by Nancy Jonker
However, if the country doesn’t have an abundance of soldiers and knows it can’t protect the border adequately, it might pull all its resources into a fort and protect its people and precious possessions in this way.
We can think of our boundary systems as functioning much like that of a country. If we have plenty of resources to protect our border and believe that this will be effective and important, we will guard and defend ourselves at the border. If, however, we feel limited in our resources or don’t believe we can be effective or that it’s important to defend our border, we may pull our precious resources deep inside and protect them there.
The Developmental Boundary Exercise
Creating a Visible Boundary
I was introduced to this concept when attending a Radix® workshop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We did an exercise around boundaries where we took a great deal of time establishing our desired physical boundary. We had a partner from the workshop walk toward us from varying angles, and we would mark on the floor where we wanted them to stop. Then we used string to mark out our territory.
Differing Levels of Development
The next part of this exercise was to experience different levels of developmental abilities. At first, we had no language, just staying in place and only able to make sounds. Next, there was staying in one place, but we were able to make movements of arms and legs (think here how babies can kick with their legs and move their arms even though they’re lying in one place). On it goes—being able to make sounds, then saying a word or two, being able to actually move from one place in the circle to another, and eventually being able to use language in phrases and sentences.
Our partners in this exercise were instructed to cross over our boundary, intruding into the space we had established for ourselves. Our job was to protect our boundary as best we could given our developmental ability (we did this multiple times, each round gaining a new developmental capacity).
This exercise completely opened my eyes to a process I had no idea was in place for me. I realized I was relatively indifferent when my partner crossed my boundary. It didn’t really seem like my boundary, even though I was the one who had set it up in this elaborate process. I didn’t care! And I didn’t treat it like a boundary!
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see other people in the room making noise, moving around, conveying to their partners that it was not okay for them to violate their boundaries. But I wasn’t doing that. There were some others who weren’t doing that as well. I was totally intrigued. What was going on here? Why was I so indifferent when others were clearly invested?
The Big Take-Away on “Border Patrol vs. Fort” Styles
From this experience, I began to learn about the “border patrol versus fort” style of protecting boundaries. People who pull into their fort (usually their head and/or the core of their body) are lackluster about protecting the perimeter. They know there’s not enough soldiers to get around and someone can just move a little ways over and get in, so not much effort goes toward protecting the boundary. These are the folks who learned in their early lives that people could intrude on them and there wasn’t much they could do about it. So, in a clever countermove, they pulled their energy and resources inside.
But here is the conundrum. This is the phenomenon of doing something to feel safe when it actually puts us more at risk. If I pull into my core and pull my energy out of my muscles and skin so that my “true self” feels safe, I have actually made my physical self more vulnerable.
Perhaps this is you. Perhaps these are people you know and care about. I have observed this to an extreme degree with people.
A Guy in a Bar and My Friend
One time, I was with two friends, one male and one female, at a local restaurant/bar. While there, a guy in the bar came up to my friend and began whispering in her ear. He was trying to coax her into leaving with him. My friend did nothing but smile. She didn’t encourage him, didn’t say yes, and didn’t leave the bar with him. But she did nothing to stop him or tell him to get back. And this was not someone she knew.
When finally this guy left, I asked her how she could stand that. What she said reinforced what I had been learning about boundaries. She said no matter how close he had gotten, he could not get to “her.” “She” was locked deep inside where he had no access.
While this might be true, what is also true is that my friend’s attitude left her totally vulnerable. She felt safe, and she was confident she wouldn’t be going anywhere with him, but she lacked the ability to tell him to back off. And she lacked the will or ability to move herself away from him. Now, maybe she got something from these kinds of exchanges. But as her friend, I know she was troubled by these kinds of interactions every week—sometimes in the workplace, sometimes in social settings, sometimes simply walking down the street.
These kinds of experiences can reinforce a worldview that says people are inappropriate, they feel free to ignore my personal space, I am right to lock away my precious resources deep inside and not worry about the outside because it’s impossible to protect anyway.
Guys at a Conference and a Colleague
Another example of this occurred when I was at a residential conference sharing a suite with a woman I didn’t know who was also attending the conference. She was a striking woman, beautiful in appearance, soft-spoken, and polite.
Toward the end of the five-day conference, she came into our room and started talking about her experience with men at the conference. One man she had met there dropped off coffee by her door each morning. Other guys made a point of sitting by her for lunch each day. Others walked her to and from her room, acting like they had been friends for a long time.
