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)no subject
Date: 2026-03-10 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-11 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 02:06 am (UTC)I am not trying to get you to rewrite them or make you do anything that makes you uncomfortable and I don’t want you to take it that way at all, it’s just that something stuck out to me because of the way the minds of people in my household work. Please don’t be offended and understand I’m trying to explain something, not criticise your boundaries as they are.
I just wondered whether you felt there was any contradiction between “if you 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” and “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” given that you are dealing with ND folk who may not always realise the difference (a) between “making fun of” and “making fun with” and (b) being told to stop seriously and being told to stop in a joking way where the other person doesn’t actually mean it (which unfortunately some people do, with laughing “oh, stop it, you!” type comments which they quite genuinely don’t mean someone to take seriously and would be shocked if someone did).
I mean, all bets are off, of course, if you’ve got as a rule at the top, “if anyone says ‘stop’ in any fashion, even if you think it’s a joke, please stop.” But if, say, it happened in the comments on DW somewhere on someone else’s DW and someone thought that “stop being silly” meant that someone was laughing along with them, when it actually meant “stop being hurtful” but the OP was trying to be polite - and continued being what they thought was “silly ie funny” and the OP thought was “silly ie hurtful” (it’s the middle of the night and I can’t remember where this sentence started but do you see what I’m getting at? Someone might continue teasing, thinking the other person was in on the joke and not realising the other person wasn’t finding it funny, and it seems harsh to decide they’re malicious and delete them from your life forever without looking into mending it.)
The reason I bring this up is that it’s something which happens in our household sometimes. I live with the kindest guys in the world, but they’re both capable of not realising they’re being hurtful and going on after I’ve obliquely asked them to stop.
If I’m clear about it, and say “stop now please” they know to stop, but I did have to explicitly teach Mouse this because when he was younger he still thought I was joking and continued. If someone hasn’t had a parent who has taught them this (maybe because they haven’t had the sort of parent they would take the piss out of), especially if you know some younger people who are ND, they’d learn a lot from being friends with you, and while that’s not a good reason to stay friends with someone and your boundaries are absolutely valid however you choose to define them…I wondered whether there wasn’t some room for considering whether this fit into the category of the boundary to do with discussion to tell someone they’ve messed up and how to repair it.
Gah. As you probably gathered from the top, writing this out made me exceptionally anxious so please don’t be annoyed with me. If you need your boundaries to be like that because of your own past experiences I completely understand it; it’s my own past personal issues which are leading me to ask you about it, but they’re your bloody boundaries and put them wherever the fuck you want!
no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 02:52 am (UTC)Comment two: I haven’t had it happen that way yet in my server but it worth thinking about. I’ll come back to that in a bit, once you’ve got a returned comment showing that I’m not mad! It’s okay! Get some rest, you!