After reading Cristien Storm’s excellent Empowered Boundaries: Speaking Truth, Setting Boundaries, and Inspiring Social Change, I’ve been thinking about my own boundaries and exploring boundaries with clients.
Storm does such an excellent job laying out the merits of boundaries, obstacles to them, and a simple but flexible framework for identifying and enacting boundaries that I’m going to recommend you read the book instead of offering a lot of my own thoughts. But one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is that boundaries are as much about connection and intimacy as they are about safety and separation.
Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.” There’s a complex truth in that. Separation allows for connection and greater intimacy. It is scary and uncomfortable to realize everyone else is inhabiting unique subjective and equally valid worlds.
A fence demarcates the line between us, reminds us that we are separate and have separate experiences. A fence reveals the limits of my territory and responsibility, and helps me to focus on cultivating the kind of experience I want to have. I can only care for what is within my territory and you can only care for what’s in yours. If I want to raise a beautiful garden and you want to pave your land and install an Olympic size pool, those are experiences we can have, but if the construction from your pool begins to harm the environment of my garden, we need to have a conversation. I can be accountable to what I’ve done, and give you feedback about how you affect me, but I am still only able to tend my land.
But a fence is not a wall—it is open and permeable, it allows for connection and exchange. Building a wall to shut out everyone around me means losing access to important information, resources, opportunities for alliance. The land does not truly belong to any of us, and we all affect and are affected by each other in our relationship to that land. The fence helps me to have focus on what is within my capacity to tend. I cannot tend the entire land, but I can tend my own territory.
My own tendencies toward conflict and boundary-setting have historically been avoidant, with certain notable times I would set boundaries and would experience them being ignored or overridden as though I’d said nothing at all.
That’s a story I tell about myself but it’s also not entirely true. As I write this, I remember a time in high school—when I was perhaps most fearful and inward—when some random people at a campsite approached me claiming that I’d stolen and destroyed their Confederate flag during the night. Though I was scared, I was surprised by how strongly I stood my ground and told them they had no proof and should leave me alone.
(In retrospect I imagine myself saying “I wish I had ripped up your fucking flag!” There was no reason for them to be flying that flag which wasn’t steeped in white supremacy. We were in Indiana, which fought for the Union. But I don’t think those words actually came out of my mouth. They were a group of older guys who looked in better shape than me, and I was meek enough. )
As I’ve deepened my work around my own needs and boundaries, I’ve learned how much avoiding boundary-setting is its own form of hiding and inauthenticity. For so long I thought it was good to be a person who was easy-going and bad to be a person who got angry or expressed disappointment. I remember adults commenting on how polite and patient I was when people behaved with disrespect toward me, and I built my ego structure around that praise.
But after a while, I realized it was a lie. The disrespect affected me, and mentally I was fully aware of the people who hurt or disrespected me. Instead of addressing it with them, though, I outwardly behaved like everything was okay—reassuring them it was fine—and then would emotionally distance myself. No one knew I was upset, but then people also didn’t know if I cared at all. The distancing manifested as simply withdrawing and not communicating with them, not making further plans, or getting really awkwardly controlling about future plans. At worst, I would find myself doing my innate power move of being really intellectualizing and criticizing the person from a “rational” perspective.
These defenses are very effective at both avoiding conflict and quietly ruining important relationships. There is a behavior punishing a prior transgression, but the person does not know what they did that was upsetting and has no opportunity to correct it or make amends. It also did not require me to take ownership of how I participated in the problem by not stepping up and clearly communicating my wants and needs.
In the past several years, I’ve been learning to tell my important people when I feel hurt, angry, or disappointed, which has felt awful and scary and embarrassing but also made so many of my relationships better.
Setting a boundary communicates that I care about something, reveals myself to the other person. Indeed, it often communicates that I care very much about the other person. That I cleared my calendar to make plans with you tonight and it hurts that you let something else take priority. That I want to be present when I hurt you but I feel flooded and overwhelmed when you raise your voice and criticize me instead of talking about your feelings. That I want us to be closer, but when you dismiss or ignore my feelings I feel shut down and sense myself emotionally moving away.
These are not punitive consequences, things I am saying or doing to hurt you, these are genuine expressions of my experience for you to consider. If you want to keep going in the ways that cross my boundaries and cause these consequences, then I need much firmer and thicker boundaries. If you want us to be closer, you’ll notice the consequences and respect the boundary.