7 Ways To Deal With Your Toxic Family in Quarantine!

Last Updated on January 21, 2021

Right now, the people who are in self-quarantine are considered the lucky and the privileged ones, but being inside 24/7 with toxic family members can weigh heavily on your mental health. And since you live in the same house, social distancing doesn’t apply, and there is no effective escape, the only way to find peace is by finding ways to deal with toxic behavior. In this article, we give you seven pieces of advice on how to generate respect in a relationship and how to set boundaries and protect your mental energy.

1. Deal with yourself first

If you want to perceive the signs of a toxic family, you need to understand your own toxic signs. If there are heavy interactions between family members, and if there is a lack of healthy relationships and healthy communication, you need to be introspective before starting to look for flaws in your family members. Understand if you are engaging in any toxic behavior yourself, and after you improve your ways to help maintain peace at home, start analyzing how you can improve your relationship with the people around you. If you are insightful enough, you will be ready to deal with the toxicity of others.

2. Identify the toxic behaviors of your family members

To better understand how to engage in healthy communication with the family member (or members) that are harming you, you need to figure out what actions are leading to the unhealthy dynamics you are experiencing. The unhealthy behaviors can range from things that some people even consider normal (when they’re definitively not!) from screaming, lack of empathy, and behavior denial, to something more serious like alcohol and drug abuse, intimidation or even gaslighting, which compromises your mental health. These are some examples, but this list could go on forever, and even though it isn’t always easy to identify those unhealthy behaviors, once you do, there is no going back. When you share a house with toxic people, there is no running away from it, and it is vital that you set some boundaries with them. You don’t need to be cold, you don’t need to be cruel, but you do need to make them understand your point, to show them what they are doing to hurt you, and to discuss with them the changes that should be applied.