Empowered Boundaries

by Cristien Storm

  Reflecting on Safety as an Individual Right

  In some contexts, boundaries are positioned as a personal, individual right. In self-defense classes, I have heard teachers describe safety as a personal right that women need to claim. To some degree, this is true. Women do deserve to live in a world where they are safe—we all do—and there is much work to be done toward creating that reality. But carving out safety as an individual right tends to place responsibility for safety solely on the individual rather than on the various factors and conditions that cause or perpetuate that which people are trying to protect themselves from. When we centralize safety around the concept of individual rights and focus on the behavior of individual boundary transgressors or perpetrators, while simultaneously ignoring the complexities of factors in which violence and abuse occur, we often end up reacting to individual acts of violence while ignoring violence as a larger social issue.

  For example, arresting male students accused of sexual assault on a college campus without there being a larger community response to sexism, gender and gender-based violence, male privilege, and social systems that contribute to misogyny on campus. Another example comes from my early work with Home Alive. A bartender responded to a customer’s racist remark by eighty-sixing him (i.e., telling him to leave) and letting him know he was not welcome back. While laudable, we dialogued with the bartender and staff, asking them to consider a more holistic response that could address the larger social conditions; to consider the various ways in which staff and customers were made to feel unsafe and impacted by sexism, transphobia, homophobia, or racism, and how they could be supported. The staff agreed and a series of meetings were held at the bar with staff and community members. Through these conversations people developed a number of creative responses. These included offering a series of workshops, hosting events at the bar, and posting signs in all the bars in that neighborhood stating clearly that bigotry of any kind was not acceptable and that staff would intervene and respond to all incidents of bigotry. During this series of talks with bartenders and club staff, they asked about how to identify and intervene in situations that may involve domestic violence. This led to another round of community trainings with creative solutions, including posting artwork and resource information in bathrooms and having staff trainings about community resources. The staff began having conversations with regulars about violence and abuse in relationships, and groups of men began to talk with other men about how to interrupt “bad” behavior, as they put it, among their peers.

  In another instance, a woman was raped in the bathroom of a club. Community members responded by offering trainings to club staff around responding to sexual assault and supporting survivors. The club organized benefit shows with proceeds going to sexual assault advocacy programs. In addition, the club posted literature with local sexual assault resources, ways to organize community responses, and accountability processes. A local artist curated an art show in the bathroom where the assault occurred. Patrons of the bar organized cab fare funds and coordinated rides home for women.

  These ongoing discussions helped create larger community backdrops that enabled people to respond to individual acts of violence in ways that interrupted victim blaming, worked to hold people accountable, addressed multiple intersecting issues and social systems, and changed the environment in which violence occurred while creating a number of creative responses. None of this was perfect by any means and there were ongoing discussions about problems, concerns, and issues that arose throughout. One factor we continually faced was that when social conditions are considered, they are often viewed as easily remedied through punitive or policy-oriented measures that do not seek to radically transform. Punishing people who engage in domestic violence through arrest and criminal proceedings is one example. This approach to safety is individual-focused (both on the individual survivor and on the abuser) and responsive to the violence itself but does not focus a great deal on transforming the social and cultural systems that contribute to interpersonal violence. The organizations NW Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian, and Gay Survivors of Abuse and generationFIVE both have amazing, informative resources about how to respond to violence and abuse in transformative ways.

  We Shouldn’t Always Want to Feel Comfortable

  It is important that people are able to prioritize their own safety and well-being. It is also critical that situating safety as an individual right does not curtail our capacity to tolerate things that are undesirable or uncomfortable. This is different from enduring abusive, unsafe, dangerous situations or controlling behaviors. The complex reality is that we live in social environments full of adverse (as well as wonderful) interpersonal and social situations. If the primary tools for dealing with unwanted behaviors or undesirable people is to cut them off, push them away, punish them, or sever the relationship entirely in order to assert our right to be safe, then the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to navigate those moments of hurt or difference, the moments of holding firm with our boundary while holding onto relationships, becomes limited. It positions safety as oppositional, which is not inherently bad but important to be mindful of nonetheless.

  A student in a six-week self-defense class asked if they could write the phrase, “My safety is more important than someone’s feelings” on the board before each class. The rest of the students liked the idea and so they wrote it on the dry-erase board each night. We used this statement as a way for the class to consider various aspects and the complex contexts of self-defense and boundary setting. There will be times, for sure, when we will not care about hurting a person’s feelings when setting a boundary. But there will also be times when we will care very much. How people have been taught by their family and social conditioning to consider (or not) people’s feelings will inform their relationship to the statement. For some people, learning to not consider someone else’s feelings will be a radically transformative and empowering act. For others, learning to consider how their choices impact others may be enlightening and transformative. The class used the ongoing discussion of the student’s statement to explore how situating individual safety is informed by social conditions, and how prioritizing individual safety can be empowering as well as a mechanism to assert power over someone else in ways that mirror systems of privilege.

