How to recognise normalised dysfunction: Signs you're accepting toxic behaviour without realising it

Have you ever left a social gathering feeling drained, anxious, or doubting yourself, and assumed it was normal?
In this episode of Things We Say in Therapy, we explore normalised dysfunction: the toxic behaviours we learn to tolerate in friendships, families, and workplaces without even realising it.

You’ll learn:

•  What normalised dysfunction is and why it happens
• The psychological concepts behind it (hedonic adaptation, normalcy bias, attachment patterns)
• Signs your friends, family, or workplace may be harming your self-esteem
• How to listen to your body’s signals instead of your self-doubt
• How to set boundaries, recognise patterns, and rebuild self-trust
• Journal prompts and self-reflection questions to help you identify toxic environments in your own life

This episode will help you uncover toxic patterns in your relationships, and what to do next. 

🎧 Episode on Cognitive Dissonance: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2515214/episodes/17916946

📺 Links to watch FULL EPISODES on the Things We Say in Therapy YouTube Channel below!

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro: what if it's actually dysfunction?
• 1:55 How we normalise toxic environments
• 4:58 Friendship dysfunction: subtle signs you overlook
• 9:55 Triangulation, people-pleasing & self- abandonment
• 12:29 Family dysfunction: emotional neglect, criticism & manipulation
• 15:59 Distance creates clarity in family dynamics
• 17:30 Workplace dynamics: burnout, bullying & overworking
• 20:27 Cognitive dissonance in toxic work cultures
• 21:57 Why dysfunction starts to feel normal
• 24:00 How to recognise dysfunctional patterns you've been tolerating
• 26:00 When it's time to walk away
• 26:59 Self-reflection questions to identify dysfunction
• 29:01 The resistance you'll face when you start healing

Transcript

Hey everyone. Welcome back to your regularly scheduled self-reflection. I am Tash, and this is things we say in therapy. A place to feel seen, to learn some psychology, and to self-reflect on some hard truths to improve your mental health.

So I am gonna start off this episode with an important question. Have you ever left a gathering with family or friends and left feeling drained instead of energized, left feeling doubtful of yourself instead of confident,

and you notice it and you think, well, that's just how they are. or is that just your normal?

What if I told you that what you've been calling normal might actually just be dysfunction that you've normalized,

dysfunction that you've been taught to accept? dysfunction in our lives. It often hides in [00:01:00] plain sight because we normalize it over time.

When we're younger, we are forced to be in places that we don't wanna be. Sometimes

when we're kids, we're put into school and we have our given family environments, both of which that we don't get to choose ourselves.

When we're adults, we have to work. And a lot of people don't get the choice to just leave their work environment because of financial stress or whatever it might be.

And a lot of the times we're surrounded by people that we don't get along with, but we are forced to get along with these people because we have to survive in that environment.

We become friends with groups of people that are toxic and dysfunctional a lot of the time, and sometimes we don't realize it until a lot later.

Sometimes in these environments you can be around people who normalize toxicity.

It's possible that we're in those environments so long that we adopt those habits ourselves.

We adopt the mannerisms of the people that we're around.

And sometimes that doesn't actually reflect who we really are.

I [00:02:00] became aware of this topic because I was in a lot of toxic environments growing up. My high school experience was extremely toxic, not just because of the people that I was around, but the high school culture in general was extremely toxic. My family at the time didn't feel safe for me, and I was in, I was put into survival mode.

I adopted toxic habits myself to deal with it,

and I thought

a lot of people must go through this So I thought it might be something to speak up about because I don't hear about it very much.

So the goal of this episode is to help you listeners acknowledge and identify normalized dysfunction

and how it may be affecting your emotional health.

So defining dysfunction.

I am sure we all know what dysfunction is, but it's essentially an abnormal social environment. Something that doesn't work well or function well. dysfunction can feel normal in social and family environments

because our brains adapt to those environments over time. We [00:03:00] develop coping mechanisms

and they become our default behaviors, even if they're unhealthy But just because everyone else tolerates it and that environment is normalized, it doesn't mean you should too.

