I have a hell of a time setting boundaries. Whenever I don’t say yes to what someone else wants, I feel like I’m going to get in trouble. I can remember almost every time I’ve refused someone simply becuase I didn’t want to do something, and I carry those instances around as proof that I’m not a nice person. Since I’m stuck alone in my apartment, and my head, I’ve got lots and lots and lots and lots of time on my hands to try to unpack this shit. There’s a reason half the tiktoks on my For You page are therapists.
I remember when I was 5, my parents took me to see a dance studio and watch a class, and my dad holding me while mom asked if I would like to take lessons. I either hesitated or said no, and dad said “your mom always wanted lessons when she was a kid”, and I knew immediately that it was my job to take dance lessons to make up for that. So I took dance classes for the next 7 years until I was 12, when I was fed up enough to have a fight with my mom about being ungrateful for the opportunities they gave me. This was after a full year of pretending to be sick or to have sprained my ankle in gym to get out of going to class at night. I remember banging my ankle on the metal frame of our babysitter’s trampoline to bruise it enough to be believed.
It’s not like dance classes were terrible. I mostly enjoyed learning the skills, but I hated the performances, and I hated being singled out. If you were doing well, you’d get pulled out and made to demonstrate to the whole class, and if you were doing poorly, you were pulled to the front to be corrected in front of everyone. I learned early that the only way for me to get through a class comfortably was to find the middle of the road and not draw attention to myself.
There was way more emphasis on perfect execution than on the joy of movement, and this is a huge part of why I can’t relax and dance for fun as an adult. It didn’t help that our class was good, and we won 7 gold medals and 2 silver medals in the various competitions we entered, so now whenever I think about dancing, there’s a mental battle to remind myself that no one’s watching, and no one’s grading this and there aren’t steps and you aren’t doing it wrong and you aren’t going to be put on the spot and gee isn’t this fun. No, not particularly, unless I’ve had at least 4 drinks and have reached the “fuck it” stage.
Anyway, that day when they signed me up for classes made it very clear that one of my roles in the family was to make up for my mom’s unhappy childhood. She wanted dance lessons for herself; I got dance lessons. But I also watched mom join the mother’s dance class after I’d been doing it for 3 years. It’s a very weird feeling as a kid to know your mom pushed you into trying the thing she was afraid to do herself, made you test the waters and then worked up her own courage to follow.
I’m not saying mom did that knowingly, or deliberately used me to work out her childhood issues, I’m sure at the time she felt like she was handing me all the happiness that had been withheld from her. But the fact is that no one seemed at all interested in what kind of kid I actually was. It took me decades to admit even to myself that I would have much rather played t-ball and baseball than ever put on tap shoes and a damn leotard, because it still feels like I’m being ungrateful to complain about the fact that I had dance classes as a kid. And it’s not like was big trauma in any way, it was just a weekly grinding down of who I was and who I wanted to be in favour of who other people thought I should be. And that shit, taught young enough, is fucking difficult to unlearn. To this day, I have a hard time telling if I enjoy doing something because I actually enjoy it, or if I agree to do it and the pleasure I feel comes from knowing I’ve said yes when it was expected and now no one is going to yell at me.
Growing up with a mom who had survived, but not dealt with, an abusive childhood was a fucking gauntlet. It was a bit like living with a volcano in the living room, never entirely sure when it would go off. It was never physically abusive at home, but there were a LOT of days where I got yelled at out of the blue, told that I shouldn’t make mistakes, that I should know better because I was the oldest; didn’t matter that I was 4, or 6, or 9, I should know better. I still feel an immense amount of pressure to have answers in every situation, and to be able to take care of the people around me. I take charge of group outings, but I don’t do it for fun, I just do it because I expect to get in shit if I don’t have everything in hand. If something goes wrong, it’s because I fucked up, didn’t think ahead, didn’t think it through. I still expect to be judged, and yelled at, whenever anything around me is imperfect, and I am still only comfortable when I can find that middle ground where no one notices me.
To be clear, I love my mom. She had an incredibly hard childhood, and she did one thing absolutely right – she married a man who was 100% cut out to be a good father. He was shit at standing up to her, but he was never angry or erratic or verbally abusive the way mom was. And I understand how hard it must have been to be a mother of 2 at 26, and completely unprepared to create a loving household when you’ve never experienced it. I’m not mad at her anymore, but I do need to think through the mistakes my parents made to see why I am the way I am. I have such a hard time attributing anything bad to my dad because he was the one that seemed to love me unconditionally, while mom’s love was always felt contigent on whether or not I did what I was told, and did it the way she wanted.
I’m in the middle of reassessing a friendship with someone who can be both very kind and very cruel, depending on how insecure he feels at the time. I’ve basically cut off all contact since February, because it’s impossible for me to let him be part of this process. You can’t ask someone to be an impartial jury on the case of whether you should kick them out of your life or not. I don’t think I’m going to be able to remain friends with him, and that feels like a failure on my part to make space for his flaws. I’ve never learned how to care about someone and say no when they want something from me that I don’t want to give; I usually just cut off all contact because there’s no other way I know how to maintain a boundary between their requests and what I’ll give away. I really don’t know how to navigate conflict without giving up on what I want, and holding my ground makes me feel like I’m being unkind and irrational.
I read something the other day about empaths, and while I don’t really like that label for myself, there was a lot in the article that rang true, particularly these points:
- People develop extraordinary levels of empathy when they are repeatedly in situations in which they must be hyper-aware of their surroundings, and cautious as to whether or not someone is going to hurt if not abuse them in some way. Very empathetic people develop their abilities to understand and “just know” out of a need to down-board think and predict other people’s actions, for the sake of safety/survival (even if it’s just social).
- If they do not make a conscious effort to remain connected to their core, intuitive selves, they can easily adopt other people’s thoughts and beliefs as their own, without even realizing.
- You teach people how to treat you, and once people realize that empaths are prime candidates for giving them the love and attention and recognition they feel they may lack, people who are just looking for a pawn, or someone to “feed” off of emotionally, latch onto them like leeches. This is why they may, on the surface, seem a little slow to trust (if not have a full-blown Trust Issue, and rightfully so). ((HOLY SHIT IS THIS TRUE))
- They’d rather lightly lie to you than leave you feeling uncomfortable or unsupported. They tend to nod and agree with whatever someone is saying, even when they completely disagree, because it doesn’t do anything for them to argue. This is also why they tend to “ghost” on people quickly, or avoid certain individuals/situations for seemingly no reason. It’s not that they can’t communicate; it’s that conflict is stressful because they’re picking up on everyone’s heightened emotions, and their inherent awareness leaves them feeling responsible for resolving it altogether.
There’s a fantastic Instagram account called Notes from Your Therapist that I’ve been following and recommending to people for months, and they really help clarify how having your emotions and preferences disregarded as a child teach you not to have a sense of self outside of pleasing the adults around you. I think there’s entire generations that need to unlearn that.
limaindiasierra 