dogforpresident

Also not OP, but your question reminded me of a podcast that has stuck with me (the “how to survive family time” episode of the Unfuck Your Brain podcast). Her point was that we spend so much time stressing and ruminating about whether or not somebody is going to push their buttons, when unfortunately that person is almost DEFINITELY going to push their buttons and you have no control over what they do so the best use of energy is to plan your response.

This caveats into the boundary thing now, there’s no reasonable way to set a boundary that will prevent people from asking about your family (maybe refusing to engage in society but that would proooobably be an UNreasonable boundary). As you said it’s a hard topic to avoid. Since they will DEFINITELY ask, find your boundary and stick to it.

Examples: - “I’m not in contact with my family.” - “I no longer speak to my family for reasons I’d like to keep personal.” - “I cut contact with family to keep myself away from harmful and criminal activities they were involved in, but am not comfortable discussing it further.” - “My family and I don’t speak. You’re a good friend and I don’t mind sharing a bit more but since we are at work/in public/having a fun night out/etc., I won’t be getting into it right now.”

Then when people keep pushing, I find my customer service persona takes over. Just repeat “I am not willing to discuss that,” “Sorry, that’s personal,” “This is not a topic I’m willing to engage in so let’s please focus on the task at hand or unfortunately I will have to leave.”

Say this repeatedly with the same calm sorry-but-there’s-nothing-I-can-do vibe a cashier would say “Sorry, we are out of mcchickens,” “I am happy to serve you some nuggets or a filet o fish but we have no mcchickens at this time so I am unable to do that for you,” “unfortunately mcchickens will be unavailable until we are restocked tomorrow so I’d love to ring something else up for you if you like but otherwise I will have to step away to serve the next customer.”

You might worry about making things awkward but actually that’s the fault of your conversation partner for repeatedly pushing into your personal business despite several rebukes.

You can also just tell them to F off of course! But here’s a few more options, idk… hope this helps!

Thanks for doing this! A few questions: Do you have any success stories to share about how your safe consumption site has made a positive impact on someone’s life?

I feel like there is a lot of hate and dehumanization aimed at drug users, do you agree? If so, what has it been like for you facing that as both a leader for your organization and also as someone who was in that lifestyle?

What do you think is the biggest thing that needs to change in order to prevent more people falling victim to drug addiction?