By Lissa Carter, LCMHC
If there is one word I hear from nearly every client I work with, this is it: Boundary.
We all know we need them, we all know we need to honor them, and we all know that they are vital in maintaining healthy relationships with ourselves and with others. At the same time, it is rare to encounter anyone who has a clear definition of what, exactly, a boundary is.
So let’s establish some terms.
What is a boundary?
My definition of boundary is an ecological one. When I think of a boundary, I think of ecotones---those liminal spaces that are not quite woodland, not quite meadow, but incorporate elements of both and, as a result, are incredibly fertile. Boundaries are the tidal zone between ocean and shore where two distinct communities engage with each other. I think of hedges, too, as used in permaculture design—carefully designed multispecies systems that provide food, habitat, fodder, and nutrition.
Imagine a hedgerow planted around a garden in which tender seeds are sprouting. Perhaps there is hawthorn at the outer edges of the hedge, so that any deer encountering it will nibble their way around, thwarted by thorns but finding nutrition in the tender buds, while being guided away from the center of the garden. Maybe birds shelter within to feed on berries and problematic insects, and nitrogen-fixing plants like locust and comfrey enrich the ground on both sides while crowding out any grass. This is a very different concept of a boundary than, say, a cement wall.
A well-designed boundary is as much about creating a fertile environment to protect a tender new element in the garden as it is about shutting something out. This time of year, many of us go out into the cold nights to put blankets around blooming trees to protect them against a hard freeze. That blanket is a boundary. It’s protective.
But there are unhealthy boundaries, too.
Terry Real, founder of the Relational Life Therapy that I am currently studying, has a saying: “Under patriarchy you can be powerful or connected, but you can’t be both.”
So, in order to stay safe in an unhealthy system, some of us trade our power for connection. Others trade our relationality for power. If we set a relational boundary in an attempt to control another person, that is a power consolidation move, and the price is connection. Equally, if we are afraid to set boundaries, or disregard others’ boundaries out of fear that boundaries will interrupt our sense of attachment, we are trading away power in an attempt to stay connected. That’s not helpful either.
So how do we create healthy boundaries?
Did I mention that boundaries are hard? Oh yeah, it’s in the title. But it bears repeating. Boundaries are HARD. If you need any proof, look at the myths and stories we humans have inherited—so many are warnings about how boundaries can go wrong.
Sleeping Beauty, dissociated and numb at the center of a thicket of thorns.
Bluebeard, engaging in power consolidation that mimics boundary-setting, telling his latest victim not to use the tiny key that opens the last door.
Psyche, violating an unspoken boundary by looking at Cupid in the dead of the night and setting her world on fire as result.
St. Patrick, driving entire species and modes of being out of the system in the name of keeping it safe.
I could go on, and on, and on, and I suspect you could too.
Still, if you dig, there are some stories that have been passed down that are not warning tales, but instruction manuals. I have found two in particular that I lean on heavily when I am doing boundary work. One walks us through the steps of setting and keeping a boundary. The other describes each form of relational pushback we can expect to encounter, and how to navigate those relational costs without giving up on ourselves.
I won’t get into the stories here, though I am working on making them available as standalone courses. But their very existence gives us hope that there IS a way to do this complicated thing well! And there is a concept, centered in both stories, that can serve as a touchstone in this hard, expensive work. That concept is sovereignty.
Maintaining Boundaries through Sovereignty
In the old days, one of the tests of sovereignty was to place a candidate for kingship on a cart driven by two horses. Each horse would pull powerfully in a different direction. If the candidate could ride the tension of the opposites and find a way forward through that tension, that person could be sovereign.
Unfortunately, for some of us the word Sovereignty has been infected with ideas of individualism and autocracy. When we view sovereignty as an individualistic or autocratic stance, we are back in the territory of boundaries built to consolidate power. That’s not a healthy position.
Sovereignty is, and always was, a relational proposition. It has to do with relationship to the self, relationship to the land, and achieving a healthy balance of all elements within the system. In the Celtic tradition, Sovereignty was visualized as a wheel. Elements of winter, summer, autumn, and spring—-elements of east, west, north, and south—elements of air, fire, earth, and water—were all carefully considered and brought into balance. A person, in this view, approaches sovereignty when they bring water into a fiery system, maturity into a naive system, a sense of spring into an autumnal system. Sovereignty is a balancing of the wheel.