Examples of normalized dysfunction could be things like excessive family criticism, bullying each other,

and then it's labeled as tough love or a joke,

gossiping, exclusion, judgemental behaviors in friend groups,

or accepting disrespect. Overworking as a workplace culture or emotional neglect in workplaces.

So let's talk about dysfunction in friendship circles. I

signs that there's dysfunction in your friendship. Circles are when you come away from spending time with these people feeling drained, self-conscious,

or anxious from being around them. Things like backhanded compliments, gossiping,

or exclusion. I know that I've been part of friendship groups where other people were [00:04:00] excluded. I usually wasn't someone who was excluded, but other people were ritualistically excluded. And I didn't realize until that was turned back on me and I started being excluded from things and judged and gossiped about.

And you don't notice it until you're the victim, but it can be happening around you. And just because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it's not toxic.

Other signs that there's normalized dysfunction

in your friendship circle could be that you prioritize other people's needs above your own. If you feel like you need to prioritize other people, and when you don't, there's a problem that is dysfunction and that is not okay when you stick up for yourself. You should be supported.

If you put up boundaries

and are met with resistance or made to feel guilty for not showing up for somebody

when not showing up for that person meant you were putting your own needs [00:05:00] first. It's possible that that person or that group is using you for your generosity of your time. my point here is that peer pressure and a need to belong, it can often override

your need for self protection and

can encourage self abandonment when you are close with people and in a normalized dysfunction relationship with people who take and take and don't give back, or don't respect your boundaries.

I'm gonna give some more examples of normalized dysfunction that I've experienced personally. So, male centered friends is one. Male centered women are extremely difficult to have a good friendship with because

you will never be prioritized. I was made to feel like I was sort of jealous of my friend's relationship with her partner, which is not true. It's just that her

Relationship with like whoever she was with at that time would always [00:06:00] take priority over my friendship with them and I would be gaslit into thinking I was crazy. Judgmental friends is a huge one. And it can be subtle judgment too.

I felt like I couldn't fully express myself with people of this nature, and I just thought it was always my problem. I always thought I was too much. my opinions were, you know, too out there to be expressed. But I'm actually just like

quite woke and politically correct. Um,

and I have strong opinions about things. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But when you are a shell of yourself, when you don't feel like you can fully express yourself to your closest friends, there's a problem there. Uh, that doesn't necessarily mean that those people are judgmental. They might just be the wrong people for you, but in the cases where you feel like you're going to be judged, if you fully express yourself, then it's probably time to walk away.

Friends who ask for favors and don't return [00:07:00] them, this is a huge one. I used to have a friend that would constantly ask everyone around them for money. and in my experience, when I asked them to pay me back, they would only pay me back part of what I asked for

or part of what I had lent them. And then I found out that they had thousands, hundreds of thousands saved up in the bank, but somehow their bank banking app, whatever, was never working.

But that behavior was normalized by the per by the people around them, including me. I never said anything. I didn't feel like I was close enough with this person to say anything really. But yeah. When you get that feeling of, oh God, this is a bit weird, I feel a bit off about this, you're usually correct.

I feel like if you have good intentions, your gut feelings are usually correct.

Another one is friends who only value your time when you are drinking, partying, or [00:08:00] gossiping about somebody when you're someone to fill their time in. Behaviors that. Aren't necessarily healthy. Now, that's not to say that you obviously can't have friends that you drink and do stuff like that with, but when you're spending a lot of time with people who only want to do those things with you, that is not a healthy friendship

and you are likely engaging in some unhealthy behaviors, it's probably a good time to reflect on who you're spending your time with, but also your own habits

because who you are, your habits, your interests, your behavior, everything will reflect the people that you spend most of your time with.

