We all have kept in touch with toxic people in our lives. They are the kind of people who cause very much discomfort to others.
There’s no getting away from these people — as Therese’s experience proves, they’re everywhere. She quickly mastered the art of dealing with difficult people and learning to empathize with them.
Perhaps this is because early in her life Therese herself was a toxic person.
Therese was born with a violent nature. Her mother said, “She flings herself into the most dreadful rages when things don’t go as she wants them. She rolls on the ground as if she’s given up hope of anything being right again. Sometimes she’s so overcome that she chokes.” She admits in her autobiography Story of a Soul that her temperament could easily have led her to grow up to “become very wicked,” if she hadn’t had such good parents who helped her overcome it.
When she first became a nun, she wrote, “Everything in the convent charmed me,” but soon she learned that, just as she had toxic tendencies and continued to be a work in progress, so too did the other women with whom she lived. She particularly had problems with her new boss, the prioress, who treated her severely.
“I never met her without being reprimanded for something,” Therese says. She tells a story about how a simple housekeeping job became the occasion for humiliation:
“I remember once when I had overlooked a cobweb in the cloister, she said to me in front of all the other nuns: ‘It’s easy to see our cloister is swept by a child of fifteen!’”
This public shaming fit in with a theme of being accused of laziness, and the prioress would often claim, “This child does absolutely nothing!” Therese had to learn to deal with the prioress, though, because for better or worse they spent much of their lives in close contact. It got worse before it got better, and she relates that the problem got so bad that she worried something was actually wrong with her that was unfixable.
Over time, she realized the problem didn’t lie within her and that she was going to have to learn to deal with this toxic person in her life. Here is her advice
By keeping herself quiet she started to be away from them. Therese doesn’t mean we should let others push us around, but that when we’re falsely accused and labeled, it shouldn’t bait us into a fight. When the prioress insisted on calling Therese lazy, she could have snapped back and started a verbal altercation, but she knew that nothing she said would make a difference.
It’s easy to love family and friends. It’s difficult to love a person who shows no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Therese speaks of a nun for whom she had a natural dislike and how she realized that, because love is an action and not a feeling, this was the perfect person to teach her to love better. Remember, Therese herself had once changed as the result of the patient love of her parents, so she knew the power of loving someone who seems unloveable.
She says, “I tried to do as many things for her as I could, and whenever I was tempted to speak unpleasantly to her, I made myself give her a pleasant smile.” After a while, she reports that her feelings truly began to change.
In the end, a toxic person can only affect you as much as you’re willing to be affected. As Therese shows, there’s always another choice. It may be difficult or even seem impossible, but her example reveals that even the most toxic person has the potential to become a saint.