WHAT WE GET WRONG ABOUT BOUNDARIES
12 JULY 2022 (13 MIN READ)
The term “boundaries” has taken the self-help world by storm, having everyone and their mothers constantly rambling on about the importance of them. Don’t get me wrong, boundaries definitely have their place, but they have been manipulated by the masses to unconsciously condone severe narcissistic behavior and resistance to any negative emotion. Before I go down the road of explaining their downfalls, let’s begin by explaining what boundaries get right. In essence, what personal boundaries do, is tell someone else how you deserve to be treated. Thus, somebody with no boundaries will welcome all kinds of treatment—even the highest forms of disrespect. People like this often find themselves in abusive relationships and friendships, as they do not stand up for themselves in the sense of revealing what treatment they deserve. For cases like this, boundaries do wonders, saving people from abuse and creating a new world of increased love and kindness for them. Another thing boundaries get right is the way they can aid in healing triggered points of trauma in a relationship, such as a partner doing their best to not trigger their partner’s trauma, as their partner has revealed a boundary surrounding that specific part of their pain. This can look like a partner not calling their wife names because her parents would constantly call her names and it causes her too much pain. However, boundaries are not being primarily used in these beneficial ways anymore. They are being manipulated by people to match their own internal narcissistic world.
Since one’s boundaries are reflective of the treatment they think they deserve, what happens when somebody believes that they should be treated like a princess or a king? They will state boundaries to others that lead them to treat them in that manner, controlling them until they act exactly like they want them to. Due to today’s deeply narcissistic culture, created by the consequences of social media and woke culture, more people than ever believe that they should be treated like a royal. They may not perceive it in that manner, but their behavior and actions align with that reality. Think about the aspiring influencer who flips out at the barista for not using oat milk or the young Gen Z-er who throws a hissy fit over a microaggression. The constant occurrence of situations like these are a result of a collectively unhealthy relationship to boundaries. So, how do we fix this problem? And how do we develop a healthy expectation of what boundaries should look like for us?
The rest of this article will answer these questions by arguing that unhealthy boundaries are created by a resistance to experience any kind of trigger, an inability to lose control, and narcissistic expectations. Nevertheless, we can remedy these problems by working through them, as well as learning how to build bridges instead of boundaries, where both people get their needs met, rather than just one getting on their high horse and leaving the other to suffer.
RESISTANCE TO TRIGGERS
Triggers get a bad rep, since most people in today’s day and age do everything they can to avoid them. I am not necessarily talking about big trigger points, such as ones stemming from PTSD, but rather smaller ones that we can handle as human beings. These small to mid-level triggers serve as reminders as to what we need to heal inside ourselves. For instance, if a romantic interest is doing a poor job at answering our texts quickly and we get triggered, the trigger can aid us in finding where this point of pain stems from, usually from a distant parent. When we take this trigger and use it to learn about the inception of our pain, we can heal ourselves quite well and become more in control of our emotions. But what happens if we immediately start creating a boundary? Such as telling this romantic interest that they must answer our texts fast or just leaving them. This “boundary” does not aid your development; it merely extends the control of your pain over your life, because you are allowing the resistance to the trigger to dictate the course of your relationships. Thus, if we keep ignoring the whispers of our triggers and creating unnecessary boundaries to protect ourselves, the pain that created them will keep controlling our lives until we heal it. So what’s the best way out of this? Learning how to use discernment in choosing when to state boundaries.
