How to Stop Being a Toxic Person

Asking yourself how to stop being a toxic person is, paradoxically, one of the most honest and courageous questions a human being can ask—because the very capacity to recognize toxicity in yourself requires a level of self-awareness that genuinely toxic people, in the clinical sense, rarely possess. If you are genuinely asking this question, you are already further along than you might think. That doesn’t mean the work ahead is easy. Recognizing a problem and changing the behavioral patterns that constitute it are separated by a distance that takes real effort, real humility, and often real professional support to cross. But the recognition itself matters, and it deserves to be honored rather than immediately converted into another source of self-attack. The word “toxic” has been used so broadly in contemporary culture—applied to everything from genuinely harmful relationship dynamics to ordinary human friction—that it risks losing its meaning. For the purposes of this article, toxic behavior refers to consistent patterns of action and interaction that cause harm to the people around you and, ultimately, to yourself: patterns like manipulation, chronic negativity, emotional volatility, boundary violations, excessive criticism, jealousy, controlling behavior, dishonesty, or the relentless centering of your own needs at the expense of those who care about you. What all of these patterns share is that they damage relationships, erode trust, generate suffering, and prevent the genuine connection that human beings need to flourish. They are also, in virtually every case, rooted in psychological pain—in unresolved trauma, in fear, in unmet needs, in learned survival strategies that once served a protective function but have outlived their usefulness and are now causing the very damage they were designed to prevent. This is not an excuse for toxic behavior. It is an explanation—and explanations are the beginning of change. Understanding where these patterns come from is not the same as absolution; it is the foundation for the kind of deep, sustained work that actually produces lasting change rather than temporary suppression of symptoms. This article will walk you through that work: honestly, without sugarcoating what it requires, and with full acknowledgment that struggling with these patterns is a human experience, not a mark of irredeemable character.

Let’s start with something honest. Most people reading this article are not monsters. They are not calculating predators who set out each morning to harm the people around them. They are people who keep noticing a gap—between who they intend to be and how they actually show up. Between the relationships they want and the ones they consistently create. Between the person they see in their best moments and the one that emerges under pressure, in conflict, in intimacy.

That gap is painful. And the pain of it, if not carefully navigated, can become another engine of the very toxicity you’re trying to change—driving self-loathing, defensiveness, and the kind of shame that makes honest self-examination nearly impossible.

So before we go further: you are not a toxic person in any essential, irreducible sense. You are a person who has developed some toxic patterns—patterns that can be understood, worked with, and over time, genuinely changed. That distinction matters enormously, and holding it with care is one of the most important things you can do as you engage with what follows.

What “Toxic” Actually Means Psychologically

Before addressing how to change, it’s worth being precise about what toxic behavior actually is—both to ground the work in something concrete and to separate it from the broader, sometimes indiscriminate way the word gets used in contemporary culture.

In psychological terms, toxic behavioral patterns are those that consistently and predictably generate harm in interpersonal relationships—not as occasional aberrations in an otherwise caring person, but as recurring responses to certain triggers, relationship types, or emotional states. They typically involve some combination of the following:

• Manipulation — using indirect, dishonest, or coercive means to influence others’ behavior, often driven by fear that direct communication will fail or be rejected
• Emotional volatility — disproportionate, unpredictable emotional reactions that leave others feeling anxious, walking on eggshells, or responsible for managing your internal states
• Control and possessiveness — attempting to manage others’ behavior, choices, or relationships out of anxiety rather than genuine concern
• Chronic criticism and negativity — a consistent orientation toward what is wrong, insufficient, or disappointing in others or in life generally
• Boundary violations — repeatedly crossing the stated or unstated limits of others, either through insensitivity or deliberate disregard
• Gaslighting and dishonesty — distorting reality, denying others’ experiences, or consistently misrepresenting the truth to avoid accountability
• Competitive victimhood — using real or constructed suffering as a tool for attention, sympathy, or avoidance of responsibility

Crucially, most of these behaviors are not consciously chosen. People rarely decide to manipulate or gaslight in the way they might decide to take a different route home. These patterns operate largely automatically, activated by specific emotional triggers—fear of abandonment, shame, perceived criticism, threat of loss—before conscious reflection has a chance to intervene. This is important because it clarifies the nature of the work required: not a matter of simply deciding to behave differently, but of identifying the underlying triggers and building new, more conscious response pathways through sustained psychological work.

