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 This discussion about boundaries stands alone, but it should also be viewed as a corollary to the Dysfunctional Family paper, the Codependent paper, and the Communications section, because a person can’t really be a good communicator without good boundaries. The definition of boundaries is the ability to know where you end and where another person begins. It is also the ability to defend yourself while not offending someone else. Another aspect is the ability to take good care of yourself, while not trying to take care of or have responsibility for another. Secondarily, for our purposes, it is fair fighting and conflict resolution. There is no way that a person can have good healthy boundaries, unless they were taught appropriate boundaries at some point in their life, and one cannot teach good boundaries unless they have good boundaries.
In order to have good, appropriate boundaries, a person has to know himself or herself. Very often in dysfunctional families, which a number of people come from, people are systematically taught some very crazy rules that make this self-knowledge problematic. These rules are addressed more in the Dysfunctional Family paper.
One of these dysfunctional family rules is the idea of being perfect which is a crazed thought. If a person believes that they have to be perfect, they will become shut off from a very large part of their emotional and intellectual self-knowledge, which does not allow for the establishment of healthy boundaries. There is no way a person could have good boundaries if they buy into that particular logic. If a parent feels they and the child have to be perfect, then that parent will systematically disagree and invalidate many aspects and characteristics that the child has that would simply be human.
An example is a child who is sick and tells their parents that they feel sick. The child is making a boundary statement. What they’re saying is, “Inside, in my reality, this is going on. I’m sharing it with you, a separate person.” If a parent then turns around and says, “No, you’re not sick,” that is crazy making for the child. The child will look inside, they’ll look out at the parent, they’ll look in, then they’ll look at the parent again; and because kids need to feel that parents are always right, and that they are solid and powerful so that the child will feel safe, they will assume that they are wrong and bad. The child will take on the blame and assume that their perception is faulty. As a result, a large part of their reality is now dissociated out of their body and out of their awareness, and their self-esteem suffers. The effects are even worse than that because they begin to look towards other people to define who they are, and what they feel. That is a very fundamental aspect of codependence and this type of interaction tends to cause this problem.
If someone doesn’t realize who they are, if they don’t have a good sense of reality testing, then they fail to develop the capacity to defend themselves or even to assert their own reality. The result of this type of parenting is learned helplessness. To give an example, about ten years ago I took up fencing, and because I come from an abusive, alcoholic family where I had a very physically abusive father, as a child I learned that he had a right to do things to me, but I did not have a right to do anything to him, except defend. In fencing when somebody comes at you with a sword, you are supposed to block it and then immediately repost or stab back. It’s called marrying the repost to the parry. It took me several months to change from simply parrying, which I felt comfortable with, to actually taking a physically aggressive action and thrusting, because I had developed learned helplessness from my family of origin.
At first, children have no boundaries at all. They are egocentric. That means, very simply, that they are concerned with themselves. If one really looks at the whole idea of being a child, it’s a full-time job. Children are terribly vulnerable. They lack mastery in almost everything. It would be as if a person had a tremendous case of the flu, which makes their focus go inside until the person feels better. They care about others, but they don’t have time to show that. That kind of egocentricity is perfectly understandable. Children are needy, they don’t think a lot about other people, and yet they’re human, which means they make mistakes.
If parents do not understand this is normal and natural, then the child is not going to develop appropriately. They are going to be blamed for simply being human, and they are not going to be able to develop healthy boundaries. People are often told that immaturity and egocentricity are bad, but they are not. It is just age-appropriate. Children need time, attention, and direction. When parents attack a child’s neediness, that child learns to hate himself or herself and tries not to need. At that point, they don’t develop boundaries, which is simply where one ends off and someone else begins. Instead, they set up walls and erect barricades to keep themselves inside, safe, and other people out. Walls are not permeable, walls are permanent, and they tend to enslave people inside. They are not effective boundaries.
Parents cannot teach boundaries unless they have them, and they can’t have them unless they themselves have been taught. That’s how the “poisonous pedagogy” that we’ve been educated by for years and years unfortunately continues to cause problems. Very often, in dysfunctional families, the idea of simple privacy, of allowing kids doors to be closed in the family home, is viewed as somehow an affront against the family system. There are very few instances of appropriate boundaries in these families. When a child does not have boundaries and has no idea of what normal is, it is very much like a doorway where the door is not there, just an empty room. That is essentially what kids in a tremendously dysfunctional family deal with. If somebody says something critical in a shameful manner, it will immediately have an impact on them and wash over them. The child will take it in and tend to believe it. That is an indication of no boundaries whatsoever. They don’t realize that they can defend themselves, that there just might be the possibility that the other person is wrong about what was said, or wrong about the way it was said.
As with any problem, there is a continuum of boundary difficulties that people suffer from. If a person has developed a few appropriate boundaries either in childhood or through therapy, it’s as if the doorknob is on the outside of the door, so that in general, their sense of reality is protected. But if somebody hits a weak or hot button for them, a sensitive area that has not really healed, it’s as if the abuser has opened up the door, thrown a bomb in, closed the door, and the person blows up. When the person has developed truly appropriate boundaries, the doorknob is on the inside of the door. That means that if somebody says something that seems to make sense, the individual might open the door, really take a look at what has been said, and then decide if the information is appropriate for them or not. If the information is a correct criticism they will realize the difference between personhood, and behavior. Guilt is about behavior, shame is about personhood. They’ll only open up to what makes sense. If not, it will bounce off the door and they won’t be personally affected by it. That’s a good indication of appropriate boundaries.
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