Ending a Toxic Friendship: Breaking Your Telephone Addiction Part II

You can decide that you want to break your telephone addiction with your toxic friend, however; that may not what your friend wants you to do. That's how some people remain trapped in their toxic friendships. The toxic friend tries to make you feel guilty because you have made a conscious decision to break your addiction. They may say things like you're avoiding them or you don't care about them, etc. Keep in mind your goal is to rid the toxic friend from your life and breaking your telephone addiction is one of the first things you need to do.

You can't control what your toxic friend does but you can change how to respond to what he or she does. You can let your friend know that your ultimate goal is to end the friendship and one way of doing so is to overcome your telephone addiction with him or her. Let him or her know that you don't wish to receive any more phone calls from them. If you're lucky, the phone calls will stop. If you're unlucky as I was when I told my former toxic friend to stop calling me, the calls will continue. So what do you do?

Well, if you have the will power or whatever it takes to go "cold turkey" that's great. Most of you don't so you will have to wean yourself and that's fine.

You can begin by:

1. Eliminating any need to communicate with your friend by telephone.

2. Letting your friend call you, don't call him or her and if you should happen to"miss" their phone call, don't return it.

3. Keeping all conversations short. Set a time limit for yourself, perhaps a five or ten minutes and then end it without explanation. Just say you have to go and hang up the phone. If your friend calls you right back, don't answer.

4. After training yourself to keep the conversations short, you'll then be able to move on to telling your friend that you are busy when he or she calls and that you can't talk at all. Or you can simply tell your friend that you don't want to talk to him or her.

5. Changing the frequency of how often you talk to your friend. If it's 5 times per day, decrease it to 1 or 2 times per day. Remember doing things gradually will increase your chances of success.