Toxic Cultures

I’ve been thinking about toxic cultures a lot lately.

A culture can be defined as: “The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. Also: the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time” ( Source).

And toxic can be defined as: “containing or being poisonous material especially when capable of causing death or serious debilitation” ( Source).

Combine the two and you might end up with a culture hell bent on sucking the life out of anyone participating in it. That’s my definition anyway.

I’ve had my share of encounters with toxic cultures and personalities. Encounters with toxic personalities can be very painful. I know for me it takes 2–3 days to recover from such an encounter. Such encounters don’t have to be very long to cause serious pain and suffering. Often such toxic encounters are more of the hit and run variety.

A toxic culture takes such things and normalizes them so that the people who are part of a culture come to expect that toxic encounters are what is considered normal.

They aren’t. We should never allow ourselves to be convinced that toxic encounters are normal or to be expected.

Toxic cultures show up in a variety of ways and places. I have encountered toxic cultures in workplaces, politics, churches, and common run of the mill places like grocery stores. You can actually feel the toxicity when…