Part of me is sad it took me this many years to get the hang of it. The rest of me is just pleased I’ve had the experience of being able to deal with it with kindness, and no lingering unhappy feelings on my part (my main goal).
I have found – through a lot of (unwilling) experimentation – that ignoring is not fruitful, humour or retaliation escalates, and angry responses express how I feel, but have no positive impact on the other person. Worse, since their goal is to enrage me and enjoy it, I have helped them with their goal and reinforced their awful behavior.
This time though, this time I was calm and safe (enough) that I could make eye contact and say hey, that feels like fun for you, but when you taunt someone to make them angry it’s called bullying. I am lucky that this was enough to dissolve the situation and for the first time when it was over I wasn’t still left vibrating with helpless rage.
This has been a work in progress for what feels like my whole life. I grew up in a household where it was normal and ‘hilarious’ to poke people with sharp verbal sticks. I then moved on to a ‘witty’ social group at university where scoring points for being verbally sharp was a marker of social status. I’ve since selected for people whose sense of humour is not cruelty based and who value kindness over verbal social competition. It’s taken me years to build that community and I still have certain… instincts shall we say both in attack and defense. I am trying to learn how to let them go.
I owe a lot to the people who have loved me and made it possible to be safe without constant verbal self-defense.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
transcendancing for example is profoundly skilled in this area and her delicacy and care have patched parts of my soul. maharetr is a constant, gentle presence whose openness to dialogue I am grateful for every day. *beams* chaosmanor and cupidsbow who form the rest of my household are also profoundly safe people, meaning my home is not just hilarious and full of robots, but is also a haven. I'm also incredibly lucky in that my father has grown into a person who is profoundly kind and gentle, I did not expect it.
An excellent resource for describing the feminist-baiting dynamic is The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck which identifies it clearly as bullying – a word that now carries considerable weight in work environments I have been in, and am now part of.
I have found – through a lot of (unwilling) experimentation – that ignoring is not fruitful, humour or retaliation escalates, and angry responses express how I feel, but have no positive impact on the other person. Worse, since their goal is to enrage me and enjoy it, I have helped them with their goal and reinforced their awful behavior.
This time though, this time I was calm and safe (enough) that I could make eye contact and say hey, that feels like fun for you, but when you taunt someone to make them angry it’s called bullying. I am lucky that this was enough to dissolve the situation and for the first time when it was over I wasn’t still left vibrating with helpless rage.
This has been a work in progress for what feels like my whole life. I grew up in a household where it was normal and ‘hilarious’ to poke people with sharp verbal sticks. I then moved on to a ‘witty’ social group at university where scoring points for being verbally sharp was a marker of social status. I’ve since selected for people whose sense of humour is not cruelty based and who value kindness over verbal social competition. It’s taken me years to build that community and I still have certain… instincts shall we say both in attack and defense. I am trying to learn how to let them go.
I owe a lot to the people who have loved me and made it possible to be safe without constant verbal self-defense.
transcendancing for example is profoundly skilled in this area and her delicacy and care have patched parts of my soul. maharetr is a constant, gentle presence whose openness to dialogue I am grateful for every day. *beams* chaosmanor and cupidsbow who form the rest of my household are also profoundly safe people, meaning my home is not just hilarious and full of robots, but is also a haven. I'm also incredibly lucky in that my father has grown into a person who is profoundly kind and gentle, I did not expect it.An excellent resource for describing the feminist-baiting dynamic is The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck which identifies it clearly as bullying – a word that now carries considerable weight in work environments I have been in, and am now part of.
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That is a wonderful response.
I've had lots of thoughts about been verbally sharp. It's something I can enjoy, and a lot of my friends do it, but I find I've usually drawn a line between being funny and being malicious, and when people ignore that line it's upsetting. It's also upsetting to have people assume I was being malicious, because they assumed I'd said something in earnest whereas my assumption which was that what I said was so ridiculous that no one could possibly take it seriously. Lesson: don't say things that are the opposite of what I mean.
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My thoughts on this is that the 'line' is a moving target, if I'm feeling bouncy and you're feeling tender then the line moves and I may not detect it. I'd rather have relationships with people who are simply kind, certainly in my home relationships and my 'safe' relationships I need this.
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I think it will depend on circumstances, I am relying on ppl not wanting to be identified as bullies, and on them being able to hear me... which I realise is not always going to happen :(
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:)