A couple of years ago, I found a subreddit called AITA (Am I the Asshole?). It’s been around for a long time, I’m just late to the party in finding it. I asked the ole magic 8 ball, also known as the Google, if I was wrong for standing my ground when it came to setting boundaries with my family out of desperation. I was struggling with guilt, years of unhealthy programming and gaslighting that I was seriously confused about whether or not saying no to my family about unreasonable requests made me a horrible person. The idea of saying no back then caused me to feel a tremendous about of guilt and that I was being incredibly selfish.
One of the first results from the google was a similar question that was asked in that subreddit. I read through some of the posts and discovered that one of the most common themes that people replied to posters with was the idea that you are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm. As crazy as it sounds, this was a new concept for me. And the more I saw people responding this way to people in similar situations as me, I actually felt somewhat…validated.
When you find yourself debating in your own mind about whether or not you are required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm, give yourself this litmus test:
If a friend was in your situation and they were about to light themselves on fire to keep other people warm, what would you tell them?
I’m willing to bet you would warn against them doing so…and to set strong boundaries.
Last year, two of my relatives came to my husband and I asking if we could pay their power bill. Long story short, we were not in a financial position to do so, so we politely said we couldn’t help them out. One of the relative’s reasons for asking us was that he hadn’t worked as much lately, and he didn’t want to go into his savings account to pay the light bill. He had thousands of dollars in his savings account but told us that he needed that money for his future. Yep. He actually came out and said that.
Prior to that, I had told him that my husband was worried about losing his job because of the pandemic and that our financial situation wasn’t what it once was. “No” should have been a complete sentence for me, but at the time, I felt like I needed to explain myself – again, bad programming I was still overcoming.
In the world my husband and I operate in, if we have to go into our savings account to pay a bill, that’s what we have to do. It’s not someone else’s responsibility to pay our bills. But for whatever reason, this relative didn’t really seem to care about our financial situation. He just didn’t want to have to go into his savings account because according to him, it was for his future. Our future or present, really, didn’t seem to matter to him at all.
Had my husband and I given them the money, it would have been difficult for us to make our own ends meet. We would have lit ourselves on fire to keep someone else warm.
My relatives were not happy when we said no. And it is totally okay for someone else to not like you setting boundaries that you have to set for yourself. But, pay attention when people react with anger and hostility to your boundaries. You have found the edge where their respect for you ends. You can be empathetic to the person’s situation and try to help them come up with ways resolve the issue. We tried to help our relative come up with solutions to pay the bill. They didn’t really want to hear it, though. They just seemed to be interested in us paying it for them. Just remember that empathy without boundaries is self-destruction.
