Thread by @Remember_Sarah

I was talking to a fellow chronic people pleaser who said she couldn't fault people who treated her like a gf/therapist/emotional laborer bc she didn't draw hard boundaries against it--she didn't tell them NO, but went along w/ it. She called this "consent." I disagree.

There's the kind of consent people can assume you're giving by NOT proactively, assertively telling them NO, and then there's enthusiastic, affirmative consent: saying YES.

One of the things I find hard in assumed emotional consent relationships is that I have a very hard time NOT bending myself to the needs of others, and I often don't realize I'm engaging in behavior that makes me uncomfortable or violates my boundaries until I'm alone.

Women in particular are raised to tune out their inner voice--the voice that says YES or NO--in favor of the needs and expectations of others around them. Assuming the absence of a hard NO must mean YES is just that: an assumption, and a potentially harmful one.

While talking to this people pleasing friend, I told her about something that felt almost too weird to put into words: my fear that by voicing my needs and refusing to bend to someone else's, I would somehow accidentally kill everyone.

To my shock & relief, she understood this.

What is this fear about? If I can trace it to anything, it's my mom's decades of treating me as a filter for all of the emotions she couldn't cope with on her own--which is to say basically all of them--and how, when I refused to do this for her, she responded w fury & panic...

...as if I had ripped out one of her internal organs & run away with it. Which, in a way, I had. She could t process her own emotions & didn't believe it was her job to. I had destroyed the system she'd made, & stopped doing the work she saw as love. I felt like I was killing her

& my emotional labor strike continued. It was an incredibly painful experience for me. It made me feel evil. & I kept striking, because I knew that if I kept obeying her under duress, what love I felt for her would be completely swallowed by resentment & quiet rage.

This strike began when I was 26, by the way. It can happen at any time. There's no correct age to begin disengaging yourself from the relationships & behaviors that swallow your sense of self. We get there when we get there, & the journey will take the rest of our lives.

All this is to say that assuming someone can healthily take on your emotional needs/escalation of the relationship if they don't specifically, vocally oppose it is something that will not work for people with a history of emotional coercion. & we are legion.