Where to Draw the Line_How to Set Healthy Boundaries Every Day

by Anne Katherine

  When our use of time has impact on someone else’s hourglass, it becomes a relationship issue, and the boundaries involved are more complex.

  PUNCTUALITY

  If you agree to meet someone at a certain time, you are creating a contract with that person. Every minute that you are late uses a portion of the other person’s life.

  Being habitually late starts affecting relationships. Your lateness squanders the time of the person who is waiting, and it can create distance and friction.

  I know that some friends will be punctual and that this is important to them, so I am too. With other friends, we have a fifteen-minute grace period. Other friends are always late, so I’m late too.

  When I was young I was often late—a combination of an unmanageable life, perfectionism, procrastination, and a lack of understanding of the effect of lateness on others. As I’ve gotten healthier, I’ve gotten more punctual.

  It helped me also to realize that it is easier to be early than to be on time. Being on time requires precision; arriving at exactly the right moment requires perfect coordination in leaving, getting through traffic, and finding parking. It is easier to aim for the vague space called early.

  Punctuality is partly defined by one’s culture and subculture. Some cultures find lateness rude and insulting; others use time in a fluid fashion that includes a broad band of minutes rather than one point on the clock.

  Even the region in which you live can make a difference. Arrive early at a party in Seattle and you’ll find the hostess in the shower. Arrive late at a party in the Midwest and it may be over. When members of different cultures mix, they may inadvertently insult each other by being early or by being late.

  When you are late, what’s it about? Are you disorganized? Do you plan poorly? Do you get distracted or sidetracked? Do you try to do too much? Do you leave too much to the last minute? Are you fearful of arriving, or resentful about leaving home? Do you have insufficient help with the things you have to do? Do you simply not care about being punctual?

  If you are a punctual person and you have a friend who is usually late, think about what you need. Talk to your friend about how you feel, the message you are getting, and what you want.

  If that friend continues to be late, you can choose to be late yourself. You can reset your arrival time to correspond with your friend’s habit. You can also set a limit for how long you’ll wait. When you reach that limit, leave.

  Setting a boundary for the amount of lateness you’ll tolerate can be freeing. In keeping such a boundary, you maintain ownership over your life’s time.

  HEALTHY TIME BOUNDARIES

  Healthy time boundaries are somewhat flexible, allowing for the insertion of a new decision based on your priorities and your true obligations to others. They are also somewhat firm, protecting your schedule from interruptions that don’t truly require your attention.

  Your greatest obligation in your use of time is to yourself, so that you are filling the days of your life with the pursuits and activities that reflect your deepest values. Time boundaries protect these pursuits, creating the limits that allow you to interact most fully with what matters to you.

  When we clutter our lives with imagined obligations, unnecessary activities, and distractions that only kill time, we dilute the power of our lives.

  You have the ultimate responsibility for the use of your time. At the end of your life, none of the excuses or defenses will matter. What will matter is that you spent your time on the experiences you wanted to have.

  Chapter 3

  DEFENSES VERSUS BOUNDARIES

  When Rachel Wannamaker walked into Seth Greenbank’s chemistry class, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Her hair framed her face like satin curtains. Those eyes, an ocean blue, drew him in so deep he couldn’t think of anything more important than being inside them.

  It wasn’t courage that prompted him to invite her for coffee at the end of class. He couldn’t have stopped himself any more than feathers can make themselves fall straight.

  The grace he saw in her fluid gestures turned out to represent the real thing. She had an internal graciousness as well. He couldn’t resist her. He fell so hard in love with her that he never hit bottom. They married a few weeks before he shipped out to Vietnam.

  He never once had the slightest worry that she would leave him. He trusted her absolutely. He didn’t feel heroic exactly, but he was giving up years of his life to a miserable experience for the sake of his country so he thought he was racking up credits with both God and woman, namely Rachel.

  While he was keeping faith with the traditions of manhood, the people of his country were abandoning ship. The populace was so against the war, and the politicians promoting it, that many forgot to stand behind the young men who had no choice about being there.

  Rachel continued to write him letters of love and encouragement, but she also wrote of incomprehensible activities at law school, such as protest rallies and a petition she had drafted to emphasize the illegality of the war he was fighting. She loved him personally, but she hated what he was doing and saw it as having no value.

  These things made no sense to him. When his tour was over, he returned to a country he didn’t recognize and a wife he couldn’t understand. He could hardly find traces of the girl he had kissed good-bye in the poised woman who greeted him at the airfield. While he had been pining for her in the mud and terror, she had converted herself into a powerhouse who fearlessly challenged any person or institution that stomped on the little guy.

  They stumbled along for several years, producing two children, a mortgage, and a suburban lifestyle. Then, after a decade of accusing him of not participating in the marriage, Rachel filed for divorce, and he was out on the street.

  She had never been sexually unfaithful to him, but she had abandoned him by becoming a different person with foreign perspectives. Her mind had become unfaithful to him.

