and on the other foot

Cycling back 'round to the first post of today, about setting boundaries and 'friends' hurting you: I'm realizing that the reason a person might do this unconscious sort of 'snarling' (like my friend did this morning with his unconscious comment) may be because I've said something that hurt him.

But since he doesn't say "ow!" when I hurt him, I can't really know.

And I have no intention of doing this work for him. He has to learn to set his own boundaries; if he discovers there's something about our friendship that he values, he'll have to learn to give me enough of what I need so that I stick around. And conversely, if he needs something from me that he's not getting, he needs to learn to speak up about it. I have no intention of becoming his mother, or anybody else's mother, for that matter. I reserve that behavior toward people who are actually children, or toward those who are consciously working through something in their lives and are consciously asking for help. Which means they not only take responsibility for knowing about and asking for whatever it is that meets their needs, but they also become aware that it's not something they can take for granted. The only time in our lives that we're allowed to take this one-way street of needs-meeting for granted is when we're a child. The rest of the time it must be carefully negotiated as a mutual needs-meeting process, whether for money (with a therapist) or for love (with a friend or other loved one). In this latter case there is always some kind of exchange process going on, whether the parties involved are consciously aware of it or not. I find it works best in the long run when I can be consciously aware of the exchange.

So: I'm not going to take care of anybody who doesn't put an equal amount of effort into taking care of me in return. That's basically the gist of this post. Altruistic social fantasies aside, we give because we get. That's human nature, as far as I'm concerned. The 'goes around comes around' philosophy works in sort of a broad, sweeping way in communities in general, but in individual relationships? There's gotta be an equal amount of give and take, else the wheel's're gonna come off that bus, and it ain't goin' nowhere.

And just for the record: I don't like all the 'codependent' bullshit that's been going around for years - to me it's a cop-out that denies that we're all dependent on each other. We are, at the root of it, social beings. We need each other. There's just simply no way around that, despite all the John Wayne lone cowboy fantasies to the contrary. The lonesome cowboy myth is just an explanation, after the fact, of a phenomenon that's happened way more than it was ever meant to. It's like religion: It evolved to fill a deep-seated human need. But rather than getting the need met, instead we deny that we even have the need (because, for one reason or another, we're unable to get it met. We pretend instead that we don't even have the need because it's less painful and frightening that way.)

So to fend off the terror of having no control whatsoever over our lives and what happens to us, we rationalize or otherwise make up explanations that allow us to gloss over, deny, or otherwise cope with reality. In other words, all this shrink talk (and damn near every philosophy you can think of, whether religious or otherwise) is basically yet another coping mechanism for dealing with the inexplicable.