Where Toxic Behavior Actually Comes From

Understanding the roots of your own toxic patterns is not about avoiding accountability. It is about creating the conditions for genuine change—because patterns you don’t understand, you cannot change. You can only suppress them temporarily, at great psychological cost, until the pressure builds again and they emerge with renewed force.

Research in developmental psychology and attachment theory has identified several of the most common origins of toxic behavioral patterns:

Unresolved trauma and adverse childhood experiences. When childhood environments are characterized by inconsistency, threat, abuse, neglect, or emotional unavailability, children develop coping strategies calibrated to those conditions. Hypervigilance to perceived threat. Manipulation as a means of securing attention and care. Emotional volatility as the only language of distress that was ever responded to. Controlling behavior as the only available response to environments that felt dangerously unpredictable. These strategies were adaptive in the context where they developed. In adult relationships, they cause harm—not because the person is fundamentally flawed, but because they are using survival tools designed for a dangerous past in a present that doesn’t require them.

Insecure attachment patterns. John Bowlby’s attachment theory and decades of subsequent research have established that early relational experiences with primary caregivers create internal working models—deep, largely unconscious templates for how relationships work and what can be expected from other people. Anxious attachment generates fear of abandonment that can drive clinginess, jealousy, and controlling behavior. Avoidant attachment generates fear of intimacy that can drive emotional withdrawal, dismissiveness, and the devaluing of others’ emotional needs. Disorganized attachment, often associated with trauma, generates both a longing for closeness and a terror of it—a combination that tends to produce particularly volatile and painful relationship dynamics. These attachment patterns operate below the level of conscious intention, which is why people with strong attachment insecurities often feel genuinely bewildered by the damage their behavior causes in relationships they deeply want to work.

Unmet core emotional needs. Psychologists like Jeffrey Young, who developed Schema Therapy, have identified a set of core emotional needs whose chronic frustration in childhood creates the psychological structures that drive toxic patterns in adulthood. These include needs for safety and stability, autonomy and competence, freedom of emotional expression, spontaneity and play, realistic limits and self-control, and—perhaps most fundamentally—consistent, unconditional acceptance and love. When these needs went chronically unmet in early life, people develop schemas—rigid, pervasive patterns of perception and behavior—that attempt to address the original unmet need in ways that are usually counterproductive in adult relationships.

Modeled behavior. Much toxic behavior is learned. If you grew up in an environment where manipulation was the primary means of getting needs met; where emotional volatility was the dominant mode of conflict; where criticism was more freely offered than care; where boundaries were routinely violated—you absorbed these patterns as templates for normal relational behavior. You may have vowed, as a child, never to be like the adults around you. And you may have found, with dismay, that the patterns of the people who raised you are more deeply embedded in your relational wiring than your conscious intentions. This is not determinism—it is the predictable outcome of learning, and learning can be unlearned, though it takes time and deliberate effort.

Low emotional intelligence and dysregulation skills. Some toxic behavior, particularly around emotional volatility and communication, reflects an underdeveloped ability to identify, tolerate, and regulate difficult emotional states rather than any fundamental malice. People who never learned to sit with discomfort without acting on it, who lack the vocabulary to name and communicate their emotional experience, who were never modeled healthy conflict resolution—these people aren’t necessarily cruel. They’re often emotionally overwhelmed and underskilled in the very competencies that adult relationships demand.

The First Step: Radical Honesty Without Shame

The starting point for genuine change is a particular quality of self-awareness that is harder to achieve than it sounds. It requires being genuinely, unflinchingly honest about the impact of your behavior on others—not the impact as you intended it, not the impact as you experienced it, but the impact as it was actually received. And it requires doing this without sliding into either defensive denial or crushing shame.

Denial is the easier trap to identify. “I wasn’t manipulative—I was just trying to get my point across.” “I wasn’t controlling—I was concerned about them.” “They’re too sensitive.” Denial protects the ego from a painful encounter with its own behavior, but it makes change impossible because the problem being denied cannot be addressed.

Shame is subtler and in some ways more dangerous. Shame is the experience not of “I did something harmful” but of “I am a harmful person”—and the psychological research on shame, most comprehensively articulated by Brené Brown, shows that shame is one of the least effective motivators of genuine behavioral change. Shame shuts down the reflective capacity needed for change, drives defensive self-protection, and tends to produce the very behaviors it ostensibly condemns. The person so overwhelmed by shame that they cannot honestly examine their behavior without collapsing is not in a position to change that behavior. They are in a position to manage the unbearable feeling of shame, which is a different project entirely.

