Empowered Boundaries

by Cristien Storm

  I brought my punk rock roots and the sensibility of both no and yes into adulthood and the work I did with nonprofits and collective organizations. For example, in response to an allegation of sexual assault, when someone would say there are two sides to every story and they needed to be listened to as well, the no and yes framework that had developed through countering white supremacy and white nationalism became useful. It is true that there are multiple perspectives to all events and it is important to listen to people. Listening is essential to boundary setting. There is a difference, however, between someone who will never acknowledge (or does not believe in) the complexities of consent and the role that intergenerational, gender-based trauma and sexism play in shaping how women and female-identified folks respond in certain situations, and someone who is open to understanding why and how sexism and gender violence operate and shape experiences. If someone is not open to the possibility of shifting their beliefs (or clearly against addressing sexism and gender-based violence, like in this example), then our boundaries must be different.

  As we face the alarming rise of white nationalism and emboldened white supremacy, it seems imperative to me that our boundary work include an understanding of how to say “No. Not ever” to white nationalism and fascist tendencies while saying, “Yes” to all kinds of solidarity work. Both kinds of boundaries are necessary in organizing for collective liberation. The personal is political, the political is personal, and our boundaries must embody our individual wants and needs as well as our political and social sensibilities. I hope you find creative and inspired ways to weave these together as you go through this text.

  In struggle & solidarity,

  Cristien Storm

  Introduction

  I was three years old when I learned how to take off the frilly dresses my parents made me wear. I’d wait for them to leave the room, then yank the dress over my head and clumsily button up the white shirt that went with my favorite black, green, and purple wool plaid pantsuit with matching vest and cowboy boots. I loved that outfit. I felt fabulous in it. I’d clomp around in my pointy brown boots practicing my swagger. I hated, in contrast, the pastel dresses my parents would inevitably try to put me in. I was very clear on this. Checkered pantsuit with matching vest and cowboy boots—good. Dresses—bad. Simple. When I was little I knew exactly what I liked and didn’t like. As I grew up, the world around me slowly eroded my confidence like an ocean chewing a sandy shoreline. I learned that boundaries, like shorelines, would be pounded on continuously by corrosive elements. I learned to negotiate a constantly changing perimeter. I learned that stability was like sand—consistent in its eternal shifting.

  I grew up, like many people, without the fortune of being taught healthy communication skills. My models were a confusing and contradicting mess. I learned that children should be seen and not heard but adults yell all the time. I learned that crying means you are weak, but crying is also an effective way to get what you want. I learned that you never ask for things directly but resent people when they don’t give you what you didn’t ask for. I communicated in hesitant fits and starts, throwing words and wants out to the world in a desperate attempt to be understood without revealing too much about myself. When people didn’t understand what I was saying, I would blame myself for not being clear or blame them for not being a good listener. I learned that communication was to be approached like a chess match. Use strategy and outwit your opponent. Communication was framed as a way to manipulate and manage the world and the people in it, not as a way to understand or listen. Communication was placed in a combative context. I struggled with this framework until I reached adulthood and eventually realized that communication is a relationship, not combat.

  We all have individual experiences that shape how we learn to communicate our needs, wants, preferences, and limits. Each of us faces different obstacles or barriers to setting boundaries and we will be more adept at boundary setting in different situations depending on our experiences, values, and personality. Despite these differences, fear is a common response when people begin to identify and communicate needs. What we fear (anger, abandonment, punishment, missing out on something, etc.) depends on our personal narrative, but the motivation plays out the same: avoidance. Unfortunately, this is not an effective strategy. Fear is a powerful motivator but it inhibits communication. If we are afraid to identify what makes us happy and ask for it directly, we might try to ask indirectly. This hinting or sideways communication stops us from learning how to sit with the fear and anxiety of asking for what it is we truly want. Avoidance reinforces the belief that whatever it is we are avoiding should be avoided. Avoidance tricks us into deceiving ourselves. If we habitually communicate indirectly, we also risk losing sight of what we want and need. We link anxiety and our needs to the point where we may stop identifying our needs altogether because it creates an uncomfortable amount of anxiety. Our wants and needs are then defined by our avoidance of anxiety instead of a reflection of what they truly are.

  Living like this often means we build a life with the scraps of what is left after we avoid, avoid, and avoid. Like a maze built from doors, you avoid one bad thing by going through a door and once that door shuts, the doors that are left determine your path. Our lives, our relationships, and our selves are defined by what is left rather than by who we are. Our true selves get buried under a mountain of fear. Instead of trying to avoid the anxiety and fear of asking for what we want, we can learn to tolerate and navigate the terrain of our anxiety. Most of us have an understanding of how powerful ocean waves are. If you have ever swum in the ocean, you know that when you get caught in an undertow, despite your initial response to swim madly for the shore, you have to relax and let the waves carry you. If you struggle, your risk of drowning is much higher than if you relax and let the waves pull you closer to shore where you can get your bearings. Fear and anxiety are like getting caught in a series of terrifying waves with a powerful undertow. Our first response is to thrash wildly. Our first response is natural, but it’s not the most helpful. If you relax and let the waves come, ride them out rather than fight against them, they will pass and you can continue toward your goal. We can approach anxiety and fear like surfers who learn to override their initial urge to swim madly when caught inside powerful waves. Doing so helps us be more present. It’s a matter of working with rather than struggling against what is happening. When you are not trying to avoid feelings or emotions, you are more connected to yourself and the present moment. And the more we connect with ourselves, the better we can connect to other people.

