Tell Me About Your Boundaries

The “downside” with boundaries is that if you enforce them IN a relationship with abusers, you’re still not getting anything you want.

You have a boundary? Oh, they leave or they escalate or they go behind your back. That’s a main factor in why so many people in abusive relationship learn to deactivate theirs. They’re trying to preserve the relationship.

Too bad the game is rigged and the relationship will still blow up eventually, boundaries or not.
Boundaries work fantastic for when you’ve decided to step out of the hostage situation and live your life!

I stopped answering emails that were not directly related to parenting or finance. FW would try and goad me into a fight by bringing OW, or criticizing my parenting, or insulting me. I stuck to whatever parenting thing was being discussed – schedules, school, etc. He would ask me questions about my personal life or daily activities, or what I was feeding my kid. I wouldn’t answer, because it was none of his business. I knew that whatever information I provided, however benign, would somehow be turned into fodder for his legal harassment of me. It had happened often enough.

If we had a scheduling change and I wrote “What time should I pick up the kid?” He’d reply with something like, “You’re so antagonistic? You’re a shitty mom. Why should I have to always be the one to accommodate you? You don’t care about me or your kid. You’re just using him as a pawn in your own selfish game. Just like you used me.
No wonder you don’t have any friends.” And I learned to just reply something like “So is 3pm good?” Or he’d interrogate me about where I had gone and with whom and I just…didn’t answer.

It was really hard at first. To let go of feeling like I needed to defend myself to him about whatever accusation he was making. To not answer irrelevant questions. I used to get panic attacks (racing heart, sweaty palms, etc.) when I would send short replies, or not reply immediately (or at all). But gradually it got easier. I came to expect the temper tantrums and verbal assaults and thus did not take them so personally. My attorney likened my stbx to a toddler throwing a tantrum. “Just step over him and move on with your day” was her advice to me.

FW painted this as me being difficult, uncooperative, antagonistic, secretive, and unstable. He tried to use my “lack of willingness to communicate” against me in our custody hearings. Only the custody evaluator told him that my personal life was none of his business and I didn’t have to answer those questions. He was…not happy about that. The custody evaluator also said point blank “You’re not used to her having boundaries, so it’s going to upset you now that she does.”

FW also wanted to meet up and “talk” at several points, and I refused to have in-person meetings with him. I told him I would discuss things via email, or over the phone if email wouldn’t be sufficient. He would reply “well, if YOU don’t trust yourself to behave like an adult, then…”. And I refrained from pointing out that I wasn’t worried about my own behavior, but his. He could be scary. He was intimidating, and I had a lot of PTSD from his abuse, which meant I tended to cave when I had to face him directly, or would get flustered and not be able to speak well. I was very happy that during the stage of the custody evaluation when the evaluator took our histories, that she granted my request that we meet separately from one another. In the meetings when we were both there (even though they were on Zoom and not in person) I would be shaking having to see him on the screen, often sneering or shaking his head like I was lying about the things I said.

Another boundary I put in place was when FW started copying OW into emails with our custody evaluator, or our realtor, etc. I pointedly removed her email address from my replies and never mentioned her in any of it. OW had no right to be involved in my divorce, home sale, custody dispute, or any of it and I wasn’t going to acknowledge her.

Oh, gosh. I’ve always been good with boundaries for those who are not part of my inner circle, and terrible with boundaries for those who are. I keep my inner circle very, very small. For me, it all started when I read “Boundaries in Marriage”. I realized that I did not have to put up with all the crap that my then-husband was dishing out. So, I started in a very teeny tiny way to draw some lines in the marriage. I didn’t know that letting him walk all over me was part of the marriage contract in his mind.

He worked out of town a lot and I realized that all of the kids and I were much happier when he wasn’t there. So, my first big boundary was that I told him to move out to give us all some breathing space. He had moved out for a couple of months once before when it was his decision, so it seemed very reasonable. He went ballistic, but I held firm. I kept the two biggest (not the oldest, but the biggest) kids by my side and I had my phone in my pocket in case I needed to call the cops. I handed him his suitcase (that he had not unpacked from vacation–full of dirty clothes, I’m sure he was furious) along with another one of his work clothes that I had packed. He was just coming home from a work trip so he had all of his essentials with him anyway. You’ll notice that I’m such a chump that even now all these years later I’m recalling that I was concerned that he have what he needed to survive. Sigh.

That was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done.

