Toxic Relationships: What They Are and How to Recognize Them

When something feels persistently wrong in a relationship, people often attribute it to personality clashes, stress, or "the usual difficulties." But there is a qualitatively different state — toxic relationships — where the very pattern of interaction becomes a continuous source of harm.

What Makes a Relationship Toxic

The central mechanism is guilt used as a means of control. When one person consistently makes the other feel "always at fault," "never good enough," or "permanently indebted," this is not a random argument — it is a toxic dynamic. Toxicity also lives in the *activities* themselves: in how people communicate, react, and make decisions together.

How to Recognize It

Key signals to look for:

• Persistent guilt with no clear cause. You regularly feel guilty — even when you have done nothing objectively wrong.
• Suppression of natural self-expression. Any impulse to assert yourself, be active, or voice an opinion is met with criticism or ridicule.
• Energy doesn't flow — it gets blocked. In healthy relationships there is a sense of being pulled forward, of being complemented. In toxic ones, you feel constant resistance, exhaustion, and an inability to move.
• The relationship works in reverse — 180°. What should bring people closer pushes them apart; what should support ends up destroying.

Toxicity Is Not About Character — It's a Broken Dynamic

Dr. Saulitis emphasises: toxicity is not simply "a bad person nearby." It is a particular type of interaction — toxic activities that repeat themselves over and over. Learning to see this pattern matters not in order to immediately end everything, but to understand clearly what you are actually dealing with.

The First Step: Call It What It Is

As long as a person does not acknowledge that what is happening is toxic, nothing will change. Recognition is not weakness and not catastrophe. In the doctor's words, it is like "opening your eyes wider" — the first phase, after which the next steps become possible.