Toxic Friendships

Suzanne Degges-White, PhD, LPC, LMHC, NCC, is professor and chair of the Department of Counseling, Adult and Higher Education at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. She is a licensed counselor and her research interests include intimate relationships (including friendship and motherhood). She is the author of Friends Forever: How Girls and Women Forge Lasting Relationships and Mothers and Daughters: Living, Loving, and Learning over a Lifetime. She is a featured blogger on the Psychology Today website and has edited four books on counseling in the community and in schools.Judy Pochel Van Tieghem has over three decades of experience in reporting, writing, and researching for various publications. She was awarded the Illinois Associated Press Spot News Reporter of the Year honor in 1984 and was a winner of the Kenan Business Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1990. She currently resides in the Chicago suburban area, where she works as a freelance reporter.

This book is intended as a kind of field guide to ‘toxic’ relationships of various kinds, but especially friendships among women. . . .Degges-White is a therapist as well as a professor of counseling. She has had many years of experience helping women who are trying to understand and/or extricate themselves from damaging relationships. Van Tieghem is a professional freelance writer. The authors first lay out why people need relationships and then propose ten ‘cross-cultural’ rules for maintaining healthy adult relationships and ten rules for parents who must help their children successfully navigate their own worlds of friendship. Basing their suggestions and conclusions on ‘shared stories of composite clients’ and other women contacted via a survey, the authors then take readers on a guided tour of familiar environments that are particularly prone to being toxic (e.g., the soccer field). In the last section of the book, the authors offer advice on how to gracefully bail out of a toxic relationship and how to use the rules of relationships to build healthy friendships while keeping one's integrity and sense of self intact. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

• AcknowledgmentsPrefacePart I: Understanding the Need for Social Connection 1: The Need for Community 2: Friendship Patterns from Girlhood through Older AdulthoodPart II:The Rules of Friendship and their Role in Relationships3: It’s a Matter of Trust4: Just the Way You Are5: Any Friend of Hers is a Friend of Mine6: Being There7: A Friend in Need8: Keep the Friendship Favor Balance in Check9: Defending Your Honor10: Bring Joy to Your Friends11: Criticism is Not Okay12: Jealousy is Not Okay13: A Rule-by-Rule Guide for MomsPart III:Toxic Environments outside the Home14: Soccer Moms and Carpool Queens15: Church Group and Civic Group Friends16: Down the Street and On the JobPart IV: Taking Stock and Cutting Back17: Playing by the Rules18: Writing Your Own Rules19: Taking Stock and Letting GoBibliography