[eksistor]

I find that I am very afraid of people crossing my boundaries, so when I see they will not, I think they are doing me a favor and I become overly amenable to their needs or wants. As though I've made a contract with them in exchange for leaving me alone. (Examples are often figures of authority: landlords, bosses, etc.) But really I never owed them my privacy, my boundaries, in the first place. Because of this mistaken conception of how to be around others, I end up just keeping people out entirely, and then lose intimate relationships altogether. Even though I don't believe it, I do still act as if intimacy is letting people in regardless of my comfort level. That something has to be given up in order to even share a moment with another human being. I grew up with a lot of what I would say is bad messaging around boundaries. I often find that the same people who are allergic to what they deem "self-help speak" (people who get mad if you use words like self-esteem, boundaries, co-dependency, etc.) are very ready to take advantage of others. They're only mad because you've correctly identified these phenomena and disrupted their ability to get what they want from you. I hate to take this sort of cliched self-empowerment tone, but at the same time it is actually important to empower oneself to speak for and advocate for oneself, and act on one's own behalf. There is something so hard to accept about the fact that people in the world, people in my own family, are so disgusted by the very idea that one might need to work on being more assertive. Maybe they think they can't get what they want from people unless they manipulate them. At the same time, this characterization still puts the criticism on them, instead of focusing on the problem at hand, which is treating oneself with self-respect and acting with integrity.