Another one is triangulation. Now I am somebody who is quite upfront about the things that I have a problem with. If I felt uncomfortable about something that you said, if you've done something that upset me, I am not gonna keep it in. I do my best to come across as compassionate and [00:09:00] to be understanding and sort of like, not react, but sort of take everything in before I say something.

I think that I do a good job with that personally, but when I do have a problem with somebody,

that issue is between me and them. I want to sort it out directly with you because what is the point of telling anybody else, right? Triangulation is when insecure people who struggle with confrontation and conflict involve others in order to feel supported and like they don't have to deal with it on their own. if they can convince other people that they're in the right, then

they didn't do anything wrong and they don't have to take accountability. I've been close friends with people who, whenever I would speak to them about something deep or something I had a problem with, or whatever it was, someone else would always know. It was never just between me and that person in this friendship group that I was with, they would always call other people [00:10:00] to talk about it, to rant about it, whatever, instead of speaking with me.

I think that is so odd I just think it's so immature, but I understand why they do it, but it is, it's frustrating and impossible to have friendships with people like that when you're someone like me who likes to just get things out in the open. So something to self-reflect on here is whether you excuse toxic behavior and normalize dysfunction around you. In order to avoid conflict or in order to feel like you belong, because it can be very easy when you are starved of connection and you're desperate to sort of have a group, which used to be me,

then it's easy to sort of excuse the behavior around you and convince yourself that you are overreacting or that you have the problem and not them.

You need to be honest with yourself because being alone is never going to be worse than being surrounded by people who. Aren't for you or [00:11:00] people who are toxic and dysfunctional, it's never going to be worse to be on your own because you're gonna have more time to get to know yourself, to spend time with yourself.

And that's always going to be better because

only you know the perfect solutions to make yourself happy.

So let's move on to dysfunction in families. Now, this is a very deep topic. there are a lot of dysfunctional patterns that go on in families.

Things like chronic criticism and, you know, dismissal of feelings, emotional neglect, favoritism, triangulation in fam between family members and justifying harmful behavior as family tradition or that's just how the family is kind of thing. It's very easy to normalize dysfunction in families because things happen through the generations that just get passed down and there's no one you are more likely to get your mannerisms and behaviors from than your parents because they bring you up.

And they're responsible for what attachment [00:12:00] type you grow up with, right. I've spoken previously on attachment theory. There's so much information on it out there if you dunno much about it. But attachment bonds, they make it hard to

separate from dysfunction or even notice dysfunction because you've been around it for so long.

Emotional ties with family, they can blind us to that toxic behavior.

Especially if it's not outright abuse. Things like emotional neglect and

manipulation and subtle put downs and things like that. They take a toll over a long time and you can be gaslit or manipulated into thinking that there's actually nothing wrong with what they're doing and you are the problem.

If it's possible and safe to do so. It's always important to get distance from your family when you can, because it can really come with some great clarification on what patterns have been going on in your family that you didn't notice until you were sort of [00:13:00] separated from it.

I know that a lot of toxicity and families can try and keep you around and there's a lot of guilt surrounding leaving them. And if that is you, it's really important that you listen to your gut if it's possible for you to do so. I know that financial issues are a huge thing, but

staying with a friend or a partner for even just a little bit can help you get some clarity. And talking to people outside of your family is also very important about how you're feeling and the things that go on. Because talking to a safe person about what's going on can also help get an objective perspective on things.

If you have that inkling that there is something toxic going on, getting clarity from people outside of the family can be quite important.

So something to self reflect on here is.

Noticing how you feel on the inside. Don't listen to your mind. Listen to your body if it's feeling anxious or

resentful or unseen, or if you are [00:14:00] consistently self-doubting. if there's feelings or thoughts that you are consistently having things like this doesn't feel right, or

those things that they said hurt me and I wanna say something, but. I feel like I'm overreacting, that self-doubt in itself is actually a sign that you are being manipulated and there is some sort of dysfunction or toxicity happening there because you shouldn't have to push those feelings down. There shouldn't be this much self-doubt in there.

