Maybe it was binge-watching Netflix’s “3%” yesterday, maybe it is watching the ongoing and ceaseless fallout related to Trump, maybe it is my experience with the abuse community, but it is clear that we let the loudest asshole in the room power over others over and over again.
“Good” is not the same as “nice”.
And we teach our children to be ‘nice’, which has nothing really to do with “goodness”. Niceness is often a performance of civility. Defined: pleasing or agreeable in nature, exhibiting courtesy and politeness.
“It’s not nice to say that.”
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
So instead of shutting boundary violators down from the first, we try to ‘nice’ them into being nice to us.
Explaining our perspective and asking them to respect our boundaries and trying to engender understanding.
NO.
Is that maybe a step in the process? Sure. AFTER you set a boundary.
It is literally the same as dealing with kids. If you see your 3 year-old hitting someone, you don’t explain to them that this is not nice to do to our friends, et cetera, without physically stopping them from hitting the other kid first.
We need to stop tolerating boundary violations.
Both in our personal life and the political stage. We need to stop treating all viewpoints as ‘valid’, especially when the person with the other viewpoint isn’t treating ours as valid.
Do not give away your power under the misapprehension that using that power is inherently wrong.
…that it is ‘not nice’. You know what is not nice? Allowing bullies to continue bullying. Allowing people to get torn to shreds. Wringing our hands as the (predictable) next victim is victimized.
Preventing people from experiencing the consequences of their behavior is what enables abuse and abuse of power.
“When they go low, we go high” doesn’t mean disempowering ourselves. It means we act with integrity and moral strength and conviction. Not only can you set boundaries with integrity, having integrity means you should.
Truth is not power.
Truth is not justice.
Truth is simply the framework for understanding, and then making choices and acting on that understanding. Knowledge has never been enough to effect change.
Knowing someone is abusing you isn’t enough.
Knowing your behaviors are abusive isn’t enough.
Knowing something is wrong isn’t enough to stop it.
SOMEONE has to stop it.
And expecting entitled boundary violators to stop themselves is foolishness. And that’s what we do every time we try to communicate to the boundary violator, to the bully, to the abuser that what they are doing is wrong.
We are doing SO MUCH EMOTIONAL LABOR for these assholes.
…and yet never let them experience the consequences of their actions. But we persist in treating them like reasonable people when every action of theirs is unreasonable. Instead of looking at their actions, we attribute to them our own beliefs and motivations, and give them the unearned benefit of the doubt.
We need to learn to hold people accountable for their actions without vilifying them.
Because that is stopping us from holding them accountable in the first place: we don’t believe they are villains, or that you shouldn’t determine someone is a villain until ‘all the facts are in’.
And if you stop someone at the early boundary violations, they never get a chance to escalate to villainy.
WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS. But we are responsible for ours, and for our unreasonable expectations around unreasonable people.
One common thread I’ve seen is how ‘nice’ people are so hamstrung by their fears that other people won’t think they are ‘nice’.
And so they stay and ‘nice’ at the aggressor, over and over, trying to change them. You know what’s good? Not trying to change people. Respecting that they are the way they are, and making empowered decisions from that knowledge. Letting an aggressor experience the consequences of their actions.
Total submission to overwhelming brutality in the (likely futile) hopes that they will finally recognize your humanity and stop is the absolute last resort for a victim who is trapped.
But the fact that we have defined ‘niceness’ as submission is horribly problematic. It also puts the responsibility on the victim to ‘keep the peace’, even though the peace was already broken by the aggressor.
We’re paranoid about being like ‘them’.
So we act like a mirror, which only complements the abuse and bullying dynamic. But the opposite of mis-using your power over someone isn’t to abandon power, it is to use your power wisely. The opposite of being assaulted isn’t to take it, it is to prevent the assault, to protect yourself.
Reflecting the inverse of abuse isn’t the opposite of abuse, it completes abuse.