There are two kinds of boundary violations: overt and covert.
We know a lot about one half of boundary violations: the kind acted out in an anxious way.
This first kind of boundary violation is hopefully already obvious. This is when you say no, or are unable to consent, and someone goes ahead and touches you anyway. This is the kind of boundary violation that occurs when someone touches your body when you are drunk, or are unconscious, or are drugged, or do not say an enthusiastic yes, or your body language communicates trauma, fear or hesitation and someone goes ahead anyway. It is the kind of boundary violation when men insist that we smile for them on the street, or smile before they will give us our food at a restaurant, or when they insist we talk to them and placate them and flirt with them when we are really trying to get from point A to point B in public space.
There is still a long way to go in creating clear and straightforward ways to get no to mean no. There is still a long way to go in getting overt violations to stop.
Another category of boundary violation exists, however. I understood it a few years back at a counselling session when I felt like I was losing my mind and I blamed myself for it. My counsellor said, ‘no, this is not you. that person has crossed your boundaries and you are owning something that is actually not yours.’
This second kind of boundary cross is the covert kind, what my friend Martin calls ‘the unmaking.’
This is when you (consciously or unconsciously) use deception, undermining, prevarication, manipulation, or dishonesty when you want access to someone’s body, or want them to serve some purpose for you – whether sex or adventure or status or flattery – rather than engaging with them as a whole human being who has intelligible needs and feelings of her own.
Just as with overt violations, you can do this while not being fully aware that you are doing it. This doesn’t make you a ‘bad person,’ it makes you a human being who has done a harmful thing, who needs to know how to make it right. Saying “I didn’t realize,” or “I meant no harm,” or “I just didn’t get the impact of my actions,” or throwing up your hands helplessly and saying “I don’t know how this happened,” is not an appropriate response to hearing that you have done this to someone.
In this covert violation, you use conscious or unconscious deception rather than force to enter the gates, but you are not actually trustworthy, and once inside you damage everything you touch.
You get inside a woman’s trust by using (conscious or unconscious) manipulation, and then when she lets you in, you undermine her and smash up her emotional safety from the inside.
This behavior takes the physical pleasure you want, or other experiences that you want from someone, using deception, using that person for your own needs without the encumbent relational responsibility involved in gaining another human being’s physical and emotional trust.
This is a Trojan boundary violation.
You get her to open her emotional gates to you by hiding, lying, deceiving, manipulating, prevarication or dissembling, by saying all the right words even as your words bear no resemblance to reality. You talk about how much you do your own emotional work, about how accountable you are, about how you have the same values as her, about how self-aware you are, about what a good ally you are. You make promises. You tell her how much you love her. You talk and talk until she makes the mistake of trusting you, and lets you in to her trust, to her body, to her soul.
Once inside, however, you treat her with disrespect and gaslight her, creating instability, and hide your dishonesty from yourself and from everyone around you. When she asks you, bewildered and confused, to help her identify why her gut is telling her one thing while your words are telling her another, you lie or change the subject. You get more and more desperate as she gets closer to the truth, a truth you cannot handle or own.
This is every bit as much a boundary violation as the first kind. It is still getting someone to let you in, when they have not actually been able to make an informed choice about your trustworthiness, because your words are not remotely honest or you use words to try to control and mask reality.
It is deeply normalized in our culture for men to act in this way, as evident by how unsurprised we all are by ‘advice’ columns that say a guy ‘would have sex with a woman on a first date’ ‘only if he’s not really that into her.’ Men are still taught that they are not expected to be accountable for their actions in relationship – because women are responsible for everyone.
This dynamic is still gendered, in our day and age. Those who identify with femininity or who walk in the world as women have to navigate a landscape in which we are expected to constantly discern whether men are actually treating us with respect. We are expected to ‘withhold’ sex like some kind of trump card until they prove they are treating us well. It is somehow our fault if they lie to us, our fault of we are trusting or gullible and believe them. This double standard begins young.
The same is not true for men navigating the sexual landscape, who are not raised to believe it is their job to ‘protect’ themselves from being used and deceived in this way.
Somehow this culture raises men who are not taught to take any accountability for their choices, words, and actions in sex, and raises women who are taught we are responsible not only for our own actions and emotions but for the actions of men, as well. We are somehow expected to ‘safeguard’ ourselves against masculine manipulation and dishonesty while men are taught their job is to ‘conquest’ and base their masculinity on how much sex they can get, no matter who they hurt. If we get duped, everyone asks why we did not run away, why we were unable to tell a guy was lying to get into our pants, when what they ought to be asking is why that guy used manipulation and dishonesty to gain access to our trust and to fuck us. Boys will be boys, amirite?
The reason covert boundary crossing in a patriarchal culture is so dangerous is because it is at once so quiet and so fundamentally undermining.
The ‘talking you up to gain your trust’ stage is the kind of grooming behaviour that people with narcissist qualities employ, who can then say they did not know they were doing it. They can be completely un-self aware by nature, and use this as a defense for dismantling someone else’s mind. As though someone other than themselves is responsible for their actions.
