Boundaries and Healing Relationships: Can they co-exist?

Rebecca is answering your questions about healing relationships. If you have a question, you can add it to the comments or email info @ consciouslyparenting (.) com (without the spaces) and ask your question. We’ll be choosing questions to answer each week about relationships with couples, parents and children (of any age), extended family members, and friends.

Question: I have some relationships I am working on healing, but I don’t understand how I can have boundaries and heal a relationship! Doesn’t healing mean you’re opening yourself up? And boundaries mean you’re closing yourself off?

Great question!

Answer:

Not only do I think it’s important to have boundaries when healing a relationship, I think it is actually critical to the process of repairing a relationship to have appropriate boundaries. Healing happens when we feel safe and we can’t feel safe if we don’t have boundaries when we’re trying to do our healing work. I’m going to share a little about where much of the confusion comes from about boundaries and healing, as well as examples of boundaries with a younger child and then an adult relationship that both need healing to try to explain this in a way that makes sense and that you can apply in your life.

Confusion about Healthy Boundaries begins when we’re small

I think that many of us are confused about healthy boundaries because of the messages we received about them when we were growing up. For some of us, growing up meant that we needed to make sure everyone else was taken care of, often at the expense of even knowing what our own needs were, let alone taking those needs into consideration. This could have been modeled indirectly or spoken directly to you. Indirectly might look like your own parent disregarding their own needs to take care of other people or an assumption that you’ll pick up the slack for someone else’s needs. Directly might be someone telling you that you need to take care of a sibling or a stranger, that their needs are more important than yours. Many times, it’s subtle, but you might notice that you know what everyone else needs except for you. These beliefs can also begin even during our time in the womb if we have a parent who is struggling to care for themselves, or after birth if we have a parent who is depressed, struggling with addiction or mental illness. This means that, for some of us, these patterns began before we had words and they’re part of us in a really deep way.

What you might see in Parenting with this Pattern

When we have these kinds of beliefs in place, we often head into parenting putting the needs of our children first and disregarding our own needs. In the parenting context, this is when a parent will share with me that they’re yelling at their child when they can’t contain themselves anymore because they are beyond done. I see this often with sleep, with nursing more often than the parent is comfortable with, when a parent doesn’t say no because the child will be upset until the parent loses it… And they lose the connection with their child in those moments when there needed to be a boundary before this point. Healthy boundaries keep everyone safe, including you.

What makes all the difference is being able to say things like, “No.” “I don’t like that.” “That doesn’t work for me, but let’s try this instead.” “I’m not ok with that.” When you have a no, you can also have an authentic yes that you really mean and the other person can feel. This is true of relationships with young children and also necessary for healing with another adult. We need to know our yes and no to heal.

Next, I’m going to share what healing with a young child looks like to provide a further example about boundaries and healing before we move to a relationship with another adult. I will talk more about healing with older children, teens, and young adults in another post.

Healing with a Young Child

When you’re healing a relationship with a young child, boundaries are essential. We’re often taught to disregard or not name how we’re feeling about something, to ignore, to distract. But it’s important that we’re authentic with our feelings. For young kids, feeling is the way they primarily understand their world. When feelings and words match, things make more sense and everyone settles. So when you can name that something isn’t working, it helps match the feelings they might be picking up on, even if you’re trying to keep them inside. Keeping them inside and denying actually creates more confusion than naming what you’re feeling. This isn’t about blaming but owning your experience.

“Mama is having a hard day today.”

“Daddy is having some big feelings right now. And I’m going to get some support.”

So if you’re disconnected from your 4-year-old in general and he’s hitting you, it isn’t about smiling and pretending it’s fine for you. Rather, it’s important to name, “Ouch! That hurt me. I can’t let you hurt me, so I’m going to move away a little bit, but I’m still here with you. You can have your feelings about what just happened, but it needs to happen in a way that’s safe for both of us.” In real life, it would probably be fewer words or these words over a few minutes, but the intention is what I’m describing. This helps you to come back into connection more quickly because what’s happening has been named.

The alternative might be you enduring your 4-year-old hitting you in the name of trying to reconnect. That ends up not feeling good for either of you. Your 4-year-old doesn’t really want to hurt you. And that makes everyone feel even more disconnected.

Healing with another Adult

When you’re working to heal the relationship with another adult, the idea is the same. You might need to do some work to determine what belongs to whom and whose responsibility it is. If you’ve been taught that it is your responsibility to take care of someone else’s feelings or make sure the other person is ok, even if it hurts you, that makes it harder to do the healing work where everyone takes responsibility for their part and their feelings.

This healing work requires two adults, not just grown-ups in grown up bodies. And some people in grown-up bodies really aren’t adults. My mentor, Ray Castellino, often said, “Look with your present adult age, your adult eyes.” We often have very young parts of ourselves that come up when there’s a disconnection with someone we care about. It’s important to acknowledge those young parts of ourselves and support ourselves to return to our present age. Robin Grille, author of, “Heart to Heart Parenting” and other gentle parenting books, suggests that we: “Do something adult. Stand up. Go make yourself some coffee.” This helps to bring us back into present time and reminds us that we are an adult in this interaction. Once we’re back in our adult self, we can begin to ask the questions: “Who does this belong to? Is this my responsibility? What belongs to me?”

Healing requires safety.

Just like you cannot heal your relationship with your 4-year-old if you’re being hit and not feeling safe in this moment (knowing it is your job to teach those skills and support boundaries that keep you both safe), you can’t heal your relationship with your mother or another adult if it doesn’t feel safe (and it isn’t your responsibility to teach your mother those skills like it is your 4-year-old; it doesn’t belong to you). This is where boundaries come in. When we can say, “No, I’m not ok with _____” and it can be respected, that creates a foundation for healing to happen. When it can’t be respected by another adult, this may be where the process stops with the other person until there is enough understanding to continue.

Is it really reconnection and healing when we’re not feeling safe? How does it help us to feel more connected and repair if the other person wants to have conversations only on their terms and that doesn’t feel safe to you? How can we heal together if they’re continuing to hurt you or your loved ones? In the situations where you’ve placed your boundaries and communicated what you need and it still isn’t being respected, you can still do your own healing work to feel more settled and integrated about the relationship without the other person’s direct involvement. The boundary helps us to begin to rebuild something together by understanding the needs of each other, or to see that the other person isn’t able to do that right now (that belongs to them- it is their responsibility to heal) and we need to continue to protect ourselves. (Keeping yourself safe- that belongs to you!)

Getting clear on your own needs is an important step in healing any relationship. And those needs can be stated as a part of the healing process. When you’re both feeling safe, you can ask yourself it if is safe to try to open your heart, and if yes, that’s where the healing can happen. And if it can’t happen safely in the relationship, you can still do your own healing work around the relationship for yourself.

Do you have a question about healing a relationship? We’d love to hear from you! Write a question in the comments or email info @ consciouslyparenting (.) com without the spaces or parenthesis. We’ll be choosing one question a week for Rebecca to answer!