The idea of setting healthy boundaries is so that we live a healthy life. Boundaries are fashioned to protect us, and they also help form our identities in childhood. Boundaries teach others what we find ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ as well as what is important to us (our values). For those of us with poor boundaries, however, the opposite is true. We live unhealthily because we don’t have healthy boundaries, and we have difficulty identifying and asserting what is acceptable or unacceptable to us because, somewhere in our history, we experienced trauma that prohibited us from learning how to protect ourselves. Boundaries take on a heightened significance for those who have experienced childhood trauma because they challenge the negative assumptions trauma survivors often form about themselves. The result of this/these experience(s) confuse our ability to set healthy boundaries as we constantly feel unsafe and weren’t given the tools or conditioning necessary to know how to protect ourselves, identify what is important to us, and put our needs first.
Boundaries are largely formed in childhood, and how a child is treated by others shapes how their boundaries are defined. When a child’s needs are met appropriately, they feel safe and secure, and the child understands a healthy sense of their boundaries. Contrarily, when abuse and/or emotional neglect (aka trauma) is present in childhood, it disallows a child a sense of safety and the need to explore their identity and needs. Boundaries are often a reflection of the conditioned fears that are still subconsciously dictating our emotional and behavioral responses. As Stephen Porges, Ph.D., explains, “The removal of threat is not the same thing as the experience of safety.”
When boundaries are difficult, it’s because trauma taught us to fear getting hurt and the resulting feelings of guilt or shame. This fear manifests in our bodies by making our nervous system feel dysregulated, activating our fight, flight, or freeze response. When this occurs, we immediately go into ‘survival’ mode, and all awareness and concern about our intrapersonal needs or logic go out the window. We regress into our child-like selves, looking for a way to feel safe in that moment. Some thoughts that may consciously or subconsciously occur are, “If I don’t do it, I am bad”, “If I don’t put others’ needs first, I am not a good person”, or “If I take too much time for me, I am selfish”. These thoughts are generated as a result of our mammalian brains, which are wired for making human connections, in order to defy impending feelings of guilt or shame and ensure that we’ll be accepted and cared for by others.
We often approach our poor boundaries in adulthood, which manifest as issues like the fear of missing out (FOMO), perfectionism, or wanting to please everyone to the detriment of getting your own needs met, through a solution-focused approach (e.g., work less, more self-care, etc.). In addition to this approach, we should also be identifying the underlying reasons that these poor boundaries exist. As a therapist, it’s easy enough to direct clients to do things like ‘get a hobby’, communicate their needs, use assertive language, or just say no more often, but this isn’t getting to the root(s) of the issue(s) (aka your experiences) that helped shaped the poor boundaries being demonstrated.
Victims of abuse experience a loss of control over their own bodies and lives. Children who grow up in homes that don’t function well in terms of communication or understanding where physical, mental, and emotional boundaries are not respected often become confused, vulnerable, and insecure. Children who have been abused or emotionally neglected often are not allowed to or are never given the chance to, learn their boundaries. Children are wired to give up authenticity in order to feel acceptance and safety.
As Morgan Concepcion of Lifeworks Psychotherapy Center puts it, “If you have experienced trauma, you may be less likely to actively defend yourself, your desires, and your personal boundaries in new situations. Trauma impacts the way you understand and relate to your own boundaries.” For example, if you grew up with a parent that abused substances such as alcohol and/or drugs, you might have spent your childhood being the ‘peacemaker’, resulting in parentification (when the child becomes the ‘parent’ to his/her parent(s) and/or their siblings in lieu of the actual parent) and the development of hyperfocus on taking care of the needs of others instead of your own.
Other ways that trauma in childhood might have shaped your boundaries is that you grew up as the oldest in your family and you learned to mediate your parents’ arguments. In adulthood, this may manifest as you constantly making sure that everyone around you is at peace and happy despite your own exhaustion and discontent. If your trauma involves sexual abuse, it likely led to confusion over the very basic rules of ownership of your own body. Instead of learning that your body is your own and no one else is allowed to touch it without your permission, you learn that your body is not your own. Here are some other examples of poor boundaries indicative of childhood trauma:
1. It is difficult for you to ask for what you want and need and hard to say ‘NO’ to
others when you would like to.
2. It is easier to take care of other people’s needs and desires than your own. It is also easier to go along with them than express your own opinions.
3. Other people seem to know you better than you know yourself. They also seem to know what is best for you.
4. It is hard to make decisions because you frequently don’t know how you are feeling or what you think about important things.
5. When feelings are present, they are so strong that they are overwhelming. It is difficult to control the ‘volume’, to turn feelings up or down and still be in touch with them.
6. Relationships seem to be one-way, and you always put more into them than you get out of them. But even though you’re not getting what you want, you stay with them just the same.
7. Other people’s moods have a big effect on you because you feel responsible for them. When they are happy, you are happy. When they are sad or angry, you blame yourself!
8. Disturbing thoughts or memories keep popping into your awareness and sensations occur in parts of your body for no apparent reason.
9. Concentrating and paying attention are often difficult. You are too easily distracted or influenced by things going on around you.
10. Learning from your own mistakes is not easy. You seem to keep making the same errors in judgment repeatedly, and you have little confidence in your own experience.
11. Other people seem to have a better grasp on reality than you do, so you depend on them to tell you what is true and real.
12. People can take or borrow things from you without returning them or repaying you. What’s theirs is theirs and what’s yours is theirs.
Setting healthy boundaries as a survivor of childhood trauma causes you to constantly battle with self-doubt, poor self-image, and a damaged perception of your boundaries. Self-preservation and self-worth are diminished and often ignored if you’ve had these experiences. This is added to the other existing layers of difficulty in setting healthier boundaries, but by working on setting healthy boundaries you are combating all of these barriers, little by little. It’s helpful to allow yourself to approach practicing boundary setting with more self-compassion to guide you. Explore what your boundary issues are and how they may be related to what you learned in your childhood when your ability to make choices was limited, and your experiences were largely out of your control. Growing your self-awareness to improve your boundaries is invaluable and will help you heal and reshape how you treat yourself as well as how well you allow others to treat you.