Asklemmy

Eventually you will also come to the question often expressed in the popular phrase: is it better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all? i.e., even as you retreat from hostile forces, what are you advancing towards, that is worthwhile? I am not very knowledgeable about this - most of my own advances irl have failed, though I do not really regret any of them, as each decision was made only with the knowledge that I had at the time, even if I have learned & changed & grown since.

The reason I bring it up is to help illuminate how boundaries need to be set even upon the very setting of boundaries (how meta!:-P). In the limit (I mean in the mathematical sense), the ultimate safety is achieved by walling off everyone and everything so that it cannot affect you in any way - I have heard that concept expressed as an analogy where someone builds a castle, and thereafter basically suffocates inside, walled off entirely from the world, both the bad but also the good from it.

At some point you (& me, and each of us, possibly uniquely for each situation even) will need to find the appropriate balance point b/t avoiding toxic people, vs. allowing contact with imperfect humans. If we cannot forgive them, at some level we cannot forgive the faults within ourselves, and that would be the ultimate tragedy - if we could not even stand to be around our very own selves! That said, it is an advanced concept, b/c for instance it does not mean that we should re-establish contact, or to not break away contact, from a toxic person. If anything rather, it is the ultimate severing of their "hold" over us, where we know that we will be okay regardless of what they do, even if we remain in contact with them (which would need to be decided on a case-by-case basis ofc, b/c the more contact we have with them, the more they influence us even if we fight tooth & nail against that).

Doesn't that sound nice, in theory? Sigh... I have literally no idea what it means though, in practice:-P. We, like them, are all just bumbling around in the dark, trying in our own way to do the best we know how. The difference is that at least you are making the attempt to illuminate the situation - and that will make a HUGE difference in the outcome!