Which brings us back to the garden: maintaining sovereignty, at times, requires balancing the elements within the system quite sharply. For example, if there is an invasive element like bamboo in the system, you might need to place it on an island with a deep moat of water all around, to prevent it from compromising the entire garden. This does not mean that I judge the bamboo or find it any less valuable. It only means I need to be savvy and realistic about the placement of this element if I want to maintain sovereignty in the system.
Remember that your boundaries, just like your sovereignty, are entirely your responsibility. We have to place them and we have to maintain them; we cannot impose them on others.
In fact, this is one of the ways we can get boundaries wrong. We ask the bamboo not to spread instead of digging a moat. Bamboo is bamboo. It is going to spread. Telling it not to is just giving your power away: an exercise in futility.
On the other hand, sometimes we need to balance the system by welcoming missing elements in. I once saw a gardener in Canada get a banana tree to grow by placing it against a wall that absorbed the southern sun and protected it from the wind, with a small pond dug in front to reflect even more light and warmth.
What tender new aspects of your life are emerging that need to be protected with this kind of boundary? How might you welcome emerging new identities or ideas by placing boundaries around your time, for example? How might you reflect light and warmth back onto these tender areas in your life to encourage them to grow? And how might your sovereignty be brought into balance by welcoming missing experiences—are the thorns getting too thick in places?
The internal price of boundaries
Very often, when my clients first get started in therapy, things get worse before they get better. They may feel more anxiety, more grief, more relational turmoil. This is a very confusing experience, but it is to be expected: we are medicinally re-introducing, into the client’s system, elements that have been anesthetized away. This is part of bringing the system into balance, part of introducing healthy boundaries and welcoming missing elements in. But even though it was the lack of these elements and boundaries that was causing the imbalance in the first place, the reintroduction is turbulent. Why? Because it interrupts a strategy that was almost working.
For example, if a client who values connection had used the strategy of avoidance (walls of thorns) to keep from feeling rejected, once that client starts digging up those thorns and opening herself up to relationships, she will feel all of the uncomfortable, unwanted feelings that avoidance once protected her from. And, simultaneously, she will be moving closer toward her value of connection. There are always two horses to ride on the sovereignty path. We have to find a way forward anyway.
The relational price of boundaries
As organisms, we love homeostasis. Change frightens us, so when systems are stable, even if they are unhealthy, that stability feels reassuring. If you are introducing change into your relational system by, say, digging a moat around the bamboo or throwing a blanket over your tenderest new blossoming ideas, the system is going to react. The people around you—even the ones that love you—may not respond well to the change.
You may encounter defensiveness, rejection, accusation, withdrawal, abandonment, vilification-- all of the most dreaded experiences a human can imagine. “Sovereignty”, as my favorite storyteller Martin Shaw once put it, “Is ugly in the getting but lovely in the keeping”. Boundary setting and boundary maintenance is hard, hard work. Have I said that already?
If you encounter withdrawal, abandonment, or vilification in the course of building a healthy and balanced garden, notice the price you are paying. If the life you are building is worth the cost, welcome these feelings in. They are the horribly uncomfortable breadcrumbs on the trail to sovereignty.
That said, never hesitate to find help and community if you are facing violent pushback on your boundaries. Friends, family, mediators, or therapists can be valuable allies in this work. Never endanger yourself by setting boundaries alone with a person who exhibits abusive behavior.
If, on the other hand, these dreaded experiences are encountered in trying to plant a wall of thorns around the kingdom, or riding roughshod over someone else’s boundary wall to let the cows into the corn—they are a warning sign. In this case, the pushback you are getting could be a sign of the degradation of your own relational integrity. The key discerning question to ask—whether it is a boundary of your own, or another’s that you have encountered— is:
What is this boundary in service to?
If the boundary in service to avoidance, escape, defensiveness, or power consolidation, revisit your boundary strategy. If the boundary is in service to sovereignty, relational integrity, or self-compassion, take care of yourself and keep going.
In closing, if you are struggling to set and maintain healthy boundaries, or if you are experiencing painful relational pushback around the boundaries you set, you just might be a human being. When I was growing up, I was told in school that humans only use 5% of their brains and that 95% was still, basically, up for grabs. That was so exciting to me—I used to daydream about those unused parts of the brain holding, say, the ability to fly.
Later in life, I learned that this 95% of the brain is far from unutilized. That 95% is the percentage of the brain devoted to analyzing and understanding human signalling and social relationships. It’s that complex, and that important.
So be gentle with yourself. The garden is never complete, it’s a work in progress. And you deserve a garden surrounded by hedgerows that are fertile, live-giving, and protective.
If you are longing to more clearly understand boundaries, join Lissa for a Boundary Clinic on Saturdays in January. Learn more and register below.