Big Bluesky Boundaries
As a psychotherapist, I talk a lot with patients about boundaries. Healthy, unhealthy. Permeable, solid. Which ones compromise your integrity and which ones don’t. Which ones violate your emotional and physical safety and which ones don’t. When our lives are truly threatened, sometimes a boundary is a kick in the groin or it might be running away or playing dead or appeasing and complying. It depends on the survival needs of the moment. While what constitutes appropriate boundaries is unique to each of us, if a patient is unable to set a boundary with a chronic abuser that’s a flag for me.
Over at “The Bad Place,” as some of us now call X/Twitter, there are abusers galore. It’s become an unmonitored, toxic cesspool of vitriol. So, many of us decided to leave and hang out where the skies are bluer. And some of those abusers have followed us with a singular agenda to “own the libs.” They have no desire to engage in anything approximating a healthy dialogue. They’re not reaching across the aisle in the hopes of reconciliation or understanding, but rather lunging across the aisle, fully armed, eager to attack and endlessly torment.
Despite winning the presidency, both chambers of Congress, possibly, and knowing SCOTUS is captured, many MAGA folks still want to torment. This tells us a lot. There is an insatiable desire that at its core has absolutely nothing to do with winning the election. They’ve projected whatever past deep wounds they have onto us. We’re just convenient targets of their deep-seated rage.
To engage in that abuse, in my opinion, is to participate in the dynamic. And a way to choose not to is to create a boundary. Not a permeable, typical Democrat, “Let’s all be friends and take the abuse because we’re taking the moral high road” boundary.* A hard boundary. By blocking. Block, block, block. And that’s what many of us have chosen to do. And we’ve felt the relief and the empowerment that often comes when one takes action to extricate themselves from a bully.
When we choose to change the dynamic in an unhealthy relationship there is almost always push back. An escalation. “Going to hide in your little echo chamber, you pussy libtard??” is an example. It’s the taunt of a bully. It’s an invitation, which I hear as a desperate plea, to continue the bully-bullied dance because without our engagement the bullies have nowhere to discharge their rage and sadness, and they’re just left with themselves. How great it would be if they chose to work on their deep wounds. But I’m not holding my breath with Trump actively fomenting their rage.
Any pundits calling Bluesky an “echo chamber,” are carrying water for the bullies because, in my opinion, they also want the drama, the dance, just as they did during the election when they made it a horse race. They don’t care if it’s unhealthy for us, just as it seems they didn’t care that their normalization of Trump was unhealthy for our democracy. I propose we create hard boundaries not only with bullies, but with the mainstream media who refuse to set their own boundary with Trump because their bottom-line demands it. In calling Bluesky an “echo chamber,” they’re normalizing the bullying by pathologizing the bullied. In doing so, they’re not only denying the reality of our situation, but helping to create it. Let’s not let ourselves deny our reality no matter what they or anybody says or doesn’t say. That would be self-gaslighting.
Bottom line: we don’t need to engage with people who are abusive or who normalize abuse. There are so many terrific independent media folks on Bluesky and other platforms now posting, writing, doing pods and videos, as well as plenty of respectful, kind people to engage with, including having respectful debates. We need to actively take care of ourselves in these next four years and beyond. It’s past time Democrats and non-MAGA allies engage in healthy boundaries. #BigBlueSkyBoundaries
*If there are folks who voted for Trump who truly want to engage in a real dialogue with a goal of understanding, I’d do that. But this is not that. I know that. You know that. The pundits know that. And the bullies know that.