If there was healthy behaviors going on, you wouldn't consistently have that doubt. You wouldn't consistently feel unseen, anxious, or hurt, and most likely you're being manipulated into feeling like you are wrong.

So think about where you've compromised your own wellbeing, your own truth in order to keep the peace or in order to avoid conflict. It is extremely difficult to accept that your family members, that you so badly want [00:15:00] to love you and treat you well, could be acting this way. And it's not always a, I know that cutting people off culture is huge right now, but it's not always a case where you have to either sort everything out and it be perfect harmony or you have to just completely cut them off and go no contact.

I think there are scenarios where you can work out these dysfunctional behaviors with family members and talk things out and you know,

you can become closer that way. But the only way you're gonna do that is by confronting your emotions and realizing how it's actually making you feel and figuring out the best way to communicate that and the way that. Other people react in honest conversations like that is the best way to know whether having a connection or a relationship with them is for you.

Because once you're honest with the people that you love, they either attempt to take accountability and repair the connection with you, or they will [00:16:00] deflect gaslight,

not be understanding, and you'll know once you, once you own your truth. So, Let's move on to dysfunction. In workplaces. In workplaces, there's microaggressions, there is bullying or subtle bullying. Yes. Even as adults. And this bullying can be normalized as office culture, which before my generation was just accepted, but we're, gen Zs are no longer accepting this stuff.

chronically overworking yourself, working overtime without compensation,

burning yourself out in order to stay loyal to the company. It is not healthy. You are being exploited

or dismissing your boundaries and your mental health needs. Don't let people who don't understand that people who overwork themselves and dismiss their own needs tell you that taking a mental health day is just a Gen Z thing that we've made up and an excuse to [00:17:00] not work. Burnout is so real, especially nowadays.

Do not let people tell you that you are being weak or you're being disloyal to the company, or that

looking after your mental health is silly.

It is so upsetting these days with the financial pressures of everything that a lot of people just don't have a choice whether they get to work in a toxic environment or not, like. A lot of people have to stay because they will lose their house if they don't, or they'll not be able to put food on the table for their kids or whatever it is.

It is so important that you stick up for yourself.

There's always gonna be someone somewhere that you can talk to. Hr, especially about toxicity and workplace environments.

but if this is you and you're having to deal with a toxic work environment, I'm so sorry. It's so difficult to not feel like you have a choice.

But trust yourself and work on strengthening your confrontation skills, because that will save you in environments like this. Being able to communicate [00:18:00] in a way that helps you stand your ground, but also doesn't create that uncomfortable

conflict with, saying things that you regret. It's important to learn to communicate well in environments like this.

So organizational culture can normalize these things a lot, and cognitive dissonance helps employees justify it. I did an episode on cognitive dissonance a while ago. It was episode three I'm pretty sure, on how cognitive dissonance affects your everyday life. Please go back and listen to that. It's very insightful

and I will link it in the description, but

there is a lot of cognitive, cognitive dissonance that goes on in workplaces where your. Personal values don't match with the company's values or morals or beliefs,

or there's dissonance between how the company portrays themself publicly and how they actually are. So if the company has public values on their website saying that they value their [00:19:00] employees, but they're rewarding people with overtime and for burning themselves out in order to stay loyal to the company or whatever it is, and putting their own personal life after their work life, and companies rewarding that.

Luckily, a lot of places these days are shifting that. Kind of culture as Gen Z gets higher up in office culture environments and mental health is being valued a bit more. But be aware of this cognitive dissonance because it can be really harmful.

So a question to ask yourself here for some self-reflection is, are you tolerating something at work that you would never tolerate in your home life? and ask yourself how this impacts your self-esteem, your energy, and your mental health, because it can slowly nag at you over time this cognitive dissonance and dealing with the shit that you don't want to deal with simply because you need to keep the job.

