,
7 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
(Cw: suicide) Oh, man, yes, self-harm threats when you confront someone about their bad behavior is the extreme version of "I'm just a shitty person," and because it's so extreme, it calls into focus how much it's about avoiding doing the work.
More to the point, since I don't think everyone who responds that way is a manipulative mastermind calculating how to avoid dealing--in many cases the low self-esteem is probably genuine--it confuses self-punishment and feeling bad and actually making amends.
Let's start with punishing yourself. It's pointless, and no one really wants you to do it. *Punishment* is pointless. Sometimes there are negative consequences for your actions. Sometimes making things right costs you. But the cost isn't the *point.* The making amends is.
So your self-punishment isn't for the sake of the person you hurt. It's for you. And it's time and energy and brainspace you could be putting into actually making things better, directed toward the other person instead of yourself. It's self-centered.
Same with making a big deal of how bad you feel. I get it--when I screw up, I want people to understand that I feel bad about it (probably because that's a signifier of being a Good Person). But there's a fine line between acknowledging you feel bad and making it all about you.
It's similar to the punishment thing. If you've hurt me, I don't want you to feel bad because I want you to suffer. What I want is for you to *understand the effects of what you did and want to fix it*. Feeling bad because of that is a side effect, not the point.
And basically, all of this stuff shuts down the ability to actually talk about what happened and find a way to move forward. Self-harm threats are the extreme version of that, because they essentially hold people hostage if they don't forgive.
