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A hard thing that I& #39;ve been working through, slowly, these past few years, is my shifting capacity to be an emotional resource for my friends. For a variety of reasons, I have historically prided myself on being a primary emotional resource for the people in my life.
Part of the reason was that my MAIN response to my own trauma was disassociation, which gave me a false sense that I had an endless capacity to hear about and process other people& #39;s traumas because I felt nothing! Feelings were a purely theoretical exercise for me.
But I have also come to realize that, as a closeted asexual person with a huge amount of anxiety around being left behind by friends as they entered romantic relationships, I strove to keep myself relevant by providing as much emotional labour as I possibly could.
I needed to prove my value, always, so that people would keep me around -- and that value I felt I could contribute was intense emotional processing, since other people seemed to need it and (I thought) it cost me nothing.
As I& #39;ve worked further through my trauma and learned to stop disassociating, building the capacity to actually feel things in my body, my capacity for processing other people& #39;s feelings has gone way, way, way down. It exhausts me now in a way it never did before.
When I was processing this early on with a friend she told me that I would still have value as a person even if I never did anything for anyone else ever again, and WOW did I not believe her. But I& #39;m slowly warming up to the idea that I don& #39;t have to prove my worth.
Interestingly, this isn& #39;t a big problem with my more recent friendships. The folks I& #39;ve met and befriended since moving to Vancouver have made friends with the me who isn& #39;t all-trauma-bonding-all-the-time.
We have shared vocabularies for asking permission to talk about hard things. We have a sense of one another& #39;s boundaries and limitations. There& #39;s an ease in those friendships that I know has sometimes led me to neglect or ignore older friendships that lack that ease.
(A weird piece of this dynamic is absolutely that I make a very vulnerable podcast, which for some far-away friends has produced a vicarious sense of emotional intimacy that doesn& #39;t necessarily match the reality of our relationship.)
The challenge for me lately is to figure out how to reshape the boundaries in older friendships that I still value and desire but in which I can no longer play the same role. This is fucking hard to do, because my fear that people won& #39;t want me if I& #39;m not an emotional resource?
That fear is sometimes borne out. The reality of learning and communicating your own boundaries is that sometimes people won& #39;t want that version of you. I& #39;m learning to be okay with that.
This thinking was prompted by having to do some friendship renegotiation with a friend whose needs and my capacity aren& #39;t aligning any more. I feel like I& #39;ve pulled a bait-and-switch, forging a relationship based in trauma-bonding and then changing my mind.
My fear that boundaries will make me un-useful and thus unlovable are very real and very present in these conversations, but I& #39;m slowly learning to have them anyway. They& #39;re hard, but they& #39;re also deeply healing.
As other friends have pointed out, a big part of the challenge here is how little shared vocabulary and experience we have in negotiating the shifting forms of friendships. They& #39;re so often imagined as stable and enduring in comparison to romantic relationships.
