#but this isn't her first time deactivating on her own terms so idk hope she comes back when she wants to if she ever wants to

[fierceawakening]

ceanothusspinosus Oh! I did not at all mean to imply that competing access needs are necessarily solvable. They really truly may not be, and when that clash prevents a good relationship, it sucks. It also takes skill and practice to sort out what your own needs _are_ and it sounds like she is… not good at that. Possibly not interested in becoming good at that. Possibly ashamed to look at it too closely and see where she can and can’t compromise. Who knows. At some point it doesn’t matter for your purposes. :/

ceanothusspinosus I think that the existence of ableism provides a lot of context and imposes a lot of constraints on the whole situation. I imagine that in a less ableist world she’d maybe have different expectations of you and tbh of herself. But it’s not ableist to notice that different people have different abilities, and in your situation it makes sense that you’re really sensitive to concepts like expectations around “ability” used without failsafes.

ceanothusspinosus And in ~abusive/very unbalanced situations “ability” and motivation is commonly, idk. Complicated. Unclear. It comes down to “even if the most generous reading is true, I don’t think it’s going to change and I don’t want to live like this.” I’m thinking of you wondering if she’s copying some of your own ND traits/habits - I certainly can’t know from here, that’s definitely not the sort of thing you’re likely to get a straight answer on if so, it _could_ just be her own stuff...

ceanothusspinosus …so where does that leave you? Looking at the situation more carefully while you do your best to be what you consider an ethical person with no obvious answers, unfortunately. :/ And it’s clear you are trying to be careful.

ceanothusspinosus Also btw, thanks for being clear about the kind of answer you wanted.

No problem! I think part of the issue is, like... social justice types of framework, where you taboo certain phrases, really don't port over well when someone is dealing with an abusive situation or a situation that's leaning that way. Like, it's useful when my therapist says something sounds narcissistic not because she can or should diagnose anyone who isn't me (and I don't take her to be doing that), but because we have a somewhat shared understanding of the word. She's telling me she thinks that behavior is unfair, and the sort of unfair that stays that way and you don't fix with a clarifying conversation, because the kind of person who is often unfair in that way is the kind of person who isn't psychologically ready to have that clarifying conversation and is going to lash out.

It's the same way (and the same situation, I think, painted different colors) I eventually decided I felt about gendered slurs. No, I don't technically HAVE to call my abusive ex a bitch, and I actually wouldn't see much use in calling her that now. But at the time, when I was angry and hurt? Trying to police my own ways of thinking about what was happening were what got me stuck in the being abused in the first place. It was only once I could trust that I wasn't revealing some deep evil going "fuck that bitch" that I could get the distance I needed to rethink whether that was a phrase I wanted to use once the experiences were sufficiently behind me.

Which is I think the problem with a lot of those posts, especially online, that exhort people not to use certain terms to analyze the behavior of someone mistreating them. What that comes across like to the person trying to understand what the fuck happened is "you're mean for processing this in your mind, and if you want to do that you need to choose from the approved tools."

Which I think is why those posts got my goat so much. (I hope they wouldn't as much now that I've thought through this, but they might still bug me, I can't promise the berserk button is totally deactivated.) Survivors need space to be mean and aggro and messy, and just because we feel it this second doesn't mean we endorse it forever. People who are injured scream. This does not mean screaming is appropriate behavior most of the time. It means that it's normal when someone is injured.

Like with my ex. Reading books on BPD actually helped a lot! Not because I came out of it thinking "all people who have that are abusive;" I can think of several friends current and former who I don't think are abusive and who I certainly don't think would ever do the things she did that traumatized me. But because a long careful description of behaviors and psychic distortions helped impose some order on what I experienced as a maelstrom of desire and need and rage and hate.

I'm not even sure I'm going to come out of this thinking narcissism is the problem. I might even decide I think she's neurotypical when all is said and done, I don't know. But I need to be able to shut the social justice framing down at least long enough to sort out what I need, why what I have is not that, and whether (as my therapist has also said) the right thing for me is no contact or less contact.

And in order to sort that out, I need to be able to try on ideas like "No one cares that you're disabled. I care that you don't stop, whether that's won't or can't."

I can sort out whether that's too harsh *later*, when I know my own decisions and their results better than now.

Does that make sense?