Love your thoughtful reply!
I personally find that the word toxic is quite apt, because everyone is already familiar with the concept of various degrees of toxicity. Sexual abuse is very toxic, someone who always talks over you and doesn't listen is still toxic but to much lower levels.
And like with all toxins, individuals can choose if there are any redeeming qualities that outweighs the negatives. Alcohol is a good example, pain killers another. Similarly, I think it has this intuition already built, ya there's some toxic behavior at my work, but it pays really well and I'm learning a lot. Ya my brother can be a little toxic, but he's always there to help when it matters and cares a lot about me.
Yet everyone understands that it would always be best without the toxic parts. Which is where for work you can look at other opportunities and see, this other place seems to not be toxic and similarly pays well and has a lot of growth opportunity.
> Labeling something as toxic means that the only realistic answer to resolving the issue with that toxicity is to cut it out of one's life
You seem to insist on this a lot, I don't think I agree.
I mentioned different ways to approach a toxic scenario.
One is to stop your exposure to it. You can do so by leaving or by having the cause of the toxic behavior leave.
Another one is to stop the cause of the toxicity, which you can do so by having the behavior stop (through repremendation, shaming, authority, education, etc).
You can also adapt to the toxicity, develop a thicker skin, or what I called "suck it up". Hopefully making its negative impact on you milder and maybe non-existent over time.
But the ideal pattern in my opinion, is not for the person who already feels shitty to have to deal with trying to figure out a way to avoid or stop the toxic behavior, but for others who are in much better positions to do so to do so.
It's pretty hard for someone bitten by a snake to save themselves from the poison. Once you're already feeling shitty, your courage and energy levels to face people that make you feel shitty about the very topic are low, and doing so can be a risk to face even more toxic backlash.
In a workplace, it's really the responsibility of the company to make sure they deal with toxic behavior preemptively, and offer easy channels for remediation if someone calls it out.
And as decent human beings, it is really all our own responssability to be aware of when and what make others feel shitty and see how we can adapt to make others feel good instead. That's how you can coexist positively with others. It's normal relationship building for trust, comfort and all that.
Now, I see that a lot of people want to be pedantic and point at an edge case which I'd consider is a bit of an absurd call-out, because in practice it's very rare that people call out these kind of toxic but shouldn't be scenarios. That's the case where someone feels shitty about things that for the majority of people do not make them feel shitty and sometimes even a normal person would feel good about.
The thing is, most of the time, in those scenarios we are dealing with trauma. And I think here too, like how you'd help someone in a wheelchair and not slam the door in their face, people with trauma need our help and compassion as well.
> But yet, there are often numerous ways to resolve an issue if it isn't deemed as toxic and the power to resolve it remains with the person
Can you expand here in what you mean by keeping the power with the person? In my mind, "toxic" is a new found power for just that, the ability to name and label a behavior that hurts you as toxic now levies new power to actually make that behavior stop or change or go away, where as before people had often no recourse and could only "suck it up".