People don’t respect my boundaries. I am so, SO sick of it.

I cannot recall a single time where I’ve set a boundary and someone responded in a way that didn’t make it hard for me to enforce that boundary and make it harder for me to set new ones going forward. I am not exaggerating.

The most obvious issue I run into is people straight up ignoring my boundaries. Sometimes it’s played off as a joke, but it’s really not funny. For example, I’ll say “please don’t tap me” and they’ll proceed to immediately tap me as a “joke” and say something stupid like “ohh you mean like this??” Other times people will just tell me I’m being too sensitive when I set a boundary or say/imply that my boundary is stupid. And other times, people will just not even acknowledge the fact that I’ve set a boundary at all.

The other issue I run into is people making me feel bad for setting boundaries. A more tame example of this is when I told my grandma that I don’t like being touched so much, as she is very touchy feely and I have sensory issues, and then every time she was doing hello/goodbye hugs she would make a point of saying something along the lines of “well, I guess I can’t give YOU a hug”. Eventually I told her she could hug me, and she went back to being super touchy feely with me. >!An even worse example that still haunts me is when I dated in high school and I clearly established every time I started dating someone that I didn’t want any sexual relations, yet every guy I’ve dated has guilted me into doing stuff I didn’t wanna do.!<

I know a lot of this doesn’t seem very serious to people because I’m seen as overly sensitive by most, and my boundaries are seen as insignificant, but they hold a lot of significance to me, otherwise I wouldn’t set them, as I already have trouble setting boundaries anyways, so if I am gonna set one it’s gonna be something that matters a lot to me. I’ve pretty much just stopped trying at this point since no one’s gonna respect my boundaries anyways and it just makes me feel guilty to try to set them, but it sucks because I‘m uncomfortable so much of the time and constantly holding back how upset certain things make me, and at this point I hardly even wanna socialize anymore.