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5 Wants + underlying Unmet Needs: ( Read more... )

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In shadow work news, either I’m really good at sliding sideways around things that make me uncomfortable, or the people who wrote the Shadow work prompts I’ve been using are way too fucking neurotypical for the way they frame things to be helpful for me. Like, the last prompts implied that I should rate my loved ones on a hierarchy? Which does make me uncomfortable, but for autism-type “my brain doesn’t do that” reasons and not “this is a part of yourself that your past has taught you to disavow” type reasons. I may need to go get a library card and check out some print media on the subject, or just start doing a bunch more thinking about the questions and figuring out whether they can even be helpful or if I need to rewrite them the way I rewrote so much of the cisheteropatriarchy out of the CBT workbook prompts here.

8. What are the three most important relationships in your life, and how have they influenced your beliefs about who you are?
Do people really do this? Like, I get the Circle of Trust exercise where you evaluate between people you tell certain things to, or have certain people you trust with some things that you don’t entrust to everyone. But like, ranking people as most important? Which of your limbs is most important?

I learn things about myself from all of my friends, and keep or change behaviors accordingly. It doesn’t matter whether they’re “most important” to me or not. I know that nyyki, genderjumper, and ot_atma have commented on my behavior and personality the most often, bc I’m around them fairly often and few topics are off-limits from me. Does that make them more important than other folks in my network? *shakes head in consternation*

9. What kind of people do you attract around you?
I attract all sorts of people, really, but only some are welcome to stay. I don’t tend to keep mooches/users around me anymore because now when they make those early asks for things bigger than our friendship warrants I will comment on how our relationship isn’t there yet. Just having the most simple verbal boundary is enough to discourage 90% of the goddamn vampires out there. Mooches don’t like to hear people tell the truth about them to their faces, so any signal that I’m going to tell them stuff their inflated sense of entitlement can’t deal with means that they will export themselves from my life.

Now I need to learn meta-communication skills about feeling alienated from someone, since that was one of the problematic things about my relationship with Ghost, my relationship with Xenoix, … lots of my relationships, both “romantic” and platonic. It’s not that I “attract” aloof/avoidant people, I think I just don’t know how to call out the withdrawal behaviors or know how to ask for things I need but can’t identify in the moment. I might have to go back to doing the “5 wants 5 unmet needs” journal entries soon. Not that I’m planning on starting new relationships anytime soon, but … it’s kind of not fair for me to ask what other people need so that I get to help them and then not let them know how to offer help in return. It’s lopsided, imbalanced, unsustainable.

Gotta fix that.