Social safety is the tool that creates the boundary between you and people that have lost their agency and become harmful. The social safety tool also helps determine who is best to surround ourselves with relative to that individual's degree of personal self-love. Also, we can choose who supports us in being our best in the journey of becoming.
If someone doesn't love themselves, it will be proportionally unsafe for us to socialize with them due to neurological influences, like mirror neurons, that will affect our own self-love. If someone doesn't love themselves, they cannot encourage us as a role model through their actions to love our self. Approximating our relationships with others, relative to their self-love, can protect our personal integrity. By doing so, we nurture our own self and can have relations with others that are learning from their mistakes, promote mutual growth and limit negative influences from those who are misguided.
This skill at taking space from people is easy with those that we have no attachment to or do not have deep feelings of love for. However, when those we care about like our families, friends or intimate partners, begin to disregard their mistakes and perpetuate harm to us, they place themselves in an unsafe category.
Every individual has a degree of self-awareness and agency, or control over themselves and their decisions. Sometimes our deeply ingrained habits can fall out the radar of our self-awareness and our agency. Problems of personality disorders, psychosis or substance abuse can place an individual into an unsafe category even though at some times they wish to gain control and care for us. Being realistic of people's limitations is important for us to know what distance and individual can have in our life without directly or indirectly causing harm.
The difficulty is learning temperance and not removing oneself from responsibility, withdrawing to cause harm, or being malicious in intention when another has caused harm to us. It is useful to utilize the other tools and methods mentioned in the Practical Philosophy section, like the Social Reports Tool, as a means to bring greater awareness to those that have problems of self-awareness and agency that cause harm to themselves or others.
Taking space is not an all-or-nothing boundary but approximated to the degree of safety or harm that the individual displays through the learning curve of their habits and awareness. If, for example, someone is violent, the individual would have to remove oneself from physical space and it would be recommended to have at least 6 months of good behaviour and a confirmation from a group therapy session between the individual who is being harmed and the person who loses control, to confirm the progress of the individual's anger management.
On the other hand, if someone is suffering from substance abuse issues, the agent can direct the individual to rehab, psychotherapy, or counselling and help guide them from a distance where the good of being supportive is not disproportional to any potential harm like stealing or emotional abuse.
If someone loses control of their emotions, the agent can simply let the person know that they have lost control of themselves, take a 5 minute break and attempt to try communicate again. We are all human and will necessarily make mistakes sometimes. Therefore taking a moment to recollect ourselves and approach a situation with a new mind and emotional stability can be quite beneficial. Trusting our self or our partners when a 'time out' is needed, can be very useful and is a habit we have the opportunity to develop.
This technique is situational specific and in my book I will offer a more detailed breakdown that will make it easier to apply. The general principle is to approximate oneself to others relative to the degree of safety in the 5 categories of self-love listed in the Self-Love Tool.
The main requirement for a relationship is growth and it is unrealistic to expect others to be perfect. We all have areas of weakness and being open to accepting our mistakes and areas of growth is the fundamental element of a healthy relationship. If individuals are able to communicate and cooperate on becoming the best versions of themselves, they can have authentic friendships and intimate relationships. (see Friendship)
Mistake Protocol
1. Situation: Socializing.
2. If other makes a mistake or is harmful, communicate to them the harm.
3. If other corrects the mistake then continue socializing.
4. If other disregards the mistake, then take space until you are emotionally stable then attempt to re-communicate the mistake again.
5. Upon re-engagement, explain why space was taken and the mistake that was made.
6. Request that the individual commits to learning from the mistake to prevent causing future harm.
7. Hold space until the other accepts responsibility for their actions to protect self from harm.
AJ 7.2.18, 19.2.18 , 14.3.18, 29.5.18, 9.8.18, 27.3.20
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