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
The way I’m trying out currently about it is (done in order to have the foundation covered)
Establish needs (I still need a more formalized way of doing this besides just granularly asking about a directly relevant aspect)
Can these needs be met by the other? This has to apply both ways
What are our relevant wants or wishes, like defined and transparent? No tricks or goalpost-moving (evolution is ok but tricker because then the wants-terms are changing and other redefinitions need to be pondered in turn)
Can we both have our wants met at this time
To me, the key is always good-faith. Even if I disagree with stuff, as long as we both know its serious and there’s not room for games here, and there’s ways of sussing that out. Easiest is to ask for something simple or a small concession that is important to you and if they can’t manage you having the audacity to request something of them, its a tell that they’re not ready or fundamentally incompatible.
Either way, nothing of value will be lost, harsh as it sounds. Cancers are your flesh and blood too but you owe them zero duty of care or consideration beyond excision and removal from your life
Abso-frigging-lutely. Even the dumbest person, or maybe someone with a bad memory, but who is trying can eventually be trained, or else constrained, whereas a malicious actor can do everything “right”, until they get what they wanted all along and then cause the highest magnitude of harm.
I like how you are approaching it intentionally, which demonstrates awareness and intent to make things better for yourself, and also others as you plan ahead for what is most important.
Truthfully, I am extremely sensitive to the words and agendas of people operating in bad faith and I don’t mean that in any way that is facile or overly-subjective. I don’t mean garden variety sarcasm/irony/jokes/etc. Its less an accomplishment or result of active effort on my part so much as its a reflexive , gut-level antipathy and violent skepticism towards. I have a zero-tolerance policy towards it
I mean the folks that clearly troll, constantly play devil’s advocate or a contrary position where I’ve respectfully requested they make clear and justify, or straight up pull bullshit out their ass in any proximity to me. Or pile on in before they ever stop to define and cite specifically that which they take issue with, too, or engage in other rhetoric that I can’t necessarily put a name to but I can reasonably intuit is setting off my bullshit-o-meter.
Then this might help: remember that even as you try to set boundaries between yourself and others, you can set boundaries within yourself as well. e.g., you could watch a movie depicting a fictional narrative of a not-good-faith event, and decide to at least attempt to not be triggered, or at least quite as much. You cannot control the world, but you control your response to it, and you deserve to be happy:-). Though you need to find the route to get to it - even in spite of others attempting to ruin it for everyone around them, to become as unhappy as they are.:-(
I guess you already said this, sorta, in that when people act that way, you respond to increase your happiness by getting away from that source of toxicity. But I mean something deeper, which you may also already be doing, in terms of setting the boundaries within yourself, to not feel unhappiness about their actions.
I’m in a better place where I can have curiosity and take a closer dispassionate look at problematic things but I am very clear about their place in my IRL life and reducing my susceptabillity to it online and calling it out online where I see it being done and being allowed to stand unduly.
Kinda cool cuz it lays out the triggery areas pretty explicitly so I can name it and add to my awareness of the difficult stuff. I’m doing other work so its all content and fodder for that, even if it seems I’m not handling it productively at the time :)
Edit: I take a more “working with” the feelings to understand the geneolgy of them and where they fit into everything else and situations in which they arise.
Its fascinating and it feels really good to think about the feelings in a more inquisitive approachcm, if I can handle the objective actions and words that otherwise arise in the darkness
Like, if something takes away my joy (I feel), my first concern is removing myself from harms way or further intensity. Then, I want to look at why I might feel that and trace it back or name it as best I can and reevaluate my attitude towards repeating the experience and whoever is on the other side of it. Boundaries are involved throughout the process but I don’t view the expression of the boundaries and everyone having a learning experience at the expense of guranteeing your own safety first.
The only way I would lose from that situation would be for me to explain away all that in such a fashion that fundamentally invalidates the way I felt in reaction. I don’t subscribe to the CBT approach that your feelings are faulty and you need to think better in order to be ok again. I feel like a lot of it is gaslighting even though it is possible for people to also have logical or procedural biases in their thinking that also causes additional distress unduly
Eventually you will also come to the question often expressed in the popular phrase: is it better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all? i.e., even as you retreat from hostile forces, what are you advancing towards, that is worthwhile? I am not very knowledgeable about this - most of my own advances irl have failed, though I do not really regret any of them, as each decision was made only with the knowledge that I had at the time, even if I have learned & changed & grown since.
The reason I bring it up is to help illuminate how boundaries need to be set even upon the very setting of boundaries (how meta!:-P). In the limit (I mean in the mathematical sense), the ultimate safety is achieved by walling off everyone and everything so that it cannot affect you in any way - I have heard that concept expressed as an analogy where someone builds a castle, and thereafter basically suffocates inside, walled off entirely from the world, both the bad but also the good from it.
At some point you (& me, and each of us, possibly uniquely for each situation even) will need to find the appropriate balance point b/t avoiding toxic people, vs. allowing contact with imperfect humans. If we cannot forgive them, at some level we cannot forgive the faults within ourselves, and that would be the ultimate tragedy - if we could not even stand to be around our very own selves! That said, it is an advanced concept, b/c for instance it does not mean that we should re-establish contact, or to not break away contact, from a toxic person. If anything rather, it is the ultimate severing of their “hold” over us, where we know that we will be okay regardless of what they do, even if we remain in contact with them (which would need to be decided on a case-by-case basis ofc, b/c the more contact we have with them, the more they influence us even if we fight tooth & nail against that).
Doesn’t that sound nice, in theory? Sigh… I have literally no idea what it means though, in practice:-P. We, like them, are all just bumbling around in the dark, trying in our own way to do the best we know how. The difference is that at least you are making the attempt to illuminate the situation - and that will make a HUGE difference in the outcome!