Nobody tells me what I’m going to do or where I will be going and when that happens
I am open to invitations or requests or suggestions where my involvement is desired or ostensibly necesary for somone else. But I will never respond to this as a statement of fact or in the form of a threat
If you are a giving person, you have to put a limit on how much you can give. Takers have no limit.
I have to remember to look out for myself because even though I’m trying to look out for a lot of people I care about, no one is looking out for me.
In my experience it’s not so much about putting a limit as it is about avoiding takers and finding other givers. But one has to be careful not to be used. :)
I find it’s important to allow yourself to be vulnerable to a moderate degree, to give people the chance to expose themselves as a giver or taker.
Letting a taker take even once just teaches them they can take and move on to the next victim. People need to prove themselves as trustworthy before giving them anything. Offer them something relatively small like buying lunch. If they don’t hesitate to take it then they’re takers. Someone who won’t refuse at least twice has no qualms about taking for nothing. But I just don’t associate with people enough to allow them the chance to even try.
Family is the relationship, relatives are who you’re related to.
You can pick your family but you can’t pick your relatives.
You don’t have to associate with your relatives if you don’t want to. Family is a group of people who you’ll want to associate with.
I grew up being told constantly, “I’m family, you have to love me,” which definitely wasn’t good for my mental health until I realized the above statements. My relatives are typically terrible people, and the last time I saw most of them they openly wished for my death at Thanksgiving (because a different relative outed me as bi to the whole gathering) and I haven’t gone back to their gatherings since.
They’ll often (years after the event above) send me invitations weeks in advance to the gatherings and then either the day before or morning of send me a message saying, “Sorry, we didn’t mean to invite you. You aren’t welcome here.”
So I guess in a way the statement, “You have to love family,” is somewhat true but in the, “a prerequisite for someone being family is love,” not a being forced to love someone you’re related to.
And the barrier that you mentioned OP, is definitely a good one and one I didn’t even realize I whole heartedly was using for a long time.
The fundamental error in my opinion (we are all implicated in this to an extent cuz we don’t come out of the box necessarily “knowing” it) is this notion of anyone being entitled and unreservedly owed anyone else’s
- time
- attention
- resources
Like obviously if you make a committment to someone or there is an implied non-opt-outtable one that still has the color of your consent or legal liabillity for etc, thats different.
Simplest rule I do is
If I generally come away feeling worse and not respected after we interface, there won’t be another encounter to the greatest extent I am able to openly prevent (not just avoid or evade) that
Nobody tells me how to format my comments.
if someone tries to make me format my comments in a specific way, I’ll refuse to comply and sometimes go against that format
- just to spite them.
I enjoyed the humor, but the OP did set a boundary of [serious].
So I guess what we are learning here is that setting boundaries is always going to provoke some people to break those boundaries out of spite.
A fairly pragmatic one:
People are not entitled to my attention 100% of the time. I am not obligated to respond to your message right away or pick up the phone for an unscheduled call.
This was a challenging one for my relationship with my wife, as she operates differently. We’ve worked hard to establish reasonable expectations.
Nice, yeah, I enjoy the hell out of asynchrous communication, particularly where its heavy stuff. Nobody should be time-pressured to make a response to things without having time to digest the words and arrive at a respectful, proper response.
Just in general, people should respond when they are ready to respond, but also, its a useful exercise to be able to shoot a text (regardless of content) and forget about it and just ask the person to being you up to speed if the context fades from you.
Also, if you have enjoyable conversations (persuant to my other boundary about not repeating experiences with negative people), people will often naturally want to engage with you but it cannot be forced and any pressure you apply will likely blow up in your face
I second this! When I was in an emotionally abusive relationship this was one of the worst things. I do not have it in me to be available to you 24/7, and I guarantee it will result in the degradation of the relationship. That relationship ended 6 years ago and I still get a trauma response when someone has unreasonable expectations for a response in a non time sensitive conversation.
I have my own things and resources that are mine and guaranteed so nothing can be taken away or held over my head as leverage to do things contrary to my boundaries and/or authenticity
I setup my life to ensurethat I did whatever it took to secure my own housing, job, benefits, friends, hobbies, and ways of doing things and that nobody could externally hold those key elements or anything else I needed over my head and take anything away.
I refuse to rely on anybody in a way where that can be leveraged to compel me to act in ways inconsistent with what I need+want and allow that to play out repeatedly on a chronic basis and that ever allow for the possibillity where I lose access to that which I need at the caprices of another person or entity
