Are You Swallowing Poison Over Time?

I saw that they want to cut back on the fluoride in the drinking water due to kids having too much of it. They may not take into account things like every child in my family trying to eat their toothpaste because it now tastes like candy. Maybe we don’t worry about things that are harmful over time.

If you read the ingredients on the packages of your favorite foods, I bet there are 2-10 things you can’t pronounce, don’t know the origin of it, what it’s used for or its potential damage either immediately or most likely, long term.

It’s a bit easier to document a study on physical damage. If something is scientific or touchable, we can identify it a bit easier.

What if we were to apply this same type of thinking to the things we cannot see which are making us sick over time? Relationship problems might hand out more poison during the course of our life than any external chemical in our food. This is not to say we shouldn’t be educating ourselves on what we are ingesting, but it’s cross-cancelled if we are still eating the small bits of emotional poison being ladled onto our plates every day.

For instance, a rapid fire of guilt or anger coming at you can feel heavier than everything you've already endured, but if you were to total the accumulated guilt you have felt up until now, your lid might not fit on the blender. We can sometimes think we can put up with more guilt if it's given to us in bite-size pieces. We might even think small bits are easy to recover from. On the contrary, I believe they act like small cancerous cells dispersed evenly over the body.

Identifying to me isn’t the biggest problem, though. My concern is that we know what is killing us slowly and we’re ok with it. We even laugh about it and make jokes out of it. It’s partly because it allows us to cope with the small bits of pain so we can enjoy all the good parts of the thing we are ingesting. If you eat a chocolate cookie, the best excuse to eat it is to tell yourself everyone else is doing it. You can ignore the bad ingredients by laughing at how you can’t pronounce them so you can simply consume to sweet parts without guilt.

This happens in dysfunctional relationships too. We excuse the bad behavior by cracking jokes about our partner so that we can continue in a less-than-ideal situation without being harmed by its poison. If you receive anger, guilt trips and other unacceptable behavior in your relationship because they are bite-sized and easily digestible, you could possibly be ignoring the power, not size of these cancerous growths.

If you have finally decided that a bad relationship needs to end because you are finally feeling the poison’s effects, it might take a seemingly positive turn or it the poison might rush in like a river. In the case if guilt trips, you might not be able to handle how much poison is coming so you stay there in order to alleviate the assault. A heavy assault like that can make us think it was the first time we were being poisoned when in fact, we didn’t see the tiny portions at every meal over a 5 or 10 year period.

I think the same thing applies to every drop of poison we let in our lives. Gossip, bad-mouthing, hate and violence are other things which don’t seem problematic when we watch a 5 minute broadcast or read a short article in the newspaper or online but they can manifest over time to seep in and destroy our character without us even noticing.

I know it’s difficult when the poison escalates to an intolerable level. Our bodies sometimes tell us to go back and moderate the toxin which throws many of us back into very unhealthy relationships. I think once we can identify what is destroying our character, we can ignore be aware that it can kill us slowly or quickly, but remain decided that it is in fact poison and it does have to be cut off.

If you are a compassionate soul, this might be harder to identify. I don’t think we have to lose our compassion for others when we set personal boundaries. I believe we are intelligent enough to have both.

Man, I do love chocolate, though. Not big on eating toothpaste, though…

Karen :)

“Boundaries are to protect life, not to limit pleasures.” ~Edwin Lewis Cole