chasing the ball apologizing that you didn’t see they weren’t ready. You resume to play ball and the same scenario happens again and again.
You say you want to play ball. That means ball games, not head games! Is it possible with narcissistic emotional abusers?
When you decide you want to go play with someone else, it is then that the toxic person engages and plays a few rounds of ball successfully catching and throwing the ball back and forth with you. The toxic person, however, soon returns to the same initial way of playing ball when you begin to become comfortable playing catch with them.
This cycle continues for years with the toxic person never figuring out how to play catch for any length of time the way normal people play catch because one of two reasons. One reason is that they don’t want to play ball the way you want to play ball or the second reason being that they simply can’t play ball the way the normal game of playing ball is played.
Ask yourself what kind of game of ball catching would you prefer playing? Have you ever played catch with someone who really knows how to play and can read how you can catch and then throws the ball in a way that feels good for you and works?
Or, are you so used to chasing dropped balls with your partner who never seems to “get it?”
There comes a time when you will realize that for once in your life you’d like to really play ball instead of scrambling after balls that not only fall on the floor, but most of time fall in places you really don’t want to put your hands.
Perhaps an important choice to consider would be to think about playing ball with a different person while you still can.
There is a video on “YouTube” by “A Gossamer Heart” with a slide showing a picture of a young child evolving to a middle-aged woman and to a mature-aged woman. Similarly to the video, look at the stress lines in your face and begin to realize that those lines are there to stay and that the years existing in a relationship that is everything but satisfying are gone.
Time waits for no one.
