The psychology and self-help world makes boundaries seem so simple. For many of us with mental health struggles, a trauma background, or who are simply neurodivergent, boundaries are often anything but. I think one of the many reasons they are such a complicated fiasco for so many of us is that we are led to believe that boundaries are only set with others. In my healing journey, I had to learn to set boundaries with myself, before I could set them with others

Personal Struggles with Boundaries

Ideally, we should learn boundaries as children. They should be role modeled for us by the adults in our lives who love and raise us. For many of us, though, the adults in our lives were barely able to maintain their own mental health, let alone provide for the psychological needs of their children. In too many cases, these parents end up role-modeling unhealthy patterns of connection instead.

As an adolescent, my mother’s bipolar disorder was out of control, and help (possibly intentionally) was kept always out of her reach. This resulted in my mother becoming a gaping black hole of need and pain. As the caregiver in the family, I was the one used to fill this hole.

I was taught regularly throughout my childhood, that my needs, desires, thoughts, and feelings did not truly matter compared to the pain and whims of the adults around me. My mother, desperate for relief from the crushing depression she experienced, stripped me of any boundaries. What she felt, I felt. What she thought, I thought. I existed solely to care for her, to enable her, and to ease her pain.

When I became an adult and escaped the clutches of childhood trauma, it took me a few years to realize that I was even supposed to have boundaries. It took me much longer to even understood what those boundaries were.

Boundary Extremes

In my attempts to protect myself, I would throw out boundaries like brick walls. Terrified of being used again, I refused to connect with others around me at all. I guarded my resources and my love violently, perceiving any attempt at a meaningful relationship as a threat to my safety.

Instinctually, I tried to erect the thickest, most rigid boundaries I could to protect myself. My childhood training, however, warred with this instinct. The result was oscillating between two extremes. Brick walls and nudity were the only levels of boundaries I knew. Neither worked, but they were the only tools I had.

The reality was, that I had no concept of my worth outside of serving others. My thoughts and feelings had been brushed aside so consistently, I had no trust in my thoughts, emotions, or desires. I was unable to validate myself because I did not think that what I experienced or felt was valid.

Unfortunately, yet another side effect of growing up in a dysfunctional household is a lack of parenting skills. I did not know how to adequately nurture, encourage, protect, or love myself. These were all skills my caregivers struggled with. They were skills they could not teach me, so I never had a chance to learn them.

I isolated myself from potential sources of help and support. I allowed myself to be used and demeaned. To add insult to injury, I treated myself the way I had been taught to treat myself. I was only worth the distraction or pleasure I could bring to others. Love, even from myself, was something that had to be earned with work and subservience.

Setting Internal Boundaries

Many of us who grow up in traumatic homes end up with these overly rigid and/or overly diffuse boundaries. Allowing people to use us or refusing to connect at all. The self-help and psychological resources I sought out encouraged me to begin boundary-setting. But I realized I couldn’t set boundaries with others, because I had never even set them with myself.

How can you ask someone else to treat you kindly, when you cannot even be kind to yourself? How can you demand to not be invalidated, when you don’t have enough faith in yourself to even know if you are valid? How can you request the world change its behaviors to ensure your safety when you are unwilling to allow yourself to be safe?

Some people have the ability to fake it until they make it. By exhibiting the external behaviors, they are able to build the internal self-esteem and validation they need. I am not one of those people. I had to do the internal work before I could make the external changes. This meant learning to set boundaries with me.

The Steps of Boundary Setting

In our next podcast, Ivy and I will be discussing the 5 steps to setting boundaries. While every self-help book and therapist will have a slightly different approach to boundary setting, these 5 steps are often the underlying foundation of all boundary work. I found that they can even be used to set boundaries with ourselves.

Step 1: Remain Calm

Remaining calm, for those of us that struggle with overwhelming emotions, really means learning how to be calm and how to return to calm. The first step of this is learning healthy coping skills that can help you deal with overwhelming emotions.

Screaming, crying, martial arts, running away, punching a pillow, journaling, meditation, and medication are just a few examples of these types of coping skills. It takes time to learn these skills, though, because you have to even learn what will and won’t work for you.

It also takes time because you have to practice using the skill regularly. When we become escalated, we lose our ability to think logically. We tend to revert to known behaviors. Too often these are unhealthy, damaging behaviors. Practicing these new coping skills carves new neural pathways in our brains. These pathways ensure that when we do begin to become escalate, we can choose the healthy new road, instead of the dangerous old one.

Once you have coping skills in place to handle the extreme emotions, you begin the work of emotional regulation. This is all about learning to keep your emotions from overwhelming you and ruling your life. You are not necessarily learning how to control or stop your emotion. Rather, you are learning how to experience them and release them safely.

Remaining calm is vital to setting internal boundaries. Because while boundaries are about emotional protection, they require some type of logic to set. They require a sense of stability to consistently enforce them. Logic and stability that you do not have if you are drowning in extreme emotions.

Step 2: Make Clear Statements

While this step makes sense when setting boundaries with others, it can be confusing as to how this applies internally. The reality is, though, to make clear statements, you need to have a clear picture of who you are and what you want.

If you spent your adolescence surviving instead of figuring out who you are, there is a good chance that you don’t really know yourself. You may have never had the chance to explore your desires, your thoughts, or yourself.

Boundaries are simply a way of communicating how you want to be treated. You have to know how you want to be treated. For me, that meant knowing what I wanted out of life at all. Figuring that out required me to understand who I was and the kind of person I wanted to be.

Step 3: Keep It Simple

When creating boundaries with others, this step is about reducing the amount of information given so you don’t muddy the waters. When creating internal boundaries, this step is more about focusing on one thing at a time.

When we are finally able to start the healing journey, many of us want to heal everything, now. We already feel like we are falling behind, we understand the amount of work that is needed, and we want to feel better and get on with our lives already.

The problem is, though, that the healing journey is just that, a journey. There is no set destination. There is no done. It is a path most of us will walk our entire lives. When we attempt to heal or change too many things at once, it can be overwhelming.

Many times, also, it is an impossible goal. Every step forward requires the step that came before it. When setting boundaries with ourselves, we need to allow ourselves to focus on one thing at a time. Provide ourselves with the space and time to handle each step successfully.

Step 4: Don’t Debate

This step applies just as much internally as it does externally. When we attempt to set boundaries with others, these others may push back and argue. They may invalidate our thoughts, experience, and emotions. They attempt to debate if the boundary needs to be set, or possibly if we are even worth the boundary being set.

Sadly, many of us have the same internal debates with ourselves. Invalidation often goes hand-in-hand with trauma. If you grew up in a dysfunctional home, there is a good chance that you frequently invalidate yourself. You find it difficult to trust your feelings. You doubt your worth. You wonder if your perceptions, experiences, or thoughts are accurate or true.

At some point, we have to start believing in ourselves. In the past, nobody may have defended us, nobody may have stood by us or protected us. As adults, we now have the power to be our own protectors. To stand up for ourselves. We can choose to believe in ourselves. We can learn how to validate ourselves.

Step 5: Stand Firm

When setting internal boundaries, the step of standing firm is a lot more about standing up again and again. That is because we fall a lot on our healing journeys. When you are doing the work to heal, to become more stable, to love yourself, you will not always be moving forward. The healing journey is a difficult one. There are slippery areas, steep slopes, and extremely comfortable ruts.

A setback, though, does not mean the journey is over. It is simply a setback. Sometimes, the setbacks we encounter or the burnout we experience are crucial parts of the healing journey and not setbacks at all. They are lessons we needed to learn so we could carve the right path for ourselves. They are rest periods we needed so that we had the energy to keep going.

The boundaries we set with ourselves or with others may fall down. That’s ok. We just need to remember to keep putting them back up. To keep strengthening them until they (and we) can learn to stand strong.

Putting It All Together

My boundary work started with me. 1) I learned coping skills to deal with my strong emotions and then learned how to begin regulating my emotions. 2) I put in a lot of effort to explore who I was and to get a clear picture of the person I wanted to be. 3) I allowed myself the time and space to do only what I could at that time, to not take on more than I could handle in my healing work. 4) I chose to trust in myself, defend myself, and validate my beliefs, emotions, thoughts, desires, and experiences. 5)And every time I fell down, I got back up again.

By following these steps, I learned how to love and respect myself. This meant that I then wanted to be treated with love and respect, and I began demanding this type of treatment from myself. because I had done the work, I had also learned the behaviors I needed to offer myself the love and respect I needed.

Boundary work can be difficult work for so many reasons. Setting boundaries with ourselves first, can make setting boundaries with others easier, though. It can be an avenue for doing the work we need to do to become healthier. Sometimes, if we do the internal work first, the external work isn’t as hard as we feared.

If you are interested in learning more about boundary setting, listen to our upcoming Podcast Episode: Setting Boundaries with Others. And check out the FREE Boundaries Handout available on our Products page.

Setting Boundaries with Yourself