It’s Lonely Up Here

There's only one way to go from atop a pedestal

Boundaries + Consent for People Pleasers starts 9/4

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“I trust you to know I’m no better than you.” This is how I open all my classes now. In the work I do as a consent educator, I’ve found a few things to be consistently true:

1.        People come to me to heal them, to fix their relationships, to teach them how to stay safe. When I cannot do that, they feel betrayed. Often these people are arriving to this work with a lot of unresolved trauma. That trauma is often projected onto me.

A lot of the people coming to me for guidance and information on consent, communication, relationships are really struggling. They’re having the same challenges again and again in their relationships. They’re struggling to speak up for themselves and identify their boundaries, and as a result they’re experiencing consent violations of varying degrees frequently. Others come because people have told them they’re hard to say no to, that they’re pushy, and they’ve even perhaps ended up in some hot water because of this. They see me as the solution.

Pedestalization is enormously dehumanizing. Therapists experience this: clients expect that their therapists are excellent communicators, never stressed, never angry. My rabbi taught me the term “the symbolic exemplar” when I shared the experiences I’d been having with him. I thought, “Of course he also experiences this.” The assumption many people make, consciously or unconsciously, is, “He’s a rabbi so he must be the most spiritually awakened, the most spiritually grounded, and he must treat everyone with kindness 100% of the time.”

It seems to me that a lot of the people looking for this kind of guidance and healing are hoping to find the thing that will save them or keep them safe. But consent is not the panacea. No matter how much I say, “You know yourself better than anyone,” many defer to my judgment over their own, even on the topic of themselves—their needs, limits, and boundaries. Those very people want someone human enough that they can relate, but superhuman enough to blindly trust. When I’m not the answer and don’t have all the answers, the feeling of betrayal can cause a lot of pain and some even want to tear me down and actively participate in trying to prevent me from succeeding (stay tuned for updates on that…).

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June from my own series called Portraits of Young Women, 2017.