“The core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others. Recovery, therefore, is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connections with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological faculties that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic capacities for trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy. Just as these capabilities are originally formed in relationships with other people, they must be reformed in such relationships.
The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure. Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to assist the survivor founder because this fundamental principle of empowerment is not observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest.”
Judith Hernan, Trauma and Recovery
Tag: boundaries
Affection
“No child should feel intruded upon and have their personal space not respected.”
basically:
- it is not a virtue to not set boundaries
- ignoring your own wants and needs is not a healthy way to show love
- people worth loving will respect your boundaries
- people worth loving will not want you to set aside your own wants and needs to make them more comfortable
- ‘having no boundaries at all’ describes a person who is very hurt, not a person who is very virtuous
- suffering for others’ comfort is not how you be a good person, it is just how you become very hurt
- sometimes you need to make others uncomfortable in order to get your needs met
- your needs are more important than others’ comfort
- your comfort is equally important to others’ comfort
- making other people uncomfortable is not, in itself, ethically wrong or morally dubious
can i add a thing:
what really helped me with boundaries is to realise that not having/showing them didn’t just hurt me, but also hurts my friends. and that interacting with someone that doesn’t state their boundaries is not at all ‘comfortable’ or ‘easy’. that’s a perspective that was so alien to me, i never realised other people might genuinely want to know about boundaries, and be genuinely distressed about overstepping them. but when i did, it really changed how i approached this!
‘my needs are more important than others’ comfort’ is absolutely true, but can be hard to embrace. but what about: ‘if i don’t state my needs, that makes interacting with me more difficult and hurtful’?
we don’t usually want people we care about to hurt for our sake. if we find out that they did, we’ll feel really bad and guilty, like we should have been able to prevent it by being more attentive. guilt ping-pong can happen. everybody gets to feel toxic. that’s not good!also, if i don’t state needs and wishes, i leave the onus of steering everything to the other. if they care about my needs and wishes, it is now their job to gently pave the way for me, to make me feel safe enough to express them, or, worst, to somehow guess them, and none of this is making it especially easy for them, on the contrary!
it can be very hard and it’s okay that it’s hard. (like you’re not being “unfair” by being bad at stating boundaries forex.). but, basically, establishing boundaries and needs isn’t just good for me, but it’s good for both, and
in healthy relationships
will often make both equally more comfortable. sometimes it’s not ‘my needs vs. your discomfort’, sometimes it’s a win-win.
I flat out cannot be relaxed around people who I cannot trust to maintain their own boundaries. NOTHING makes me more anxious and more stressed than the idea that someone might just….not indicate something is not okay with them.
Because here is the thing: I know damn well this stuff does not go away. I know damn well that it builds up, slow and toxic and it TELLS.
And to start with it’s horrifying to think that I’ve been inadvertently harming someone. And then just to follow up?
It WILL blow up in my face some day. I KNOW this. (As in, it has happened. Multiple times.)
I cannot read minds. I am less capable than your average person of catching Subtle Cues. (And they’re not good at it.)
So Hell. Yes. Figuring out your lines and making them known and backing them up will be a huge relief to anyone worth worrying about.
When someone disagrees with you online and demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a complete and logically sound defense including citations, you can save a lot of time by not doing that.
Bro, I’ve known you for twelve seconds and enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.
This got a lot of responses from people pointing out that evidence is a key part of intellectual inquiry, discourse, and debate. That being able to support your beliefs is a key critical thinking skill. Which is 100% true.
Except that you don’t actually have to participate in intellectual discourse any time some fucko on the Internet tells you to.
There’s a vast difference between “this is an important thing to be able to do,” and “this is a thing that you must be continuously available to perform in public for any stranger who asks.”
my genuine advice to younger-than-me wlw & questioning women about sex: it’s supposed to feel good. if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t have to do it. if you don’t enjoy something, you’re allowed to not like it. no matter what it is. even stuff that our culture says is essential to sex. you’re allowed to not like pain or crude language when you have sex, you are allowed to not like penetration, you’re allowed to not like oral or anal, you’re allowed to straight up not like being touched (being a stone top is okay!!!), you’re allowed to like things that most straight people don’t even consider sex but feel good, you’re allowed to like things that most cis people don’t even consider sex but feel good, you’re allowed to have preferences and enjoy sex and decide against sex that doesn’t feel safe and good. there is so much pressure to feel like you should like certain things, and I want you to know that it’s important to find out what you actually do like, not just what you feel like you’re supposed to like. you’re the one living in your body, and you get to decide what feels pleasurable
#
good advice for everyone tbh (via @dingo-inna-domino-mask)
“you’re the one living in your body, and you get to decide what feels pleasurable”
A red flag: “I don’t want you to see me as an authority figure”
If your boss or academic advisor says something like “I don’t want you to see me as an authority figure,” that’s a major red flag. It almost always means that they want to get away with breaking the rules about what powerful people are allowed to do. They’re probably not treating you as an equal. They’re probably trying to exercise more power over you than they should.
Sometimes authority figures say “I don’t want you to see me as an authority figure” because they want you to do free work for them. The logic here works like this:
- They want you to do something.
- It’s something that it would be wrong for an authority figure to order you to do.
- If they were a peer asking for a favor, it would be ok to ask, and also ok for you to say no.
- The authority figure wants you to obey them, but they don’t want to accept limits on what it’s acceptable to ask you to do.
- For purposes of “what requests are ok to make”, they don’t want to be seen as an authority figure.
- They also want you to do what they say. It’s not really a request, because you’re not really free to say no.
