Boundaries

Lately I've experienced some boundary violations in real life. I've had to deal with this issue for what seems like most of my life, and I'm even ashamed to admit that my hands aren't clean on this front either. I've been learning, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a little of what I've learned.

House

Think of your body and your mind in terms of your house. When you don't know somebody well, you don't invite them to your house. You might not even want them knowing where you live. When you get to know someone a little bit better, or you want to know them better, you invite them to your house. In the beginning, do you let them go through your refrigerator and go into the bedrooms and the bathroom to rummage through your medicine cabinet? Do you let them use your computer? No. They get to sit in the living room and maybe you tell them where the toilet is if they ask. They only get to see what's in the living room on display, like your books or your taste in art.

Later, when you get to know them better they might stay overnight and get to see the guest room. You might let them come into the kitchen to keep you company while you cook. You need to know someone pretty well for either of those things to happen though. Even when you live in the same house with someone, they don't get to see everything or go through your things. They don't get to stand outside and talk to you while you're on the toilet. They don't get to play with your phone or get into your wallet. You have to be extremely close, like family or someone you're in a relationship with to be allowed to do that.

Self

Now translate these concepts to yourself. It's a matter of scale. Your house is an external representation of you. When you get down to a smaller scale, your body is your house. Just as you get to decide who comes to your house or not, you get to decide who touches you or not. Strangers do not get to touch you. Friends can touch you, but only on the hand or the shoulder. They don't get to touch your front or below the waist. Family might get to go a little further, and a sex partner gets to go further still, but even there there might be communicated limits.

Body Map And Touch

That's just the body. Now we get to the mind. A new acquaintance might be allowed to know a little about you, like your name or your marital status, what city you live in. They don't get to know how much you paid for your house or your political views. They don't get to pry into your personal business. A friend might know a little bit more, like what your hobbies are or what you're doing on any given day. Family might get to know a lot more, like what your favorite color or food is, what your sexual orientation is, etc., but there again there are still limits. They don't get to know everything. They don't get to question you about personal phone calls or open your mail, for example. 

Boundary Violations

A boundary violation is when someone crosses a line, say for example a stranger tries to pry into your personal life on the first meeting. Another way it might happen is when someone tells you something very personal before you know them well enough for that. Oversharing. They're telling you something you don't have a right to know, and maybe you haven't decided yet whether you're ever going to know each other like that. Yet another example might be a new acquaintance railroading you into doing something for them that they have no right to ask for. I've had two people drop off their kids with me with no notice. That's a boundary violation. If somebody borrows something of yours and returns it trashed, that's another type of violation. I've had a family member go into my room and rifle through my things right in front of me, or walk into the bathroom while I was taking a bath. All of these are boundary violations. Sexual harassment at work is a boundary violation. Your work wanting to police what you do on your own time is a boundary violation. 

The problem with boundary violations is that they can be a slippery slope to being abused. A lot of people will start with small infractions to see how far they can push it, and if you don't set firm limits they will either walk all over you or escalate into full-blown abuse, be it emotional, physical, or verbal. Boundaries represent what you will and will not put up with from another person depending on how close the two of you are. Even when you are close, you are entitled to privacy and you get to decide who touches you and how someone talks to you and whether they are allowed to make certain demands on you. You get to decide how much they know about your life and how involved they get to be in your business. When someone crosses your boundaries, what they're telling you is that what they want is more important than what you want. 

Safe

We have boundaries so that we can feel safe and so that we don't feel controlled from outside or taken advantage of. Boundaries are the things we tolerate and don't tolerate. In order to have healthy relationships, they have to be there. They represent respect for one another. It's also a prerequisite for living together. Privacy is a big part of boundaries. It's why I'm somewhat alarmed at what's happening with social media and government initiatives to spy on citizens, employers monitoring things like social media or conducting drug tests. These things are meant to make us feel connected or make us feel safe, because someone is watching, but in truth they make us feel more insecure. Not everybody needs to know everything about you. You have a right to privacy. When you hear someone say "If you're not doing anything wrong then why does privacy matter?", ask them if they have a lock on their front door or a door on their bedroom. If they're not doing anything wrong, why do they need those things? Is it because they need privacy after all? 

I remember as a child never having any privacy, so I spent all of my time trying to avoid attracting attention so that I could just do my own thing and have a little space to myself. Instead of seeing it for what it was, because that would have meant admitting to having forced me into that position with the lack of boundaries, my behavior was interpreted as "secretive". Not so much. I had to do that because it was the only way I could have a sense of self. When there are no boundaries, we can't draw a line between ourselves and others. We can't feel like our own person. It's important. I suspect that most of the people without boundaries are like that because they never had healthy boundaries modeled to them by the people around them growing up. Maybe that's why it's so important to set those boundaries with them and stick to them, and if necessary spell it out to them why they need to respect the boundary. After all, we have to live together on this earth and we all get so little to call our own. 

Life is tough enough without making it harder for others. It's worth being mindful of your own boundaries and observing the golden rule with others by treating their boundaries as if they were just as important as yours.