I was about six years old, standing outside my family’s home in Illinois. My younger sister was in the home, my mom and my dad. I can look back and see the yellow light coming out of the windows, the sun setting, dusk, and we were on the edge of a cornfield. I could see the rutted, cold, if not even frozen mud, with little bits of water in it, reflecting the lights of the homes in the hills in the distance.
And in that experience, very soft, poignant, wistful, was a knowing that the unhappiness in that home over there was not my doing. There was no abuse, no trauma. There was the ordinary wrangling of two young parents who themselves didn’t have strong family support. There was no village to raise the child. They were under a lot of pressure. I have no rancor for them at all, just, factually, that unhappiness is not mine. I’ve got to deal with it, but it’s not mine. That was very real in me. Okay. I’ve got to take care of myself for the next 10 or 12 years, until I can move on toward more of my own kind of family, my own kind of relationships, out there in the world.
I think many children, even very young ones, have had a sense of that. At some deep level, even if they couldn’t act on it or reveal it, they knew they were differentiated from what was happening around them in their home, and they needed to get on their own side. They were, in some ways, on their own. It was up to them.
That’s the first foundation of healthy boundaries. Self-respect. Getting on your own side. You matter. If there’s no sense of being on your side, if you don’t think you have standing, how could you dare to have boundaries? How could you think you deserve them, if you don’t believe you have standing as a human being? There’s a line from the Buddha I keep coming back to. When faced with a swollen, raging river, if one is swept away by it, how can one help others across? Or, as they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first. You’ve got to take care of yourself to be able to sustain care for other people.
Second foundation, a combination of compassion and equanimity. Compassion means simply recognizing suffering over there, and that you’re not trying to do any harm. That’s real. At the same time, equanimity means recognizing, with insight, that the causes and conditions swirling along to make that other person’s process unfolding over there are, in some fundamental way, distinct from the causes and conditions making your own process unfold. Their mind stream is not your mind stream. It’s really important to pay attention to the ways we sometimes blur that boundary harmfully, taking on the attributes of others to prevent conflict, or to keep them engaged with us, out of a fear that if we don’t mirror them, or become an extension of their will, there will be trouble.
Third foundation, having your own capacity to risk dreaded experiences. To set a boundary, or act on the basis of one, we’re often afraid that bad things will happen. They’ll abandon us. They’ll reject us. They’ll yell at us. It’s sometimes said there are two major roots of psychological difficulty: low distress tolerance, and negative rumination. So the antidote to both is becoming more able to stay centered in your own calm strength, even if you’re a little rattled around the edges, so you can risk experiences like other people being upset with you, or distancing from you.
Self-respect. Compassion paired with equanimity. The willingness to risk what might happen. Those are the parts of this you can start building on your own, quietly, without anyone else even knowing you’re doing the work.
The how is harder to do alone. It’s the actual practical list, the specific things you say and do differently in your real relationships, especially the complicated ones, where you love the person, or you owe them something. That’s exactly what I built the Setting Healthy Boundaries workshop to cover. It’s a four hour deep dive into the practical side of everything above. Use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.
The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.
Self-respect. Yes. It reminds me of what you how written about "getting on your own side."
What I have realized is: I am conflicted. Gabor Mate might have been the first to make me aware of the child's conflict between authenticity and attachment. In order to be on my side in some ways, I have given up being on my side in other ways. I have made these choices and then forgotten that I made them, forgotten that I could be different, and, now, some of those choices could be remade differently than I made them in the past, if I found a way to revisit and reopen them. I've discovered it is not as simple as just deciding to be on my side -- there's work to be done!