With noxious people, you can only have noxious relationships... Such relationships can cause mental and/or physical illness in others around them. These noxious people have personality disorders, mood disorders, and problems with thought or impulse control.
Trauma and stress can change the brain and injure one’s ability for social reasoning. How do we understand these high-conflict people? We know that their noxious behaviors have origins much earlier in their lives; that they suffered some type of developmental trauma; experience chronic noxious stress in their adult brain; have impaired function of the prefrontal cortex in relation to social reasoning. The personality disorders associated with noxious people are the DSM-5 Cluster B group of Borderline Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Mood disorders include Minor Depression; Major Depression; Bipolar Disorder. Anxiety Disorders include Generalized versus Phobic Anxiety, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Pathological Perfectionism. Anger disorders include covert anger and episodic-aggressive anger.
The way we deal with these types of noxious people is through the therapist’s ability to help the person develop through the use of interventions that use behavioral skills, interpersonal skills, cognitive-behavioral skills, Dialectical behavioral skills, and positive psychology.