Friends, I have been hearing from a lot of you recently via email and many of you are struggling with boundaries in your lives. I am not a counselor, and I am not a psychologist, but I wanted to tell you a few things I have learned about boundaries along the way in the experience of my life and I hope it will be helpful to you. I encourage you if you are having challenges with this to go and talk to a qualified counselor. This can be so helpful in getting your life, your family and your parenting going the way you want it to! What a wonderful way to start the New Year!
Boundaries, to me, are a skill that many of us have to learn. Perhaps our ability to set boundaries was damaged in childhood or early adulthood. Perhaps we are not even sure what a boundary is or why we would want boundaries. Or perhaps we have too many boundaries and have erected relentless walls in order to keep the world out.
Yet, healthy boundaries are so necessary. A boundary is something we set in order to separate ourselves from other people; it tells us how far a person can go with us and how far we can go with another person. It keeps us from becoming enmeshed with another person: enmeshment is a complete state of feeling so empathetically with that person that we take on the other person’s feelings, responsibilities,challenges and problems completely and wholly as our own. As parents, we are separate from our children; we are different people. And, boundaries not only separate us from our children, but it also shows how we are linked together in familial roles. We are linked together, but we are not the same. We are the adult. The relationship is not an equal one. We have more experience and more guidance, more logic and reasoning to bring to any situation. We also have a duty to honor the developmental stage of our child and we can do this with boundaries.
Relationships without boundaries cause dependency and stunted emotional growth for both ourselves and the other party involved. If we have too many boundaries, no one can get close to us at all and we end up isolated and alone. With good boundaries, we learn to develop an appropriate sense of roles amongst family members and the other people in our lives. We learn to respect ourselves and others. We can trust and listen not only to ourselves, but to others.
Specifically in parenting, boundaries allow children to feel safe and secure. Boundaries helps children learn self-control and how to function with people outside of their immediate family. Parents who set good boundaries for themselves and for their children are modeling for the children, how, in turn, to set emotional and physical boundaries for themselves. If we can be calm as a child tests out what the boundary and line in the sand actually is, then we are modeling for our child how to handle this in their own lives. We help them learn how to function in the world.
For parents who have trouble setting any boundaries for their children, out of “respect” for the child, I often will ask the parent: Continue reading