Building Boundaries When You're Buck Naked (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798197360380)

The codependent in a clothed context is a recognizable figure. She is the mother who does too much. She is the friend who is too available. She is the colleague who absorbs the projects nobody else wants. She is the wife who manages her husband's feelings as a full-time second job. She is, in many cases, the woman who has built an entire identity around being the one who shows up, and who has not, in many years, asked herself what she would want to do with her time if she were not, perpetually, showing up.

The codependent in a nudist context is, in my opinion, an underdiscussed phenomenon, and one of the things I want to do in this book is name her, because she is a particular figure who has not, I think, gotten enough attention in the nudism literature. Most of what is written about boundaries in nudist spaces is written about how to defend against the manipulators, the touchers, the encroachers, the people who would violate your physical space. This is important work, and I have done a lot of it in other books. What I have not, before this book, fully addressed is what happens when there is no manipulator. What happens in the ordinary, friendly, well-meaning social fabric of a nudist community when an empath who has not done her boundary work walks into it.

What happens is, in short, that the empath gets eaten. Not by anyone in particular. Not by any one person. She gets slowly, gently, continuously eaten by the cumulative weight of every small request, every small assumption, every small social pressure that comes her way over the course of a weekend, an evening, a year. Each individual bite is so small that it does not register as a violation. The cumulative effect, however, is that by the end of the weekend, or the end of the year, the empath is exhausted, depleted, and unable to identify what has happened to her, because no single moment of harm has occurred. She has, simply, said yes to a thousand small things, none of which she fully wanted, and the thousand small yeses have, in aggregate, consumed her.