i got many "oh thank you for explaining this" responses on my last thread about recognizing subtle manipulative behavior in the wild!! so i am back with another psa thread, but this time on: spoon theory and boundaries/consent when it comes to emotional labor! +

first, let's define spoon theory. christine miserandino is widely credited as the originator of spoon theory thanks to her attempts to explain living with lupus, often an invisible illness, to her able-bodied friend. you can ready the original here: https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/

wikipedia also does an excellent job summarizing how this works! +

it's important to note here that fully able people Do Not Have Spoons in the way those with some kind of "spoonie" illness or condition do...but recognize that due to the often invisible nature of spoonie conditions, a Lot of folks are honestly not fully able. +

so!! what we can recognize here is that many people have to ration their energy, or spoons, in order to be able to make it through the day or function through basic daily tasks because they are handicapped by their illnesses. +

this concept can be canvassed nicely onto emotional labor as well - because sometimes, you just simply don't have enough left in the tank to listen to your friend rant it out about /their/ latest difficulty, or comfort them when they're feeling down. +

or as i like to put it sometimes: two sinking ships can't rescue each other. please secure your own oxygen mask before helping others. +

and this is not because you don't love that person, no matter who it is - your parent, your sibling, your significant other, your best friend. you just don't have enough reserve, and if you're non-able, you don't have specifically enough /spoons/ to spare. +

and here's the critical piece of recognition: your need to conserve the reserve and/or spoons you have left is EVERY BIT AS VALID as their need for support in that moment. +

especially if we're talking spoons, because as miserandino explains, if you overdraw, you're actually drawing from the next day's spoons, and the next, and the next after that. because being not-able means there is a very defined limit on your capacity that you must respect. +

so where do boundaries and consent come in? allow me to tell a short story of me and my best friend. although it is a very long, very traumatic overall narrative, i will offer just the details salient for this explanation. +

essentially, there was a time when i, due to my caretaker complex, would constantly rush to lend whatever spoons i could because this friend was so tremendously critically low on spoons that they were barely making it day to day. +

but obviously, two whole people cannot live on one chronically-ill person's spoons alone. that's not only codependent (which is a whole different thread), it is also RADICALLY untenable. +

suffice to say, we hit a breaking point, and we hit it hard. she came very close to dying. and honestly? in some ways, i almost did too. it wasn't until she got a long-overdue diagnosis whose treatment then taught her about spoon theory that things began to turn around for us. +

we realized that we had been flagrantly drawing upon each other's spoons - although she more than i, simply by virtue of having less at the time - and that wasn't healthy or fair to either of us. +

we rebuilt our entire relationship from the ground up. and while discussing spoons wasn't the entirety of what we had to work out, it was a big part of that. +

we had to develop new language for what it looked like to say no to each other - even when we desperately /wanted/ to help the other party, because sometimes it just simply wasn't healthy for ourselves to be lending spoons in that situation. +

honestly? that friendship is still to this day one of the things in my entire life that i am proudest of. because we truly fought for it, tooth and nail, in the wake of what i can only tell you was an incredible amount of trauma. but i digress. +

here is where boundaries and consent come into play. because we learned it's /absolutely not fair/ to just come in and STEAL someone else's spoons, or guilt them into giving them up. +

i stop here briefly to make the point that when i label a behavior as manipulative, i do not mean to say that the person engaging in that behavior is at all somehow irredeemable or evil. +

sometimes, they are. but more often than not, we are /all/ fighting to try and recognize our own worst impulses/behaviors and grow and be better people than we are yesterday. +

and just like using pathos on your personal acquaintances to try and get them to do with you want might not strike everyone at first glance as inherently manipulative behavior, what i'm here calling "stealing" or "guilting" spoons from someone can be rather subtle. +

i have known and encountered plenty of otherwise wonderful people who just have no respect for my spoons and while i do think they could learn, i have to remind myself that it's not my obligation to teach them...especially considering how many spoons THAT task would take. +

so what can this look like? +

a person comes up to me and starts ranting on and on about their current struggle without any preface that they're about to tell me something that will potentially require my emotional involvement. +

