Boundary setting for healthier balance
Do you ever find yourself unclear or unsure of your boundaries or limitations? Maybe you sense you or someone else has violated your boundaries? It can help to put some more particularity to the boundaries you have, need, and how to support your relationship to your boundaries. Let’s start with the basics: the two categories of boundaries that we can consider when we think about boundaries and limitations.
Internal vs external boundaries
In general, we’ve got internal boundaries and we’ve got external boundaries. Knowing these categories might help us consider if there are areas either internally or externally where our boundaries need more support or might need to be renegotiated.
External boundaries are pretty practical and easy to identify. This includes things like time, physical space, touch, noise or stimulation, energetic output. You might think about external boundaries as your relationship to things and people outside of yourself.
Internal boundaries can be a little harder to notice, pin down, and describe. Here we’re talking about mental and emotional boundaries. This too is about your relationship to other people and things, but in a quieter way. What are you taking into yourself from the outside world? What stressors or emotions are you allowing your internal world to absorb from others? How does a thing impact you, and can you protect yourself any differently? These are just as important as the external boundaries, but again, can be more challenging to identify. I think of it as, what are you taking in? And is that ok with you? Is it tolerable for you? Emotional dysregulation is a good clue to this.
Clues you might be blowing past an important boundary
It’s a given that sometimes we are going to miss an important boundary, whether internal or external. A variety of things can happen that can make it such that we miss, disregard (consciously or unconsciously), or maybe just need to change a boundary. There are some internal experiences we might have that let us know we need to adjust a boundary, or reconnect to it. Consistent emotional dysregulation is a big clue––tearfulness, anger and frustration, anxiety, big feelings that are hard to manage with your coping skills and supports. Also, chronic fatigue can be an indicator of missing a limitation. You may need to adjust your energy output.
Relationally, I find resentment to be the most common and powerful indicator of a boundary that’s not working for you. If you find yourself consistently resentful of your partner, parent, friend, coworker, examine your boundaries.
From rigid to porous, it’s a spectrum
In her book, Setting Boundaries that Stick, Julianne Taylor Shore uses a spectrum to talk about boundaries. I find it super helpful to think about a spectrum from rigid to porous, and we all have different boundary needs at different times. If you find yourself feeling resentful of others, you may have fairly porous boundaries of say time or emotional burden, and you might want to experiment with shifting your boundary down the spectrum towards rigid.
With too rigid boundaries, we may be feeling lonely, unsupported, isolated, numb or unemotional. Try shifting your boundary down the spectrum toward porous, practicing more openness, vulnerability, availability, and connection with yourself and others. See what that feels like.
How your body helps support your boundaries
All this talk about boundaries, but how do we know what they are and when we need them? I often talk to clients about how our thinking brain moves a lot faster than our body. So we can miss some important cues from our body about our boundaries. In order to slow down long enough to check out the cues from our body, I like to ask this question:
Where else is your “yes”, “no”, or “I’m not sure” in your body?
Maybe you notice tension, constriction, discomfort in a part of your body. Or maybe you notice ease, relaxation, openness, or softening in your body. This is really good information about what you might need.
How to use an image to support your boundaries
We’ve got thoughts, we’ve got feelings, we’ve got sensations, but our brain also speaks in images. In her book on boundaries, Julianne Taylor Shore, recommends using an image to help support your boundaries. I find this especially useful when I’m needing more help with my less defined internal boundaries. For this, I recommend creating some space and time to get really quiet inside, do a little grounding practice, like feeling the chair beneath you, your feet on the floor, follow the rhythm of your breath. Once you feel fairly settled and connected to yourself, see if there’s a boundary image that comes to mind. Don’t get too thinky about it. Allow your body, your intuition to bring you an image. It might be something very closely related to boundaries, like a fence or barrier of some kind, or maybe an image that is already meaningful to you. I find for myself and many of my clients, imagery of nature is really powerful and supportive. Once you have an image in mind, connect to it, linger with it, let your mind-body system get acquainted with it. The more you familiarize yourself with your image, the easier it will be to access that image when you really need it. So return to it, connecting with it daily if you can.
Examining and resetting boundaries is important and challenging work. And work that I find hard to do on our own. After this crash course in boundaries, if you find yourself needing more support around setting boundaries or repairing broken or violated boundaries, I hope you’ll consider reaching out about how somatic therapy can help support boundaries for a healthy mind-body system.