Selfish: mildly uncomfortable experiments with boundaries
I’ve been feeling pretty selfish these days. It’s a little strange but mostly kind of awesome.
It’s to do with what I've been finding out about boundaries. If, like me, you’ve lived with shmooshy ones your whole life, things are likely going to get real weird once you start to explore them for realzies.
How we learned to live / love
In a way, boundaries represent how we learned to express love. In general we are conditioned by our families, cultures, religions, and communities to hold boundaries the way we do.
Some people were (inexplicably) raised with healthy boundaries: knowing when to say no (and being fine about it? baffling), clarity around when they’ve had enough, that sort of thing. Other folks’ boundaries are a little harder edged: more contained / constrained in their experiences and expression.
Then there those with what I so eruditely refer to as shmooshier boundaries, where the tendency is to be more accommodating. That’s the crowd we’ll focus on in this piece.
And I’m majorly oversimplifying for the purposes of this piece, of course. Obviously there are not only these three categories, and there is a far more subtle, nuanced continuum of experience for each person. In fact, I’d love to hear about yours—let’s get a conversation going in the comments, shall we?
What it feels like from the inside
For the shmooshy people, the experience from inside our more pliable walls might feel like kindness, like generosity, or simply the right way to live. The tendency is to give, even if we don’t have much to give. To do anything else feels selfish, even hateful. So we overdo, over accommodate, we smile, we say yes. We are easygoing and generous. The gates are open all the time, folks come and go and take because they’ve always had an unspoken invitation to. We give and we give and we give and you see where this is going right? What’s left for us?
And I don’t mean this in the martyry way it sounds. In fact, that’s part of why I’m writing this: to take the martyrdom out of it. Because I think we tend to approach this very common issue in pretty extreme ways—e.g., not acknowledging that it even is an issue until we’re physically sick or in deep crisis. And then we get righteous and defiant and blamey about it. It becomes about Taking it All Back, Putting Ourselves First, giving a giant middle finger to everyone who has asked and taken and assumed.
Anger and alignment
Yes, of course, anger is appropriate in these situations. But not at the “perpetrators,” or even at ourselves. Not at anyone, period. Anger is simply the emotion that shows us where our boundaries are. (More about that in this awesome article by Karla McLaren.) We have the option to just feel it and notice what it’s telling us. “Right here,” it might say. “This is what I can’t do anymore.” We can even let it guide our actions—as in, I don’t know, maybe stop doing the thing?
Of course, this is where it gets tricky. It will feel selfish to stop because, maybe for the first time, you are indeed putting yourself before someone else. It might even feel straight-up wrong. Like, have you ever had a yoga teacher or bodyworker show you what it is to stand up straight, but you feel like you’re leaning back because you’ve been hunched forward your whole life?
Ironically, finding alignment can feel like getting thrown off balance at first.
Blame
This might be where we start getting defensive, because we feel we have to justify this weird new posture to ourselves, our communities, our hearts—whatever the source was of the message that we couldn’t have boundaries in the first place.
This is a loop I see folks getting caught in often. We feel anger, which as nice people we’re not ‘supposed’ to feel, so it morphs into its cousin indignation, which then gets poured into stories, into causes. For instance, one story I hear a lot is that this issue with boundaries is something only women experience. Sure, it’s heavily weighted in that direction, but it’s not exclusive by any means. Yet we get swept up in stories like this, direct our anger there, and then we’re out even more energy fighting to change this societal phenomenon that we believe is causing the problem.
It is true that societal structures are built on patterns of behavior, and it's absolutely important to bring awareness to those structures. That’s part of dismantling them. Simultaneously we can work to dismantle them at the source: each of us shifting the patterns in ourselves. This is super hard work, so it’s understandable that some go toward outrage, blast the anger outward, punch up. Indignation is another safety mechanism. It keeps us from feeling what asserting personal boundaries can otherwise feel like at first: selfish. Unkind. Unsafe. Lonely.