What you’re aiming for is guilt rather than shame—the experience of “I did something harmful” that leaves your fundamental sense of self intact while creating real motivation to understand and change the behavior. Guilt says: something I did was wrong, and I want to understand why and do differently. Shame says: I am wrong, and the only responses available to me are self-destruction or denial. Guilt opens the door to change. Shame slams it.

Practically, the path to honest self-awareness usually involves some combination of: asking people you trust to be honest with you about how your behavior lands; noticing patterns in feedback you receive across multiple relationships; journaling about specific incidents with genuine attention to the other person’s perspective rather than your own justifications; and working with a therapist who can help you see your patterns from the outside without either condemning or enabling them.

Recognizing Your Specific Toxic Patterns

General commitments to “being less toxic” are not specific enough to drive real change. What you need to identify are the particular patterns you tend to fall into—the specific behaviors, the specific triggers, and the specific emotional states that precede them. This specificity is what makes change tractable.

A useful framework for this self-examination involves looking at three things: the trigger, the internal experience, and the behavioral response. When does the toxic behavior emerge? What situations, relationship dynamics, or specific actions by others seem to activate it? What are you feeling just before the behavior appears—and underneath that feeling, what are you afraid of, or needing, or protecting? And what specifically do you do: what do you say, how do you withdraw, what do you manipulate or control or criticize?

Common patterns and their typical underlying drivers include:

• Jealousy and possessiveness — typically driven by fear of abandonment or inadequacy; often rooted in attachment insecurity
• Criticism and contempt — often a displacement of self-criticism; can also reflect a need for control or superiority that compensates for underlying shame
• Emotional outbursts and volatility — usually reflect poor distress tolerance and emotional regulation skills, often combined with a history of emotions being ignored unless expressed dramatically
• Withdrawal and silent treatment — often a combination of conflict avoidance, punishment, and inadequate skills for direct emotional communication
• Manipulation and indirect communication — typically driven by fear that direct expression of needs will be rejected; a learned bypass of vulnerability
• Chronic victimhood — can reflect genuine powerlessness that was never processed, or a learned pattern of using suffering to secure connection and avoid accountability

Mapping your own specific patterns honestly—ideally with professional support—is the foundation from which all other change work proceeds.

How to Stop Being Toxic: Key Strategies That Actually Work

Change at this level is not produced by willpower, positive thinking, or the force of good intentions alone. It requires specific, sustained work across several domains. What follows are the approaches that research and clinical experience support most consistently.

1. Seek Professional Support—Therapy Is Not Optional, It’s the Engine

For patterns rooted in trauma, attachment insecurity, or deeply entrenched schemas, self-help strategies alone are rarely sufficient. They can support and accelerate therapeutic work, but they cannot substitute for it. A skilled therapist—particularly one trained in approaches like Schema Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Emotionally Focused Therapy, or trauma-informed CBT—provides something that no book or article can: a real relationship in which your patterns will activate, be observed, and be gently, consistently challenged and redirected.

This is not a small thing. The relational patterns that drive toxic behavior were learned in relationships and must be unlearned in relationships. The therapy relationship itself becomes a laboratory for practicing new ways of relating: tolerating vulnerability without manipulation, communicating needs directly, receiving challenge without collapsing or defending, experiencing genuine care without exploitation.

Going to therapy to change toxic patterns is not a sign of crisis—it is a sign of courage and genuine commitment to the people you care about. It is the most serious thing you can do if you mean what you say about change.

2. Build Emotional Intelligence and Regulation Skills

A significant portion of toxic behavior is driven by poor emotional regulation—the inability to tolerate difficult feelings without acting on them in ways that damage others. Building emotional intelligence addresses this at its root.

Emotional intelligence, in the model developed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer and popularized by Daniel Goleman, encompasses the ability to identify your own emotional states accurately, to understand what triggers them and what they mean, to regulate them effectively rather than either suppressing or being overwhelmed by them, and to read and respond appropriately to the emotional states of others. Each of these capacities can be deliberately developed.

