How to have boundaries with other people

Developing your inner authority, part seven of seven

For part one of this series, “Your own personal wilderness survival map,” click here.
For part two of this series, “Changing the way you THINK,” click here.
For part three of this series, “Change your thoughts, change your life,” click here.
For part four of this series, “Befriending the wilderness within,” click here.
For part five of this series, “Turning the wilderness outward,” click here.
For part six of this series, “How to have boundaries with yourself,” click here.

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“Boundaries protect the things that are of value to you. They keep you in alignment with what you have decided you want in life. That means the key to good boundaries is knowing what you want.”

—Adelyn Birch

Photo by Frank Albrecht on Unsplash

In the mid-90’s, there was a show on Nickelodeon called “The Secret World of Alex Mack,” wherein the titular protagonist, due to some unfortunate accident that I don’t quite remember, could spontaneously transform herself into a puddle and then move around in liquid form (this sounds ridiculous now that I’m spelling it out—here’s a clip if you’re curious). I wasn’t even all that into this show, despite loving my Saturday night SNICK ritual, but I return to it now because it’s a perfect metaphor for how I felt when I woke up and realized that I had zero boundaries.

This sudden and unignorable realization overwhelmed me. I opened my eyes one morning in the very baby days of my sobriety, and saw that my entire way of being up to that moment, my whole identity out in the world, was as nebulous as the dust floating around the afternoon sun pouring through the windows. You see, I had drank to take the edge off for so long that when I finally quit, I was so edgeless that it’s a wonder I didn’t just blow away. I was a shapeshifter, a chameleon. I would mold myself into whatever shape I thought you, or the situation, wanted. I was hypervigilant, constantly scanning my environment, stretching myself to be two steps ahead of everyone else at all times. I was self-conscious, full of doubt. I was witnessing the people around me making great strides in their lives, while all I could seem to do was sort of…hover and float about.

I had no idea who I was or what I wanted. My sense of self was formless and undefined.

I saw that my lack of boundaries over the years had showed up in ways both benign and damaging. On the more benign end of the spectrum, this looked like me saying yes to certain foods I didn’t actually like over shared meals with friends, or always being the one to volunteer to take the bunkbed or pullout when traveling with other people, or keeping my head all the way in the sand when it came to money, regularly blowing past any budget, never able to save more than a few hundred dollars here and there.

On the more damaging end, well. In romantic relationships, this looked like becoming a proxy version of myself—the performer—who prioritized others’ pleasure over her own, who talked herself out of red flags and gut feelings, clinging instead to magical thinking and the misplaced hope of “potential.” At work, this looked like never-not-once asserting myself with a gaslighting boss, who would fawn over my performance one day, and then cut my hours the next. My career trajectory was all over the map, as I had a pattern of jumping from interest-to-interest-to-interest, never committing to anything. In friendship, I was often flaky. Then there were all the times I’d kept my mouth shut when something didn’t sit right with me because I didn’t want to rock any boats or ruffle any feathers.

The effect of this over time was a whittling down. I became small, stuck. Stressed, anxious. And then I’d drink just enough to keep me numb enough to continue to avoid my life until tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Here, in sober retrospect, I see more clearly. I see that what I thought was an easy-breezy, go-with-the-flow personality, was actually just a boundary-less puddle on the floor.

You are born whole and complete. Then, things happen that chip away at that wholeness. Maybe it was the way you were parented—or not parented. Maybe it was harm that was done to you—abuse, or neglect, or some other trauma you lived through. Maybe it was injury, or loss, or betrayal. Maybe you were told that who you were was wrong, or too much, and so you learned to hide, to tamp down, to please everyone else but yourself. More than likely, it was a combination of these factors, your own unique swirl of shit that followed you into adulthood, that when left unresolved or unhealed began to clamor for your attention—often in dubious ways—until you were able to listen.

As the saying goes: none of these things are your fault. But they are your responsibility. Enacting boundaries with the people in your life is a way of taking responsibility. It’s the way you patch up and fortify your edges. It’s the way you return yourself to that sense of wholeness that is your birthright.

