People testing your boundaries

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There's a topic that ties in with bullying in a large way, one that we find hard to navigate at times due to our lack of perception of subtlety from others, and that's when people test your boundaries. As a man with ASD, at the high-functioning (Asperger) side of the spectrum, I've occasionally had people try to "test me" to see how I'd react, and if they could "walk all over me". Trouble is, I kinda took it as hyperbole from childhood when dumbass educators and counsellors told me "just ignore them (turn the other cheek or whatever crap), they're just trying to get a rise out of you." Of course, typically it leads to something more sinister, the tormentor is like an addict and the behaviour's like heroin to them.

Granted this boundary-testing can be more frequent depending on context - like in a place like prison it happens early and often - but in a typical workplace, not nearly as much. In school, it varies, like I mostly went to an upper-middle class school while living with one parent so it wasn't as bad, but one year I was with my other parent and I went to a school "from the wrong side" and it was hell. It can certainly happen with house-mates, as I've had happen on more than one occasion. Trouble is, many times their behaviour is abusive but not illegal and you can't cross the line in standing up to them but sometimes it seems to escalate in that direction - ostensibly because we didn't stand up for ourselves earlier when they tested our boundaries (i.e. we didn't recognize or were reluctant to do something b/c of the "glass houses" mentality we have about ourselves) and now it's "too late to deflate" without taking more intense measures. So in those couple of cases, I did the rational thing and left.

An anecdote: in university, again it's generally rare but has happened, this one time I was at a local bar off-campus and was chatting up a girl, asked her to dance and she agreed - problem was there was this "former fake friend" who was hanging around there that night, some guy I trusted and thought was cool with me but just had a sarcastic veneer, and he butted in to us asking "mind if I cut in instead?" - they appeared to know each other already and he was a fairly big and athletic guy compared to me, so I submitted and walked away while his minions looked on and jeered at me. However, two months later I ran into him again by chance at a house party, and while his minions egged him on he grabbed and shoved me and called me "a fag", I just said he was a drunken idiot who didn't know what he was talking about and left, while most NTs would have felt compelled to bash him one. Clearly, it's because he knew I was "soft" from the prior incident, which I should have stood up on. I just didn't want to get doctors or lawyers involved I guess

Another thing that sort of deterred me from making a stand against boundary-testing, was that more than once in my childhood or teen years I had a "false positive" where someone was genuinely acting in a friendly or appropriate way, and I accused them, ostensibly b/c my mind had been so f*** around with in the past. So I regretted those incidents, but trouble is when the REAL ones come up and you have "false negatives", because you have to analyze it more thoroughly instead of reacting on gut intuition to get respect back, that's where our/my boundaries get crossed.

Yes, I had people "test" me too over the years. Some of them even offered the explanation that they were curious to see what it looked like when I was mad because they'd never seen me angry. I still don't understand why this is a need for some people.

It's fortunate that I'm in an environment where no one tries to actively provoke me now. I don't know what the best response is to those who feel the need to throw their weight around.

It takes some serious inspiration to really win some days. A read an article in Miracles magazine about a guy who was working as a clown, and took a short-cut through an underground parking garage to get to his next gig at another mall. Unfortunately, there were two rival gangs mugging people down there. When they both showed up to fight over the pleasure of messing him up, our clown stayed in character as an infant, and went waddling over calling on gang leader "Da Da!" They all just backed off from the crazy sight.
Another time, there was a hostage taking at a prison, and two days of very tense stand-off between the now-armed prisoners and the guards. Finally the warden snapped, and ordered his staff psychologist to go over and negotiate. He had been hired the week before, right out of school and was "supposed to know something." As he walked, reluctantly, across the no-man-land, he dropped into a slow Hollywood-gunfighter walk, pointing his fingers like guns, and started whistling the theme from "High Noon." Then, nobody could draw a bead on him, because the whole place was laughing so hard.
Sometimes, you can summon superior force in your defence, too, or just find another potential target or three to pal with.