If someone is toxic, it's necessary to cut them off. But what do you do if you can't cut them off?
Example: I knew this girl a while back. We were good friends. After a couple years, she realized she had romantic feelings for me. I politely told her I wasn't interested and wanted to remain friends. Fast forward to about half a year later because this is a much longer story than anyone would care to read. She starts acting weird, like the "in need of help" kind of weird. Long story short, she became really toxic (emotionally abusive is also a fitting term), and guilted me into staying by her side.
"But Ethan," you ask, "If she was like that, why didn't you just sever the relationship and move on with your life?"
Eventually, when she started to feel like guilting me alone wouldn't make me stay anymore, she started threatening me. She threatened to hurt herself or me if I tried to leave or told anyone what was happening, so I ended up staying.
I never went into a relationship with her, thank god, but the person with whom I really was in a relationship at the time was not happy and not exactly understanding of the situation.
I would've left ASAP if I had known how bad things were going to get, but eventually it got so bad that I couldn't leave.
Basically what I'm saying is, the main solution is to cut off the person, but what if you can't do that? What if the toxic person is so abusive that they threaten the victim with things like harm (to either themself or the victim)?
I'm not challenging anyone here. Ignoring them and cutting them off are good things to do, but sometimes they just aren't possible. I want to know what others would suggest for a situation like this, because I obviously had trouble handling it when it actually happened.
That's just my two cents.