At the risk of getting too woo: I visualize healthy boundaries as a golden orb of protection surrounding me. It is my job to preserve the continuity of that orb, to patch up any leaks, to repair the places it was chipped away.

Inside of this golden structure, I am wilder and more self-expressed than ever. With my edges reestablished, I experience the thing I thought taking the edge off would grant me: freedom.

That first year of not drinking, I spent so much time alone. I spoke far less. I felt recently hatched: delicate, fragile, wonder-eyed. The question of who am I? took me on a personal scavenger hunt through past, present, and future. I began to fortify myself from the inside. The lens of magical thinking through which I’d been viewing the world was stripped away, and what was left was a much needed turn toward reality. And, my relationship to time shifted: life felt urgent. After so many years of being borderline anesthetized, I didn’t want to waste a moment more. I wanted to speed up the healing process. I wanted my outer world to hurry up and reflect the inner expansion I was experiencing.

I know you know it doesn’t work like this.

When it comes to boundaries, there are so many wonderful resources out there, entire scripts you can follow to help you assert yourself. I find the specificity and clarity of these scripts to be incredibly helpful, even if they don’t relate to my specific situation. And. Sometimes I have be even more granular. I can’t tell you how many times I’d have an interaction and then find myself still ruminating on it six days later, wondering why such a little blip had me stuck in a loop of overthinking. Scripts aren’t helpful if I can’t recognize that a boundary has been crossed until after the fact.

If the idea of asserting boundaries with people in your life is terrifying, practice simply having preferences. If someone asks you, do you want this or that?—instead of saying you’re “fine with whatever,” tell them what you want. There are so many small and subtle ways to practice having preferences, and most of them are low stakes. Like, if you have to compromise and get the mushrooms on the pizza because that’s really what everyone but you wants, it’s not going to kill you do do so. Practicing having preferences is a simple way to begin speaking up for yourself and what you want, and it also helps give you evidence that you won’t die if you speak your needs (forgive the hyperbole but sometimes this work does feel like life-or-death when you consider that having zero boundaries was a thing that helped you feel safe until it didn’t).

From here, you can build. Like, oh, everything else, consider it a practice, a muscle you can develop. Boundaries are not meant to be rigid, though they might start that way. Let them be sinewy and strong, yet supple. Resilient.

Remember who you are: a redwood tree.

This is going to feel like a leap, so stay with me:

I am not a poet *sheds solitary tear*. I read poetry every day, and, I know very little about it. But I did have to teach poetry in a teaching fellowship once.

You’ve probably heard of sonnets, haiku, villanelle. Many poems have a structure. A form, a boundary, and yes, I’ll say it, an edge. When I was first studying these forms in preparation to teach, I believed them to be confining. Limiting. But then I read the following poem (read it aloud) by Edna St. Vincent Millay, wherein she tames chaos into a sonnet, and my brain blew open:

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon --- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

When you enact boundaries, the chaos of your life is organized. Relationships, situations, circumstances that once felt murky and confusing become sharp, crisp, clear. You say what you mean, you no longer have to over-explain or apologize. You no longer float away into the ether based on someone else’s opinion, because you know who you are: the pooling-out puddle on the floor has returned to its rightful shape, texture and form. You have a defined outline, a border that holds you together, that clarifies yes and no, that you can bounce off of, that maybe—gasp!—you can even have some fun inside. When you return to wholeness, you can rest in who you are. You can trust yourself to take care of yourself, to preserve the mystical orb, to nurture the inner wellspring.

Without chaos, life is all order. If your boundaries become too fixed, too rigid, you miss out on forgiveness, growth, and the space that is required for evolution, both for yourself and your people. Without some order, well, you’re back to that chaotic puddle on the floor.

A sonnet rolls off the tongue in the most delicious way, belying the skill required to make it so. We are not here to get it right. We are simply here to practice. Practice!

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SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

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