Rocking the boat. This makes me smile. I have rocked many a boat in my life and nowadays, I’m completely OK with it. In the past, when the boat was rocked and I was punished, I would protest inside (but this is unfair!). Nowadays, I fully accept that it’s pretty expected. If I genuinely believe that I’m being treated unfairly because the boat is rocked, I defend myself – if I decide that there is need for it. Sometimes, I may just let go or leave as well. Admittedly
I sometimes feel pretty smug about rocking some boats – those boats that want to include me or try to include me in a group that’s prone to choose and target some innocents; some ”Professional” environments of mine have been crucibles like this.
So, in my family: I think I have been rocking the boat from my teenage years onward. I had anger issues with my mother and because she has obsessions with being a “democratic family”, there hasn’t been one incident where I didn’t defend my boundaries on this ground
We are a highly political family, mother being the colonizer, me being the colonized. But I’m a subaltern has a sense of a free country (either because she isn’t a full-fledged NPD, because my father had a balancing role, or because I somehow survived through this childhood with behaviours becoming more prominent through self-sabotage rather than submission.)
Recently, I have rocked a very serious boat in my mother’s family’s narcissistic unit by exposing something serious that happened when I was a teenager.
With my friends. Again, I’m not sure. With controlling elder females friends that I was drawn to when I was younger and unhappy, I think I rocked the boat as soon as I felt like that. This didn’t happen through a conscious decision, the boat got rocked when I expressed my new wishes, my new boundaries. It then became very easy to drop those friendships.
With some other close female friends (my besties), I can’t imagine that a boat can be rocked. We can have disagreements, differences, but there is no fear as to what may happen if the boat is rocked. We’ll still be loving friends, I know this.
With a friend, I now see (with the help of FHTH) that I rocked the boat unknowingly. I have no control on that. Unfortunately, my friend and I didn’t have enough closeness to know each other’s reality about us.
In a significant long-term relationship, I think I was afraid of rocking the boat while on the surface I was defending my boundaries. It was a mess on my behalf. We were involved in dysfunction and were living in the rocky boat but we couldn't leave it. It was like being afraid of stabilizing the boat I suppose.
In professional circles, my experiences have been very tiresome sometimes but I have learnt a lot from them. Basically, I'll do what I believe is true and if the boat is rocked it's rocked. There is nothing I can do about that. I've paid for it severely in my career before but am OK with it. I was expected to take sides with people I didn't believe were acting sensibly and they seriously survived on flattery and cliques. I don't regret anything I've done really.