Meanwhile because the worst of it happens in private with no one but your abuser there to witness for you, no one can quite make out what is actually going on. People may have a funny feeling about the relationship but they may just think the woman is inherently unstable, especially if the guy is quiet, mild-mannered, or unassuming. The growing gap between public perception, word, and reality leaves the woman alone with this insanity, unable to come into words about how deeply wrong everything feels and unable to get help as she gets more and more isolated.
This kind of boundary cross destroys people.
It unmakes them.
It can include betrayals of trust by making and then breaking safety agreements around sex, while prevaricating to make it sound as though you never made the committments, or only ‘kind of’ made them. It can include humblebragging about what a good ally you are instead of actually doing your own emotional work. It can include using flattery and love-bombing to gain trust and connection without actually being responsive or emotionally safe; telling her you are in love with her when you are not; cultivating the feeling that she is your special secret friend or otherwise creating a special feeling of intimacy with her without actually being there for her; and calling her needy or crazy when she tries to name this gap.
It can include using her prior trauma history or mental health status to manipulate her by inviting her to share secrets, vulnerabilities, and intimacies with you while not really sharing intimacy or vulnerability of your own; sharing ‘pseudo-intimacies’ (such as ‘it is really hard for me to open up to people’ as though this is an intimacy) while not actually opening up at all; it can include subtle put-downs, undermining of her confidence and feeling of emotional safety with you, such as gaslighting her about normal emotional safety needs, or acting cold and cruel to her while telling her you are so generous, giving, and constantly burdened and put out by meeting her perfectly normal needs – needs that an emotionally healthy person would meet without thinking twice.
This last is deep narcissist territory and particularly damaging.
It can include acting in ways that make her question herself, like making out with her in private then acting like you do not know her as soon as other people are around, or being with her while not telling anyone you are with her, or being with her while making it clear to her you could bolt at any time if she does anything to displease you or has any needs you do not like. It can include doing all this while denying this is occurring, prevaricating, dissembling, subtly changing the subject when she brings up the gap between your word and action, and generally fucking with her sense of reality until she is so unstable that she looks crazy, while you look calm and like you’re ‘such a good feminist’ to put up with her as she gets crazier and crazier. Then dumping her because you say she has ‘needs you can’t meet’ and quietly telling your friends and family that you ‘tried everything.’
When confronted with your manipulation and dishonesty, in this kind of boundary violation instead of owning, apologizing, and doing repair, the perpetrator – even or perhaps especially when he sees what he has done and is drowning in guilt – is so busy feeling guilt and shame that he feels no empathy. Instead of owning, he deflects, prevaricates, manipulates further, attempts to flee, or if all else fails, goes on the attack and tries to shut the woman up, discredit her or prevent her from naming what has happened to her. Anything to keep control of her mind, to keep control of the narrative, to prevent anyone from seeing the secret core of self-loathing that drives his acts of harm.
This reaction to naming harm – attack, avoid, or flee, driven by his guilt addiction rather than by empathy or accountability – creates an extremely unsafe environment for the person whose boundaries have been violated because when the survivor names the harm, the one who caused the harm is so deeply in narcissistic guilt and shame that rather than return with full accountability or any honest apology, the perpetrator goes on the attack and tries to destroy the woman to keep her from speaking and exposing his core of self-loathing, which he feels he must hide from the world at all cost.
You will see women in these kinds of relationships get smaller and smaller and smaller over time, living with this quiet, continual undermining of their trust in their own perceptions. It is the attempted unmaking of another human being.
This Trojan boundary violation entails manipulation and dishonesty of a profound and dangerous kind, because it is both traumatizing andhidden, and therefore deeply isolating, coming from within the boundaries of trust, from a lover, partner, or friend who has convinced you they are reliable and emotionally safe when they are actually fucking with your sense of reality moment by moment, day by day, and undermining you to those around both of you when they have committed to be your rock, your safe harbour. You will feel wrong but not know what is wrong or where the feeling is coming from. You will learn to separate yourself from yourself, because to live with the cognitive dissonance requires nothing less.
What is the difference, in the end, between drugging someone’s drink or isolating them, destabilizing them, and manipulating their social circle and their mind?
Both get you in, both let you get off treating someone like they are not a human being, both are a way to take all the power while taking no accountability for yourself.
The second kind of boundary violation, the Trojan boundary cross, is especially dangerous because it is usually done by those who are so fucked up inside that they don’t even know when they are lying and when they are telling the truth. They manipulate so successfully because they actually believe their own stories, since their true self – the part of them that would do empathy, trust, or connection – is not online, utterly buried under firewalls and firewalls of shame.
A narcissist has built a false persona and resents everyone and everything that asks sincerity, empathy, or genuine connection of him, because he cannot provide these things, because he does not know that they exist. He will make this everyone else’s problem, and herein lies his danger and his violence.
He can playact being in love or looking you in the eyes, while you can’t understand what is going on because he is actually looking strangely inwards at himself. He can come inside you looking right at you, while the absence of an empathic or connected self there with you creates a terrifying cognitive dissonance.
They can mask for years the fear of actually letting you see any part of them, the fundamental disconnect and absence of an actual guide to connection with other human beings. They can lash out, shame or blame or ostracize you if you attempt to understand, or if you attempt to make sense with others who have experienced the same thing.