  Seth was shell-shocked after the divorce. It took him a few years to establish a routine that satisfied him. He set up his own accounting business and got involved with a ham radio group. With the social activities of the ham group and his daughters on alternate weekends, his life was full enough.

  Then Becky Race came to work for him. She was a pint-sized bundle of energy topped with flyaway brown hair. After a while they began dating. He could tell that she was a bountiful person, and she was obviously crazy about him. She was an incredible cook and gentle with his daughters. After a while it just made sense to marry her.

  She continued to be the same person after he married her. If he was waiting for her to prove herself, she came through like the Red Cross. She was kind, womanly, generous of heart and energy, especially toward him.

  He had no complaints. She had only one. She could feel that he held his heart in reserve.

  He knew he could trust her. He knew she was devoted to him, but he could not let his heart out of its box. He couldn’t risk the carefree, spontaneous joy of loving when its amputation had brought him such darkness. Occasionally she would do something that would so touch him that he very nearly felt himself open. But he would clamp down on the impulse and harden himself again.

  When Seth was seventy-eight and sat in the shadows of the funeral home, with his Becky cold and silent amid the flowers, his heart broke a second time, as much for the loss of years of loving as for the woman who was gone.

  • • •

  For many of us, our first exuberant love ended badly. We were young, innocent, unskilled, and we didn’t know how fragile love could be. That first heartbreak laid us low. We had never imagined we could hurt so excruciatingly and not have a visible wound.

  Some of us react to that situation by making a decision, often an unconscious one, to guard our hearts from then on. We might love again, but never so wildly.

  Similar results can be spawned by other situations. Being failed by someone we’ve wholly trusted or boundlessly needed can be shattering. No matter what age we are when this h
appens, it can set the parameters for how much we will dare risk again—not only with that person, but with anyone.

  When we withdraw ourselves from the possibility of a repeated calamity—by walling out certain feelings (or a certain intensity of feeling), or by not allowing ourselves to repeat such trust, need, or love again—we take ourselves into a fortress, a defended state of being. Even if the original loss happens when one is so young as to be not fully conscious, a defense can still be erected.

  A defense can be a state or an action. We are in a defended state when we stand behind some sort of unilateral protection in order to prevent a feeling we can’t bear to experience again. Defensive actions are discussed in Chapter 5.

  We take pride in our sentience, justly so, but instinct and survival have lives of their own seemingly separate from our great thinking brains. We can make a sincere decision to be more open or to let in joy—and our intention can be powerful—but if an approaching shadow looks anything like what hurt us in the past, we may fend it off without conscious thought. There are ways for us to reset this programming, and these ways are not violent, but they do take commitment and patience.

  • • •

  Like most babies, Helen came into the world receptive to whatever would happen. From the get-go she had emotional as well as physical needs. Being fed, diapered, and warm was good but not enough. She also needed to be held, cuddled, and embraced. She needed to feel safe and connected to another human being.

  Her psyche reached through the mists in search of an answering heart, as if she had a cord that needed to be plugged in. Unfortunately, Helen got a mom without an outlet. Mom herself had a cord that needed to be plugged in. A little baby teeming with needs was not her best companion.

  When little Helen ran into the house with blood gushing from a cut, Mom ran out of the house and called a neighbor. Helen got a black eye from the neighborhood bully and Mom asked what she’d done to provoke it. When she was playing with her older sister and her sister fell and broke her arm, Mom blamed three-year-old Helen for the damage (for forty years).

  Helen’s mom wanted to be taken care of herself. She resented Helen for presenting these pesky needs and for creating situations that demanded something of her.

  Deep down inside, Helen was in pain. Needing this Teflon-coated woman hurt way too much, so her psyche decided not to need ever again.

  For the next forty years, Helen went through life on automatic. She made great decisions. She married a good man, found a comfy life, and was popular, but she went through half a lifetime without feeling.

  Her stockade covered extensive ground. Not only did Helen stop needing, she also blocked contact with her inner self. She felt no joy, no sorrow, no peace, no thrill, no heart-expanding happiness, no grief. She did not reach out for emotional connection and didn’t take it in when it was offered to her.

  As children we may opt for a defended state if our circumstances are dangerous, hostile, nonsupportive or dismissive. Emotional abuse or exploitation, emotional neglect or abandonment, lack of support for the natural stages of development—any of these can cause a complete reordering of our systems in the direction of self-protection.

  CREEPING BASTIONS OR HOW DEFENDEDNESS SPREADS OUT

  Let’s look at a simple behavior that is a natural part of childhood—asking questions. If Franna is ridiculed every time she asks a question, what do you think will happen?

  • She’ll ask more questions.

  • She’ll ask fewer questions.

  • She’ll stop being curious.

  She’ll ask fewer questions, perhaps even stop asking questions altogether. The risk is that her mechanism for self-protection will expand beyond the mere voicing of questions to the very process of questioning. She may even resist her sense of wonder, blocking her curiosity and interest in the unknown.

