Twitter Thread #3: Emotional Expressiveness

perhaps we should be clear that some things get cast as “shit tests” which are in fact emotionally abusive behavior

those are straightforwardly bad and should not happen

unfortunately shit testing is used to describe a lot of things, including “this woman is experiencing feelings in a way that makes me uncertain/uncomfortable and I feel like I have to fix it or she’ll be mad at me”

I feel like I’m having a conversation about parental discipline where some people associate the phrase with straightforward abuse and some people are pointing out that that umbrella also covers necessary developmental boundary setting and it would be nice to be more specific

Or abandon this god awful phrase entirely idk

if you insist on having a conversation within a frame that includes extremely relationally destructive behavior but in practice is used to also talk about people doing pretty normal people stuff that got mislabeled

Everyone is going to have a bad time

And yes I too am guilty

may i humbly suggest that discourse which paints most women as crazy and/or manipulative allows women who are genuinely being outsize destructive, emotionally abusive, and machiavellian to do so with limited if any impunity

and that that is a problem

women may have trouble leaving a physically abusive partner but at least culturally there’s a clear narrative that that’s not just the normal cost of being in a relationship with a man

this norm does not exist for emotional abuse, particularly imo for men recognizing it in women

those waters get muddier the more we act like women are incapable of being emotionally fair, the more we tell men that it’s normal for women to be emotionally destructive

perhaps the object level proof here is that this is true

in my relationships with women it radically has not been

I’ve been thinking about this before; it still concerns me: “do you know what’s appropriate to expect in a healthy relationship”

Like The framing around shit tests iirc is “here’s how to pass them so you can date her”

It is NOT “here’s when a woman’s behavior crosses a line into explicitly destructive behavior and you should protect yourself by disengaging from her entirely”

I know this thread is long I’m weaving together some thoughts here and thinking out loud

Part of this confusion too seems to stem from the question “how much of my gf’s emotions are my responsibility to fix”

women can and should seek to express emotional distress in ways that are fair to the people around them

Plenty of women use peoples emotional responsiveness to their distress in ways that are abusive, manipulative, harmful

This is wrong and not all expressed emotion is bad

the complementary action items seem to be

-learn to differentiate between appropriate emotional distress and manipulative/destructive expressions

And

-build the capacity to respond supportively to the appropriate variety

These both seem to rely on a sense of differentiated emotion

Being able to let the people around you have feelings without seeing them as implicit demands that must be responded to

Learning to care about other people’s feelings without the sense that those feelings control you