Avoidance Now, Pain Later
Always slay the dragon under the rug or he'll grow bigger than the room.
It's a horrible thing to have to put up boundaries sometimes. There's nobility in empathy. I get to feel good about myself while helping someone else. The person I'm helping gets a lift and doesn't have to feel so alone. Both people win. But it's difficult to recognize when someone is beyond the point of help. And to be clear, this exists. Assistance is only sustainable when the assisted are either in need of institutional care or when they can take ownership of their station and work towards its improvement. In the case of the former, the assisted have a debilitation that doesn't allow them to care for themselves. The assistance is sustainable because everyone agrees on the reality of the situation, be it at-home care by a family member or residence in a specialized facility. In the case of the latter, the assisted can be categorized as falling on hard times, and with a temporary boost from friends or family can get themselves back up and running through self-reflection and change.
But there's a middle category. A no man's land, where the person is not so broken they need institutionalization, but is not responsible enough to avoid making the same life-crippling mistakes on a regular basis. To someone like this, assistance will rarely lead to any significant upward trajectory because of the repetitious and self-inflicted nature of their problems. It doesn't matter how much money you send, how many resources you offer, or how long you let them crash at your place. Their affliction has less to do with their unwillingness to improve, and more to do with their pathological inability to do so even when they see their mistakes. That's the generous interpretation, anyway. The lives of people in this behavioral limbo are not straightforward, and some never recognize they're held accountable regardless of their hardships.
But it's not as if they wear a sign around their neck, imploring you to steer clear. And since we tend to prioritize politeness in conversation, it feels unnatural and rude to stop someone every few sentences to press them for clarity when their claims of victimhood smell. In addition, personalities like this will often float in and back out of our lives like a tornado in the desert, full of destructive power but nothing to grasp and uproot. So when faced with the choice to confront someone about their self-awareness deficit (and risking the guaranteed backlash), most will opt to defer the act of doing so, sometimes indefinitely.
That was my plan. I planned to ride it out until the end, never openly challenging the litany of assumptions casually tossed around in conversation, or questioning the number of scorched bridges in their wake. And for the most part, the plan was working. Like many paths of least resistance, however, this plan was born from cowardice. By assuming the role of "supporter absolute", I avoided any culpability for remaining silent when exposed to flaws in their logic. In retrospect, this role I set for myself was likely the appropriate boundary for the time. Out of the fruitless attempts to dispute their choices during that phase of the relationship, my first line in the sand emerged: just keep the peace. Things had been worse before - abuse, addiction, attempted suicide - and though the path was jagged, things appeared to be headed in an upward direction. Who was I to judge, especially after all they'd been through?
And so it went for years. The names changed but the stories were always the same: One friend I'd never heard of was this amazing, incredible person. Next month they're garbage, a wolf in sheep's clothing, not to be trusted. Another friend, talked about for years, together through thick and thin, is now a disloyal traitor. Work is going great, everyone loves them, so many compliments get tossed their way. Next month, the manager's a prick, everyone's out to get them, and they got fired because someone "talked shit" to the manager or something equally impossible to prove.
"Typical".
The keep-the-peace boundary was doing its job, and I listened to the tales of unwitting self-sabotage with sympathy in my heart and frustration in my brain. But I didn't realize this approach had a fatal flaw and one that would only manifest itself when the status quo changed. By adopting my first boundary of passivity long ago, I was opting into a slow, methodical deterioration of the relationship between us. Every time I looked the other way when I needed to pay attention, every time I took their side over their friends' who were right, and every time I bit my tongue while the truth was sitting on it, I removed another brick from our foundation. I won't lay claim to the lifetime of poor decisions they made, but I set the wrong boundary all those years ago. My lack of candor meant over time, rather than continuing to build up the relationship and grow closer together, I was putting up semi-opaque screens in between us. The more screens I put up, the less I came to know who this person was, and arguably worse, they stopped getting to know me. So when the status quo changed, and the city of cards crashed to the Earth, two strangers remained standing, staring blankly at each other, wondering how it was possible they ended up so unable to see eye to eye.
The person they are now is the same person they were when I first set that misguided boundary. So no one can know if setting the proper one from the beginning would merely have fast-tracked our current estrangement. As I said earlier, even the ones who can at least see their mistakes still have trouble, and I don't know if they will ever see their mistakes. But I always say, in every situation, there's something I could have done differently that may have had a chance at altering the outcome. And I can see it now. I should have been more honest.
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