If you want other people to care about your problems and be accommodating, courteous and so forth, you will burn a lot fewer bridges if you expect that to be a two-way street. Be caring, courteous and accommodating of their stuff as well.
It's fine for you to try to find a way to get your needs met. It's not fine to act like other people only exist to serve your needs and don't have problems of their own.
This seems to be the original source for the idea of comfort in, dump out:
How not to say the wrong thing
My original exposure to this idea of comfort in, dump out was on a very toxic forum where the way this idea was presented was poisoned by the generally narcissistic, classist awfulness of the place. I was also treated this way by Genevieve, who acted like my very serious problems didn't count and I was just a whiny loser who wasn't trying hard enough, etc.
The rule of thumb in the article is for a fairly short-lived, acute crisis that is expected to be resolved. But what if your problem is never going to go away?
When you live with what is basically a permanent crisis, no, you can't run around expecting the entire world to always drop everything and bend over backwards for you while you act like their needs are insignificant, don't count as real problems, etc.
You can't expect to be allowed to follow the rule of thumb in the article that you can say anything you want to anybody, but they can't "dump" on you. It doesn't work to take this idea from the article and feel that your needs should always trump everyone else's needs all the time because you have some permanent crisis in your life.
Genevieve did exactly that to me. She acted like her being trans meant she was the only person who had any real problems. Everyone she knew, including me (and I have some very serious and incurable problems), didn't really have any serious problems.
In her mind, "dumping" on her meant expecting anything at all from her, even basic common decency. Everything was all about her crisis every minute of the day and she didn't even bother to be appreciative.
She was briefly homeless for a few days while leaving her abusive home situation at my behest and traveling elsewhere. She was homeless under circumstances that could be characterized as between housing while moving.
And her period of homelessness was so brief in part because I spent three hours one night creating a spread sheet of potential rentals in her city far from where I lived thanks to the magic of the internet. I did this while she slept so she could wake up to a list of places to check out.
She rented the very first one on the list of seventeen rentals. It was the first one because it was the only one that met all of her criteria.
She only physically looked at the very first one and promptly rented it, thereby ending her brief stint of homelessness. Then she gave me hell for not spending more time on the spreadsheet, even though she literally rented the very first one I found.
LGBTQ individuals are at very high risk of homelessness. Genevieve was only very briefly homeless, due in large part to support from me and other people.
No, she wasn't appreciative of that fact. No, she didn't go "Dodged a bullet! Thanks for helping me resolve this so quickly!" Instead, she wanted my head on a platter for bullshit reasons I don't really want to go into here.
A few months later, after she had kicked me to the curb, I ended up homeless. No, she didn't write me to offer to look up useful information for me, make a spreadsheet of resources, etc. like I had done for her.
Instead, she wrote me to lecture me and act again like I didn't have any real problems and I just needed to get myself off the street somehow magically because she had bitched me out and pissed all over me.
We were no longer on speaking terms, but she was still reading everything I wrote and she deemed it to be appropriate to get in touch again to piss all over me and let me know what a fuck up she thought I was, how much contempt she had for me, etc.
I ended up spending nearly six years on the street in part because I wasn't getting the kind of support from anyone that she had gotten from me and others.
If you do burn your bridges with someone who was very kind to you, don't do this sick crap of stalking them and harassing them and so forth like Genevieve did to me. Let it go.
Your takeaway should be that:
It's fine for you to try to find a way to get your needs met. It's not fine to act like other people only exist to serve your needs and don't have problems of their own.
This seems to be the original source for the idea of comfort in, dump out:
How not to say the wrong thing
My original exposure to this idea of comfort in, dump out was on a very toxic forum where the way this idea was presented was poisoned by the generally narcissistic, classist awfulness of the place. I was also treated this way by Genevieve, who acted like my very serious problems didn't count and I was just a whiny loser who wasn't trying hard enough, etc.
The rule of thumb in the article is for a fairly short-lived, acute crisis that is expected to be resolved. But what if your problem is never going to go away?
When you live with what is basically a permanent crisis, no, you can't run around expecting the entire world to always drop everything and bend over backwards for you while you act like their needs are insignificant, don't count as real problems, etc.
You can't expect to be allowed to follow the rule of thumb in the article that you can say anything you want to anybody, but they can't "dump" on you. It doesn't work to take this idea from the article and feel that your needs should always trump everyone else's needs all the time because you have some permanent crisis in your life.
Genevieve did exactly that to me. She acted like her being trans meant she was the only person who had any real problems. Everyone she knew, including me (and I have some very serious and incurable problems), didn't really have any serious problems.
In her mind, "dumping" on her meant expecting anything at all from her, even basic common decency. Everything was all about her crisis every minute of the day and she didn't even bother to be appreciative.
She was briefly homeless for a few days while leaving her abusive home situation at my behest and traveling elsewhere. She was homeless under circumstances that could be characterized as between housing while moving.
And her period of homelessness was so brief in part because I spent three hours one night creating a spread sheet of potential rentals in her city far from where I lived thanks to the magic of the internet. I did this while she slept so she could wake up to a list of places to check out.
She rented the very first one on the list of seventeen rentals. It was the first one because it was the only one that met all of her criteria.
She only physically looked at the very first one and promptly rented it, thereby ending her brief stint of homelessness. Then she gave me hell for not spending more time on the spreadsheet, even though she literally rented the very first one I found.
LGBTQ individuals are at very high risk of homelessness. Genevieve was only very briefly homeless, due in large part to support from me and other people.
No, she wasn't appreciative of that fact. No, she didn't go "Dodged a bullet! Thanks for helping me resolve this so quickly!" Instead, she wanted my head on a platter for bullshit reasons I don't really want to go into here.
A few months later, after she had kicked me to the curb, I ended up homeless. No, she didn't write me to offer to look up useful information for me, make a spreadsheet of resources, etc. like I had done for her.
Instead, she wrote me to lecture me and act again like I didn't have any real problems and I just needed to get myself off the street somehow magically because she had bitched me out and pissed all over me.
We were no longer on speaking terms, but she was still reading everything I wrote and she deemed it to be appropriate to get in touch again to piss all over me and let me know what a fuck up she thought I was, how much contempt she had for me, etc.
I ended up spending nearly six years on the street in part because I wasn't getting the kind of support from anyone that she had gotten from me and others.
If you do burn your bridges with someone who was very kind to you, don't do this sick crap of stalking them and harassing them and so forth like Genevieve did to me. Let it go.
Your takeaway should be that:
- Yes, nice people actually exist. Your abusive parents aren't representative of the entire human race.
- Your reprehensible treatment of that individual means your behavior needs to change. This is messed up stuff that you learned from messed up people.
- Let the person YOU burned go and leave them alone as the least worst thing you can possibly do after messing things up terribly. Do NOT run around talking trash about them as Genevieve apparently did to me, according to a mutual acquaintance.
- Absolutely do not latch onto them like they are the only person that can possibly fix your life and they still owe you. They don't.
- You had your shot. You blew it. Go try to establish a not completely fucked up relationship with someone else.
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