After that I slowly but surely started mentally moving him out of my inner circle. He made no effort to heal the marriage or see the kids. He would come around to the house occasionally to use his tools out in his workshop. I filed for divorce. I opened my own cell phone account and didn’t give him my number. He eventually got the number, but I never responded to texts from him and at some point stopped answering if he called. During the divorce I learned that I did not have to answer his emails immediately. In fact, the angrier his message made me, the longer I would take to respond. The very best boundary was after my youngest child turned 18. I blocked him on all routes of communication. He cannot email or call me. If the asshole wants to get in touch, he can send a snail mail. He’s probably lost the address though. LOL.

I got “can you send me Dr H phone number, I cannot find it?” “Can you send me the name of the doctor who did my vasectomy?” “Can you…”. My response, was to ignore and not respond. I finally responded with, “I am not your secretary, I gave up that job the day I walked out on you.”
Side bar-I walked out on Christmas Day with the kids and the dog and never went back. He still uses the abandoned o. Christmas narrative and that I took every living thing with me. I did once tell him I left the plants and they were living until you couldn’t even keep them alive so why should you be trusted with kids and the dog.
Crickets

My number 1 boundary is never to see, speak to, or be in the same room as cheating bastard ex. He is blocked via phone and text and I will only accept or send business-related emails regarding the last two ventures that aren’t yet fully separate but will be by year’s end.
My youngest is relocating to the west coast at the end of the month. Her friends are throwing she and her partner a huge going away event a few days before they leave. When I was asked to join them, I responded I would be honored to do so and said I would gladly show up earlier or later as to not conflict with the time cbx would be attending.
Turns out, he isn’t invited.
Yeah, even their friends know I am unsafe in his presence.

I was working in a large international organization in Switzerland when I met FW. We got married and he wanted to move to D.C. so he could “set the world on fire”. Didn’t happen – well the move happened even though I very much wanted to stay in Europe – but his setting the world on fire ended up a damp fizz with him struggling to get work. I managed to get a job at the World Bank (hated D.C. but the Bank was good to me), when two years later he wanted to move home to Pittsburgh. Nothing against Pittsburgh but sorry, that wasn’t why I left England all those years ago. Anyway repeat performance in Pittsburgh, with him struggling to get a job. I managed to work from home while looking after our baby son, when I got a call from Switzerland asking if I wanted to return – and we both jumped at it because he wasn’t setting the world on fire in Pittsburgh either. After a couple of years we moved just across the border to buy a house in France, and do the daily commute into Geneva. Life was good. Then about 10 years later he wanted to “move to Montana and build a log cabin”!!! We’re living in French alps with good jobs – why not build the frickin’ log cabin here????? Neither of us had ever been to Montana and I knew that if I gave in it would be all on me to make it happen – he just had to throw the idea out there and muggins would do the work. I had expat benefits, our kids were in a bilingual school, I had home leave and we were making good money. So FINALLY I found the balls to call his bluff. Told him that HE should head out to Montana, get the great job making good money because I wasn’t giving up another great job just so he could gypsy around the world. Needless to say it never happened! And thank God, because not long after that he ran off with the bar room skank and I would have been up shit creek without a paddle somewhere in the middle of Montana if I had pandered to him yet again!

I stopped allowing her to drive onto my property when we do exchanges of our daughter. The problem was, she would just babble on about how she missed her plants and had suggestions for how I should prune plants, etc. She would pretend that everything was normal and act like we were still such good buddies. Uh….no.

My ex, with his mistress-turned-wife, makes $1M+/yr AFTER paying my spousal support and her spousal support, came at me claiming he gets the tax write-off for our daughter and that he wouldn’t “force me” to refile.

Nope. Residency trumps $$$. Her time in college is considered a temporary absence from my place. I managed to calmly smack him down without emotion.

Here’s the kicker — it would be a whopping $500 write off for him. For me it would mean losing HH status.

How spiteful can you be? It’s been a definite trigger, bringing back all the pain of my divorce, where he showed absolutely no remorse for lying/cheating/stealing gaslighting & deception for his serial cheating over 20 years! This is a man who refused to split the airlines miles, even though he travels all the time because “his butt was in the seat” while I was tethered to the house raising our daughter.

It seems as though history repeats itself. I was the big earner when we married, albeit at a much different income level, and the new wife outearns him 2x now.

Although he never expressed it to me, he felt emasculated and acted out by having affairs. Will he repeat himself again? Or will the money and power couple image be enough for him?

Oh yeah, we’re talking about boundaries. He only cares about money. He is responsible for our daughter’s living expenses and made her approach me recently so I would look like the bad guy if I said no. I told her that he was trying to manipulate me and he shouldn’t put her in the middle.

My boundary is not taking the bait and not showing any emotion. It’s difficult for an emotional person like me to do.