I hate to break it to you, but life is a deeply uncomfortable, painful experience. And the more we do not accept that reality, the more we will block ourselves off from genuine human connection and personal freedom. If we live our lives in complete resistance to our uncomfortable emotions, we will do whatever we can to control others to not trigger them inside ourselves, creating unnecessary boundaries that block us from proper connection. Living on this boat of constantly protecting ourselves from pain, we will never feel safe allowing somebody to completely be themselves in front of us, as we will be trying to control their words and actions to not hurt us. Due to these protective boundaries, we will not be able to properly connect with people out of fear, which is a fast-track route to living a miserable life. And in terms of personal freedom, if we live our lives in fear of negative emotions, our every waking moment will be spent doing whatever we can to run away. When we spend our whole lives running, guess what we can’t do? Sit down and enjoy the ride. To break this bad pattern, learn to sit with and tolerate your negative feelings, refusing to push them away and listening to the messages they are trying to deliver to you. Often, if we create the space for them to, our most painful emotions let us know what has to change in our lives for us to find freedom. Once you have learnt to tolerate the negative feelings inside yourself, you will not be as resistant to other people triggering them, since you now know how to handle a negative emotion and learn from it. Boxing legend/modern philosopher Mike Tyson once said that whoever causes you internal discomfort serves as your master; if they control how you feel, then they control you. We cannot keep handing people this power, and the easiest way to keep doing it is to constantly create boundaries that disallow you from feeling the emotions that are there to tell you what’s wrong. And if you silence the truth about yourself, then you land in a world of lies, where you can be easily manipulated by others. The only way to find this truth is through allowing your triggers to communicate what needs healing inside yourself. However, when do we know if a trigger goes beyond healing? This is where discernment will work wonders.
In terms of what triggers require boundaries, consider the acronym DIG: Disrespect, Intellectualizing, and Gaslighting. If somebody outright disrespects you, and no I’m not talking about a harmless joke or microaggression, then a boundary is required to stand up for yourself and let this person know that you will not stand for their shit. Although intellectualizing may sound like a weird word to pick in this circumstance, consider all the times where you just wanted to talk to somebody about how you feel, but what you got in return was somebody psychoanalyzing you and telling you why your feelings are incorrect due to X, Y, and Z. We rarely desire people to rationalize our emotions for us, we just need somebody to understand how we feel. Therefore, a nice boundary to have in your relationships is letting somebody know that you are not interested in being analyzed, but you just want compassion and understanding for what you are feeling. And for the last one, gaslighting, you should never allow someone to trick you into believing that a genuine concern of yours is not valid or does not exist. Good boundaries work wonders in not allowing yourself to get gaslighted. Other than these three key areas where boundaries are incredibly helpful, use your discernment as to whether or not you are just protecting yourself from feeling any kind of discomfort by creating an unnecessary boundary.
LOSING CONTROL
The more walls you build up in your personal relationships, the more frightened you tend to be of getting hurt. And these walls are expressed as boundaries, communicating to people what treatment you will accept through them. But all these boundaries are doing is allowing you to hold on to control as much as you can, potentially saving yourself from getting hurt. Although this may sound like a good thing, if all we are doing is protecting ourselves in our relationships through control, then we can never really enjoy or trust the experience. And if we cannot enjoy or trust the experience of friendship, can it even be called a friendship? No. It serves as the opposite of that—a vehicle to extend our sense of power over the world, where nothing or no one can hurt us. To defeat this damaging habit and experience the fruits of beautiful, trusting relationships, you first need to investigate where the need for control stems from. What is the feeling you are so deathly afraid of experiencing? If you need help answering the question, then investigate the commonality of the boundaries you express, hopefully giving you clues as to what point of pain you are most adamant about avoiding. Once you have gotten familiar with the sensation, allow it to guide you to where it was first created. Most of the time, in circumstances over needing control, the pain stems from having no control over the suffering inflicted on us by someone in our childhood. We must clear the stored, painful somatic experience from our body by allowing ourselves to feel the terror, rather than doing everything we can to not feel it. To do so, picture yourself in that moment where the pain started happening and sit with your younger self, holding them while they process their emotions. What also helps in healing from these situations is telling the person who hurt you, in that specific moment in your mind, what they should have been told. After repeating this process a couple of times, over time you should notice the sensation of pain that causes the need for control to lessen. However, you still have to work on breaking the habit itself of controlling.
