Repeat offender…

My propensity to continually give people the benefit of the doubt is my worst trait.

Even when I know someone is being shady, I find a way to guilt myself into accepting the shade.

I am an enabler of disrespect. And the worst part is I am able to convince myself that I am a bad person for judging anothers shortfalls, and that I should show more empathy.

Ah no girl, you should stand the fuck up for yourself and enforce those perfectly reasonable boundaries.

But in doing that I have to remember to do it with integrity. If I lose my shit, then it is no longer about them, it becomes about my reaction.

A lot of my therapy time has been spent on my reaction to disrespect. I have made great progress, but given enough bullshit I will combust. I guess my theory behind that is, I've presented this to you kindly, nicely, reasonably ten times, the eleventh you are fucked, all bets are off, I'm going postal.

Mostly I'm able to avert that outcome .

Of course I know that type of reaction is wrong, but for me the hardest thing to reconcile is how I feel after I have behaved like that. I suppose the take out is that I actually addressed the issue so many times to begin with. My boundaries should have been respected, or I should have removed myself. Unfortunately that is not as easy as it sounds.

It really is the worst thing when you point out something shady and it's denied. You know, because you can just feel it, your concern is valid. Yet you allow yourself to be gaslit by someone who is minimising, excuse making and projecting in order to avoid accountability.

At some point they will usually admit that is in fact exactly what they are doing.

That's not a victory, that's validation that you didn't honour yourself.

Instead you extended grace to someone who was essentially attacking your character in order to avoid the reality of their own dysfunction.

And that was able to happen because you didn't believe in yourself, again.

Doing this enough times normalises dysfunction.