this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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How do I draw the line between accommodating a fellow ND's needs and drawing healthy boundaries for myself?
I'm the house manager at a sober living home, and there is a new resident that's been driving me up a wall recently, and I can't tell if it's me being ableist or me being tired of being taken advantage of by someone who refuses to do some growing up.
He's an autistic trans man, and talks about nothing but traumas. He's escaping a bad domestic situation, and he talks a lot about it. On one hand, I know he needs space to talk about it a little bit. On the other hand, it's literally all he talks about. Me and someone else will be having a completely normal conversation and he'll just interrupt it with "Oh yeah, insert x trauma here" and half of them are ones he's already spoken about at length repeatedly.
He also needs me to constantly remind him of things. Now I'm not above needing some reminding, so this is something that I'm happy to do for him, but some of the things and the frequency of the reminders seems a bit excessive. For example, I have to remind him of how to wash dishes because if I don't he won't clean the outside of the dishes or won't use the sponge to scrub them. This morning I had to remind him multiple times to text sober living staff to get his proof of residency, but he didn't do it until we were in line for a food bank. When he was waiting for a text back, he told me she hadn't texted back multiple times, each time I just said "She's a busy person, there are 15 other houses". I've had to remind him 3 times in the past 2 days of restrictions on his public transit account because he missed some rides. He'll try to book more rides and start freaking out that he can't book rides, so I have to read the message that pops up on his phone out loud over and over again that explains what he can do (he can still book rides, just two at a time and not a certain number of days in advance). I have to remind him of what time his rides are even though there's a list of his ride times on his phone. I have to remind him that the laundry machine is still running so he doesn't try to open it while it's locked and break it even though there's a light on there that shows when it's on. He asked me 3 times if it was going to rain today, each time I looked it up and told him the weather said no, but 30 minutes later he'd ask again. Yesterday I had to show him how to put things in cardboard boxes. Like I said, some of these things just seem ridiculous to me, but I'm not sure if I'm being ableist and should accommodate all this or if this is just someone who refuses to grow up. This is someone like 5 years older than me, he has multiple children.
Experiencing trauma can contribute to memory issues, unfortunately. I'm not sure what a great solution is. That sounds hard.
But I'd say at the very least, it's appropriate to reinforce that bringing up trauma can be retraumatizing to other people and needs to be kept to therapy.
Yeah, right now I'm trying to be understanding. A lot of the people who have came through the house that need a bit more assistance gravitate towards me because I am patient with them no matter what, like I didn't lose my cool with him at any point. But I also have a habit of bottling things in and just snapping at some point, and I'm trying to avoid that because then I'll actually be an asshole and it will be beyond what is justified.
He's a nice person at least, and that makes me a lot more patient with him. I've had much worse housemate before, but this is the housemate that's been expending the most of my energy because being as supportive as they need so far has proven to be harder than watching after my autistic children when I was a step parent.
Good for you for sticking with it. Maybe try to set aside some time for a conversation where you're like "I'm happy to help you with X, but also there is a lot of shit going on in my life too and so I can't help you this much with Y or Z." Even if his behavior doesn't change much afterwards, clear communication might help avoid resentment on your part.