As much as we like to think otherwise, we cannot control anybody but ourselves, especially when it comes to how they make us feel. The more we repeat this truth to ourselves, the more likely we are to live by it. Nobody can make us feel a negative emotion, rather, we choose to interpret the words in a manner that triggers negative emotions inside us. So the real trick here is learning that the only control we have is the way we choose to interpret things. In my head when a conversation with someone triggers my negative emotions, I always ask myself, “What interpretation of this situation is causing me to have these sensations?” Once I find the answer, I both gain awareness about myself and snap back into the present moment of peace. (Obviously, to reiterate for my socially sensitive readers, if somebody is outright spewing hatred or dangerous words, then your angry reactions are justified and should be used in whatever manner you desire). Another useful tip when it comes to breaking our desire for external control is knowing that we have the power to bring ourselves back from internal pain. And if you master the exercise in the previous paragraph, I promise you will start to feel like nothing can fuck with you. When we know that we can both soothe ourselves when we are in pain and come back stronger, we will not feel the need to control others into acting the way we “need” them to, because we will no longer be afraid of the negative sensations their unpredictability may cause. Each trigger caused by someone else is an opportunity to get stronger, always remember that.
NARCISSISTIC EXPECTATIONS
Comedic genius, Ricky Gervais, has an excellent quote that is especially relevant to the overall point of this section: “How arrogant are you to think that you deserve to go through life with no one ever saying anything that you don’t agree with or like?” Unfortunately, a large share of people in today’s day and age possess that level of arrogance, providing endless boundaries around how they should be treated so they do not feel the slightest bit of emotional discomfort. Those people should know that life is not a fucking fairy tale. We cannot be so delusional to expect everyone in the world to treat us exactly the way we want to be treated. It is in this wretched expectation that deep division and narcissism are spread rampantly throughout society. Due to the echo chambers provided in social media, where every algorithm-recommended post aligns with our exact worldview, we start to believe that the real world aligns with all of our opinions on how human beings should relate to one another, and anyone who steps outside of that perception is a hateful bigot who has no business sharing this earth with us. In reality, this echo chamber represents a tiny fraction of the world. The rest are merely focusing on trying to make ends meet to feed their families who depend on them. When we view people who do not align with our exact worldview as monsters whose mere presence threatens our entire existence, we contribute to the increasingly poisoned well of a divided society, through blocking off a connection with them by creating boundaries to protect ourselves from any slight discomfort they may cause us. This is no small problem. The words, “United we stand, divided we fall,” are incredibly accurate. And we are currently in a societal free fall with no end in sight. I can promise you that you can have a pleasant conversation with someone who has different perceptions on how we should treat one another. And challenging yourself to lead with love in these circumstances feels a whole lot better than immediately presenting a personal boundary when someone does something that slightly triggers you. Furthermore, society needs you to be able to handle slight deviances in personal opinion and the personal treatment you desire, as its foundation quite literally depends on it. Once we break this expectation of everyone treating us in the exact way we want them to, we can begin to build bridges rather than boundaries, where both people can find a path to freedom, rather than one taking the egoistic road to painful solitude.
BRIDGES VS. BOUNDARIES
Instead of going straight to a boundary when somebody triggers us, such as coming up with a way of separating ourselves from the person and their words, we should train our brains to come up with a bridge, where both people have a path to personal freedom. This communication can be presented as, “What you are saying is bringing up some sensitive emotions in me. Do you mind holding space for these emotions and navigating this conversation with care? I really want to hear what you have to say, but it can be done in a way where we can both get the most out of it.” Compare this way of speaking to either running away from the conversation or hurling an insult rooted in anger. Again, I do not recommend building a bridge when someone is disrespecting you, but I do recommend it for minor triggers or areas of conversation that bring uncomfortable emotions. When we present a bridge, we are also deepening the capacity for personal connection, leading to more fruitful relationships, rather than the dramatic, toxic ones that frequent boundaries create. Furthermore, if we get in the habit of building bridges instead of boundaries, then we are also strengthening our ability to experience uncomfortable emotions with grace, reducing our need for total control, and strangling the narcissist inside of ourselves. This is an awesome deal!
Lastly, to ingrain the habit of building bridges, connect to how much better you feel after creating a bridge rather than a boundary. The more we tap into this higher vibration, the more we will be likely to run away from seeking the lower one that comes with boundaries.
See your fellow humans as opportunities to create connection, not painful disconnection.
