Setting and understanding healthy boundaries

How well do you manage setting healthy boundaries? Any tips for me? I tend to recognise a bit more lately when my boundaries aren’t being respected or are being unintentionally over-run or vice versa, but its still hard. I feel stuff too around others and I am never sure where it all is coming from. At times I feel guilt for setting healthy boundaries.

I just had an incident where I felt forced to do something I wasnt comfortable with and luckily it was by text so I just shut down the phone, I pulled over to the side of the road to answer but answering meant lunch is now late and I am a bit all over the place today anyway. When I resumed driving home, I got a bit of a shock with the surge of anger I felt and the way it affected my gut when I felt this energy coming at me and then judged myself for shutting down or felt quite anxious as a result.

I was reading in David Richo’s book on Daring to Trust last night that in healthy relationship you don’t just leave without asking for a time out. I know it got done to me a lot in my previous relationship when my ex partners wounds from childhood were triggered. In the end he couldn’t handle it another way or cope with my emotional reactions either so he would just cut off, give me the silent treatment, then come back and blame me without owning his part and opening to negotiation. In the end we separated.

For me relationships are fraught what Complex PTSD expert Pete Waker calls the abandonment melange.. a pretty good word for the chemical cocktail of feelings that can cascade for me in an avalanche when ever anger starts to be expressed or accusations are being hurled around or a whiff of the threat of being abandoned draws near. In that last relationship he could cut me off for up to 5 days or a week. He didn’t try to ever empathise or understand the needs and frustrations hidden under my anger but to be honest I had a lot of work to do to hold my own scared little girl. Even with my therapist there were several times we had a tussle over this as she felt I was calling too much between sessions but I was having a struggle understanding, holding and managing my feelings through certain crises. Having to hold for myself at times did make me feel much stronger.

The worst struggle took place around the time my Mum died and in the aftermath with family organising the funeral I just could not go to certain things with the rest of them because none of them express much emotion and so I would end up holding heaps of feelings and crying even more. I may have feared their reactions too because they have been dismissive with me in the past. I can now have emotions fairly easily with my sister and with my Mum. In the final few years of her life we could sit in grief together with each of us allowing each other our process, though she really struggled when I expressed anger.

I felt quite angry when I cut off the phone before. I started to drive again and blared my music really loud and was yelling. I know I was overwhelmed and it was almost like I was trying to drown out the ‘demands’. Scott knows me by now so he kept texting he knew I was upset and had switched off and was not angry at all. I think it may have been more of a request than a ‘demand’ but its not something I want to do and then of course my inner critic started to make me ‘bad’. I was often ‘bad’ for having anger with family members and I have read that in families of multigenerational trauma/addiction anger is one of the most dysfunctionally expressed or repressed emotions.

I am still shaking a bit writing this and when I had the conflict last week I arrived at therapy shaking all over with terror. Luckily Kat is so validating and always helps me to unscramble my feelings but two hours a week when I first started this process of disentangling everything is not much. I had to leave an Al Anon group where I got shamed for anger by certain members so therapy became my one ‘healthy’ boundary support.

Emotional upsets affect my brain, they affect my gut and digestion too and the complex head trauma I still carry from 2005 means I stretch or spin up to four hours a day. Peter Levine trauma expert speaks of the trauma vortex which can spin one of two ways clockwise or anti clockwise. I read once in a Buddhist book that trauma creates twisted Tsa or life energy. I feel this unravelling process go on and I have to notice when I or others ‘wind me up’ or when my body is trying to wind itself down, especially around 3 – 5 pm in the afternoon which is laden with trauma imprints for me.

Anyway I was able to shut off the phone today to find my boundary. Next time I will ask for time out first. I know this boundary work takes some practice. I was also thinking about expectations around feeling and grieving today too because I am reading a novel in which the mother dies and a second child from the father to another mother turns up and affects the family who are grieving, not really having any idea of what is means to lose a mother herself but feeling she has all the answers literally driving the other daughter crazy. It makes for a very interesting read. In one paragraph Lizzie, the character who tells the story in first person narrative speaks of how in families it is not always possible to turn towards each other for comfort, or understanding as each person grieves differently and has different issues and timetables around grief. It made sense to me of why I haven’t got any comfort much from many family members following my father, sister and mother’s deaths. Ours is an extremely emotionally disengaged family rather than an overly enmeshed one or an emotionally supportive one. And that makes grieving harder in some ways because the grief reactions get buried under other emotions or caretaking strategies.

Wow boundaries are involved. I have been semi typing this while stopping to eat a late lunch my schedule got thrown today as Jasper would not walk this morning so I took myself out instead to the markets. If anyone has anything to share about boundaries and grief or tips on setting healthy boundaries without shutting down I would be so happy to read it. I learn a lot by reading about other’s processes as we all go through grief and loss and other boundary struggles so if you feel like it share anything at all in the comments section below.