My life might be proof that being known or identified as a person who sets boundaries carries a double edge because some perpetrators view this as a challenge. “Oooh, boundary! Must cross!” Or “Oooh, boundaries! Must take you down!”

My late uncle who was a green industrialist sort of mentored me from the time I was 10 years old thinking I might go into the family biz. He cryptically gave me bits of business wisdom from time to time, such as his observation that people who lack integrity will invariably try to target those who have integrity because anyone succeeding without being corrupt destroys the cynical rationale of the integrity-free that corruption is necessary to succeed. His company had all sorts of stopgaps against hiring divisive, untrustworthy people in the first place (deep, elaborate background checks) and managing corporate sabotage in order to keep the working environment as positive and unmicromanaged as possible. It worked and my uncle’s company was the subject of graduate business school seminars every year for decades because of it’s flat hierarchy, lack of titles and employee freedoms (what companies like Google pretend but never achieved). Basically the lesson there– which is something I eventually figured out after paying the price of missing the clue– is that you can’t let the creeps near you to begin with because they invariably cause severe damage on their way out. Just as important as having boundaries is having a deft picker.

I suspect part of the reason FW’s DARVO was so hateful and angry from the start of the affair was because he knew I was a formidable opponent when crossed and it scared the bejesus out of him. Of course before FW shifted to the cheater track, the fact that I fought back against various offenders and had boundaries probably flattered his narcissism as one therapist put it, as if I was some hard-to-get commodity that rejected other contenders yet accepted him. But that feather in his cap sort of turned into a grenade with the pin pulled out once he turned against me. Then it’s like he started to identify with the scoundrels I’d fought back against.

For some context, I interned and worked in a notoriously competitive industry in which harassment and assault were commonplace, a fact that my parents and uncle tried to warn me about but was only recently blown wide open during the #MeToo movement. I was also raised not to take any crap. It was kind of a family motto. The weird thing is that, rather than making me look for offense around every corner, I was convinced that the way I was raised would act as a magic shield against it so I was always shocked to the bone when that wasn’t the case. Later when I did advocacy for victims of violence, I learned that the whole view that victims “draw” aggression towards themselves due to low self esteem was a crock and part of rape and battering myths. As it turns out, victims aren’t any more likely to have had tough childhoods than anyone else and even statistically tend to skew slightly towards higher pre-victimization self esteem. Basically perpetrators vary in taste in prey, some preferring “big game” or challenging targets. D’OH. In fact, on reflection, the only women I saw navigating their way through this rapey industry maze (if they didn’t just give into it and enable it, which many did) were tough as nails due to traumatic upbringings. I’ll never forget my first internship working under a poker-faced redhead from Nacogdoches, TX. At first she terrified me. She never smiled and called me on every mistake. But I admired the way she talked back to the creepy company director and got away with it. Once she saw I wasn’t an incompetent idiot and worked hard, we became friends and I spent a wonderful New Years eve with her and her three legged rescue kitten making up nicknames for all the creeps in the company. She knew everyone’s dirt but was never gratuitous about it, didn’t pick on harmless people. Over time I learned that she’d been a mistreated foster kid and had a depth of wisdom and generosity that I’ve rarely encountered. But one thing she couldn’t impart was how to act so impenetrable all the time that nobody messes with you. And would anyone really envy the kind of background that produces such a bulletproof exterior? She even said that I might eventually figure out I was in the wrong line of work and that it’s pointless to envy anyone’s success since you don’t know what they suffered or paid to get where they are.

I did start to improve my radar a bit from experience and from knowing people like her. Something else that probably intimidated FW is that I was on my way to developing an improved creep detection system. For instance, FW and his mother had been devotees of a certain new age sect since he was a kid. He once took me to a meditation center which had an eight foot portrait of the founding guru at the entrance. I took one look at it and thought, “Eek, pedophile.” A few years later, this particular organization hit the headlines for being a den of child rape and the founder was exposed as a serial rapist. I was impressed that FW read the reports and stopped patronizing and practicing. I remember him saying “We’ve got to be about truth as much as it hurts.” Yeah, well. Another time I helped police bust an unapprehended child molester when I saw a guy hanging around a children’s baseball game and took his license plate because my gut screamed “wrong, wrong, wrong.” When I saw the report in the paper the next day with the recreated sketch and description of the suspect, I called it in because it fit the suspects appearance down to the stripes on his shirt, his remarkably green eyes and his weird little-boy Ked-style sneakers. Cops are used to getting useless tips from busybodies and the cop who took the call asked in a bored voice if I’d happened to take down the plate and then spit out his coffee when I said that I had.