Experimenting
I’ve had to put up pretty harsh-feeling boundaries with an acquaintance who recently reappeared in my life. Historically they have been needy, and historically I’ve moved to fill those needs. It has felt like kindness, like I was helping. And to be honest, it wasn’t taking that much out of me physically, financially, or even in terms of time. But it was draining my mental and emotional energy big time, siphoning it way faster than it could be replenished. I was constantly thinking about this person, anticipating what they might need next, what they might ask for, how I could potentially avoid their need, or what it would cost me to meet it. I was literally losing sleep. It probably goes without saying that I was deeply pissed at them.
Meanwhile I noticed that other folks in this person's life, who were in equal proximity to them as I was, were sleeping just fine. They weren’t nervous or angry or stressed. In fact, they didn’t have any strong feelings about this person at all.
That’s when I began to see that this isn’t an objective truth about this person. The call was coming, as it were, from inside the house.
Encouraged by wise friends, my therapist and others, I began to use this relationship as grounds to experiment. For instance, I defaulted to saying no, even if it felt wretched. Or I put the boundary line out even farther, waiting a day or two to respond to a text, or not responding at all.
Oh god it felt awful. For a minute my sleep got even worse. But then…
They changed too
They stopped asking. Naturally, I was terrified at first that they were upset with me, that I’d hurt them. But when I saw them next, our interaction was a warm one. They even thanked me for what I had done for them so far but, in that moment, didn’t ask for anything further. They seemed to be in good shape, not deprived of anything. It would appear they were getting their own needs met some other way.
It really wasn’t my job. It never was.
Slowly I took this experiment in other directions, into relationships of greater consequence. Letting a little more time go by before a response. Not apologizing for whatever I perceived as a failure of extrasensory perception on my part (i.e., I’m sorry for not reading your mind better). Not apologizing, period. Trusting—and this part is huge—that the person (adults, all) would find a way to get what they need without my help. That even in my closest relationships, it’s not my job to ensure others’ comfort.
So far, everyone’s still around! As far as I know nobody’s even mad at me. Are you? Heh. That’s part of this though. Part of setting boundaries is risking people being disappointed in me. Mad at me. I’m risking being rejected: a core wound I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid. I have to trust (anyone seeing a theme here?) that I am loved for more than my learned behavior, and that anyone who does leave because I’ve changed that behavior probably didn’t really love me to begin with.
Focusing inward
This has given me just enough breathing room to examine how this trait of shmooshy boundaries developed in me. As with all learned behaviors, surely there was something I gained from it early on, before I was conscious of it, and it took up residence as an automatic response.
I know that for some, the inability to assert boundaries was a very clear deal made with very real (not so healthy) people early in life, and indeed the consequence of saying no might mean losing that person. It is true: that person may go away for a time if we assert a boundary. After all, doing so is changing the ‘rules’ of how we’ve always interacted. They’re not going to like it.
Our impulse might be to focus on how we ‘hurt’ them, on how awful we are (again, the message we’ve gotten our entire lives). Another possibility is to reserve a smidgen of attention to notice how we feel, in addition to how they do. Maybe our feelings aren’t tinged with as much resentment or guilt. Maybe we stand up straighter, can take deeper breaths. Maybe there’s a modicum of liberation, of freed-up energy.
What about you?
When anger gives you the “I can’t do this anymore” message, get curious. First, can you stay with the anger in you without immediately turning it onto someone else? If so, what is the “this” you can’t do? What would it be to honor that? What would life feel like if you in fact were no longer doing it?
There’s no need to take this beyond a thought experiment until you are ready. And please please engage all the support you can around this in the form of therapy, coaching, friends. It’s complex, nuanced, challenging work. You can always explore, on the page or in a conversation, how this is all showing up for you. And then maybe, like me, you can find little ways to start experimenting.
And please share your experience with all this below!
Didja know?
In addition to hosting groups and helping people write, I also do more ‘traditional’ coaching, holding folks in their process of growth and unfolding. If you’re in a transition or needing clarity, I’d be so glad to chat about possibilities.
