How to Deal with Barriers
These ideas are so much better Shared!!
Before sitting down to create the Toxicity Toolkit, I spent a lot of time examining the different family environments that I’ve experienced in my life. I spent time asking myself how events could have been avoided or improved. I examined how people in each of these toxic environments lacked autonomy or maintained control.
I spent years questioning what I could have done to change situations, balance out the power, or create a culture that left no space for all of that destruction.
I realized after decades of anger, that the adults in my life when I was growing up didn’t have the tools to change things. I struggled, deeply, finding out that they all knew that the dynamics of our family were harmful, and they all kinda let it happen.
The reality is that they tried, but they lacked the tools to be effective, so they chose distance. Eventually, lacking the tools myself, I chose distance as well, and chose to be homeless in another state rather than stay.
The abuse continued. The absolute control continued. I just wasn’t in it anymore. At 18, raised in a hotbed of toxicity, I desperately wanted to change it, but I didn’t have the tools, so I left with nothing.
I found myself in several other families after leaving my family of origin. Each family had autonomy struggles. In each family in experienced imbalanced power that is maintained and abused. Members of each family experienced trauma and pain because of it.
Eventually, at 25, I decided to go to college and major in Psychology to try to get the tools. That was 16 years ago, and I’m just starting to understand and use the tools well.
Since creating the Toxicity Toolkit, which is loaded with skills and explanations that I wish I had growing up, I’ve had to ask myself what it would have been like to introduce the Toxicity Toolkit in those environments.
It would have been rough.
The Toxicity Toolkit would have been dismissed. The person suggesting it would have been ridiculed and disregarded. It would have been this and SO MUCH MORE because abusers do not welcome a balance of power, or a level playing field.
In the families that need this the MOST, it will be the HARDEST to get everyone on board.
When you encounter barriers, remember that change is hard for everyone. In this case it’s especially difficult for people who would have something to lose if the power of the home became balanced.
Be Gentle. Be Persistent.
Talk to them about how much having a healthy home matters to you. Remind them that they get to be an equal participant in the change. Let them know that you will be doing things differently, even if they choose not to.
If they refuse to work through the Toxicity Toolkit, work through it without them. For now. Let them know they are welcome to join you whenever they would like, and that you would gladly start over with them. Really mean it.
Work through the Toxicity Toolkit with as many members of your family as you can.
Everyone has the right to opt out, and being coercive goes against the spirit of the Toxicity Toolkit.
Be Gentle. Be Persistent. Work with the people who will work with you back.
Work on yourself, the rest will follow.
Operation **Reclaim** Loveland 
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