She expressed her confusion about these interactions and wondered if my roommates and I had experienced this as well. No, we hadn’t. This just added to her distress. Why were these people treating her this way? Well, she had asked a group of women who were all in the helping field. We had no shortage of empathy and explanations!
Eventually, I offered her this very framework for understanding boundaries. I explained it, then asked her if it made any sense, though I didn’t need to ask because all along she had been nodding and responding like a big light bulb had just gone on in her head. She had never heard this framework before but it made total sense to her. She got how she was giving off signals in her interactions with others and how they in turn interacted with her, even though this was all below her level of awareness.
The next day she told me she spent more time reflecting and thinking that night than sleeping. She could see how she was leaving herself vulnerable in her efforts to feel safe and to feel a sense of belonging. She decided she was going to seek out a coach or therapist to help her with this blind spot, so she could both feel safe and actually be safer in the world. So she could feel a sense of belonging, without having to give up her personal space.
Becca’s Story: Rigid Border Control
An example of someone with a boundary style more on the rigid side of the continuum is Becca. Becca came to see me because she was dissatisfied in her relationship with her partner. They were not close, they often bickered, and she felt alone much of the time.
Becca worked in a large accounting firm, and she had her desired level of responsibility there. But she seldom felt satisfied. She felt left out from the different groups of women there, even to the point of wondering whether they were talking about her or laughing at her. She did her work well though she was often in pain from the tension in her muscles. She found it hard to relax once she got home and often consumed two glasses of wine just to be able to de-stress.
In our work together, Becca often had trouble answering questions about how she was feeling. The only feeling that was readily and consistently available to her was the experience of self-pity. By her own acknowledgement, this wasn’t all that helpful to her, and she typically felt a void inside. Intimate connections with her partner were hard to establish because each of them had troubl
e communicating heart to heart.
The work with Becca was around helping her develop easier access to her feelings and to her center of inner wisdom. She lived relatively cut off from the tender feelings in her heart, so our work was around reconnecting to those and opening the pathway through the throat and neck between her head and heart. As she did this, her life and relationships began to open up in new and satisfying ways.
—Journal Junction: Identifying Your Boundary Style—
Below are ten questions to help you determine whether you use the fort style of boundaries. Maybe you already know your style because you see yourself in the example of one of these women. But, if not, use the workbook or your journal to answer these questions. Feel free to elaborate and write some stories of your experiences, so you come to understand how this process takes place in you.
Do strangers act like they know you and treat you like you’re their good buddy even if you’ve just met?
Do friends and acquaintances think they know you really well, yet you feel like they don’t know you much at all?
Do you wonder why patterns such as these keep repeating?
Do you feel tightness in your chest and gut when someone bothers you or you feel threatened?
Do you ever or often lose awareness of your feet or legs?
Do you get dizzy and feel like your head might float away?
Is it hard for you to say no and mean it?
Do you find yourself wishing for more space but not asking for it?
Do you often feel depleted or exhausted?
Do you believe that no matter how close someone gets physically they “can’t get to you”?
If your answer to the above questions tended to be yes, you are probably more on the fort style side of the continuum of boundaries (which is on the porous side of that psychological skin or cloak).
If your answers were more often negative, read on. The following questions are to help identify boundaries on the more rigid side of the continuum. Again, writing beyond a yes or no can be helpful to your understanding of how you use boundary strategies in your day to day life. Because most of us learn our lessons early on and all too well, they become so automatic we often don’t even notice what we’re doing.
Do you find that it’s hard to “let people in”?
Do you wish for more involvement with others but don’t know how to bring it about?
Do you tend to have tight muscles and reddish skin?
Do you often feel left out of the group?
Do you find it hard to have heart to heart connections with people you care about?
Do you often feel “unseen” by people you want to be involved with?
Is it hard for you to access or talk about your feelings?
If your answers were positive in this second group of questions, you may be more on the “armored” side of the boundary continuum. For you the challenge is not to establish and maintain boundaries as much as it is to soften them and become more flexible.
If this exercise seemed confusing to you, don’t worry. Our boundary system isn’t a clear-cut system that is easily defined. You may notice that with certain people you behave one way, while with others you behave differently. This exercise is simply to help you become aware of patterns and ways we have of protecting our personal space, our energy, and our resources. Once we become aware, we can develop more choice.
