Three primary indicators to determine if you are dealing with a safe person:
- Respects boundaries, as well as social norms.
- The ability to perspective-take for you and others.
- Their accurate understanding of reality.
…and how you can tell:
Their ability to communicate.
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Before I discovered the definition of love – something I could reference and use to check against what I was dealing with – it was extremely frustrating that there were only ‘proofs’ of love.
Basically, the list in First Corinthians that shows you what love looks like (love is patient, love is kind, et cetera – meaning that someone who actually loves you is patient and kind).
I am reversing that process to illuminate what it looks like when someone is a safe person.
Because we have the primary elements of safety, but only one of those is completely self-evident: whether someone respects your boundaries and social norms.
[Side discussion: the reason I am including “social norms” is because there are legalistic abusers who act as if you not listing every single thing and if you don’t, they didn’t violate your boundaries. Social norms are understood as part of our social contract. You do not have to explicitly tell someone that not calling you names is a boundary that you have because that is understood to be abuse in our society. Or someone calling you 20 times in a row at 2:00 a.m. It is socially understood that this is not polite or okay behavior. So when a legalistic abuser tries to rules-lawyer you into accepting their violation of social norms as NOT being a violating of your reasonably understood boundaries, that is part of their abuse of you.]
Someone who is a safe person is someone you can communicate with.
It is literally that simple. That is what it looks like. If you are engaged in circular arguments, if you are having to quote someone back to themselves or are starting to over-explain yourself because they are willfully (or not) misunderstanding you, they are not a safe person.
I have had enough experience to recognize that you CANNOT create safety with someone who is unsafe.
I am a teacher and I long labored under the misapprehension that if only I could explain something well enough to another person, that they would see and understand. “Ah!” they might think to themselves, “I completely get what you are saying! Wow!” I assumed that because I have had those moments and I know plenty of people who have those moments.
But when you are ‘teaching’ someone who is unsafe, you are teaching them how to be a better abuser.
That’s it. It is literally that simple. And also the explanation for why so many victims of abuse end up spiraling further into the abuse dynamic after they have started therapy. They think “if I could only explain this to the person I love, they will understand and stop!”
[Narrator voice] They do not stop.
Is communication possible with this person?
Are they misunderstanding you?
Do they mis-state your points?
Do they recognize nuance?
Do they have the mental or emotional capacity to have the discussion in the first place?
Do they have the ability to consider someone else’s point of view?
Do they have the ability to consider evidence?
Do they understand the system?
Do they just restate their premise?
Are they more focused on how you are ‘wrong’ or have made a mis-step in logic?
I first began to notice the communication red flag when I was a suicide crisis line listener.
Particularly during phone calls with people with schizophrenia or who are schizo-affective. I am so used to being able to meet people where they are at and communicate with them, that it was jarring to talk to someone who was simply incapable of considering information outside their schema of reality.
At first I didn’t realize what was happening, but their explanation of what was happening didn’t make any sense. Or you would have your classic ‘missing missing reasons’ (credit u/Issendai). Normally you ask questions to clarify, but when you do that with someone having these particular mental health challenges, they will get agitated and then angry. Because for them you aren’t ‘clarifying’, you are questioning their reality.
I then realized this was true for abusers as well.
The reason abuse exists in the first place is that an abuser wants or feels entitled to something they don’t have. By virtue of the way reality is set up, they don’t have love or respect or money/resources or whatever the thing is. And so they have to ‘undermine’ reality to get it. The most effective way to do this is to convince others of your reality, to uphold it in the same way as “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, so they can still get what they want and pretend that they are not abusive.
So when you engage with an abuser in conversation, they are defending their false reality.
There can be no communication, no perspective-taking for others, no respecting boundaries/social norms, because they fundamentally cannot or do not want to accept reality as it is.
The purpose of the conversation is not understanding but of convincing you that you are wrong.
It is not to respect you as your own autonomous person, and to see as important your intrinsic areas of decision-making and power.
That is why a safe person can actually AGREE with an unsafe person.
And I do this often with people who are not safe for whatever reason, especially because they are generally attacking and trying to assert that I am unsafe. You can agree that things are unsafe and that the best course of action is one that supports safety, e.g. setting/respecting boundaries.
So when you are dealing with an unsafe person, you assert your boundaries, you are not asking someone to ‘respect’ them.
I generally give people the opportunity to show me that they will respect my boundaries before enforcing my boundaries, but that is at my discretion.