Personal Boundaries
[jbox]Boundaries define limits, mark off dividing lines. The purpose of a boundary is to make clear separations between different turf, different territory. . . .[/jbox]
There are two types of boundaries. Natural boundaries, which are part of the way life works – they are aligned with the reality of the rules that govern human dynamics, and personal boundaries. Let’s concentrate on personal boundaries.
The process of Recovery teaches us how to take down the walls and protect ourselves in healthy ways – by learning what healthy boundaries are, how to set them, and how to defend them. It teaches us to be discerning in our choices, to ask for what we need, and to be assertive and Loving in meeting our own needs. (Of course many of us have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for us to have needs.)
The purpose of having boundaries is to protect and take care of ourselves. We need to be able to tell other people when they are acting in ways that are not acceptable to us. A first step is starting to know that we have a right to protect and defend ourselves. That we have not only the right, but also the duty, to take responsibility for how we allow others to treat us.
We need to start becoming aware of what healthy behaviour and acceptable interaction dynamics look like before we can start practicing them ourselves – and demanding the proper treatment from others. We need to start learning how to be emotionally honest with ourselves, how to start owning our feelings, and how to communicate in a direct and honest manner. Setting personal boundaries is vital part of healthy relationships – which are not possible without communication.
The first thing that we need to learn to do is communicate without blaming. That means, stop saying things like: you make me so angry; you hurt me; you make me crazy; how could you do that to me after all I have done for you; etc. These are the very types of messages we got in childhood that has so warped our perspective on our own emotional process.
I grew up believing that I had the power to make my father angry and to break my mother’s heart. I thought that I was supposed to be perfect, and that if I was not, I was causing the people I loved great pain. I grew up believing that something was wrong with me because I was human. I grew up believing that I had power over other people’s feelings – and they had power over mine.
In my co-dependency I learned to be enmeshed with other people – to not have healthy boundaries that told me who “I” was, and that I was a separate person from them. I had to become hyper-vigilant in childhood. I learned to focus on trying to interpret what my parents and other authority figures were feeling in order to try to protect myself. As an adult, I unconsciously tried to manipulate people – by trying to be what they wanted me to be if I wanted them to like me, or trying to be either intimidating or invisible if that seemed the safest course. I had no real concept of being responsible for my own feelings because I had learned that other people were responsible for my feelings – and vice versa. I had to learn to start defining myself emotionally as separate from other people in order to start learning who I was.
I was not able to start seeing myself as separate in a healthy way (I had always felt that I was separate in an unhealthy way – shameful and unworthy) until I started to see that I had been powerless over the behaviour patterns I learned in childhood. Since my behaviour patterns, my behavioural and emotional defence systems, had developed in reaction to the feeling that there was something wrong with me, I had to learn to start taking power away from the toxic shame that is at the core of this disease. Toxic shame involves thinking that there is something wrong with who we are. Guilt – in my definition – involves behaviour, while shame is about our being. Guilt is: I did something wrong; I made a mistake. Shame is: I am a mistake; something is wrong with me.
‘On an emotional level the dance of Recovery is owning and honouring the emotional wounds so that we can release the grief energy – the pain, rage, terror, and shame that is driving us.
That shame is toxic and is not ours – it never was! We did nothing to be ashamed of – we were just little kids. Just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, and their parents before them, etc., etc. This is shame about being human that has been passed down from generation to generation.
There is no blame here, there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and scrambled minds.’ ¹
In order to stop giving the toxic shame so much power, I had to learn to detach from my own reactive process enough to start being able to see a boundary between being and behaviour. I had to stop judging myself and other people based on behaviour. I started to learn how to observe behaviour without making judgments about myself and others. There is a huge difference between judgment in my definition and observation. It is vital for me to observe other people’s behaviour in order to protect myself. That does not mean I need to make a value judgment about their being based upon their behaviour.
Judgment is saying, “that person is a jerk.” Observation is saying, “that person seems to be really full of anger and it would be better for me to not be involved with them.”
‘When I use the term “judge,” I am talking about making judgments about our own or other people’s being based on behaviour. In other words, I did something bad therefore I am a bad person; I made a mistake therefore I am a mistake. That is what toxic shame is all about: feeling that something is wrong with our being, that we are somehow defective because we have human drives, human weaknesses, human imperfections.
There may be behaviour in which we have engaged that we feel ashamed of but that does not make us shameful beings We may need to make judgments about whether our behaviour is healthy and appropriate but that does not mean that we have to judge our essential self, our being, because of the behaviour. Our behaviour has been dictated by our disease, by our childhood wounds; it does not mean that we are bad or defective as beings. It means that we are human; it means that we are wounded.
It is important to start setting a boundary between being and behaviour. All humans have equal Divine value as beings – no matter what our behaviour. Our behaviour is learned (and/or reactive to physical or physiological conditions). Behaviour, and the attitudes that dictate behaviour, are adopted defences designed to allow us to survive in the Spiritually hostile, emotionally repressive, dysfunctional environments into which we were born.’