For example:
- It’s usually ok to ask your friends if they would be willing to help you move in exchange for pizza. It’s never ok to ask your employees to do that.
- It’s sometimes ok to ask a friend to lend you money for medical bills (depending on the relationship). It’s never ok to ask your student to lend you money for a personal emergency.
Sometimes authority figures pretend not to have power because they want to coerce someone into forms of intimacy that require consent. They know that consent isn’t really possible given the power imbalance, so they say “I don’t want you to see me as an authority figure” in hopes that you won’t notice the lines they’re crossing. Sometimes this takes the form of sexual harassment. Sometimes it’s other forms of intimacy. For instance:
- Abusive emotional intimacy: Excepting you to share your feelings with them, or receive their feelings in a way that’s really only appropriate between friends or in consented-to therapy.
- Coming to you for ongoing emotional support in dealing with their marital problems.
- Trying to direct your trauma recovery or “help you overcome disability”.
- Asking questions about your body beyond things they need to know for work/school related reasons.
- Expecting you to share all your thoughts and feelings about your personal life.
- Analyzing you and your life and expecting you to welcome their opinions and find them insightful.
- Abusive spiritual intimacy: Presuming the right to an opinion on your spiritual life. (Eg: Trying to get you to convert to their religion, telling you that you need to pray, trying to make you into their disciple, telling you that you need to forgive in order to move on with your life.)
If someone says “I don’t want you to see me as an authority figure”, it probably means that they can’t be trusted to maintain good boundaries. (Unless they’re also saying something like “I’m not actually your boss, and you don’t have to do what I say”.) Sometimes they are intentionally trying to get away with breaking the rules. Sometimes it’s less intentional. Some people feel awkward about being powerful and don’t want to think about it. In either case, unacknowledged power is dangerous. In order to do right by people you have power over, you have to be willing to think about the power you’re have and how you’re using it.
Tl;dr If someone has power they don’t want to acknowledge, they probably can’t be trusted to use their power ethically.
I think this goes for people who work for disabled people too. A lot of caregivers seem to prefer to think of themselves as “friends“ of disabled clients. Mostly when someone says “I don’t think of myself as a caregiver, I think of myself as a friend” it’s followed by inappropriate attempts at intimacy (not necessarily sexual) and a complete lack of understanding of what the caregiver-client boundaries are.
Sometimes that includes offering to do the disabled client “special favors” that they later withhold when they get angry, or use as leverage to get something they want in return.
If caregivers think their job doesn’t include listening to disabled people, that’s not a good sign. It means they think the ordinary power balance should be “the disabled person gets no say.”
This rant can apply to any disability that makes toileting difficult or impossible. I’m just specifying autism because freaking Autism Moms™ always broadcast the diapers and it pisses me off.
Having to wear incontinence products isn’t something to be ashamed of, but it’s not cool to out somebody who wears them either unless they say you can or do it themselves.
THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who post videos / photos on the freakin’ internet explicitly showing that your autistic child (adult or young) still wearing diapers at age whatever.
THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who talk about how your child isn’t toilet trained at age whatever and stating that they wear diapers as if you have to make them as embarrassed as possible to shut down advocates like me who can speak or type to tell YOU to shut up.
“They won’t see it / they won’t understand” is not a valid excuse. Talking about or showing a disabled person’s diapers without their consent serves zero educational purpose. That is not how you treat someone you claim to love and respect.
Outing someone’s incontinence without their consent is NOT educational, loving or respectful.
I mean, they clearly think anyone with what’s simply a separate medical disability (incontinence) has no mind with which to comprehend they have it, but they probably talk to people they don’t know have it every day. It’s just that obvious disability in someone you live with makes every comorbid condition seem like a symptom and treated like a behavior problem (or treated with non-science).
This rant can apply to any disability that makes toileting difficult or impossible. I’m just specifying autism because freaking Autism Moms™ always broadcast the diapers and it pisses me off.
Having to wear incontinence products isn’t something to be ashamed of, but it’s not cool to out somebody who wears them either unless they say you can or do it themselves.
THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who post videos / photos on the freakin’ internet explicitly showing that your autistic child (adult or young) still wearing diapers at age whatever.
THAT INCLUDES: All you damn autism moms who talk about how your child isn’t toilet trained at age whatever and stating that they wear diapers as if you have to make them as embarrassed as possible to shut down advocates like me who can speak or type to tell YOU to shut up.
“They won’t see it / they won’t understand” is not a valid excuse. Talking about or showing a disabled person’s diapers without their consent serves zero educational purpose. That is not how you treat someone you claim to love and respect.
Outing someone’s incontinence without their consent is NOT educational, loving or respectful.
consent doesn’t only apply to sexual touching.
you’re allowed to tell people not to hug you, not to hold your hand, not to kiss your cheek, not to play with your hair, not to put their hands on you in any way without your permission. you’re allowed to be uncomfortable with these kinds of touching, to tell people that, and to have those boundaries respected. just because a touch isn’t sexual doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to have a problem with it.
you’re allowed to create boundaries about what happens with your body and what other people do with it, regardless of those people’s motivations or their relationship to you. it isn’t only sexual touching people need your consent for and it isn’t only sexual touching that you’re allowed to revoke your consent for. people should not be touching you when you don’t want them to no matter what kind of touching it is.
The Four Social Rules every Autistic Person needs to Learn
From a young age I was taught three things:-
- The messages I get from my body are wrong
- Not wanting to be touched is wrong
- That I must override these feelings to be accepted
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.