Boundaries
Mar. 10th, 2026 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordSpeaking to several people over the past 30 years, but nobody likely to stumble across this journal:
Make a list of your boundaries.
• If you yell at me outside of an emergency, then that is not a conversation I am participating in and I am leaving until you can be civil. If you use emotional violence like threats or manipulation, I will have second thoughts around continuing to know you.
• I don’t want to know other people’s secrets before they tell me themselves. If you break confidences to show me that you are loyal to me, it will make me lose respect for you.
• When I say that I can’t or don’t want to do something, that is the end of a discussion - not the beginning of a negotiation. If you try to coerce me, it will damage our friendship.
• If you are not Covid cautious, and are not both vaccinated and tested before social gatherings, then I will not be inviting you back to my social gatherings. If you want to be part of my community, then you protect that community.
• If you berate, intimidate, or make fun of me or one of my people after we have said to stop, that is all the proof I need of malicious intent. You will be banned from my social spaces.
• If you mess up somehow I will try to find a private venue to tell you that, and will be open to discussing how to repair anything that has gone wrong between us. I expect the same courtesy. I don’t care how inconvenient and awkward it is to have “you messed up, here’s what I need from you to fix it” conversations, if you ghost me for anything less than outright abusive behavior, ie. creating or exploiting a power imbalance, then I will retroactively lose respect for you and I will have to warn others about what is implied by your version of friendship.
Are your boundaries supporting your needs? Are they aligning with your values? Explain.
• To me, my need for emotional safety means not being yelled at, not being threatened with words like, “If you don’t stop crying then I’ll give you something to cry about”. I need to feel safe to be my best self, the one that supports the stability and growth of my community; the boundaries around yelling and emotional violence support that.
• If others can’t trust you to be discreet with their secrets, then neither can I, and I need to trust in my community to follow information security protocols, because bad actors are out there. This supports my values of privacy and trustworthiness.
• Coercion is oppressive; it’s the antithesis of my value of solidarity. If you can’t get cooperation from someone on something important when you explain why you need it - then why would you even want to have a relationship, much less one where you took things from them by force? If you can’t persuade someone … Like I don’t even understand that urge. I need to not be coerced and so do my people, so please don’t make the world that we all have to live in worse by trying to get things from people without asking and making a case for the thing.
• Community care is both a value of mine and something I need. Protect my people, or go somewhere else for your sense of community.
• I still have unhealed trauma around bullying and even seeing it done is intolerable to me, so yes, this is supporting my needs and aligns with my value of beneficence.
• If you are not interpreting people generously enough to tell them they fucked something up and give them either a chance to fix it or a reason why you feel things are not working for you, then you are not someone who I need to be my friend.
Make a list of your boundaries.
• If you yell at me outside of an emergency, then that is not a conversation I am participating in and I am leaving until you can be civil. If you use emotional violence like threats or manipulation, I will have second thoughts around continuing to know you.
• I don’t want to know other people’s secrets before they tell me themselves. If you break confidences to show me that you are loyal to me, it will make me lose respect for you.
• When I say that I can’t or don’t want to do something, that is the end of a discussion - not the beginning of a negotiation. If you try to coerce me, it will damage our friendship.
• If you are not Covid cautious, and are not both vaccinated and tested before social gatherings, then I will not be inviting you back to my social gatherings. If you want to be part of my community, then you protect that community.
• If you berate, intimidate, or make fun of me or one of my people after we have said to stop, that is all the proof I need of malicious intent. You will be banned from my social spaces.
• If you mess up somehow I will try to find a private venue to tell you that, and will be open to discussing how to repair anything that has gone wrong between us. I expect the same courtesy. I don’t care how inconvenient and awkward it is to have “you messed up, here’s what I need from you to fix it” conversations, if you ghost me for anything less than outright abusive behavior, ie. creating or exploiting a power imbalance, then I will retroactively lose respect for you and I will have to warn others about what is implied by your version of friendship.
Are your boundaries supporting your needs? Are they aligning with your values? Explain.
• To me, my need for emotional safety means not being yelled at, not being threatened with words like, “If you don’t stop crying then I’ll give you something to cry about”. I need to feel safe to be my best self, the one that supports the stability and growth of my community; the boundaries around yelling and emotional violence support that.
• If others can’t trust you to be discreet with their secrets, then neither can I, and I need to trust in my community to follow information security protocols, because bad actors are out there. This supports my values of privacy and trustworthiness.
• Coercion is oppressive; it’s the antithesis of my value of solidarity. If you can’t get cooperation from someone on something important when you explain why you need it - then why would you even want to have a relationship, much less one where you took things from them by force? If you can’t persuade someone … Like I don’t even understand that urge. I need to not be coerced and so do my people, so please don’t make the world that we all have to live in worse by trying to get things from people without asking and making a case for the thing.
• Community care is both a value of mine and something I need. Protect my people, or go somewhere else for your sense of community.
• I still have unhealed trauma around bullying and even seeing it done is intolerable to me, so yes, this is supporting my needs and aligns with my value of beneficence.
• If you are not interpreting people generously enough to tell them they fucked something up and give them either a chance to fix it or a reason why you feel things are not working for you, then you are not someone who I need to be my friend.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-10 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-10 09:07 pm (UTC)• don't be petty. You can be vengeful, but if it’s over isolated incidents of little shit, that is petty and cringe. Not a good look on anybody, least of all me.
• other people have the right to leave and if you treat them like they don’t have that right it will make them want to leave, so don’t do it.
• don’t get caught unawares if you can help it; be prepared for as many foreseeable changes of circumstance as is reasonable given your finances. Not doing so just guarantees getting side-swiped by things you weren’t aware of and feeling betrayed by non-sentient happenstance.
There’s probably more? But this post already took me an hour of meditating to pull out of my head, lol, I’ll do that some other time.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-10 09:41 pm (UTC)