Set Boundaries, Don’t Build Walls
There’s a difference between setting boundaries and building walls. At least, that’s what a page out of a book I was reading this weekend reminded me of. It spoke of avoiding the common pitfall of locking yourself behind a wall and claiming that it’s in the name of setting boundaries.
My wall in the last few months has been getting thinner and thinner, but it started out at 10 feet thick, so to say that I felt very called out when I read the page in the book is an understatement. Fear has historically propelled me in the same way it probably does you. It’s made me think that the only way something - whatever that something was - wouldn’t happen again is if I had a hard stop and a do not enter vibe.
I unintentionally adopted a stubborn stance as a form of defense and called it setting healthy boundaries. I made boundaries an all or nothing situation, instead of accounting for the fluidity of my own human nature or anyone else’s.
Part of this has to do with how I grew up. In my family, you’re not allowed to “talk back” which really means, you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Unless that opinion agrees with whatever the older man is telling you. It’s masochistic and patriarchal. The position of power rests with the older man, whoever is the oldest man in the dynamic. Deference is expected whether you’re the younger man or the younger woman.
Having to keep all my opinions inside hurt me so much that once I started to put physical distance between me and my family, I think I went to the other extreme. I built a fortress around myself and turned it into my mission to defend it. Anytime something hurt me, I added more to the wall. The list of things that I would not allow anyone to do to me kept getting longer. I made it harder for anyone to get closer, to apologize, to take up space close to me.
The page in the book hurt to read because I saw myself in it. I know how much fear you have to sit with to feel motivated to build a wall. I understand deeply how hard it is to decide to tear it down as a form of self-love. I know too how your biggest enemy in setting boundaries becomes the desire to go back to the familiarity and faux safety of a wall. No one wants to get hurt again, especially not in ways you’ve gotten hurt before.
No one wants to rid themselves of the opportunity to feel loved though either. When you build a wall, it costs you love and freedom and peace. Walls need to constantly be defended, it’s tiring to be a solo-defender.
My wall was built so thick that it would have been a joke to call it a boundary. It is literally not set in stone for a reason and that reason is you. It’s a matter of fact in a present moment that requires you to feel empowered to change it if the next moment teaches you that you should.
This weekend I spent a lot of time thinking what it would take to tear down what’s remaining of my own wall. Revisiting my boundaries would help, I think. I asked myself what had to exist in order for a boundary to be both solid and fluid and I landed on the detail I was missing when I first started pushing back on everything my family taught me — I could trust myself.
In every instance that I wasn’t allowed to say what I was thinking or to decide for myself about what was right or what was wrong, I was being taught to defer to someone else’s opinion as a compass. The moment I walked away from that way of existing is also the same moment I started building the wrong foundation. I never accounted for the need to give myself time to learn that I could trust myself.
My family not giving me space to push back wasn’t because I wasn’t trustworthy it’s because they’d spent generations building walls instead of boundaries. Building a wall means you’re forever its defender. Anything foreign or unfamiliar is considered an intruder, meant to be fought off. All your energy goes into defending instead of living and trusting.
My details may have looked different, but I was still perpetuating the same mindset. With every brick I added to the wall I was telling myself I couldn’t trust myself, I needed to trust the wall.
But, I can trust myself. For instance, when my puppy chewed up a Christmas light, I was scared shitless but I also trusted myself to know what to do next. I was also reminded in that moment that trusting myself also meant trusting my boyfriend to be as much the owner of the fear and the solution as I was.
It’s new to me to share fear, to leave myself open to pain, to trust that those I let in won’t hurt me, that they’ll respect my boundaries. It’s new to feel confident even in the face of an undeniable fact — that not everyone will respect my boundaries. Some will cross them intentionally, not caring that they are there. Others will do so by accident and require forgiveness.
The most vital conclusion I arrived at this weekend was that I don’t want to keep setting boundaries to keep the pain out, I want to have them so that I can allow happiness and peace to flow freely. Defending the happiness means my identity can’t be wrapped in being a wall-builder. I deserve to be a boundary-setter with some flexibility.