Practically, this means developing a richer emotional vocabulary so you can identify what you’re actually feeling rather than just “bad” or “angry.” It means learning to notice the physical signals that precede emotional escalation—the tightening in the chest, the flush of heat, the particular quality of mental narrowing—as early warning systems that give you a window to choose a response rather than just react. It means building a toolkit of regulation strategies—breathing techniques, grounding practices, physical movement, brief withdrawal to regain perspective—that allow you to bring your nervous system down from acute activation before engaging with difficult interpersonal situations.

DBT’s distress tolerance and emotion regulation skills modules are among the most practically useful resources available for this kind of work and are accessible outside of formal therapy through books like Marsha Linehan’s DBT Skills Training Manual and related workbooks.

3. Practice Radical Accountability Without Self-Punishment

Genuine accountability is different from either self-flagellation or defensive justification. It means acknowledging the impact of your behavior on others clearly and honestly, without minimizing, deflecting, or immediately pivoting to your own pain as an explanation. It means apologizing when you have caused harm—not the conditional “I’m sorry if you felt hurt” that shifts responsibility to the other person’s sensitivity, but the direct “I did this, it caused harm, I’m sorry” that takes full ownership.

This is harder than it sounds, especially if toxic behavior has served a defensive function—protecting you from shame or vulnerability. Genuine accountability requires tolerating the discomfort of having been wrong, of having hurt someone you care about, without making that discomfort primarily about yourself. This is one of the places where emotional regulation skills and therapeutic support become particularly important: accountability without the capacity to sit with shame tends to collapse either into defensive denial or into dramatic self-punishment that puts the burden of managing your distress back onto the person you harmed.

The test of genuine accountability is behavior change over time, not the quality or duration of the apology. People who care about you are watching what you do after you acknowledge harm, not how convincingly you express remorse.

4. Develop Genuine Empathy Through Practice

Many toxic behavioral patterns involve a deficit—not necessarily in the capacity for empathy, but in its consistent application. People who behave toxically in relationships often have more empathy available for people outside those relationships than inside them, because intimacy activates their own anxiety, insecurity, and defensive patterns, which crowd out the capacity to genuinely attend to the other person’s experience.

Developing empathy as a consistent relational practice means cultivating the habit of asking: What is this like for them? Not rhetorically, not in service of your next argument, but as a genuine inquiry into another person’s subjective experience. It means listening with the intent to understand rather than to respond. It means staying in the presence of someone else’s pain without immediately moving to fix, minimize, defend, or redirect attention to your own.

This can be practiced deliberately. After a difficult interaction, take time to write out what you imagine the other person experienced—not as you intended it, but as they likely received it. Sit with that without defending. Ask people in your life how specific things you did or said landed for them, and practice listening to the answer without justifying. Over time, this kind of perspective-taking becomes more natural and more automatic—but it requires sustained, deliberate practice before it does.

5. Set Boundaries With Yourself, Not Just Others

Most conversations about boundaries focus on setting them with others—learning to say no, to protect your time and energy, to maintain your own needs in the face of others’ demands. This is genuinely important. But for people working on toxic patterns, there is an equally important and less discussed dimension: setting boundaries with yourself.

Self-boundaries mean identifying in advance the behaviors you are committed to not engaging in, regardless of how activated, justified, or provoked you feel in the moment. They are not rules imposed from outside but commitments made from the clearest part of yourself to the parts that are most likely to act harmfully under pressure. “I will not send messages when I am in the middle of an emotional storm. I will wait two hours.” “I will not raise my voice in conflict.” “I will not look through my partner’s phone, regardless of the anxiety I am feeling.”

Self-boundaries require knowing your patterns specifically enough to anticipate the moments of highest risk—the situations, states, and triggers that make harmful behavior most likely—and building specific protocols for what you will do instead. They work best when combined with the regulation skills described above, because the ability to tolerate the discomfort of not acting on a powerful impulse is itself a skill that must be developed.

6. Address the Underlying Needs Directly

Toxic behavior rarely is the actual need—it is a distorted, usually ineffective attempt to meet a need. Fear of abandonment drives controlling behavior, but controlling behavior drives the very abandonment it’s trying to prevent. Need for validation drives chronic attention-seeking, but attention-seeking ultimately exhausts the people whose validation is being sought. The behavior defeats the need it was trying to meet.

