Boundaries

In trauma therapy I learned how we have a moment in life that translates to a truth to us.  For me, most of my truths included how much of a bother I am, how unworthy I am, how I am the problem, how no one loves me unless I am good.  I learned the definition of love the way it was presented to me.  From my mother, it was on her terms.  On a good day, I got great things and on a bad day, I was reminded that I was a disappointment.   When you learn these “truths” about yourself you put on a pair of lenses and see the world through these lenses of truth.  I made poor decisions with friends because I thought “how lucky am I that these people like me” and allowed them to treat me subpar.  Some friendships were mean to me, and I learned new truths about myself: I was fat, I was the “weird” one, I was tolerable.  Some friendships were kind to me, and I learned that I deserved better, that my mom didn’t need to speak to me that way or that what I had learned was wrong.  It really built up the way I saw myself and how I saw myself wasn’t very good. 

Anyways, in my life, I like to disassociate.  I have memories of my childhood and quite a few of them but there are also huge chunks of my life I can’t account for.  I also craved walls.  Oh, I could hide behind some walls. But the most visited place was this place I went to inside my heart when I was stuck with someone yelling at me or stuck in a situation where someone wouldn’t let me leave.  Stuck in a sexual situation I didn’t have the tools to escape.  It looked like big blocks of cement like a stone wall of a castle but a tiny hidden room, about as big as a bathroom.  It was safe.  I would see myself in there, knees pulled up to my chest, head resting on them, arms wrapped around myself and a small little fire across from me.  The walls were especially thick in this place.  I was so so so safe here.  No one could touch me.  This is where I find myself when I am having a trauma response and I can’t kick myself out of it.  This place is where I find myself when I spiral out of control emotionally and all I hear are the old “truths” jabbing me and taunting me, reminding me that I am worthless no matter how much I try to become.  That I am unloved and unworthy.  That my existence is worthless, and I should not be here.  This little place is where I crawl to when I can’t escape those thoughts.  Except I am not myself there.  I am young.  I am so little, maybe 8 or 9.

One of my most transformative EMDR sessions from trauma therapy was when I watched the me, I am today, step inside this little cave and lift that little girl up and hug her. I will protect you now little Jackie.  I will not let them hurt you anymore.  I am in control and if the people in my life can’t save me, I will save me.  And I cried and cried because that’s all I was looking for all along.  I was looking for someone to tell me I wasn’t worthless and that I was pleasant to have around.  I wanted so desperately to not be the problem.  I wanted to be wanted.   It was this moment that I reclaimed myself. 

A lot of how I was raised was baggage and trauma begetting trauma and baggage.  My mom’s father was very mean to her.  I am sure she had a little girl hiding in her heart too.  My father’s father was absent to my dad.  And I am also sure there is a little boy deep inside there wondering why he wasn’t good enough too.  I have to believe that my parents did the best they could and do the best they can with what they know.  I am collateral damage to that. But I am also the rule changer.  I refuse to make any child in my life feel the way I felt growing up.  I will therapy, I will mediate, I will cry and make myself deal with my shit if only to provide the next generation with the love and security I struggle to accept every day. 

Because even though I am better, so much better, and my bad days don’t happen nearly as much, I am still so fragile and full of nervousness.  I am anxious around other people and without the help of my walls, I feel constantly exposed.  See, part of toxic patterns and behaviors is the lack of ability to have boundaries.  If your parents never had them, you never grew up knowing them.  Boundaries are like a fence with a door to your property.  Walls are like... well walls. No one can see you.  However, I don’t have to hide who I am anymore. And I never should have had to.  However, that was my safety mechanism, and I did have walls instead of fences.

The biggest difference is that walls hide, and fences allow.  You can see through a fence, but you have to be allowed to be let in.  The owner of the property has to allow.  Allowing yourself to live without walls is really a very scary thing but I personally desire a life of transparency and vulnerability – to open myself up to real conversations and real talk instead of pleasantries and fake nice peopling.  However, in order to do that I have to be good with my boundaries.  I am not.  It causes quite a bit of anxiety to me to lay a boundary and I think about it over and over, perseverating in my mind what people think, how they now view me, is it a threat? Have I offended someone? Over and over and over in my mind. There is no rest.  Boundaries are excruciating to me and yet I have learned, are also a necessary tool.  When you have a fence, when you say no, everyone sees.  When you have a wall, you can just hide behind it and there is a vague, discrete answer that people can’t 100% identify.  People can’t make a solid opinion about you because they can’t see you.  However, being open and vulnerable, allowing my own freedom to choose and be myself, good or bad means being honest to myself and other people around me.  That means when I advocate for myself and say no or lay a boundary, some people might not like it and create an opinion about me, my situation and my choices.   I personally find this very difficult because again, I grew up in an environment where you didn’t talk about the things YOU liked so no one would take it from you or sabotage it.  I grew up where my honest truth was not celebrated.  I hid my truths behind walls to keep them safe.  Now I have to content with fences.

I was unprepared for boundary backlash.  When I laid boundaries that people didn’t like, I was unprepared for their trauma responses.  See, people are at their best when they’re getting what they want.  I am good at giving people what they want because I learned fast that it was the easiest way to receive their praise, recognition and personal validation despite being the only one who becomes tasked with the job.  But when you lay down boundaries now people aren’t getting what they want, and they become – not mean. It feels mean, but I think people respond with their own trauma responses, their own baggage and their own feelings.  With how hard it is to lay a boundary in the first place, the backlash is all I ever feared anyways and now I’m thinking about it again and again and over and over again.  Its so hard not to slip into the spiral and then go hide in the space where my little girl Jackie lives when she’s scared. 

Despite all this, I stand by the boundaries.  Because at the end of the day, when you are lying down dying in your bed, it is your life that you are reviewing and if you spent it doing things you never wanted to do for everyone else who may or may not even care or know how much work you put into doing the task for them – what then was your life worth? What was it for?  Did YOU ever really live?

I want to live, and I want to do the things I care about because – its my life.  You have your own life to make your own decisions – I respect them, I should receive this same respect.  However, that’s just not how life works – the ego gets in the way, and we personalize experiences that may not have anything to do with us into our narrative.  Boundaries are a tool that allow you to open the fence to the things you allow and keep yourself safe for the things you don’t want to allow.  Although it’s difficult to see poor responses to your decisions sometimes, even we have to step back a little bit and realize that some things are just not about us.  Yes, our boundaries, yes, our decision and yes, they have a response because of it – but I am only responsible for my response – not theirs. I must honor my heart and my choices because if I am hiding and lying about them, do you even know me? Do I even know me?

In my quest to be the most genuine me I can be, I must take the bad things with the good and just hope I can continue to grow and morph into the next best version of myself every day.  Boundaries play a huge role in this for me.