  In boundary-setting classes, participants often talk about how technology makes some people feel safer. A woman shared how having an iPod has helped her feel more confident about setting boundaries because she doesn’t have to return unwanted gazes when she is wearing earbuds. She explained that the earbuds make her feel comfortable about not talking to people because she can simply gesture that she can’t hear them if someone were to try to engage her in conversation. This is great way for her to take care of herself. But relying primarily on avoiding contact with unwanted people and conversations can isolate us and deprive us of the social and boundary skills we need when we do interact with people who push our buttons or make us uncomfortable. We shouldn’t want to always feel safe and comfortable. If that’s the goal, we are not pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone, which is necessary to build a life worth living. Whether it is challenging yourself to do something scary, sustaining a friendship, starting a new relationship, mourning the loss of someone important, facing immortality, accepting an unfortunate event, advocating for social change, learning about systemic inequities and the various privileges we may hold—life is full of situations that challenge people to enter into uncomfortable and sometimes even unsafe territory. Boundaries are a tool to help navigate these circumstances more skillfully (and to avoid them when prudent to do so).

  Boundaries help people manage the complicated realm of relationships and social interactions and support people learning ways to keep themselves safe without living in fear. Boundaries, in this way, allow people to move into uncomfortable, messy situations (where mistakes are inevitable) with enough interpersonal resiliency to learn and grow from them. Boundaries are about holding oursel
ves accountable while negotiating who and how we are in the world, which means being in the world more, not less. Of course, there are days where you just want to slap on your headphones and ignore everyone while you take the bus home after a long day. That’s a fine choice. The goal of this type of boundary setting is to have options so that people can be both grounded and spontaneous and be able to identify and communicate needs and wants rather than relying on formulaic action plans. This kind of boundary work encourages people to trust themselves without thinking that some day they will no longer make mistakes. Finally, setting boundaries from this framework allows people to prioritize individual wants and needs while holding the complex reality that they exist in a world where everyone is connected, thus underscoring the importance of linking self-care to social and community care.

  Connections and Intersections of Individual and Community Safety

  Linking self-care to community care means connecting individual safety to the safety of others. This does not necessarily translate directly into surviving the same kind of harm or grappling with the same abuses or violence—just because someone or a community as a whole is being targeted or surviving violence or abuse does not mean that I am unsafe. However, it would hopefully inform how I choose to respond. If a community in a different time zone has been traumatized because their water supply is poisoned, or a neighborhood across the state is struggling to protect themselves from police brutality, or I read about a woman being raped in my city, and I believe my safety is deeply connected to the safety of others, then their safety and well-being becomes part of my agenda. If their safety is part of my agenda, then I pay attention when they are not safe. This does not mean reacting to each and every incident of harm or abuse with equal measure. There will be many instances where I will not have the skills, knowledge, experience, capacity, resources, or even the invitation to respond. But it is important to consider and to connect my work in setting and negotiating my own boundaries to the well-being of other people when possible. I may choose to prioritize water safety and organize against the privatization of water, for example, or support my local Mothers Against Police Brutality organization, or offer workshops on issues connected to identifying and interrupting sexism at my workplace.

  When other people are not safe or are targets of interpersonal or systemic violence, aggression, or abuse, I am affected. I may not be a direct target of the specific act of violence that is occurring, but I am affected nonetheless. Being affected is not the same as being the target or having to survive or grapple with the violence and abuse. There are a few ways in which I am affected. If I allow for others to be treated poorly, I allow for the possibility that I will be treated in the same manner. That I am not treated in the same manner may speak to my privilege, but it is not a testament to my immunity. We need only look to history for confirmation. When a woman is raped, it is not only she who is impacted. Other women, friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers alike are reminded of the ever-present potential threat of sexual violence that all kinds of women learn to live with. Women can be traumatized and triggered by hearing about violence against another woman. When a trans person is assaulted on the street, fear radiates throughout the community. Every genderqueer and genderqueer-looking person is reminded of how they may be targeted. This kind of harm affects those not directly impacted by reinforcing particular norms and standards and stoking fear and anxiety that can lead to victim blaming. Victim blaming makes all of us less safe because it constructs an individualistic social and cultural paradigm around both violence survival and self-care that isolates and separates us from one another and positions us as potential adversaries. Boundary work that is grounded in the commitment to linking self-care to social and community care redirects responsibility from those surviving the harm to the people choosing to engage in harm and to the conditions (social, political, historical, economic, structural) that contribute to the harm occurring.