  When we use boundaries to try to avoid fear and anxiety, we deny ourselves the opportunity to learn how to handle these emotions in healthier ways. We may fear being happy because we know it will go away, so we sabotage our joy. We may fear anger because we have been hurt by someone’s anger, so we avoid anger at all costs. We may fear love because it has wounded us, so we snuff love out like a candle flame when it grows inside us. We fear getting fired because we are not sure how we would find another job. Our boundaries then become mechanisms to try to control other people, situations, and environments. For example, we don’t set boundaries with our supervisor, so we set them with our partner because it feels safer; we say no to a desired relationship because it feels too scary to face the feelings that come up; we use boundaries to deny our frustration because it feels safer to direct it inward where it later manifests as illness or disease. There are times when we need to set these types of boundaries. We don’t worry about whether or not we are avoiding fear or letting ourselves feel fear when we yank a child out of the way of a speeding bus. The problem arises when avoiding certain emotions becomes an automatic response across all situations. We then control our feelings in situations where it would benefit us to share them, and we may stop ourselves from exploring options or choices that could make us happy because they cause anxiety.

  Environment and social context also inform boundaries. Growing up as a white middle-class woman I
learned multilayered messages about power. I knew as a white woman I had some power, much more than many. I also learned there were times and places where, as a woman, I had very little power.

  Years ago when I was just arriving on the doorstep of puberty, I witnessed a nasty argument between two married adults. The police were called. When the male police officer arrived, he deferred to the man, smiling and nodding sympathetically as he described the fight. He ignored the other woman and me, making sure to avoid all eye contact. The officer and the man walked past us into the living room side by side, casual, like buddies. I heard the officer ask, “Would you like to press charges, sir?” pointing to the scratches on the man’s cheek and neck. “No, that’s fine,” he responded, nodding back at the officer. I saw him shake his head and smile at the officer. I saw the officer shake his head and smile back. They didn’t need to translate. I got the message.

  The officer turned to the woman after he and the man emerged from the living room. He stood over her, looming really. She was sobbing and having a hard time keeping herself together. The officer, in thick black boots, thick black utility belt, thick mustache, thick muscles, and a thick sneer, leaned toward her. She was barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt. She’d been cleaning. Her T-shirt was torn and stretched, exposing the length of her collarbone as it slid off one shoulder. “I don’t see any bruises, ma’am, not much else we can do.” It was true. There were no visible bruises. Bruises, unlike (usually defensive) scratches, can sometimes take from one to three days to show up. She started to crumble. Shaking and crying, I remember her yelling at the cop, “Do you want to see what he did?” She tugged her T-shirt, yanking it up at the middle. I remember her bra was the same bright white as her shirt. The cop raised his hand, palm outstretched inches from her face: “Um, no ma’am that’s not necessary.” A sideways glace at the man. A slight purse of the lips. Pity. Anger. I’d learn much bigger words for it later in my UCSC Women’s Studies courses. But that day, again, I got the message. As the cop left, he threw a backward glance at the woman and said directly and only to her, “I don’t want to have to come back here. Let’s not do anything stupid.” There are times and there are places when you have very little power.

  Long after the couple had made up, I carried the echo of that cop’s words in my body: “Don’t do anything stupid.” I carried those words in my tightly held breath that fled to the corners of my lungs during the incident and stayed there in hiding for years. I continued to learn all the different ways we squash healthy communication and healthy boundaries. What did she expect, wearing that? How many people has she slept with? What are you, a boy or a girl? You have such a nice face; you could be so pretty if you lost weight. What are you doing here? Don’t you love me? If you loved me … In other words, don’t step out of line. Don’t stray out of your place and role. And do not, under any circumstance, believe you have the right to define, establish, implement, and communicate any boundaries of your own. Like any good teenager, I rebelled.

  I explored how to have boundaries in a world that taught me as a woman I should not have any. I got bigger and louder and more biting with my humor. I held men (and women) at bay with a razor-sharp tongue numbed with the accouterments of the young, the tough, the edgy, and the wounded. I thought these kinds of boundaries would keep me safe. They did not. I thought these kinds of boundaries would make me stronger, less vulnerable. Instead, they drained me and their rigidity restricted my sense of self. It was like wearing metal body armor. It’s hard, solid, and dense. It’s also cumbersome and weighs a ton. If you fall down, it is impossible to get back up with any kind of speed or grace. I decided after much clomping and trashing about in clumsy armor to try something else. I wanted to explore self-defense that wasn’t rigid and made of metal. I wanted boundary setting that could be as malleable and as soft as a young sapling and just as strong as a deep-rooted tree. I didn’t have a particular game plan, but the universe in its infinite wisdom provided me one.

