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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4482 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 30, 2022

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I hope this doesn't translate to anything dysfunctional. I try to hold onto relationships as long as possible too.

The way it seems to manifest is that I am aware of how I become strongly attached to my relationships, so I put up pretty significant barriers to letting other people get close to me, and thus only those very few who manage to penetrate said layers end up being part of my 'close' circle of friends.

Which, I have to say, has generally served me well in avoiding too much emotional distress. The last ex just managed to get through those barriers and did so in a way that led me to actually think I had finally found somebody worth trusting and keeping long term, then cut it off in a way that almost seemed designed to be maximally distressing to me. Just shattered my trust for no good reason.

So it reinforced my possible unhealthy tendency to distrust people's intentions. I've worked through a lot of it but I have a hard time visualizing a situation where I trust someone else that deeply ever again.

For exes, it's almost comically absurd how you can go from the most intense intimacy imaginable to being strangers.

I occasionally laugh at the ridiculousness of having some random person out there walking around knowing most of your deepest, darkest secrets, possibly enough to nuke your entire life if they chose, and you are explicitly NOT on speaking terms with this person, and yet there's the general expectation that they won't do it.

But I've also tried to get more comfortable about letting relationships go when the other person has radically changed. I used to take it as a personal affront when there was a slow growing apart.

Similar with me. I think I'm able to recognize when a relationship becomes actively toxic and cut it off (and as mentioned above, I rarely let someone in close enough for it to get to that point), but I much prefer to just kind of render an appropriate amount of distance as the situation requires, whilst not severing the link.

This tends to get MOST tricky with family members, where I still feel some obligation to render aid and comfort.

I HAVE managed to mostly purge my innate tendency to try to help people even when they reject good faith attempts at assistance.

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