Their eyes look inward, always in to themselves.
They can mimic the acts of passionate love and yet there is a coldness, a kind of non-connection, and if you come close to naming this, they will attack you rather than admit what they are missing, what is offline inside them.
This kind of sex that is in fact focussed on physical sensations while pretending to be about emotional connection is extremely crazymaking, perhaps the most intense kind of boundary cross that exists, because in gaining your trust while they undermine your sanity they cross boundaries of body, spirit, mind, and trust in your own instincts all at the same time.
To observers, the woman being abused in this way may look like the people of Citagazze, in The Golden Compass. Consumed by ‘spectres’ that are invisible to the onlookers, the adults who get attacked look crazy, as they fend off an ‘invisible’ attack: they appear to dance about, shout, cry, and eventually go still as the spectres approach them to suck out their soul. Once the viewer becomes able to see the spectres, the movements of their victims become clear. Without seeing the source of the harm, however, you would not see an attack and a desperate attempt at survival – you would only see a crazy person crying, shouting, or dancing about in evasive maneuvers.
This kind of boundary violation – abusing someone and hiding that you are doing it so everyone only sees them looking angry and crazy – is the unmaking of another human being. It is the gift of making, turned backwards and become a weapon.
It is a horrific violence to the psyche, enacted quietly over a long time, all the more harmful because it is so deeply masked from others, who may leave the survivor alone in it or mistake her inchoate fury for a ‘personality trait’ when it is actually a direct and healthy response to abuse.
The incidence of these narcissistic qualities – the inability to say sorry, to make amends, to genuinely want to know when you have caused harm, to recognize and respond to other people’s emotions, to possess the inner compass that can let you act safe and receptive, is 7.7% of the male population, higher than among women at 4.8% http://thenarcissisticlife.com/what-is-the-prevalence-of-narcissism/. (The stats do not yet include genderfluid people – all of our stats need to change to reflect the actual lived realities of gender).
It is not that these folks don’t have a true and good-hearted self underneath, it is that they have a lot of work to do to allow this part of the self back into the world, when it may have been offline, fractured and buried from a very, very young age, so far back they do not even remember what they have lost. And that would be fine, if they were only harming themselves – but when you begin to harm others that creates responsibilities.
Nearly eight out of every hundred masculine-identified people have these qualities. Look at that in the mid-30s singles dating pool and that number gets much, much higher, because these are guys more likely to have relationships end or never get going.
Add to this the tendency for the single dating pool to also be disproportionately high in dismissive-avoidant attachers, because dismissive-avoidant attachers are the ones more likely to end partnerships or remain single, and what you have for the mid-30s dating straight cis female is a veritable treasure trove of dismissive-avoidant men with narcissistic qualities on every dating site and every place where you could connect with guys.
Given the preponderance of narcissists to lie convincingly to your face about very fundamental emotional realities from day one, lie so well because they do not even know they are doing it, dating straight men past age 30 begins to feel like a game of Russian Roulette. Where 25% of the chambers contain dismissive-avoidant guys who will make you feel crazy for needing emotional connection and 7.7% are waiting to reveal that that cute, sweet, mild-mannered and awesome guy who geeks out on all the same things as you and talks and talks about how he shares your values is actually some variant of un-self-aware narcissist who will gaslight you incessantly and then call you crazy when you lose your mind.
and somehow we’re supposed to beleive the ‘crazy ex girlfriend’ stories men tell.
ffffffffffsssss
http://www.theduluthmodel.org/pdf/Equality.pdf
When this kind of harm is named, a person who cannot own, apologize fully, and repair the harm they have caused will move into defensive strategies that make everything worse. This is a variation on ‘Not All Men’ – it is called ‘I Feel Bad When You Say That.’
Please share this post! If this post speaks to you or makes you think or reflect, please help out: share as widely as possible. For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm. Thank you.
A note on gender binaries: I want in this post to talk about masculinity, and about power, and that is gendered. I want to do it in a way that doesn’t reinscribe violent gender binaries that cause erasure. This feels tricky to me, how to talk about power and masculinity – which we need to talk about – without erasing or reinscribing cishetnormativity. I want to talk about masculnity and power dynamics in the kinds of relationships that I know intimately, yet i want to be clear that these are not the only relationships and that these are not the only bodies. I don’t feel really well placed to write about how these power dynamics play out in queer and genderqueer relationships – I know they do, and I have been learning about it from people who understand how that works, but I can’t write about something I don’t know from the inside. I noticed when I woke up after posting that the image on this post is gendered – I hadn’t looked that closely at it, had seen the dotted lines that express healthy boundaries and liked that. How to fix it? Considering photoshopping them to make them all ‘dudes,’ since this is about masculinity. But the images are already so inscribed with cisnormativity. Is there a good way to get at focussing on masculinity and power while not kicking up these narratives? Am thinking maybe to photoshop out the skirt, but then photoshop in a variety of human body shapes: a range of kinds of bodies. just, like, skinny, round, curvy, hips, no hips? (update: there, have attempted ‘person person person person.’).
