How do you successfully burn bridges and get toxic people off your mind?

5 comments

1. Hide them from social media newsfeed. Go zero contact with that community. Deliberately spend time with people who are healthy to you. Learn to spend time alone.

   I come from a very toxic family, involving religious cult and in-family bullying. I have followed the zero contact policy and never be too curious to be in contact with news about them. This has worked really well for me.

2. You simply cease all contact and not think about them. In due time they will fade from your life. You may be reminded of them once in a while but the emotional distance will be larger and the impact will be less.

   Do not actively antagonize them personally or at work. Just let them fade away like the Goblin King. They have no power over you.

3. You just need self-discipline to not talk to people that don’t contribute to your life or mental well-being.

   I’m someone that is content with not having many friends or talking to people too much, so I view talking to some people simply a waste of my time. I just have better things to do.

4. Do something else instead. Something positive. When I needed to move on from my ex wife, it was cycling and sex that got me through. Didn’t take me long to get over her with those two hobbies.

5. I had to do this to stop being an addict. It’s fucking hard but I can’t describe how beneficial it is to the rest of your life. I am unrecognizable to the people I ghosted at this point. Cybersecurity analyst, sober super dad, etc.

   The key is to think of those people like a cancer. You can’t just remove the cancer, you have to take out everything around it – margins. If you still have friends who talk to the people you need to ghost, their cancer can still spread to you. Reason being, you can never truly disappear from someone’s life if they know people who still actively see and talk to you. You will always be reentering their mind and you need them to forget about you (or at least lose the desire to reach out)

   They’re also viral, not just cancerous. Even running into you at the store (or a mutual friend’s house) starts the entire bullshit process of ghosting them over again. You have to quarentine from them. This means no risking running into them, no commenting on mutual friends posts on social media, nothing that reminds them that you exist. **Never** respond to a message. I still get random messages asking for money since I’m successful now. No response. Never. Fuck them.

   I generally ghosted ~20 people at once. I have “Fuck you” messages and worse that I have left unread for 10 years. This required moving to a new town lol.

   Hopefully your case isn’t as severe as mine. I was ghosting people who loved me, called me brother, etc. so it was extremely difficult.

   Good luck to you!