Maybe it was just a matter of growing into a family quirk since a few years ago while at my mother’s house I got a call from a detective in the city we’d lived in when I was growing up. They wanted to return a sketch my mother had made (she was a professional illustrator) twenty years earlier of a suspicious man at a gas station. My mother had been on her way to her studio and stopped to fill her bicycle tires when she saw a motorcyclist filling his tank and staring at her with “bottomless, empty intensity.” After I relayed the message from the detective, my mother described having had the same bolt-of-lighting sense of dread that I’d felt a few times. She said that, a few hours after she got that “chill” from the guy at the gas station, she heard that a woman cycling in a nearby park had been raped and murdered just an hour after she’d spotted the motorcyclist. Apparently one person who’d been walking a dog close to the scene of the murder remembered seeing a motorcyclist (illegally) on a bike path. So my mother immediately sketched the motorcyclist she’d seen from memory (she has eidetic memory) and delivered it detectives. Twenty years later when she called the detectives back, they thanked her for helping to solve the previously unsolved case which they blamed on the former administration (one of the most racist, corrupt PDs in the country). The perpetrator had died many years before in prison but they were at last able to match DNA. The former administration had insisted the perpetrator had to be African American, not the young blond guy my mother sketched.

So what’s wrong with my radar that I missed FW’s cues? Maybe it was calibrated on “rape/murder” only and not on subtler danger. It also might be the price of having worked in a shitty industry for so long until my sense of smell got burned out and could only pick up on massive shit storms but not silent farts. There’s also the problem that some perpetrators can tailor their abuse as required to confound and paralyze prey. They can get a jump on you. For instance, when I was pregnant I worked for someone who was later exposed as a serial rapist of teenagers. For whatever reason, that boss fixated on me and seemed devoted to making my life miserable even if I wasn’t a teen anymore and not in his target range. When I look back it’s clear I was doing some of the best work I’d ever done then but was constantly criticized. And no, unlike my previous supervisor, this wasn’t just a test period from someone with high work standards who was going to make me better and end up my friend. This is why it confused me at first but I eventually quit when the guy almost put me into preterm labor. Then I learned that he’d had a lawyer access court documents of my past civil suit against a workplace stalker which had not been sealed. So not only did he mystically sense I might be trouble (how?), I assume he felt compelled to preemptively dig around to see if he could find something to blackmail me with and came across evidence that I was, in fact, trouble. I think his immediate harsh treatment of me as an employee was all a preemptive DARVO tactic to confound my radar. Maybe it’s not such a stretch to imagine that child abusers are wary that maternal types are automatic opponents. Maybe he was like my uncle in dark form and always deeply background-checked employees. He’s dead now so I’ll never know.

In advocacy I’d learned that serial offenders, particularly child molesters, develop an almost preternatural political sense of anyone who might get in the way of their schemes and misdeeds which is how so many seek out and manage to rise and thrive in positions of trust in which they have power over children. They might take you down before you figure them out just like my uncle warned. Or some might feel compelled to get close to you, to charm, beguile and win you. WTF. So the moral of the story is that while boundaries are critical, I made the mistake of having hubris about having boundaries. I think that applies to high self esteem as well. High self esteem won’t stop bullets and knives and it’s not a perfect shield against predators who relish a challenge. I think it’s important to realize that, for every person on earth, there’s a predator who can tailor tactics to get past a target’s defenses. So boundaries, yay, but the picker is still a primary defense and takes years and years to develop. And I’d add a note to get out of any job, career or industry that’s so full of shit that it dulls your sense of smell and may make you overly grateful and relieved when you encounter people who just don’t happen to, say, stalk, rape and murder. I’m sure a lot of embezzlers and human traffickers are genuinely against cannibalism.

I have also been enforcing my boundary that I will not seek out information about my ex or his now-wife or any of his online cheating activities. Sometimes I get curious about whether he’s crashed and burned already, but I also know that people only post good things about their lives, and if they don’t have anything good they make something up, so I wouldn’t be seeing the truth anyway. And then the urge to look kind of fades away.
But part of me still wants karma. I tell that part that if he reaches out to me for anything that I know something bad has happened in his life.
And I also take some time to really send him some bad vibes. For example,
* hoping he’s always just late enough to everything to miss something
* his pizzas (his fave) never quite taste as good as he remembers
* his clothes always have wrinkles
* he gets an incurable STD
* he gets bald soon (I thought he was on his way but tried to reassure him no before)
* every board game is missing something (we loved playing them and he kept them all by coincidence)
* his porn-watching at work gets worse so he’ll be caught
* he gets audited by IRS
* his glasses get a scratch in the most annoying spot
Etc