To Boundary or Not to Boundary

I try not to make rules for what I will and won’t accept. To the best of my ability, unguarded is my policy.

The world is constantly offering feedback that can teach us about who we are. It’s best not to get in the way of that process.

There’s a place for boundaries for sure, but once the appropriate correction has been established, it’s helpful to expand our capacity beyond. Great learning and growth can result from unwelcome happenings. Interest and self reflection are vastly more useful than closure.

The good and bad that come our way is feedback about what lies inside. Our personal reality is determined by the mix of experience accumulated within. Life around us is constantly showcasing the state of our internal condition. It’s a very popular notion that we can command our lives with positive thoughts and intentions but this concept is deeply flawed. The truth is that our internal state (unconscious self) is ultimately in charge. Every unresolved emotional injury buried within us will rule with it’s demand to be recognised. Situations are called forth periodically to stir any of our wounded feelings that remain unattended.

The world brings us the match of our condition. All that is healthy and flourishing, and all that is wounded and broken will be exactly reflected in the circumstances around us. The experiences we attract are perfectly orchestrated to illuminate the full spectrum of our interior condition. Every unwelcome occurrence offers data about our makeup that can be used to remedy and advance our position if we approach it in the right way. Whenever an upset snags and triggers something, it tells us we have a matching problem within. But it’s so common that we convince ourselves that the cause lies outside with the offending person, event or situation. That resistance to self reflection has us seek to act against the trouble – to get angry, confront the person, make a complaint, turn our backs, implement new rules, warn others of the situation, call the police, never speak to someone again etc. But the more we employ tactics to guard against what we don’t like, the more tension we end up inviting. It’s not until we look within that the issue can actually be resolved. Internal correction is far more effective than external protection.

Our wounding is magnetic. It will continually attract life circumstances that can surface the unresolved pain. Putting up boundaries might alleviate some immediate stress but the vulnerability remains so long as the original hurt lives on inside. Assigning boundaries to protect against recurrence can actually perpetuate the problem. When repeating patterns go unattended, the pain grows larger as additional experiences accumulate to consolidate the story. It’s not wrong to secure some kind of breathing space, just so long as we use it to attend to the internal source of the problem.

There are clear themes to our troubles in life. Every problem originates with an experience usually very early in our life. If we encounter a bad thing and cry our little hearts out to naturally release all the associated trauma, then that leaves us resolved. There’s no unresolved emotional residue to stalk us. But if our emotional expression gets disrupted or shut down causing upset feelings to go unexpressed, then those feelings live on inside to provoke a repetition of the upset.

We’re not meant to live with suffering. Life will, therefore, present us with situations that match our unresolved feelings in order to remind us we’ve left something inside that hurts. Troubles offer gifts of insight to reveal abandoned feelings. They will keep appearing over and over to help us recognise the trauma that we hold. Putting up boundaries means we are acting against this process like stitching a wound to hide deep infection. Rather than push back against trouble, it’s far healthier to be guided by it.

1. Identify the feeling that’s being triggered.

2. Surrender completely to that feeling with the intention of being swept back in time to the very first incident that matches this tone of feeling. There will likely be many examples in adulthood and teenage years of that precise feeling in various scenarios but be determined to feel back to the very earliest one. It’s not important to get clear conscious recall, just to allow the fullness of the original buried feelings to emerge.

3. Allow all of the feelings that come. Remain open until the emotion washes through completely to find it’s natural finish. When the release is complete, the collapse of the causative issue will act like the first in a row of falling dominos to clear all the traumas of that same theme that followed afterwards.

4. Feel again into the present time stress and it should feel neutralised.

The clues to the original core wound can always be found within the theme of the external offense.

If my home gets broken into and I respond with the boundary approach I might install an alarm system, surveillance cameras and sensor lights. Maybe this offers some feeling of greater safety but it doesn’t get to the emotional root of the problem. The alternative un-boundaried approach would have me search for what old hidden trauma attracted the intrusion in the first place. If I investigate properly, I might be ushered back to feeling terrified as a 3 year old by a ghost in my bedroom at night. The present time home intrusion is helping to highlight that original wound. All I need to do is get properly in touch with that 3 year old fear. If I shake and cry properly until that original terror finds complete release, I’ll have successfully erased that wound from my unconscious patterning. The world won’t conspire around me any longer to stir that issue because now the original seed of it is gone. Those intrusive experiences still happened and I can remember them but now there’s no unresolved emotion remaining to give it a negative charge and provoke the pattern to play on repeat. With it being neutralised, I’m no longer a candidate for attracting invasive experiences. And with that there will be no inclination to secure my property. I will feel different, and my reality will be different. Addressing things at the core offers corrections on both fronts: the safety I now feel emotionally and the security I will now experience physically.

When really terrible things are ongoing we often don’t feel we have the space or safety to deep dive into the original causes. A boundary can be useful in these situations to provide security to attend to the wounds. But ultimately they should only be employed as temporary measures to set us free.

Disturbing as a person’s mistreatment may be, these traumas can inevitably assist us in knowing ourselves better. We don’t have to excuse bad behaviour by any means, but we can make a right out of someone else’s wrong. We can turn things to our advantage if we choose to investigate ourselves rather than lock out the enemy. This is not to say we should leave ourselves in harms way, but that we take notice and reflect upon the experiences we attract.

People can’t continue to do bad things to us once we resolve our inner wounding. They either change their ways or disappear. Essentially they end up taking care of themselves once our inner work is complete.

A truly successful boundary is one that no longer needs to be policed. When we resolve out internal position, the need for the outer protection evaporates. The offending person or situation is no longer a threat. We become immune to what previously felt dangerous or offensive. We have freed ourselves, not via protection but via tending to unconscious vulnerability.

It takes a lot of energy to control the environment and maneuver ourselves through life to avoid what we don’t like. To insist on the tight control of rules and regulations is to essentially go against a natural law which is there to help us know ourselves. Try not to resort to boundaries out of fear. The brave alternative is to yield and surrender instead into the river of feeling that can wash us clean and bring renewal. The more quickly we can search for the remedy by taking our attention inward rather than outward, the better.

Don’t let boundaries lock you in.