This is the video for today:
Youtube: Julia Kristina Counselling: Boundaries for Beginners: How To Set and Keep Boundaries. April 26th 2021.
https://youtu.be/F6CJtIk457g?si=wQFohA_ocJ3A2mBF
Boundaries are the principle of psychology and obviously, likely, was made by extremely intelligent people and is a useful tool in a lot of peoples lives.
In principle, say, with a person with narcissistic parents, or a young woman that everyone wants a piece of. I get boundaries.
But have you noticed that people that use the term in real life are just giant dickheads? I have never seen it used properly, in my understanding, and most of the time I have seen it used. I have seen it used extremely badly.
I think the first time I heard of the idea. It was from a woman that I was paying to do Reiki for. I brought up an issue I was having. One of bullying and harassment at work. And she told me the important thing here is to work on "boundaries". But then, when I was trying to look further into Reiki teachings. One of them, the first one perhaps. Was: Just for today, I will not anger.
My thinking was... That isn't this contradictory. Suppress your anger then set boundaries? Why not just get really angry at the person screwing you?
I don't need it in my own life. My father is dead. My mother is not an issue. A generally positive person. And I am a hermit. I just avoid people. The one or two friends I do meet every so often these are just not issues.
Also, another issue I remember thinking over in relation to boundaries. Is that left wing and female culture is all about boundaries. But the second you step in a workplace the idea is almost a joke. They are all about everyone being a "family" and trying to get everyone to do unpaid overtime and massively emotionally invest in the staff there. And if you don't play ball. You are just fired. It seems ridiculous to talk about boundaries when there is real power at the other end of the discussion.
I know for a fact some of these women talk about "boundaries" in their personal lives. While not applying it at work.
Abusing the principle.
I was going to go through personal examples. They feel oddly personal though. So I guess I will do what everyone else does. Draw off a very few amount of personal examples and pretend I have enough knowledge to make larger generalisations.
There are three ways I can think of this principle being abused.
One: Avoidance of conflict:
A connection, a friendship or something closer. Relationship or something half way. Rather than having any sort of conversation about wanting the relationship to change. The person simply ghosts, stops communicating clearly, and then dismisses any attempt by the person to get clarity as to what has suddenly changed as "boundaries". I said I don't want to see you anymore so...
Two: Hiding of dishonourable motives:
Imagine, you are a high status individual, or a perceived high status individual. That has some sort of personal relationship with a low status individual. You cannot very much say that the other person is low status. Especially if you are surrounded by a social group that wouldn't approve (in theory. Of course, in some female in groups this is the norm. No one would admit to wanting to rid themselves of low status individuals. And everyone would persecute anyone who outwardly would do it. But they would all do it on the quiet).
So what are your options at this point? Well, you scrutinise carefully any communication and you declare some behaviour or other a violation of your "boundaries". Because then you are the victim and hence. You are exempt from criticism. If someone says "Yeah, you are a bit of a crappy human being" you just say "But so on so crossed my boundaries and did this horrible thing".
Three: Free advertising.
Stefan Molyneux talked about this once:
I think this was in relation to leftist censorship.
As a principle for social ostracism in general. Say there are two friends. One of them is a leftist, and the other friend slaughters them in some sort of conversation or debate. Then, there is a need on behalf of the loser of that discussion to classify the other person as "trouble", without earning that. They were not able to earn it in debate as they backed away from the debate.
Let's say the left wing person has a passionate desire to see anyone to the right of them as literal Nazi's. As some of the left do. One workable tactic is to then set "boundaries" in this situation. Because if a boundary is being set against said friend. Then they must be a terrible person, and hence, in no way correct about their political views, right?
The original video actually had the example of someone that discusses politics too much. To be clear. Where this differs from the given example. Is that in the video it was done directly. In this example. The person that wins the argument against the left wing individual is perfectly willing to not discuss politics. But they have to be labelled so "boundaries" comes into the equation.
Societal change.
Notably here, and I think this is the point. The term 'boundaries' does not have any real moral meaning behind it. People take it to use it because it has a morality applied to it. If people do a certain behaviour in the real world. It really has to stand on its own.
Whatever relationship exists in the second example. If the low status person suddenly became very high status. Would the boundary still be relevant? Because if it would not. Then of course it was not a boundary. It was a manipulation.
A lot of left wing people have socially ostracised right wing people such as in COVID. Years later, when the lockdowns are forgotten and the COVID narrative has lost credibility. Does the fact that there was a lockdown absolve the person doing the ostracism?
In the world we live in it seems that consequence and accountability is somewhat rare. But if it were to happen. When it does happen perhaps, on a longer timeline. In my opinion. A majority of the people getting consequences for crappy manipulative behaviour will be those that talk about "boundaries" all the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment