I choose to use the word “toxic” quite intentionally, even as there is a growing chorus not to use that word in reference to people. The argument is that it becomes too easy to reduce people to certain traits or qualities that bother or offend us. This then provides the justification for not engaging with those people (at best) and demonizing and dehumanizing them (at worst). I acknowledge there is something quite right about this worry. However, I believe the word has an appropriate and powerful application that is related to its original meaning.

“Toxic” derives from the Greek “toxikos,” which pertains to arrows and archery. Some arrows were dipped in poison. While the poison dimension remains of the word “toxic,” I want to reclaim the original “arrow as weapon” element. Two or more people can be involved in a toxic relationship when they aim weapons (emotional, physical, social, and spiritual) at one another to cause harm. This seems to me exactly what a toxic relationship is. Moreover, this leaves room for the ways in which a person can be in a toxic relationship with her own self. Each of us can shoot ourselves with those same arrows. It is not so much a matter of a person being poisonous but rather what a person does to others or her own self that is toxic. Relationships can be toxic without the........

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