If you have a big, emotional, self hating meltdown every time someone tells you that you hurt them or crossed a boundary of theirs, then that means you're not a safe person to say no to - and that's something you need to work on. Even if you're genuinely just really upset that you hurt someone, if every attempt at communicating a boundary to you results in the person you hurt having to repeatedly reassure you that you're not actually a bad person, then you need to work on controlling yourself and taking constructive criticism.
I agree with this and I want to reblog it, but I feel awkward reblogging it without commentary because there was this period in my life where I was having very big emotional reactions to being told I was hurting others, and it led to me becoming defensive and it became harder and harder to reflect on my own behavior. Looking back, I realize that what happened was that a person I was close with was using the language of healthy relationships to perpetuate unhealthy and controlling behaviors, like telling me that my behaviors were hurting them when they were really just experiencing jealousy and I was doing nothing wrong. Their jealousy was not my responsibility or my fault. But constantly being told "You're hurting me" for things that didn't make sense and were unpredictable and inconsistent left me feeling guarded, defensive, and paranoid. I felt like I was always under attack. I felt like just existing as myself was hurting people. I felt toxic. And eventually I did become the person described in the post above.
Unsurpringly, getting away from that and surrounding myself with people who respect my boundaries and autonomy has resolved that problem. I have no problem accepting blame, being accountable, apologizing, and engaging in self-reflection now that I don't constantly feel like I'm under attack.
So takeaway, if you're falling into that kind of a problem behavior pattern there's for sure something that needs fixing but it may actually not be your underlying character. Run broad-spectrum glitch checks.
What should I do if it actually is my underlying behavior? Is there any way to fix this?
Practice checking yourself, mostly? Practice self-awareness about it? It's a learning process.
When this kind of thing isn't being deployed intentionally to avoid taking responsibility, it's usually a matter of not having good emotional management, and other people getting hit with the splashback of that, often leading into a vicious guilt, defensiveness, and lashing-out cycle, so it's a skillset that has to be built.
The underlying self-regulation issues will probably turn up in other contexts even if 'being told you wronged someone' is the most dramatic trigger.
Practice noticing when your reactions are out of your control. Practice wanting to control them. There are things like breathing exercises that can help, once they get to be habitual responses to feeling yourself get upset.
(Therapy is of course a good place to go for help building these kinds of skills but it's not the only resource.)
Counter-intuitively, it's important to give yourself permission to feel the distress. Not infrequently, being bad at respecting boundaries is tangled up with not feeling confident in the right to assert one's own. Freaking out in this kind of situation can be a learned behavior to gain the social space to even have a feeling, which makes self-control feel existentially dangerous.
It may be necessary to learn to say things like 'I'm very sorry, I need to go process that now' and withdraw from the conversation until you've finished having the too much emotion.
Because while it's super not fair or okay to punish someone for setting a boundary by freaking out about the implied accusation etc, it's also not necessarily realistic to expect everyone to consistently manage 'integrating negative feedback' 'controlling a trauma response' and 'having social skills' at the same time, and that's a personal boundary issue as well.
Also, break away from purity culture. Allow yourself to believe that you can do bad or wrong things without being a bad or wrong person.
Like, obviously there's a scale here. If you are a serial killer who murdered seven people, you are a bad person because you did bad things. But if someone expresses to you that you were thoughtless about a certain issue and it hurt their feelings, THAT does not make you a bad person. If you forgot a responsibility a couple times, and it inconvenienced someone, that does not make you a bad person. If you broke a couple of promises, that does not make you a bad person. It makes you a person who screwed up. And EVERYBODY screws up. Nobody in this entire world is perfect.
So you need to stop yourself from conflating "This person expressed dissatisfaction with my behavior" and "I am the worst person in the world, I am irredeemable, and all I ever do is fuck up and cause people pain." Those two statements are NOT equivalent.
It may be helpful to talk to yourself when someone challenges you on something, and literally say out loud to yourself, "It may be true that I did THIS THING wrong, but it doesn't make me a bad person, and it doesn't mean I do ALL THINGS wrong. It just means I need to re-assess how I've been doing this thing, and maybe change my behavior for the better. Then they will be happy, and so will I."
You don't need to throw the whole computer away just to patch some software. So don't turn a software patch into a brick issue. Just accept the feedback, patch your software if necessary, and go on with life. Good people try to do better today than they did yesterday. Self-improvement is the best indicator of your overall ethics, not the mistakes you've made in the past.