  We are geniuses at survival. Whatever is inside us that leads to an experience of pain, betrayal, or abandonment, we can lock away. If we get rebuffed when we seek affection, we may stop seeking affection. If we are treated harshly every time we assert ourselves as a separate and individual human being, we may fear being different except when aligned with some person or group that validates our differentness.

  DEFENDED PARENTS SPAWN DEFENDED CHILDREN

  Gerry’s teenage years were a trial. His cold, harsh father got deeper into drink and lighted on Gerry as a target for his rage. Glen was capable of cuffing Gerry if he set the trash can down two inches to the right of the usual spot, or if he forgot to pick up a piece of homework from the dining room table.

  As Gerry moved into adolescence with its accompanying agenda of rebellion, he approached dangerous territory. His father most definitely would not stand for jeans that bagged like old socks or hair that stuck out sideways.

  So Gerry did an interesting twist. He got straighter. He began wearing tailored shirts and pressed slacks. He holed up in the library and became a serious student. He was burning with rage and hatred toward his father, and he turned it into a deadly competition. He would beat his father economically.

  He was only moderately smart, but doors will open for determined persistence, so he was offered opportunities and he took advantage of each one. Eventually, by age thirty-five, he reached his true goal. He beat out his father educationally, economically, and socially. He had a bigger house, bigger car, nicer furniture, and a wife without dark circles under her eyes.

  He could have relaxed at that point. He could have enjoyed the life he had built. He did not. Rage and hatred still fueled him, and he defended himself from both his own internal violence and the ancient violence of his father by continuing the race, by working obscene hours that caused him to miss the growth of his children, by tricky manipulations that cut off competitors at the knees. He did a lot of damage in the name of profit, long after he had any need to worry about the bottom line.

  Samuel had a very similar father. He too had no room within his home to become a separate person, but he made different choices. His internal furnace also burned rage, but deep down he felt little and weak, even when his muscles bulged out an extra large T-shirt. He aligned himself with a group of bullies and became one too. Together they harassed obvious weaklings such as innocent girls; lone, younger males of other races; and inexperienced teachers. He got nervous when he was alone, so he spent all waking hours with his gang.

  As an adult, he continued to cleave to one group of men or another, eventually settling with a bunch of drinking buddies at the bar. He still stoked his rage and he still felt helpless, and he bullied his wife and son.

  Gerry and Samuel caused different types of harm, but harm they did. Their efforts to protect themselves from being bullied went beyond blocking positive experience and sabotaging intimacy. They also turned their anger against others.

  Gerry’s damage was more subtle and global. He’d make a decision and thirty families would lose their homes. Samuel’s damage was local and obvious. He terrorized his wife and child, and an occasional teenager with a beating or a rape. Neither man understood the roots of his rage nor the extent of the ruin it caused others.

  BOUNDARIES FOR THE DEFENDED PERSON

  You can set boundaries to protect yourself from another person’s defended state. Before deciding on what type of boundaries to set, first assess your own risk. Some defended people are dangerous: they defend themselves by attacking others. If you, your children, your home, or your possessions would be endangered by setting verbal boundaries, that in itself tells you a great deal. If it is not safe for you to speak to someone, you can have little hope of working out a healthy relationship with this person. Create a physical boundary—through distance or by relocating—and insist on genuine, sustained change and proof of rehabilitation before you’ll consider putting yourself in their range again.

  No matter how bad someone else’s childhood may have been, it’s still not okay for them to hurt others, either physically or emotionally, with a mean action or cutting remark. A person who do
es this is exploiting you, and their relationship with you, by using you to discharge their own bad feelings.

  Some of us have a tendency to put the other fellow or our relationship with them first. However noble this may feel, it is not healthy—for you, them, or the relationship. Instead, you must make yourself a priority over the relationship. Put yourself (and the safety of your children, if any) first. Do not risk further harm. You may have to leave the relationship if you are to have any life at all.

  If you live with someone who is defended against goodness and intimacy, joy and fun, but who is not dangerous either emotionally or physically, then you have more options. You have the right to confront them and ask for change. Communicating your personal limit with their defended state—along with examples of how their state has impact on your shared relationship and lifestyle—is an appropriate boundary for you to establish.

  You are not required to adjust your life to accommodate a defended partner. You do not have to let another person’s defended state curtail your own experience. If the other person continues to cling to their defenses, you still get to choose a full, pulsing existence. Protect your joy. Continue to choose life.

  YOU ARE THE FORTRESS

  If you are the defended one, therapy with a skilled professional is the fastest route to joy. There are also programs and classes that teach you to do it yourself. Some of these, particularly twelve-step programs (if you are fortunate enough to be addicted or compulsive about something), are miraculously effective, and have a great track record. (Although it is difficult to have an addiction, many in recovery come to feel grateful for it, because it has been the reason they have found a new way of living. Twelve-step programs offer a way to correct unskilled behavior and the principles taught there can be used to reduce a defended state.)