Getting underneath the behavior to the actual need—and learning to communicate and address that need directly rather than through behavioral distortion—is one of the deepest levels of this work. It requires, first, the willingness to be vulnerable: to acknowledge that you are afraid, or lonely, or insufficient, or in pain, rather than expressing those experiences through behavior that makes others the object of your suffering. Vulnerability is terrifying for people whose early experiences taught them that vulnerability leads to rejection, exploitation, or harm. This is why therapeutic support is so often essential—learning to be vulnerable safely is relationship work that proceeds most effectively in a therapeutic relationship where safety can be deliberately constructed and maintained.

It requires, second, learning to communicate needs directly: “I’m afraid you’re going to leave, and I need reassurance” rather than jealous interrogation. “I’m feeling disconnected from you and I miss you” rather than punishing withdrawal. “I’m feeling criticized and I need a moment before we continue” rather than explosive counterattack. These communications feel impossibly exposed at first. With practice, they become the most efficient and relationship-preserving ways to get what you actually need.

What to Do When You’ve Already Caused Harm

Working on yourself going forward is necessary but not sufficient if you have already caused real harm to people who matter to you. Repairing that damage—where repair is possible and wanted—is both an ethical obligation and a component of the healing process itself. Accountability without repair is incomplete.

Repair begins with acknowledgment. Not qualified, not immediately followed by explanation of your context and pain, but simple, clear acknowledgment of the specific harm caused and the impact it had on the other person. This acknowledgment is most credible when it demonstrates genuine understanding of their experience—when they feel that you truly grasped what you did and what it felt like to receive it.

Repair also requires giving the other person genuine choice about whether, when, and how to reengage. The person who was harmed is not obligated to accept your apology, to provide you with the opportunity to demonstrate your change, or to remain in relationship with you regardless of how genuine your work is. One of the important markers of real change is the capacity to accept this—to let someone protect themselves from you even as you are working to become someone they no longer need protection from.

Some relationships may not survive even genuine change. This is painful, but it is not necessarily unjust. People are allowed to choose what they include in their lives, and some damage takes longer to repair than the relationship can sustain. The most honest response to this is grief, not resentment—recognizing the loss as a consequence of your patterns, mourning it genuinely, and carrying the learning forward into the relationships and opportunities that remain.

When Toxic Behavior Reflects Deeper Clinical Conditions

It is worth acknowledging directly that some patterns of behavior that read as “toxic” in relational contexts reflect underlying mental health or personality disorder conditions that go beyond ordinary character work to address. Cluster B personality disorders—borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder—are associated with specific patterns of relational difficulty that often cause significant harm to others, and that typically require specialized professional treatment rather than general self-improvement efforts.

This is not to say that people with these conditions cannot change—DBT was developed specifically for borderline personality disorder, with substantial evidence of effectiveness, and Schema Therapy shows promise for narcissistic presentations as well. But the change process for clinical-level personality pathology is more complex, more intensive, and more time-consuming than the framework described in this article is designed to address.

If your toxic patterns feel ego-syntonic—if they feel like just part of who you are rather than something you do that conflicts with who you want to be; if feedback about your behavior consistently triggers rage or contempt rather than genuine reflection; if the harm you cause extends to multiple relationships across multiple life domains over an extended period—a comprehensive psychological evaluation by a qualified professional is strongly indicated. Getting an accurate diagnosis is not a sentence. It is a map. And working with a therapist who specializes in the specific conditions involved gives you the most realistic chance of genuine change.

FAQs About How to Stop Being Toxic

Can people genuinely change toxic behavior, or is it just temporary suppression?

Genuine, lasting change in toxic behavioral patterns is absolutely possible—but it requires more than surface behavioral modification. Suppressing toxic behavior without addressing its underlying drivers typically produces what therapists sometimes call “symptom substitution”: the pattern re-emerges under sufficient pressure, or is replaced by a different behavioral expression of the same underlying psychological dynamics.

Lasting change happens at the level of the underlying material—the trauma that hasn’t been processed, the attachment insecurity that hasn’t been worked through, the unmet needs that haven’t been addressed directly, the emotional regulation skills that haven’t been developed. Research on Schema Therapy, DBT, and attachment-based therapies consistently documents significant and sustained changes in personality-level patterns through structured psychological work—not total transformation into someone entirely different, but genuine reduction in the frequency, intensity, and relational impact of previously chronic patterns. Change of this depth takes time—typically measured in months to years rather than weeks—and requires sustained commitment. But it is real, and it happens.

