Leigh Rosenberg, MSW
Sept. 11, 2024
People often talk about “boundaries,” but this word can sometimes be used in ways that I’ve actually found more confusing than helpful! So I wanted to dig in deeper with some reflections. At the end, I also offer some experiential exercises to help us work with feeling and healing our boundaries.
I feel grateful to have gotten much clearer inside myself over time about healthy boundaries, including what they feel like in my body and heart, and how refining and holding them can serve me and others. Several ideas have helped me articulate this experience.
Let’s take a moment to define what “boundaries” mean for our purposes, first. If we acknowledge that we humans are both separate from and connected to others, boundaries describe how we are delineated from each other and our environment. My supervisor, Tracy R. Willliams, LICSW, offers the metaphor of a cell membrane to help describe human boundaries, which I find very helpful. Cell membranes have the qualities of being both strong and permeable, so that whatever needs really to pass in and out of the cell can do so, but whatever should not cross cannot. This is what it can be like for us, too.
Our boundaries are mostly developed and experienced without conscious awareness, but we can learn to be conscious of them and use our awareness to experiment with new ways of holding them. For any given situation we are in, we might need to tighten up our boundaries or relax them, make them bigger, smaller, or thicker, depending on what is needed for that moment. And we might need to practice holding appropriate boundaries for ourselves, over and over, until we develop this skill sufficiently. In my experience, learning to work better with either aspect (strong or permeable) eventually helps with clarity about the other, too. Eventually, being able to feel appropriate strong and permeable qualities together can help us show up as our most embodied, authentic, and responsive selves.
Let’s first explore the “strong borders” quality of healthy boundaries. Most of what is written around psychological boundaries refers to this quality.
Healthy, strong boundaries help us differentiate
Learning to hold appropriately strong boundaries with others helps us differentiate between ourselves and others. Clear borders help us stay connected to the truth that our experience is not the same as anyone else’s. As adults, we can develop the agency to use these boundaries to protect ourselves from others physically and emotionally, and to guard what is most important to us as our own unique being. When we were young, we may have developed boundaries that are insufficiently strong, as we tried to read and please those who threatened or neglected us, in an attempt to stay safe or get better care. Strong boundaries also remind us that our work is our own to do and we cannot outsource it, much as we might wish to sometimes! And we simply cannot do others’ work for them, either.
Healthy, strong boundaries allow us to:
Keep out the bad. When we have healthy, strong boundaries, we can notice when someone or a situation is unhealthy for us. We might have to speak up and let them know firmly that their behavior is not acceptable. We might need to move away to a safer distance. Or we might need to remind ourselves that we don’t have to take on or absorb energetically whatever is coming our way, because that is someone else’s energy, opinion, or experience, not ours.
Keep in the good. Healthy strong boundaries also help us stay connected with our own deep essence and internal experience. At the deepest core of each of us is authenticity, clarity, curiosity, and care for ourselves and others. Just as a cell membrane would not permit its mitochondria or nucleus to fall out, developing our own strong boundaries prevents us from overextending, leaking out or abandoning the best of ourselves, as we contort into what we think someone else wants or needs. Healthy strong boundaries help us stay coherent and solid inside ourselves.
Now, let’s look at the permeable quality of healthy boundaries, which tends to get less attention.
Healthy, permeable boundaries help us know we are connected
Spiritual teachings across traditions, not to mention our own experience, tell us that we are never an island unto ourselves. From before birth and through death we have been, and will remain, fundamentally and deeply interconnected with others, the earth, and the universe. Permeable boundaries help us remember and experience this truth. They soothe the aloneness we may feel, and open us to the sweetness of connection and care from and for others.
Healthy, permeable boundaries allow us to:
Let experience out. Permeable boundaries help us share whatever pain and emotion we have that we are not meant to hold in isolation. When we can finally share with another something important we have been carrying alone for a while, or even a lifetime, it can be deeply healing. We need to be able to share the joys and sorrows that would otherwise pull us out of our natural shape if we held them alone. Our permeable boundaries also allow us to share the love we have to give, so we can respond with care to others and the world.
Let experience in. Boundaries with healthy openings also let us take in the sweetness of love, care, and the simple stance of “being with.” Due to having been hurt or neglected in the past, we might have overly stiffened our boundaries, even though this has come at a cost. Learning over time how to let love in from those we can trust enough, and even to let in others’ difficult experience when we are resourced enough, can be transformative.
This is ongoing work through the life course
If conditions are supportive, we can explore and refine our boundaries throughout our lives.
Under ideal circumstances, babies and toddlers work through the twin tasks of being deeply cared for by present, caring adults, while also learning that they are different from others. Games with babies like “My nose, your nose!” “Your eye, my eye!” teach about differences, while being soothed and seen teaches about connection. Toddlers learn to differentiate through expressing their wants and needs, sometimes quite strongly! When caregivers reflect their feelings well, as a safe haven and secure base, children learn to be comforted and feel connected through their triumphs and mishaps. Adolescents differentiate further by defining their own ways of being and interests, and can expand in connection through friendships and dating.
Adults can continue to refine their strong and permeable boundaries through the joys and challenges of partnerships, breakups, parenting, workplaces, social environments, etc.
There is opportunity for growth again when there is illness or loss. Even approaching death, we may reminisce to help us see clearly our contributions and good qualities. And there may be an ultimate task of letting ourselves feel the support of others and the earth and dissolve back into basic interconnection.
Boundaries also function in groups and systems
We can also apply boundary work to family systems or any group we are in. I’d like to highlight in particular how boundaries can apply to collective experiences like racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and other forms of discrimination.
We can check this out for ourselves. Is our (or our group’s) learning edge to strengthen our own strong boundaries against the dominant culture’s notions about us, based on inappropriate judgment of our racial, gender, or other identities? And/or is one of our (or our group’s) habits to have overly strong boundaries, and fail to feel the humanity and connection with others whom we may judge? Sometimes members of groups that face societal discrimination benefit from strengthening boundaries in the face of poor treatment, individually and collectively. And sometimes members of groups in the dominant position benefit from working on appropriate porousness, connection and care, individually and collectively. This is no doubt an over-simplification (and again, we all need boundaries that are both strong and permeable together), but hopefully it helps illustrate the point.
Somatic boundary exercises
You might want to explore what boundaries feel like in your body under different conditions.
- If you are able, try standing up, or you can practice while sitting. How much space does your body seem to take up in this moment? What’s this like physically? Energetically? Now, what is it like to extend your arms upward and outward? To feel your full height and width and breadth? Do you feel a pull to be small? To be large? What emotions, thoughts or images come with this?
- What happens when you imagine someone else nearby you as you do this exercise?
- Now, what is it like to imagine a boundary field all around you, 360 degrees and above and below that is strong, that helps keep you protected from others when you need to be, and that keeps you rooted in your own experience?
- Now, what is it like to imagine a boundary field all around you, 360 degrees and above and below that is permeable, that allows you to feel connected to others with whom you feel most open, and makes it possible to reveal your inner experience and beauty to them?
- What is it like to feel the strong and permeable boundaries simultaneously?
You could repeat this using different situations, people, and groups that come to mind.
May we all keep developing the healthy boundaries that best benefit ourselves and others!
Resources and additional perspectives, which may offer different takes on boundaries
https://wellnesscenter.uic.edu/news-stories/boundaries-what-are-they-and-how-to-create-them/
https://www.mettapsych.com/news/2017/7/31/what-are-boundaries
Tikkun Healing and Wellness 