3 Signs A Person Won’t Respect Your Boundaries
By: Weylie Li
Tags: Friends, Relationships, Signs, Psychology, Relationship Advice

1.) They Manage to Make You Feel Guilty

Your boundaries are aimed to defend your psychological homeland, which happens to be intruders’ target. Therefore, the existence of a boundary would be troublesome for them to take advantage of you for their own sake fully.

To facilitate their intrusion plan someday, they strategically sway your confidence in your own decisions and reinforce your compliance with them in everyday life by inflicting guilt on you for something that probably has nothing to do with you.

Not only the implementation of a guilt trip can cause an adverse influence on your both conscious and unconscious minds, as psychologist Guy Winch established, it also leads to anxiety, self-doubt, and low self-esteem, which are precisely the root cause of why you might end up with broken boundaries which are susceptible to unexpected invasion.

2.) They Are Unsolicited Advice Fanatics

If someone is keen on giving unsolicited advice to you, even when you first meet one another, you should be alert because chances are they won’t respect your boundaries whatsoever.

Different from requested advice, which could bring valuable insights into your life, unsolicited advice, in essence, is intrusive in both form and execution.

In terms of expression forms, a study addresses unsolicited advice to be lacking in both preceding requests and elicitation of advice.

“Unsolicited advice is distinguished from solicited advice by a lack of either a preceding request for advice, such as “can you help me?”, a statement of need such as “I need help with this assignment”, or complaints about too much work and too little time, which generally result in the elicitation of advice from the listener”

From the perspective of practice, according to the book Studies in Applied Interpersonal Communication, the advice-givers need to consider their “qualification,” such as expertise and closeness to the recipient, before giving any advice.

By the absence of “qualifications” required to sustain the credibility of advice, unsolicited advice-givers are more likely to show their self-entitled power in this offensive manner.

3.) They Overshare Their Weakness and Vulnerability

I’ve been using the word “intruders” to describe individuals who burst into your psychological territory metaphorically, maybe by which you unconsciously assume those people looking intimidating and acting aggressively.

However, their insidious intentions could be camouflaged with a completely unexpected appearance. They may tell you their traumatic experience, preoccupied concerns, even personal secrets that they emphasize only between you and them.

Should you interpret their behavior as authenticity, which you think is quite rare and precious in relationships, you probably will fall into their “floodlighting” trap. Floodlighting is a behavior where people intend to obtain sympathy and fast track an intimate relationship by overwhelming the opposite person emotionally before building mutual trust.

According to Dr. Brene Brown, floodlighting is a way of using vulnerability as a manipulation tool and

“Using vulnerability is not the same as being vulnerable; it’s the opposite — it’s armour.”

Being authentic is with courage and honesty to align beliefs with behavior as an attempt to embrace true-self, while oversharing is to ignore the natural progression of a relationship in the hope to control the temperature of your relationship dynamic. It’s not the vulnerable expression but the intention that comprises the clear line between being authentic and oversharing.