How do I know if I’m actually toxic or just going through a difficult period?

This is a genuinely important distinction. Everyone behaves in ways that are less than their best under sufficient stress, grief, fear, or exhaustion. A person who is short-tempered during a period of intense work pressure, or withdrawn during a grief process, or struggling to maintain generous behavior during a relationship conflict is not necessarily exhibiting a toxic pattern in the clinical sense—they are human, and humans under pressure sometimes behave poorly.

The markers that distinguish situational difficulty from genuinely toxic patterns include: chronicity (the pattern persists across situations, time periods, and relationships rather than being confined to a particular stressor); breadth (the pattern appears in multiple relationship contexts—with partners, friends, family, colleagues—rather than being specific to one); pervasiveness (the pattern interferes significantly with your ability to maintain close relationships over time); and the response to feedback (toxic patterns tend to generate defensiveness, minimization, or blame-shifting when named, while situational difficulty more readily produces genuine acknowledgment and regret).

If you’re uncertain, honest conversation with people who know you well, combined with consultation with a mental health professional, will give you a clearer picture than self-assessment alone can provide.

What if the people in my life don’t believe I’m trying to change?

This is one of the most painful aspects of working on toxic patterns: trust, once damaged, rebuilds on a timeline that is not yours to control. The people who have been hurt by your behavior have every right to be skeptical of declared change, because they have seen declarations of change before—possibly many times—that did not hold. Their skepticism is not unfair; it is a rational response to their experience of you.

The only effective response to this reality is sustained behavioral consistency over time—not occasional dramatic demonstrations of change, but the quiet, undramatic accumulation of evidence that the pattern has genuinely shifted. Time and behavior are the only currency that rebuilds trust, and there is no shortcut. Attempting to accelerate others’ trust through pressure, guilt, or dramatic displays of remorse typically backfires, because it prioritizes your need for reassurance over their genuine safety.

This can feel profoundly discouraging, particularly when you are genuinely working hard on yourself and experiencing real change internally that hasn’t yet been recognized externally. Therapy can provide a space to process that discouragement without directing it back at the people whose skepticism is valid. And it can help you maintain the long-term orientation required to build trust through the kind of consistent behavior that eventually becomes undeniable.

Is it possible to be toxic without realizing it?

Yes—and this is more common than most people realize. Toxic patterns often operate largely automatically, below the level of conscious intention, which is why people who engage in them are frequently genuinely surprised by the impact they have on others. The manipulative person who sincerely believes they are just “explaining their perspective.” The controlling person who genuinely experiences their behavior as “caring.” The chronically critical person who truly believes they are “just being honest.” The gap between intention and impact can be wide, and operating entirely within your own experiential bubble—your intentions, your rationalizations, your narrative about what happened—makes that gap invisible.

This is precisely why feedback from others, honest self-examination, and professional support are so important. Your own experience of your behavior is real but partial. The impact of your behavior on others provides information that your internal experience cannot supply—and being willing to take that information seriously, even when it conflicts with your self-image, is one of the most important capacities to develop when working on toxic patterns.

Can I address toxic patterns in my relationship without my partner going to therapy too?

Individual work can produce real change that positively affects your relationships even without your partner’s parallel engagement in therapy. You can develop better emotional regulation, more direct communication, more consistent accountability, and healthier patterns of need expression regardless of what your partner does or doesn’t do. Those changes will affect your relationship, because relational dynamics are not static—when one person in a system changes their behavior, the system itself shifts in response.

That said, if toxic patterns have been operating in both directions within the relationship—which is frequently the case, because toxic patterns tend to generate reciprocal dynamics over time—individual work on one side may not be sufficient to repair the relational system. Couples therapy, or at minimum couples counseling alongside individual work, is often the most efficient route to genuinely changing entrenched relational patterns in which both partners are participating, even if one partner’s contribution to the toxicity is more visible or more severe than the other’s.

It is also worth holding honestly the possibility that some relationships, particularly those where toxic patterns have been deeply entrenched for years or where significant harm has accumulated, may not be salvageable even with sustained individual work on your part. Working on yourself has value independent of any particular relationship outcome—the changes you make affect every relationship in your life, present and future, not only the one that prompted the self-examination.