boundaries... why do we suck at them?
and why is it so scary to acknowledge how we really feel, even to ourselves?
There’s a Rita Dove poem, The Bistro Styx, that is one of my very favorites. It’s a creative re-imagining of the story of Persephone and Demeter — a mother meets her wayward daughter for lunch and reflects on how painful it is to see her child make choices of her own, have feelings and desires of her own. It begins:
“Sorry I’m late,” she panted, though she wasn’t…
That line kills me. How many times have we all done that, said we were sorry when we weren’t? That little line is doing a lot of work. You should go read the whole poem, if you haven’t before.
I think I first read it in college, well before I ever knew about concepts like “boundaries”, “co-dependency”, or “enmeshment.” But something in the poem resonated deeply for me.
My parents divorced in my early childhood, and for most of my school-age years my life was begrudgingly dictated by their custody agreement. My parents were loving and certainly did their best, though my dad and I had a strained relationship throughout my adolescence. Once I was in college, I found myself in a position of having to choose, on my own, whether or not to go see him when I was visiting my hometown.1
I remember complaining about this situation to my younger brother, how I felt like I had to go even though I didn’t want to go. And my always-wise brother said something to me to the effect of, “you can just say no, you know.”
No, I didn’t know. Like in my bones, I literally didn’t know how to say no.
I think I did vaguely understand that I had a choice. But to make that choice to (as I now conceive of it) honor my boundaries felt extremely anxiety-provoking. It’s not that I thought of myself as being kind or selfless or magnanimous. Violating my own boundaries felt, at a subconscious level, like the safer choice.
That’s the mind-fuck about boundaries. Choosing to violate your own boundaries can feel like self-preservation, when actually it’s self-destruction.
It feels like self-preservation because the immediate discomfort of asserting a boundary (“I don’t want to do this thing”) can feel intolerable to many of us, especially those of us socialized to be peacemakers, go-alongers, not-rock-the-boaters.
We can consciously think that we are making the easier choice, to go along, while that decision slowly eats away at us from the inside, without us realizing it. It erodes our ability to understand our own needs, our own emotions, and fuses our emotions with those that we are in relationship with. Their needs become our needs. Enmeshed, like Persephone and Demeter.
But I spent 38 years on this planet TOTALLY unaware of this dynamic and how it has played out in my life, over and over again. And then, the pandemic entered the chat.
Through a combination of my anxious temperament, my eldest child role, my parents’ divorce and probably, lord knows, the roll of the dice of fate, I am terrible at boundaries. It’s not that I thought of myself as selflessly putting others’ needs before mine — I just didn’t recognize that I had needs at all.
Where there is a lack of boundaries, there is a lack of self-trust, and an inability to distinguish between your feelings and those of your loved ones.
This showed up in many ways throughout my life.
It showed up in me believing that I “wasn’t really anxious/depressed enough” to deserve my therapist’s time or to receive treatment with medication.
It showed up in my difficulty separating my daughter’s experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from my own history with OCD.
It showed up in my feeling that every need expressed by my family was draining some essential life force from me, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
… You can probably fill in the dots about how I fared with this in the pandemic pressure-cooker with two young children, one very high-needs. In the immortal words of Pete Campbell, “Not great, Bob!”
I was terrified, absolutely terrified, of acknowledging how I truly felt — even (and especially) to myself.
Because if I wasn’t holding everything and everyone together, wouldn’t everything fall apart?
The thing is, I was missing the point. You can’t keep denying your own needs to hold everything together because then you will fall apart. You’re just gonna have to trust me on this. If you haven’t yet, you will.
I still suck at boundaries. I have now swung pretty far in the other direction. If before I was just a naked blob, unprotected and vulnerable and buffeted by the emotions of other people, I am currently, as of this writing, in a bit of a fortress. Boundaries are still super new to me so I don’t know how to hang on to them, and on to my self-trust and the toe-hold of mental health I have found, while also letting other people in. We do need to be interdependent in this life; we need to accept influence from others and be able to see and hear them in their feelings while differentiating them from our own. And I’m still a very new baby at learning this.
But back to Rita Dove and Demeter. I’ll leave you with the end of that poem, to think about our relationships and whether we have the ability to see who our loved ones are, and to let them see us, while not letting it shake the foundation of our world.
I’m in three different kinds of therapy right now with three different therapists. But a lot of My Journey With Boundaries has been through self-guided research. I have found Hailey Magee’s resources and links to be helpful.
If you, too, suck at boundaries and would like to read some helpful scripts for dealing with common (and some not-so-common) situations, follow here.
Apparently I’m not the first one to notice that Demeter and Persephone are co-dependent/ enmeshed.
If you want to read up on enmeshment in relationships, this is a helpful basic explainer.
My dad and I have had ups and downs in my adulthood but we have built a strong, supportive relationship now that I really cherish. But man, at 19, it was still rough.