Today is Sunday and you are probably getting ready for the next work week. Have you been thinking about boundaries? Have you been starting to think about whether you use walls or no boundaries? How do you feel as you start to think about the concept of boundaries to have healthy relationships and how it may impact your sense of being alone or loneliness? Have you started to consider that some of your loneliness may be a result of not having boundaries or ineffective boundaries?
As you were reading about walls and no boundaries, you may have felt that you fall somewhere in between. This can happen too. Some people have impaired boundaries. Impaired boundaries can mean you have boundaries with work colleagues and most friends but perhaps not with a romantic partner or spouse. Or maybe you can have them in most relationships, but not intimate ones like with your children, parents and spouse.
Another type of impaired boundaries is that you fluctuate between no boundaries and then walls. Often this happens because as human beings, we are very social. We need people in our lives to help us live good and full lives. However, if you didn’t learn boundaries, you may get so lonely or longing to be with people you’ll muster up your courage, go out into the world without any boundaries (of course not understanding this). You go out and start interacting without any protection or understanding of other people’s boundaries and you will get hurt. In your pain, you completely retract and cut off everyone putting up a wall. This pattern keeps repeating. The unfortunate consequence of this pattern is that it reinforces that people are horrible and bad and that you believe you are not a good person or perhaps not likeable or loveable. You are likely to feel confused by people and at the same time you, yourself may feel misunderstood.
One issue that commonly arises for people that don’t have boundaries is that they confuse boundaries with threats or making people do something. We will go into this in more detail in future blogs. The important thing to keep in mind as you start to think about your boundaries is that when you tell people how you want to be treated, for example, it doesn’t mean that they will do what you want. Boundaries DO NOT MAKE people comply.
For example, a boundary I have with clients, is that when making an appointment, they must pay on the day of booking. This is a boundary I have created to ensure I’m a good therapist for my other clients. When I get new clients joining and I tell them that in order to confirm their appointment they need to pay on the same day as they booked the appointment, it does not make them pay. The prospective client has a choice to decide if they want to comply to my boundary or not. Not everyone does pay and that is okay. That just means we cannot work together. I do not need to chase them or explain why I have my boundary, nor do they need to explain anything to me.
The same is for you. If you start to communicate your boundaries, people may not comply. That is very useful information for you to consider the type of relationship you want with a person and whether it may even be possible depending up on the boundary. This is often a confusing aspect of boundaries for people new to boundaries. Boundaries gives us new information about the people we are considering having in our life or the existing people. Sometimes the information you get may not be what you want and then you must make choices.
We’ll go over that more again in future blogs.
For now, for the next week, start by thinking about boundaries you want. How do you handle when someone comes into your office and doesn’t knock or ask if you busy? How do you handle when someone asks you to do something you don’t have time for? Think about yourself and how you want to be treated.
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