Healing Into Boundaries

Most people refer to boundaries as a healing tool.

In my experience, though, healthy boundaries are an outcome of doing inner healing work. And trying to start with boundaries – before starting the healing journey – is often a recipe for failure, shame, and disconnection.

How to approach healthy boundaries

If you suspect you might have work to do around Boundaries, but don’t know where to start or aren’t feeling resonant with what others are saying about it, I warmly invite you to have a look at my approach.

I’m not a perfectly boundaried person, but I do know what is like to struggle with them and what it’s like to be freed by them. They are indeed healing, but trying to skip ahead, before establishing a solid foundation through some initial healing work, proved counterproductive for me.

One of the reasons I struggled with them for as long as I did was because the common notion that I needed to sacrifice my compassion in the process of becoming more “empowered” felt deeply misaligned for me.

So much of the advice out there about boundaries, as it turns out, comes from a reactionary place that is overcorrecting from the wreckage that “poor” (dysfunctional) boundaries cause. But we don’t have to swing the pendulum from one extreme to the other!

What I found was that by empowering my compassion, healthy boundaries became a natural outflow. And the journey of expanding my love – so that it grew big enough to include myself as well as others – delivered the healing I needed to unlock the secret to the previously elusive realm of Boundaries.

Tools of connection

Did you know that boundaries can actually ENHANCE your connections?? When employed effectively, rather than pushing people away or winning superficial favor, they create TRUST and SAFETY.

Saying Yes and then later becoming resentful does not nourish a relationship, and it will leave you disempowered.

Saying No in a way that sounds like “Eff you” damages a relationship and leaves you lonely.

However, saying No to an offer or request without rejecting or condemning the other person helps them trust that you’re capable of managing your resources AND that your Yeses are sincere and won’t be followed later by resentment.

Here’s the thing: we all have boundaries; we just don’t all implement them in the most functional ways.

Different strokes for different folks

If you’re:
~ getting exploited at work,
~ being called a doormat by your family,
~ feeling used in your friendships, or
~ going unappreciated in your romantic relationships, and you
~ often say “Yes” because you want to be “good”…
you might have a perfectly natural boundary style I call Flimsy Fences.

If you’re:
~ getting snubbed at work,
~ being called unreasonable by your family,
~ feeling pressured in your friendships, or
~ fearing manipulation in your romantic relationships, and you
~ often say “No” with a tinge of anger…
you might have another perfectly natural boundary style I call Spiked Walls.

If you feel:
~ adequately valued at work,
~ appropriately distanced from your family,
~ fulfillingly balanced in your friendships, and
~ safe to be authentic in your romantic relationships, and you
~ say “Yes” or “No” in accordance with your truth and without disconnecting from yourself or the other, then…
you definitely have a boundary style I call Selective Gates, which flows from an internally rooted security.

For those who are not quite there, or not even close, I offer my guidance and support – with no judgement for you or anyone else, and a mission to empower your compassion, so that it’s big enough for you as well as others, and you can learn to employ boundaries as tools of connection, rather than perceiving or deploying them as weapons of disconnection.

Love is unconditional.
Relationships are not.
That’s what boundaries are for.

What even ARE boundaries?

Boundaries are the limits of your finite resources, and your point of contact with the world. The way you communicate yours and honor yours and others’ will determine the nature of your relationships.

They are not the same as needs, and therefore aren’t conveyed through requests. They are your own responsibility to manage, and when you share information about them and follow through on your own self-care by respecting them consistently, you can stay resourced and show up as your best self to whatever you choose to engage in.

But here’s what a lot of folks miss: healthy boundaries aren’t something you just DECIDE to have. A lot of the well-meaning advice out there is almost shaming in the way it insists that you should just start saying No, and start loving yourself better. As though the tip of the iceberg is the whole thing. Changing behavior does not address the cause of it.

Lasting change of this nature takes DEEP excavation and an un-rush-able process of integration and opening to new ways of being.

Common advice is also often quite divisive in the way it practically insists that you start telling off the people who don’t “deserve” your energy. This reactive approach, also known as Righteousness, cloaks itself in empowerment, but it’s actually very disempowering because it convinces you that you were a victim in a situation where you could have just implemented boundaries.

The healing path to healthy boundaries

In most cases, it likely is true that you were a victim at one point, but usually that was way back in your formative years, when we’re all less empowered as people and much more dependent on our caregivers. If yours left you with self-doubt and other insecurities, you probably grew up with poor/dysfunctional boundaries. But the empowering fact in adulthood is that we can heal, learn better, and do better for ourselves.

It’s not about the other person being a [_fill in the blank with your preferred derisive label_], it’s about moving forward and learning how to reconnect to yourself. When you heal your insecurities, healthy boundaries become a natural extension of your new relationship to yourself, and they will serve you as magnificent tools of connection in all of your relationships.

When you try to start using boundaries without healing your underlying insecurities, they might be effective, but there’s a good chance that they’ll become weapons of disconnection that don’t solve anything sustainably.

With a deeper respect for the humanity within you, which is shared with all of us, you will automatically become a more boundaried person, and all of your relationships – with friends, family, coworkers, jobs, money, food, time, yourself, etc. – will become more balanced and rewarding.

We don’t start healing with boundaries, we heal into them.