SoberRecovery : Alcoholism Drug Addiction Help and Information - View Single Post

11-11-2009, 09:03 AM

# 9 (permalink)

dothi

Member

Join Date: Sep 2008

Location: Anywhere but the mainstream.

Posts: 402

What about a healthy boundary for these situations?

I remember when I was learning to make friends back in my post-secondary education, my roommate told me not to feel awkward going next door to ask a girl to use her printer. Apparently she was just "that nice". So I sucked it up, went over there, and used her printer a couple times. A couple weeks later that girl came over, knocked on my bedroom door, and wanted to borrow my cell phone RIGHT NOW, even though I was in the middle of a conversation. I asked her (reasonably) to wait to let me wrap up. She got pissed and stormed off. I went to my roommate about why the girl got so upset, and my roommate said to me, "well you borrow her printer don't you." WTF?!?!?! This was exactly what I was trying to avoid!!!!

Next time I saw that girl and she commented that I hadn't come by lately, I explained that I had been using the printer at the school. She offered her printer again and I said no thanks, that I needed to get out of the apartment anyway. I didn't have to say anymore. She got the message that she was not entitled to abuse me in return for a little favour. My boundary was not having someone come into my home and punish me like that for not dropping everything. It was an unbalanced favour. And yes, she let me down. But I'll be damned if I'm going to let one nutty character with entitlement-by-favour issues have that kind of power over me (the power to leave me devastated and disappointed with myself for "being duped again"). So I cut my losses, chalked it up to a learning experience, and moved on.

People are going to disappoint you from time to time. But some people are also going to impress you from time to time. Just because I made a mistake didn't mean I had failed at human relationships - it meant I had encountered one of those disappointing people.

It took me a long time to get this, because for a long time I didn't know how to recognize anything BUT dysfunctional, disappointing people. It took practice finally meeting other people, letting them impress me (not trying to control the situation), to finally learn a healthy response to healthy help. Something I've taken away from those disappointing experiences is that I don't have to spend the time calculating how I will return the favour - I just need to know what I will do if my boundary is crossed.

Just because this girl thought she was being fair that didn't actually mean she was being fair. I knew this because I felt that childhood-triggered abuse in how she demanded I return the favour. Just because someone says it should be this way, doesn't mean I have to accept it. I KNOW what's fair (PhD in dysfunctional families, thank you very much). And if someone crosses my boundary for fairness, I have the right to cut my losses and move on. My boundaries protect me not just from my family, but from other idiots running loose in the world too