Boundaries

Boundaries.

This seems to be one of the buzz words in the psychology world right now, and it’s about damn time.

This is a topic I explore with clients all year long but with the holidays right around the corner, it would seem every session lately at least touches on this topic in some way.

I mostly with with adolescent and adult women navigating relationships and, if you ask me, the topic of boundaries is foundational to this work. Now, I could write a hundred blog posts on the social construct around femininity and being a comfort/convenience for the world around them, but that’s not what this post is specifically about, but let me know if I should dive into that a different time.

For now, I want to explore a common theme that comes up when I talk with my clients about setting boundaries and this theme can be captured with one question I frequently get:

“But what if I hurt their feelings?”

If I had a dollar for every time I had this same thought, I would be retired on an island somewhere. This has been a major area of my own work, as well as many of my clients, and maybe you reading this right now so let’s talk about it!

“What if I hurt their feelings?”

My first response to this is validation. This is such a natural fear or anxiety to experience. If you experience any empathy at all, you know that it doesn’t feel good to make another person feel bad.

My second response is in the form of a question to my client about why we must set boundaries in the first place: how might this person know they are infringing on a boundary if you do not vocalize it? Some of the responses I get include:

“Well they should just know!”

“It’s just so obvious that what they are doing is inappropriate”.

“Everyone knows that’s not okay”.

I would be lying if I said these same thoughts don’t also go through my head. But here is where I gently point out that we might be making a lot of assumptions:

-This other person could have been brought up in a family system that, whatever the action is, wasn’t considered inappropriate,

-They could have been socialized that what they are doing is okay,

-There might be a social cue at play that the other person is not aware of,

-No one has ever said anything about it to them,

-They may lack self awareness and/or intuition,

-Or yes, there’s always that potential that there is malintent; that they don’t care about your comfortability and needs, that they are potentially experiencing a lack of empathy and only want to fulfill their needs, sure.

But in a moment where someone is violating your boundary, we do not have the luxury of sorting through all of these assumptions to identify its source and we will probably never even know the answer; they may not even know the answer!

Therefore, the most simple and effective action is to slash through all of those assumptions and make your boundary clear to them.

I see this as a sort of kindness to the other person. If they are never told what they are doing is violating some sort of boundary, they may continue on doing this behavior and be consistently met with negativity but may not be able to connect those two things together. To clearly lay something out eliminates any uncertainty. If we keep tip toeing around it, this person may always live in confusion and suffer when we think they “should just know”, which is an intuitive skill most have not cultivated.

You can set this boundary gently, but the longer you wait to set this boundary, the more your irritation and resentfulness will build up.

A quick note here: another blog post is required to explore what happens when someone continues pushing on and violating your boundaries. This post is solely for exploring the fear around hurting feelings of another when needing to set a boundary. One element at a time here, people!

The next stop on the Boundaries Express! When a client tells me they are worried about hurting someone’s feelings when setting a boundary, I tell them that that is not a good enough reason for them to not enforce their boundaries. Now I say this much more gentle in a session, but for sake of time, that’s the gist.

Listen up my friend: no one will fight for your boundary as strongly as you will. Not even your closest friends, family and confidants can fight for something on your behalf the way you can. Not because they don’t care, not at all, but because it doesn’t belong to them. For example: if I am helping a friend clean their house, I can only do that for so long until I have to go back to my own home. I will never be as invested in their home as they are, simply because I have my own that I need to tend too as well.

To not set a boundary because we are afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings is like spending all day at their house, worried about how messy their home is, when they aren’t concerned about that at all and all you want to do is go home but continue to stay there.

Lastly, a personal revelation that I have been offering to clients to explore: to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, we are robbing them of an experience to feel those feelings.

HEAR ME OUT!

Human beings have the capability to feel every emotion there is, more or less. Each emotion is crucial to the experience of this life. Afterall, you cannot have the light without the dark.

Human beings are also pain avoidant creatures and will do a lot of things to avoid feeling bad/negative feelings. However, if you ask most therapists, we would say that we cannot avoid feeling certain feelings and have things turn out great. We must allow ourselves to feel every feeling as it crosses our path, as they all contain a lesson for us. Further, feeling all the feelings is an invitation for growth and, if you really want to get into it, ascension towards enlightenment.

To avoid hurting someone’s feelings is taking away an opportunity for them to turn inward, feel those feelings, integrate that experience which would lend itself to growth. Now we are empathetic creatures to varying degrees, we know that feeling bad feelings sucks and it also sucks being the barer of those bad feelings. However, if we can zoom out for a moment, and see this interaction as a blimp on the radar, a micro-second in the vastness of this lifetime, we might see this as a small painful moment on the mountain climb towards our highest selves (this got deep, real fast).

Another fear that occurs for people is: “what if I hurt their feelings and they never speak to me again?”

I will not lie to you: this could very well happen. To invite someone to feel their hurt feelings does not automatically ensure that they are ready or even capable in this moment to see this experience as that: an invitation for introspection and growth. However, we have no control over that. There’s no way to measure someone’s capabilities of insightfulness before we set a boundary.

However, we did just plant a seed and the day you plant the seed is not the day you harvest. It may take them an entire lifetime (or two) to actualization the lesson in that boundary and the emotional reaction it triggered in them. That is also between them and their therapist, not between you and them.

To set a boundary and invite them to feel those feelings is in service of everyone’s highest selves, yourself and the other.

I know this is hard, but you can do hard things! The more practice you get at setting boundaries in a way that feels aligned with your values, the more confident you become. The people who can honor and appreciate those boundaries will flock to you, and the ones who are unable are simply set on another path of their own. It sucks when we might have to say goodbye to that person, but nothing is worth having to say goodbye to yourself which is what happens each time you do not set a loving boundary.

Go forth this holiday season! Strategize with your therapist as this post is for educational purposes only, and know that boundaries are are beautiful thing.