The culture handed us a precise new vocabulary for difficult people. Notice what every word in it has in common: none of them has a cure.
Sit in any coffee shop long enough and you will hear the new language. He is toxic. She is a narcissist. He was gaslighting me. That whole family system is codependent. I had to go no contact.
Twenty years ago those words lived in clinical journals. Now they are how ordinary people describe their fathers, their ex-wives, their former pastors, their bosses. The migration happened fast and almost nobody examined the terms on the way in.
Let me say the honest thing first, because this post is not an argument for naivety. Some of this vocabulary does real work. There are men who systematically rewrite a woman’s memory of events until she distrusts her own mind, and having a word for that is a mercy. There are people whose presence in your life is genuinely destructive, and older Christian language sometimes smoothed that over with a pat on the back and a verse about longsuffering. The Bible itself names unsafe people and tells you to put distance between you and them: from such turn away (2 Timothy 3:5). Make no friendship with an angry man (Proverbs 22:24). A man who reads this post as permission to send someone back into a house that is hurting them has read it backward.
But hold the whole set of words up to the light at once and something shows.
Every Word Points Away From the Speaker
Toxic. Narcissist. Gaslighter. Manipulator. Emotionally unavailable. Trauma-bonded. Boundary-violating.
Run the list again and ask a simple question: how many of these words does anyone ever use about himself?
Almost none. There is no cultural script for I was the toxic one in that marriage. I have never once heard a man say, unprompted, I think I may be the narcissist here. The vocabulary is built to point outward. It is a diagnostic kit with no mirror in it, and a kit like that will always find the problem in the room across from you.
Scripture saw this coming, and put it in a proverb about courtrooms.
He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. (Proverbs 18:17, KJV)
The first account always sounds airtight. Not because people are liars — because one side of a story, told by the person who lived it, is internally coherent by construction. The clinical words make that first account sound not merely coherent but technical. And a technical verdict is much harder to reopen than an angry one.
The Second Thing They Have in Common
Here is the part that should bother a Christian more than the first.
Not one of those words has a remedy attached.
What do you do with a narcissist? The vocabulary has exactly one answer: get away from him. That is the whole therapeutic payload. Diagnose, distance, protect. And for genuine danger, that is right and biblical. But the vocabulary cannot distinguish genuine danger from an ordinary difficult human being, because it only has one gear. It explains, it categorizes, it never reconciles. It gives you a name for the wound and nothing to do with the person.
Now set the older words beside them. Sin. Repentance. Confession. Forgiveness. Forbearance. Reconciliation.
Every one of those is uglier about human beings than toxic is. Sin is a far harsher word than unhealthy. But every one of them opens a door. They assume the possibility of a changed man and a restored room. The clinical vocabulary is more polite and more hopeless. The biblical vocabulary is more brutal and goes somewhere.
Jesus Did Not Deny the Mote
People reach for Matthew 7 to shut down all criticism, which is not what it says. Read it closely.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5, KJV)
Jesus never says the mote is imaginary. It is there, it needs removing, and He assumes you will eventually help remove it. What He orders is a sequence, and He gives a reason that is practical rather than merely moral: with a beam in your eye you cannot see clearly. Self-examination is not humility theater. It is how you get an accurate read on the other person.
Which circles back to the grasshopper problem. A man carrying something unexamined does not just misjudge himself; he misjudges everyone standing near him. Half of what gets labeled toxic in another person is a beam being described as a mote.
There Is Already a Procedure
The thing I find striking is that Scripture does not leave conflict at the level of vocabulary at all. It gives steps, and the first one is the one the culture skips entirely.
Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. (Matthew 18:15, KJV)
Go. Tell him. Alone. Not post about it, not run it past four friends who only have your version, not announce a diagnosis to a group chat. And notice the goal in the last clause — thou hast gained thy brother. The aim is a recovered relationship, not a validated grievance.
Paul adds the posture for the man doing the confronting:
Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. (Galatians 6:1, KJV)
Considering thyself. You go in holding your own capacity for the same thing. That one phrase is the difference between a brother and a prosecutor, and it is precisely what a diagnostic label removes — because once you have classified someone as a personality type, you have placed yourself in a different category of creature than he is.
And Scripture does make room for walking away. It puts it after the attempts, not before them: A man that is an heretick, after the first and second admonition, reject (Titus 3:10). First and second admonition. Then separation. The order is not decoration.
What Borrowed Words Cost You
A vocabulary is not neutral. It decides what you are able to think.
If your only categories for a hard person are clinical, then three things become unavailable to you. You cannot be guilty, because guilt is not a diagnosis. You cannot forgive, because you do not forgive a condition — you manage it or you escape it. And the other person cannot change, because a personality disorder is a permanent classification and a sinner is not.
That is a closed system, and it is a bleak one. It leaves a man with an accurate-sounding account of why everyone in his history failed him and no road out of his own chapter of it.
It also quietly moves the goal. The therapeutic goal is peace of mind for you. The Christian goal, where it is possible, is peace between you. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18). Paul puts two honest limits in that verse — if it be possible, and as much as lieth in you. Sometimes it is not possible. Sometimes the other man will not have it. But the limit is on the outcome, never on the effort.
The Audit
So here is the uncomfortable exercise, and it takes about four minutes.
- List the words you have used in the last year about the people who have hurt you.
- Now list the words you have used in the last year about yourself.
- Compare the two lists for severity.
If one list is clinical and the other is generous, you have not been thinking. You have been filing.
And there is a harder question underneath it. Is there a conversation you have been calling a boundary that is actually avoidance? A phone call you have labeled protecting my peace that is really a grudge with better branding? The new words are very good at making old sins sound like self-care. That is most of why they spread.
But let a man examine himself (1 Corinthians 11:28). Not examine his mother. Himself.
The Worst Diagnosis and the Only Cure
Here is why a Christian can afford to put down the flattering vocabulary.
The gospel already gave you the most damaging label anyone has ever applied to you, and it did not come from an ex-spouse or a podcast. For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). That is worse than toxic. It is not a difficult personality; it is a guilty one, and it is yours.
And then the same sentence keeps going, which no clinical term has ever done:
Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:24, KJV)
Freely. Not after years of managing the condition. The word that condemned you and the word that cleared you came in the same breath from the same mouth, and that is a trade no amount of accurate labeling of other people will ever get you.
Keep the clinical words where they belong — as descriptions, in the hands of people trained to use them, for situations that genuinely need them. Do not let them become your theology. They can tell you what happened to you. Only one vocabulary in the world can tell you what to do with the man who did it, and what to do about the man you have been.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist