I tweeted recently about how sometimes it's okay to hurt others, how sometimes it's necessary to preserve ourselves and our boundaries, and that simply accusing someone of "hurting people" doesn't necessarily mean they're doing anything wrong.
But this argument seems vulnerable-
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to being used by true abusers, people who are seeking justification for terrible behaviors that go beyond simple boundaries. And the distinction can be really fuzzy - how do you know if someone is being terrible, or simply enforcing boundaries?
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One bad sign is if they view the pain they've caused as wrong. Abusers tend to have black and white thinking - "If I'm right in my boundary enforcement, then you're not allowed to be hurt by it." Nonabusers allow both realities - "I stand by my choice, but it's ok to be hurt."
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Another bad sign is if they can't empathize with you. Sometimes not-empathizing is in itself a healthy boundary, ofc, but a skillful person will hurt you as though they are hurting themselves - with deep love, taking both of you together as a contextual unit, not as separate.
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Another way to tell is to follow the ownership of expression. If someone fully owns what they're expressing - it's their experience, they're not making you responsible for it, it's the genuine raw experience of *them* in the world - then they're less likely to be doing abuse.
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