example: oh my god mono help my significant other is being an absolute bitch and here are all of the details about this i'm so mad ughhhhhhhhhhh +

in this instance, there is an expectation that i will just allocate out my spoons to help this person deal with an emotionally-fraught situation based on their need. most of the time, i find that these are people who don't even recognize that they're asking for spoons. +

but the more considerate thing to do would be to ASK: hey, do you have the time or emotional energy to listen to me fro a second? because that recognizes that /my/ current wellbeing and spoon level is just as critical as their need in that moment. +

as someone who, and my therapist literally fucking said this to my face (god bless her), "takes on vicarious trauma like a a sponge takes water," learning to assert this particular emotional boundary was a TRIP, lemme tell you. +

what do you mean i can just. tell people i am not up for helping them with their woes? that it's actually healthy to NOT emotionally experience every issue that my friends go through as though i'm going through it myself? +

although these are two separate concepts, learning to protect my own spoons was a MAJOR part of my learning how to set my own emotional boundaries. +

so if this is new to you, consider being more cognizant of what you are truly asking for when you go to your loved ones with stuff. i'm not saying we shouldn't help each other out - obviously not!! but i'm saying that we should aim preemptively check in on boundaries. +

and this is where i talk about consent, because while this is not completely analogous to consent when it comes to physical contact or sexual interaction, i do think we can glean a LOT of insight from framing it in a similar way. +

there is nothing wrong with needing reassurance, or seeking help from friends and loved ones when you're struggling. but there is EVERYTHING wrong with repeatedly asking and/or emotionally "dumping" when the individual you're talking to asserts that they aren't able to give. +

as a survivor of sexual assault, it was much easier for me to process the idea of saying "no" to someone when i began thinking of it as my emotional consent. because to explain the analogy, it's not inherently bad to have sexual need. +

it is, however, bad to PUSH those urges onto others to solicit them to help you care for those urges when they are not willing. consent!! +

if you find yourself consistently going to people, time and time again, and talking over them for the sake of your own emotional needs, take a step back and consider whether or not you've checked to make sure that they're okay with it. +

obviously, some people (like i was...) will say they're okay with it when realistically it is not good for them. but! /you've/ done your due diligence at least by asking. +

and we all have our moments when we don't realize we're about to go full turbo-mode. but when i do this, i do try to stop when i recognize and be like "whoa okay this is more than i expected - is this okay? are you willing and able to be here for me?" +

i view this as being analogous to affirmative consent. check in to make sure things haven't changed over the course of the conversation! +

and most importantly, more than anything else - IF YOU FIND SOMEONE IN YOUR LIFE WHO REPEATEDLY IGNORES YOUR EMOTIONAL BOUNDARIES IN FAVOR OF TRYING TO SOLICIT CARE FOR THEIR OWN NEEDS, CONSIDER THAT A RED FLAG. +

if you have repeatedly said "i am sorry. i love/support you AND i am also not able to serve this role for you right now" and they CONTINUE to bulldoze right over you, they have disregarded your emotional consent and that speaks volumes. +

again. they may not recognize that they're doing this. they may be dealing with anxiety, or something else that is keeping them from recognizing how toxic and manipulative their own behavior is. +

so if you feel safe to do so, call them out on it (maybe not in the moment if they're super distressed). but you are absolutely justified in walking away to protect yourself in that moment. +

having a psychiatric condition does not excuse you from accountability for your actions, even though it may explain why your actions were not the finest in the moment. and it does not excuse you from trying to be better in the future. +

that could be a whole thread in and of itself, but here it applies because the point is that if someone repeatedly flouts your emotional consent and boundaries and attributes it to their psychiatric condition, that is extremely toxic and manipulative. +

and if you're a spoonie, what they're doing is stealing your spoons. +

i'll come back and add more thoughts to them as they happen - but for now this is all i got. mono needed to hear this at 16 and didn't until she was 21, so fingers crossed, someone else hears it before learning the hard way!

a tl;dr of the last part lmfao https://twitter.com/yeongwonhanrain/status/1309860360896286720?s=20

also if you were interested in the last psa, it’s here https://twitter.com/yeongwonhanrain/status/1309174261475684352