Raise your hand if you've ever felt victimized by a group chat.
Now raise your hand if you've ever been the villain in someone else's—and had absolutely no idea.
That's the thing about group chats. They're where we plan, rant, laugh, and overshare. They're where we feel seen—and where we sometimes cause harm without meaning to. We at Habitude think this is a conversation worth having, not because we have all the answers, but because we live in the space between skin actives and social activism. What concerns our community concerns us.
So we brought in someone who actually knows what she's talking about.
Paula Ferrer is a licensed psychologist and the current Chairman of the Technology and Media Psychology Special Interest Group of the Psychological Association of the Philippines. She's also the co-owner and Research and Development Director of Mind You Mental Health Systems—one of the leading mental health providers in the country. We sat down with her to talk about why our group chats have gotten so complicated, and what we can actually do about it.
Why are we in so many group chats?
The honest answer: because we're wired for connection.
"We get to know ourselves more. We get to know life more through other people," Paula says. "So it's just natural for people to gravitate towards each other—people with the same ideas, the same values."
Group chats, at their core, serve two basic human needs. The first is relatedness—that sense of belonging, of being heard, of not being alone. The second is what psychologist Erich Fromm called a frame of orientation—a goal, a direction, a reason to gather. Your work GC exists because there's a project to finish. Your community GC exists because there's a delivery schedule to track. Even the group chat you formed with three friends who all had the same terrible boss served a purpose: it was a safe space to feel understood.
"It's ad hoc," Paula explains, "until the feeling dissipates. When it's gone, the group chat develops a new function—or it disappears."
Most group chats start with good intentions. That's worth remembering when things go sideways.
When does it turn toxic?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: the medium itself is part of the problem.
"It's unnatural to be communicating through the phone," Paula says plainly. "There's always this danger that when you're using it, there is a lack of nonverbal communication. The micro-expressions are not there. The tone of the voice is not there. Every single text is prone to misinterpretation."
And then there's the anonymity factor—not the kind where you don't know who you're talking to, but the kind that comes from having a screen between you and another person.
"Because of that barrier, your anonymity increases, and you become less inhibited," she says. "Less inhibited—like when you drink alcohol."
That's not a small thing. It means we say things we'd never say face-to-face. It means a nudge of aggression gets amplified. It means the message you sent without thinking twice became someone else's bad day.
But here's where it gets more complicated: toxicity isn't always coming from the sender.
"Sometimes, toxicity is not the person who sent the message—it's you interpreting the message," Paula says. "Because sometimes the intention wasn't bad. But the verbal cue is gone." Something as simple as "Hey, what's good?" can land completely differently depending on what kind of day the reader is having, what history they carry, what they're afraid of. "How you read it is influenced by your personal experiences, your history, your personality. It's your pain that goes through your trauma."
So when do you know it's genuinely toxic? Paula offers three signs to watch for:
When you stop feeling safe. Whether it's your emotional safety or your physical safety—if a group chat has you on edge, that matters.
When you start performing a version of yourself you don't recognize. "You have to pretend to be something else to still be part of that group chat. You can't do that if you want to protect your sanity."
When you feel guilty afterwards. That guilt is information. It's your values talking.
So how do you detoxify it?
You start with yourself. Not because you're necessarily the problem, but because that's the only place you actually have control.
Paula points to something called the fundamental attribution error—a concept in psychology that explains why we're so quick to judge others and so generous with ourselves. When we do something questionable, we look to the situation: I said that because of the context, because of what happened, because of how I was feeling. But when someone else does the same thing, we go straight to their character: that's just who they are.
"When you interpret things, it's not the same way as how you would interpret your own behavior," she says. "You have to be very aware of that."
The antidote, she suggests, is offering what she calls the most generous of interpretations.
"When you want a relationship to work—whether it's just the two of you or a group—you need to offer the most generous of interpretations to what that person said or did. Because you never know what they're going through."
It sounds simple. It isn't. But it's the most practical thing you can do before deciding something was meant to hurt you.
If a misunderstanding does happen, Paula's advice is to address it—privately, directly, without the audience. "If it's between me and this person, I don't need the rest of the other interpretations chiming in." And importantly: clarify, but don't demand forgiveness on a timeline. "You can't force them to be okay immediately. That's on them."
The bigger question is the one worth sitting with: Am I empowering this group chat, or am I just asking it to empower me?
"Am I making it a safe space for others, because I'm demanding it to be a safe space for me?" Paula asks. "That's where the self-awareness comes in."
On leaving—or staying
Sometimes the honest answer is that a group chat has run its course. Paula is clear-eyed about this.
"Is this the GC that empowers me? Is this the GC that makes me grow? Because if it doesn't—why are you even there?"
And for the group chats you genuinely can't leave—the work ones, the family ones, the ones where leaving would itself become a whole thing—she says the goal is to manage your own behavior within them. Keep what's professional, professional. Protect your access to yourself. Don't share more than you mean to.
"What you expose your mind to, it becomes part of who you are," she says. "If every day you're in a group chat where everybody's complaining, it becomes a norm for you as well."
The purpose of this conversation—and we want to be clear about this—was never to call anyone out. But to call ourselves in.
The group chat is just a mirror. What's showing up in it is showing up somewhere in us, too. The toxicity we're most responsible for is the kind we can see when we're honest enough to look.
And maybe that's where the detox actually starts.
Habitude Conversations is our ongoing series on the things that matter beyond skincare—because we've always believed that how we treat our skin and how we treat each other aren't as separate as we think.
Mind You Mental Health Systems offers data-driven, accessible mental health support with licensed therapists. Download the app or visit mindyou.com.ph.