There are ways to go about it to deal with this stuff. [00:20:00] That won't threaten your job security.

So here are some reasons why dysfunction feels normal.

Repeated exposure to these environments. It shifts our baselines. In a previous episode, I spoke about hedonic adaptation in my episode about why we always want what we don't have. It's the psychological concept where we chase a new feeling, a new desire, a new something that's gonna make us feel good.

Then once we get that thing, it's novel, it's new, it's exciting for a while, but over time our baseline shifts back to normal to what it was before we had that thing because. It's now normalized in our life, and we go back to how we felt before we have that new, exciting thing and we start chasing something new.

Well, it's the same on the other end of the spectrum. Unhealthy behavior starts to feel normal. The more that it's in our life and the more that we have to tolerate it,

and our baseline shifts

from where we, you wouldn't usually accept that behavior to slowly, [00:21:00] slowly moving. To the point where we accept that behavior because it's like, oh, I just can't be bothered to deal with it anymore, or whatever it is. Or maybe I'm just overreacting, and then you accept something else and something else until your baseline is way below where it was before.

This is one of the reasons why people stay in toxic relationships because

they're around that behavior so much that they, you just start to believe that it's normal and that, or that you deserve to be treated this way and your baseline shifts.

But in group environments, if no one else is reacting to the behavior, you start to think that you are the odd one out, that it's your problem.

That you must be overreacting. That's what normalized dysfunction is.

Something else to be aware of is normalcy bias.

This is when something that you would usually perceive as shocking happens and you initially go into denial because it's so far from normalcy from your everyday life that it's hard to believe.

So you're like, oh, well this must not be happening then [00:22:00] because it's so far out of the ordinary and you are like, oh, I must be overreacting. Oh, it's probably not as bad as it's coming across to me.

And I feel like this could be used in this context too. I feel like when there's normalized toxic behavior and outrageous things going on around you that you wouldn't usually accept in other environments, but no one else is reacting to it,

and it's so far out of your ordinary that you are like, oh, okay. That must be, you know what it, that must not be what it's coming across as. And so you don't say anything. You don't do anything because you're like, oh, no, that must not be what I think it is.

It's a self preservation technique because we convince ourselves that we're just overreacting so that

we don't risk making a big deal out of something that might not be what we think it is or how it comes across.

But the hard-hitting truth here is that accepting dysfunction, it erodes self-esteem, it erodes mental health, and it completely collapses your trust in your own judgment.

[00:23:00] But something you need to realize is that the way that your body feels, it doesn't lie in these situations.

If the energy makes you feel uncomfortable or off it most likely is.

So here are some steps to recognize and deal with normalized dysfunction.

The first step is to notice what's going on in the circles around you. It's important to note that people do make mistakes. People are imperfect.

People move weirdly all the time just because someone does something you don't like or you get frustrated with somebody. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's normalized dysfunction or dysfunction at all. What we're talking about here is patterns.

Patterns where you notice that your environment isn't serving you

or it contradicts your morals and beliefs,

or it makes you uncomfortable and it's just not where you wanna be. Like, I've been in friendship groups where the other people's morals and beliefs just deeply contradicted with mine, and I wanted to belong, and I wanted to have a group, and [00:24:00] I'd been friends with these people for years at this point. So I felt really uncomfortable as that being my excuse or my reason to not be friends with them anymore.

I felt like I was overreacting. I felt like that was a silly reason I was using that as an excuse to stay in an environment where I could belong, where I was part of something. It never serves you to do that.

Another way to sort of see whether the environment you're in is dysfunctional, is testing boundaries in small, safe ways. So saying no in certain situations or prioritizing yourself when someone else expects something of you. If you are met with resistance and you are met with judgment or

some people saying nasty things to you or whatever, like they're not the people for you your friends should support you doing what is best for you in every situation.

That doesn't mean you should never be there for your friends,

but in situations where it would make you uncomfortable or you [00:25:00] would be abandoning yourself in order to do whatever it is, your friends should support you in that and be understanding. If they don't, they're not your friends.

Something else you can do is to seek someone to talk to or go to therapy. This can help you gain perspective, like an objective perspective on patterns that you've normalized in your life. It sometimes you just need to explain it to somebody else in order to realize how dysfunctional it is. I absolutely did this.

I had a friend stay with me who I hadn't seen in years, and I was telling him about this situation that I was having with someone who was supposedly my close friend, and I told them how she treated me and he was like, what? that's not okay. She shouldn't have done that. And I was like, oh. And I actually defended her because I didn't wanna accept that I was being treated badly because that would mean that I would need to walk away at some point and.

That can be really difficult to deal with.

So yeah, speaking to [00:26:00] people outside of your circle or a mental health professional can be really helpful.

On that point, you need to accept that some people and some environments are never going to change. Some people are never going to meet the expectations you set out for them

or whether you are trusting in their potential. You need to recognize that

removing yourself from these situations is absolutely vital because they are holding you back.

Staying in situations that aren't for you will hold you back from growing, from being the best version of yourself, of being authentic, learning what's actually right for you, and it's stopping you from finding your people.

So now I'm gonna hit you with some questions that will be good for yourself, reflection to. Consider whether you are accepting, normalized dysfunction in your own life. And I'm gonna split it into categories. So we'll do friendships first. So consider which friends leave you feeling drained or self-critical.

A lot of the time. Friends who are [00:27:00] critical of themselves can subconsciously make you critical of yourself because you tend to mirror the people that you spend a lot of time with.

And do you excuse toxic behavior because you want to belong? Or because you want to avoid conflict or you are chasing a sense of safety by staying with the same people.

A couple questions about family. Which family patterns make you anxious, unseen, or resentful?

Or where have I compromised my wellbeing to maintain harmony or avoid guilt?

A couple about workplaces.

Am I tolerating behavior at work that I would never accept elsewhere?

And how does my work environment impact my self-esteem, my energy and my mental health? And then a few for your own personal awareness.

When you notice yourself leaving environments where you feel upset or anxious, ask yourself whether this is a normal emotion, a normal reaction to something that has happened, or whether it's a repeated pattern because of who you're spending time with.

Ask yourself what patterns you've normalized within [00:28:00] yourself that are unhealthy.

And what small or big changes could you make in your life that feel scary, but feel necessary for your wellbeing?

This could be things like walking away from people you've been friends with for a long time because you've outgrown them. They're no longer for you. You're noticing dysfunction, or is it having a conversation with somebody about patterns you've noticed?

But whatever you do, listen to how you're feeling.

Answering these questions, honestly can feel very uncomfortable,

but Discomfort is the first step to reclaiming your authentic self and to move towards a life that you genuinely value, and

that feels healthy and harmonious, but genuinely harmonious. Not harmonious in a way that makes you abandon yourself.

A final little word to say that recognizing normalized dysfunction can be, and a lot of the time is met with resistance [00:29:00] because the people around you feel so comfortable in that dysfunction that they don't wanna disrupt it. And so. You will be made to feel like the black sheep. You will be made to feel like you

are in the wrong for feeling that way, but you need to trust yourself. It doesn't make you judgmental to notice dysfunction. It makes you self-aware and is actually really brave to notice these patterns.

As always, be self-compassionate in every step of the way. Always value. Yourself and what you can bring to the table and be compassionate towards anything that you're feeling.

You can use these questions as journaling prompts or just think about them,

discuss them with a therapist or a friend,

but always make sure you're being kind to yourself and to others. thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you've got this far.

Leave a

pizza emoji in the comments so I can see who's watching all the way through.

Don't forget to catch my snack [00:30:00] size deep dive episode on Thursday.

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