  Rooting Boundaries in Our Needs and the Larger World We Live In

  If boundaries are a negotiation of who and how we are in the world, and if we believe our self-care and well-being are connected to the self-care and well-being of others, then how we set our boundaries needs to be rooted in a larger sense of the world we live in—not just in our individual lives. How and when I choose to set a boundary is connected to my personal safety and may impact others. For example, there are many different responses in the classes I teach about when or if to call the police. Different people and different communities have very different relationships to police. For some communities, the presence of police is reassuring. In others, police presence can be threatening and intimidating. Some people in class have chosen to call the police when they witnessed domestic violence, while others have reasoned that bringing police to the scene could make things less safe, especially for the survivor. Class participants have talked about how calling the police when witnessing domestic violence is a way to set a boundary for themselves—a visible and tangible signal that relationship violence will not be tolerated by them.

  Boundaries are not isolated from the environment in which they occur. If I have the power and privilege to impose what I think is best (calling the police) and I impose it (calling the police) without being aware of the possible ramifications that my actions may have, then my boundaries could result in harm to someone or reproduce or reinforce harmful and oppressive systems. Transformative Justice provides a working model for responding to conflicts, engaging community members, using a systems approach, and working independently from traditional institutional responses.

  As we expand the concept of boundaries to be deeply connected to the well-being of others, it is important that we see others and ourselves in the complex social context we all live in. We get to use whatever boundaries we can to keep ourselves safe. The larger goal, however, is to not set boundaries that reproduce harm (unless that is the intention) or keep us safe through victim blaming or reproducing systems of inequity. We need to expand our repertoire and strive to keep ourselves safe and set boundaries in ways that do not uphold systems that value some people’s safety more than others. There will always be times when we fall back on victim-blaming myths and stereotypes we have learned or rely on and access social systems and resources that adversely impact some people and communities. It’s inevitable that we will be products of our environments and conditioning, and the reality is that the institutions and social systems currently in place are complicated and entrenched in inequities. What is not inevitable is how things can be. We have the power to change how we participate in our relationships and in our social environments through boundaries. We have the power to recognize that our health and happiness are linked inextricably to that of others. We have the power to choose to set and negotiate boundaries in ways that uphold our needs, value other people, and address the conditions and context that inform our boundaries. We choose how we are going to participate in our environments and our relationships. Let’s choose to participate in ways that strive to let everyone participate. Our work and our boundaries will not be perfect, but when we approach boundary setting within a framework that recognizes the larger social conditions, and in a way that reflects a commitment to valuing all of us, radical transformation is possible.

  Twelve

  Wrapping It All Up

  There are many different tools for boundary setting and self-care. This book focuses on some core skills that I believe are helpful in most situations for most people. They are not a quick fix or a sure shot for setting effective boundaries. They are part of a repertoire of tools that I hope you will continue to expand on. I also hope that increasing the number of tools you have also includes looking at all the things you have been doing. It is easy, so easy, to look back on times we didn’t set the boundary we wanted or didn’t handle a situation in the way we would have liked and beat ourselves up for it. We judge and shame ourselves ruthlessly. This does not facilitate a learning environment. In addition, it makes all the amazing things we
have done invisible. We need to celebrate the amazing things we do. We need to learn how to celebrate our “mistakes,” and extract the moments of learning out of them, and also, more importantly, discover how to be loving and compassionate with ourselves. The reflective loop is not a tool to use to beat ourselves up with for not doing something well or “right.” It’s a compassionate tool that helps us challenge ourselves, hold ourselves accountable with patience and forgiveness. This shift in perspective is important. This perspective creates the framework from which we choose self-defense, boundary-setting, and self-care tools that do not perpetuate victim blaming, that let our true selves shine, and allows us to be the complex, creative, and resourceful individuals that we are.

  We get to choose the tools that will work for us. Everyone will choose different tools at different times and use them differently. Whether it’s name the behavior, give a directive, the broken record, or end an interaction, our situations will all look different when implementing them. Everyone has a different relationship to their intuition and different barriers to trusting it. We will all use the reflective loop in various ways and be at different places with it. Some of us are just starting to build a support system, others are deepening the support they already have, while others may have been using a tool like this for a long time and are simply revisiting it as part of boundary work. There is not a better or “right” place to be in our boundary work. It’s a process, and wherever you are, you won’t stay there forever—that’s the nature of process! All the tools we’ve discussed—name the behavior; give a directive; broken record; reflective loop; intuition; building, using, and nurturing a support system; practicing accountability; and forgiveness—keep evolving as we do. We are not static beings. We, like our boundaries, will constantly be growing, learning, changing, and adapting.