  In 1993, the rape and murder of a friend and fellow artist, Mia Zapata, changed my life and the lives of many of my friends and community members. In the aftermath of her murder, a group of us got together to figure out what to do with the pain and anger and fear and hopelessness we felt. In our conversations, ramblings, rants, and community dialogues we kept coming back to the idea of self-defense. We wanted self-defense that was accessible and met our needs. Our needs, as it turned out, were incredibly diverse. We founded Home Alive, an organization that attempted to hold all our diverging, and at times very contradictory, ideas of what self-defense and boundary setting were. Even while we acknowledged the complexity of safety and diversity of what people defined as violence, we struggled to not impose our values on others. It’s hard. We want to be safe. We want others to be safe. When someone advocates something that seems “unsafe” from our frame of reference, it can be challenging to accept and support. Some people advocated the use of guns for personal and home protection, while other people’s anti-violence values included an anti-gun stance. Home Alive addressed this by having gun safety classes and talking about weapons in workshops. Home Alive took the stance that there is no one “right way” to protect ourselves or set a boundary. We put self-defense within the context of human rights and supported other groups, organizations, and communities who were doing self-defense of their own. This included raising money for Mother’s Against Police Brutality, a self-defense issue if ever there was one; organizing Seattle’s annual Take Back The Night March when Seattle Rape Relief closed their doors; working with regional and international antifa (the European term referring to Anti-fascist individuals and groups that are dedicated to fighting fascism and white nationalism); creating self-defense and boundary-setting curriculums that addressed domestic violence; and supporting community organizing efforts of all kinds.

  Home Alive created a space for me to explore, expand, and challenge ideas of how we defend ourselves and how we set boundaries. For over ten years I developed self-defense, anti-violence, and boundary-setting curriculums. I taught workshops for schools, prisons, nonprofits, activists, lawyers, small businesses, radical anarchists, human rights coalitions, parents, and all kinds of other community members. I developed teacher trainings and spent most of my days (and a lot of my nights) talking about boundaries and boundary setting. During this time, I explored how to use self-defense and boundary-setting principles as methods for healing. I addressed my own trauma and wounds in a variety of ways. I did healing work as an individual and as a community member. As a writer and performer, I wrote, sang, and performed my healing. As a teacher, I brought the empowering and resilient sprit of survivors into every class. We focus so much on fear and how to avoid danger, that we often render invisible all the amazing things we are already doing, not only to survive but to thrive. In trying so hard to be safe, we miss out on life. We live in fear and fear of fear. It was exciting to reframe discussions of self-defense and boundary setting, to move from a fear-based orientation to a liberated mindset that cultivated a resilient, resourceful self-reliance rooted in community and self-care.

  When I left Home Alive to work with The Northwest Coalition For Human Dignity (NWCHD) to do research and cultural organizing, I brought my enthusiasm for reframing discussions of violence and self-defense with me. NWCHD researched and monitored white nationalist activity in the Northwest and provided support for rural and suburban communities responding to bigotry and hate. Self-defense was a very important part of our work. The right to defend ourselves and protect others against bigotry and hate included a wide range of things. We supported individuals and communities who were responding to hate crimes, helped organizations counter the recruiting efforts of white nationalists, and defended people’s right to live a life free from violence, hate, and discrimination. Again, I was surprised at how often we resorted to a fear-based framework that ignored or minimized the strength, tenacity, humor, wit, and resiliency of all those we worked with. Both of these organizations dealt with very violent
, dark, and nasty aspects of society. It’s not surprising that fear was a regular component of our work. We were repelled by it and compelled to respond to it in a constant shifting struggle to try to mitigate intense emotions. The drain and strain of this struggle was the collateral damage we all suffered. When I entered the next phase of my life as a mental health counselor, I took with me a deep desire to continue to find ways to counter fear and anxiety with hope and equanimity.

  In my work as a therapist, boundary setting comes up all the time. I help people identify not only their needs, but also the barriers they face, and how the reality of their experience and environment informs what they will choose to do. Again and again, fear hops into the driver seat, peeling out before people even grasp what is going on. Before they know it, fear is whizzing them down a windy road and they are, so to speak, stuck in the passenger seat desperate to yank back the steering wheel and gain control but too afraid to do so. From where we want to eat to who we want to be in relationship with, to what our work life looks like, to how we feel about ourselves, boundaries inform and define almost every aspect of our lives. We can use boundaries to try to avoid fear and anxiety, or we can use them to create the kind of lives we want. Empowered Boundaries (formerly titled Living in Liberation: Boundary Setting, Self-Care and Social Change) challenges us to do the latter.

  There are many books on boundaries. Most of them have good skills to share. What Empowered Boundaries offers that is unique is a simple, direct approach to boundaries and boundary setting that reflects the complexity of the world we live in while offering practical tools. This book looks deeply at how oppression (e.g., racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, ageism) and privilege impact the context and interpersonal environments in which our boundary setting occurs.