Reply to Breaking up with my toxic mom group (Ashley Tisdale essay)

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "Breaking up with my toxic mom group (Ashley Tisdale essay)"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So she thinks it's teaching her kids to stand up for themselves by...sending a dramatic text instead of explaining how she felt and having an actual conversation about it? [/quote]

And then write about it on the Internet.

I can be empathetic to how it feels to be left out, btdt, but it would be so much easier to be empathetic if she described trying to talk about what was going on in person.

Also I'm wondering if she reached out to the person she realized was being excluded before her.[/quote]

Why is the onus on the person wronged to tiptoe around the person who did the slighting? If you recognize yourself, don't shoot the messenger. But if only she went about it a different way is BS. She's allowed to express her feelings on social media, isn't that the point of the defenders of the toxic group? They are allowed to share anything and everything on social media, feelings be damned.[/quote]

I'm on Ashley's side here, as someone who has also left a toxic friend group and identifies with what she writes in the essay.

However, I actually do agree that [b]her choosing to write about this in a public way, especially given that the members of this group were famous and a lot of people know or will speculate who she's talking about, is part of the toxic dynamic[/b]. I bet Ashley is watching reaction to her essay quite closely, maybe even looking at the social media of people in this group to see if there's any hint that they are aware of it. She probably wont' admit she's doing that, but having been there, I bet she is.

Having been through this, I think it probably would have been healthier *for her* not to publicize it in this way. Or perhaps to write this essay anonymously, or to write it and wait many years to publish it. When I left my toxic friend group, it took me years to truly detach from that dysfunctional feedback loop of still wanting their approval. And for me it's been many years, and still when I read Ashley's essay, I fell down a rabbit hole of looking at social media from people in that old group because her essay made me think about them, and thinking about them made me curious, and of course many of them still have public social media accounts where they document their comings and goings. I was also happy to discover that most of them are no longer friends, or not appearing in each other's photos or liking each other's posts, and that the one I wound up disliking the most uses her Insta account to shill for what appears to be a failing personal styling brand. So even though its' been years, I can still get pulled into these toxic emotional dynamics (I don't love that I still feel this petty about these people, I wish I was truly just above it all by now).

I'm still kind of glad Ashley wrote the essay, because she's right that these dynamics don't get talked about or acknowledged much. But if I'm really honest, this was also probably petty on her part and an effort to "win" the friend breakup or save face. I have empathy for her position as I know it well, but also know the way to really put this crap behind you is done out of the public eye, in therapy or in your healthy relationships with people who actually like and respect you, not online.[/quote]

Thank you, you gave voice to my feelings. I'm sure she has certain feelings now, having left the group, but I wonder what others could say about how she feed into the toxicity or how badly she treated other people who were in the group. The essay came off as lacking in self-awareness, in my opinion, which I found to be annoying.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics