User blogs

Sincerely,

Frog in Boiling Water

Dear Frog,

I have been all the people in your letter, both a Jane sunk in my own tedious misery who needed someone to stop me and the Frog saying, “I know that [job][partner][family] is horrible and I will do whatever I can to support you, but since I’m not actually [getting paid to work there][dating #thatfuckingguy][descended from those people] there are limits about how much detail I can absorb and how much I am willing to let them occupy every conversation, social occasion, and waking moment.”

You keep using the word “nice” and I can’t really help you there. Nice isn’t kind, and nice isn’t working. To change this situation, you are going to have to be incredibly direct. “Jane, I cannot be your venting friend[right now][today][anymore].” From experience, I can tell you that whether the friendship ultimately survives is going to depend more on what Jane does after she hears it than the specific words you used to say it. And whether the boundary sticks is gonna depend more on your actions than either her reactions or your words.

Your question came in a shape that anyone who has spent more than an hour on this website will recognize. Let’s break it down to its most basic form:

“Dear Captain Awkward, a person is repeatedly crossing my boundaries in a way that makes me feel [angry][annoyed][overwhelmed][triggered by reminders of past events][bored][avoidant][checked out][exasperated][other feelings that add up to ‘bad’]. How do I convince them to stop doing the stuff that makes me feel bad without making them feel bad?”

This framing sets the problem up as a persuasion problem. Your boundaries only get to matter after you successfully convince the other people in the conflict that they do, and in the meantime they get to keep doing all the stuff that makes you feel bad until you a) persuade them to stop b) without making them feel even a little bit bad.

Two immediate, glaring problems with this approach:

1) You can’t control how other people will react or how they will feel.

2) It puts all the power and agency in the hands of the person you’re trying to persuade. What happens if they remain unpersuaded, as Jane clearly has?

You: Maybe this problem would be better for therapy.

Jane: That’s okay, I don’t need therapy, I just need venting.

You: I’m not sure all this venting is working to solve the problem.

Jane: Vents more and harder.

When you were small, you were coerced into being an emotional dumping ground for adults who did not care about your consent. It wasn’t happening because you weren’t saying “uh, that seems like a grown-up problem, I’m gonna go ride bikes now” loudly or clearly or politely enough, it was about knowing that even if you did, at best they wouldn’t notice and at worst they might physically prevent you from leaving, punish you for trying, keep right on doing the thing, and scapegoat you for making them feel bad about any of it. “Fawn” and “freeze” start as trauma responses. When you’re dependent on someone who demands to be tiptoed around and fawned over, they become survival skills. Scratch a recovering people-pleaser who has a hard time saying no as an adult and chances are you’ll uncover a history of exposure to people who were so terrible at taking no for an answer *that it rewired their entire brain.*

Once you’re away from a coercive environment, the habits and skills that helped you survive it stop working. People who have no interest in coercing you don’t want you to tiptoe around them, put your feelings last, preemptively manage their moods, or do anything you don’t freely and enthusiastically want to do. They don’t want you to try to read their minds or treat them like they are the worst person you’ve ever met. They don’t want to be the unwitting antagonists in dramas that take place only inside your head. The only people who would ever demand that from you or punish you for not prioritizing them above yourself are people you need to avoid like the plague.

Undoing the damage and unlearning habits that no longer serve you can be the project of a lifetime. Therapy can help, working on assertiveness skills and distress tolerance can help, making a habit of surrounding yourself with safe people and limiting your exposure to unsafe people can help. Where I can maybe help today is by replacing the project of persuading Jane with the project of reclaiming your own consent. Practically, that means we’re gonna stop trying to build your boundaries out of stuff you don’t control, like how Jane feels or what Jane finds persuasive. Instead, we’re gonna build them out of your feelings, your needs, the choices you make and actions you take to limit your exposure to stuff you don’t like and replace it with stuff you do. Some of those actions may involve conversations with Jane, but not all.

Consent is why every single post here about imbalanced relationships starts with the exact same question: What do you actually want? Forget what other people want, or what they assume, or what things used to be like, or what everybody promised each other it would be like. From this moment forward, in a perfect world where you get everything you want, what would a balanced, comfortable, enjoyable friendship free of avoidance, anxiety, and dread look like for you? What can you do to build toward that?

What makes Jane fun to hang out with? What would your ideal “Day with Jane” look like? What would you do? Where would you go? What would you talk about? How long would it last?

How often would you hang out or communicate, and what are your preferred environments or communication methods? If nightly texting is a problem, and it sounds like it is, could you replace texting with a weekly phone call or a monthly hangout to catch up in person? We’re looking for consistent and sustainable way more than we’re looking for perfect, so when in doubt, round down.

How much time would you spend listening to her vent? “Zero venting” is an acceptable answer, and it sounds like the honest answer, so let’s set the default at zero for now.

Instead of listening to her vent, what are five ways you’d rather spend your time together? In your shoes I’d be thinking about hobby or activity-based hangouts, like going for a bike ride, seeing a movie in the theater, or taking a class in something you’ve both always wanted to try. These all have a defined start and end time, something concrete or hands-on to focus on that isn’t “sharing deep confidences,” and take place at a location you can leave vs. potentially having to yeet a sobbing person off your sofa at 2 am.

What are five topics you’d rather talk about than grad school drama or disappointing dudes? Think: Hobby or media interests you have in common. Stuff that’s going on in your life. Stuff that makes Jane light up when she talks. The office politics and interpersonal dramas of grad school are boring to you, but what’s she studying in grad school? What is she nerdy about? What are you nerdy about?

While we’re at it, who are five people in your life who don’t treat you this way? Who are people who make it safe to set boundaries with them?

Once you’ve made your lists, take action to invite her into the kind of friendship you want and remove yourself from the parts you don’t want.

You can invite her to accompany you to do cool stuff you think she’d enjoy.

You can ask her about stuff you are genuinely interested in hearing about.

You can tell her outright when you do not have venting capacity. You can be explicit about how you are changing the subject now. “Okay, my turn to talk!”

If she starts venting anyway, you can quietly set a limit for how long you will engage and whether you remain in the conversation. If she runs over time, what will you do about it? (Get off the phone, change the subject, leave the room?)

You can say, “If I don’t text you back, it’s ’cause I’m not available. Please stop with the serial overnight texts.” You can say, “I don’t have a lot of capacity for back-and-forth texting right now. Want to set up a monthly in-person hang where we can catch up?” You can also mute notifications whenever you want to.

You can simply be less available overall, and only get in touch with her when you know you have capacity for dealing with a certain amount of venting.

None of these things require persuading Jane about anything before they happen. They do require setting limits with yourself about your own capacity and interest, and sticking to those limits, which is where you need practice. If at any point it becomes too much work, you get to stop.

Speaking of work, before you do a bunch of it about someone who does not seem to be doing even close to equivalent work about you, I think that by far the kindest and most effective starting point is also the simplest. “Jane, I’m not up for venting right now. Can we talk about something else or should we try again another time?”

Longer, more heart-to-heart version:

 “Jane, you know how sometimes when you vent, I suggest therapy? And you tell me you don’t want to go to therapy? Right, so, I need to be more clear. You don’t ever have to go to therapy if you don’t want to, but also, that doesn’t make me your therapist. I need a break from being your Venting Friend.

I know you’re really going through it right now, and I do sympathize, but lately, it has become an automatic habit that takes up most if not all of the time we spend together. And when you talk for half an hour straight without a line-break or a question, or send me walls, plural of texts all night when I’m asleep, that’s a monologue, not a conversation.

Howabout this for a reset: If I want to know about grad school stuff or dating stuff, I will ask. If I don’t ask, or if I change the subject after a few minutes, then we either need to talk about different stuff or we need to wind down the conversation and come back another day.”

As always, suggested “scripts” are sample talking points that are not meant to be delivered verbatim or all at once without pauses for the other person to talk like you’re Hamlet brandishing a verbal sledgehammer at the Fourth Wall. I definitely did not design these specific scripts in terms of what I think Jane will find persuasive or nice, but they are what I think she needs to know in order to stop being a shitty friend to you.

If you felt like you could say any of that, you would have done it by now. If she were capable of stopping on her own, she would have stopped by now. Hence a whole process for reshaping how you think about the friendship and the problem to help you psych yourself up for what needs to happen. 

The fact remains that how Jane reacts to having boundaries set with her will tell you everything you need to know, and you can’t really know until you stop hinting and start telling. She is either not understanding or deliberately ignoring your many hints, which means you are going to have to switch to a combination of more explict communication (“That’s all the grad school I can absorb today””Is it my turn to talk? Great!”) and making yourself less available when you know you don’t have it in you.

If she doubles down on manipulation because you set a boundary with her, it’s not a sign that you did boundaries wrong, but it is a sign that Jane might not a safe person for you. If Jane is a safe person, even if she is taken aback and has a not-great reaction at first, you gotta trust that she will come back, apologize, and –most importantly!– she will adapt her behavior to new information. Setting limits with her is not mean, uncaring, selfish, etc. or any of the things you fear. It is an act of kindness and an act of trust to give a friend the chance to course-correct and show up for you. If you didn’t want to be friends, you wouldn’t even try. If she does not want to be friends with you on those terms, that’s her choice.

You are currently on the verge of blowing up the friendship without ever giving either of you a real choice about whether it could be different, so I think it’s probably worth at least one attempt.