Where Is Your Drawbridge?—The Art of Flexible Boundaries
When we think about healthy boundaries, it’s helpful to use the metaphor of a drawbridge. If your castle is on one side of the moat and the people who want to visit you are on the other side, you’re going to need a well-functioning and well-oiled drawbridge to invite them into your castle when you want them there. This implies that you have choice in the matter about whom to let in and when, and whom to keep out.
This metaphor also implies flexibility, so that this drawbridge can open and close in accordance with your wishes. The drawbridge would be of little use to you if it were stuck open or closed. But that’s exactly how underdeveloped boundaries work when they’re either too rigid (keeping everyone out) or too porous (letting everyone in). The only way a drawbridge is useful is if it can open and close upon the command of the operator in the castle.
So what interferes with the functioning of our drawbridge?
This is where the feelings of guilt, shame, and insecurity come into play. When we feel too guilty about setting boundaries or saying no, our system can get overwhelmed and “cave in.” Maybe we give too much of our time and energy away just so that we don’t have to bear the guilt of saying no.
We can see how being limited in personal power on the emotional functioning dimension is often connected to having limited personal energy, troubles setting and maintaining boundaries, and limited financial freedom.
If we think of a bell curve as it relates to boundaries, at the peak of the curve stand functional, flexible boundaries. In this area, we say yes or no to people, activities, and tasks dependent upon whatever makes sense to us at the time. We can say yes, no, or let me think about it. We don’t have to feel guilty, and we can give ourselves permission to want some people close and keep others at a distance.
When our boundaries are too rigid and automatic, we can’t decide on a case by case basis. That’s when our boundaries become a “one-size-fits-all” kind of armor. We don’t believe we can afford to let people in, so we keep our boundaries tight and our default answer is no.
In essence, our drawbridge is stuck in the closed position. As we can see, the result of this is gradual isolation. On a smaller scale, rigid boundaries create barriers to intimacy, preventing us from being seen and understood, even when that’s what we really want.
Remember Jim Carey in Yes Man? At first, he only said no to opportunities and was getting more and more out of touch with his friends. After an intervention at the “Yes Man” conference, he only said yes. Toward the end of the movie we watch him learn the art of a flexible, discriminating boundary.
When our boundaries are too porous, we have a tendency to feel depleted, overwhelmed, and resentful. We give virtually everything we have away—our time, our energy, our talents. In this case, the drawbridge is stuck in the open position and anyone can come and go, taking what they need. Even when we want to pull the drawbridge up, if we haven’t worked through feelings of guilt and shame, we won’t make those hard decisions because we’re convinced we’ll feel bad if we say no.
The most extreme kind of porous boundary is when the energy is pulled into the core and out of the periphery all together. In this fort style, there’s no point in saying no, you just find alternative ways around the problems. The use of personal power in the dimensions of emotional functioning and personal energy is very low.
Maybe you get sick, so you don’t have to go to an event. Maybe you avoid being around at certain times, so the issue of attending never comes up. Maybe you change jobs if someone is bothering you in your current one. Maybe you just put up with a lack of personal space because you’re convinced you’re not going to get it.
The fort style of boundaries is the most extreme of the porous boundary because it leaves us vulnerable. Particularly if we don’t KNOW we’re locked up in our fort and leaving the border unattended, we are vulnerable. I’ve talked with many women who will say things like, “It’s okay, there’s no way they can get to me. My real self is way in here” (while they point to their heart or solar plexus).
Even though they say this, they have little awareness of what this means for them in terms of their safety in the world. They don’t always realize they have abandoned their borders—the perimeters of their personal space. I certainly hadn’t realized the extent to which I was indifferent about protecting the boundaries I had set up until that critical exercise. Following that insight, it became my mission to understand boundaries, people’s sense of control over them, and their ability to establish and maintain them.
No matter where you are on
the spectrum of personal boundaries, there is something to learn. If you’re on the rigid side and find you want more connection in your life, you can work with your boundaries to become more flexible. You still have the capability to keep people out when you want (you have that skill down pat), but you’ll add the ability to invite people in as well.
If you’re on the more porous side, you’ll be able to learn how to fill in the holes in your boundary system, so that you have more control and more choice about who gets in and who stays out. You’ll also have more choice about where your energy and time goes.
And if you’re locked in your fort deep inside your person, you’ll learn ways to come out to the border. This is often a gradual process because women don’t always feel safe leaving the fort and fully inhabiting their bodies.
Playing with Oppositions
One of the things I do in my group workshops is an exercise called “oppositions.” I line up folks across from each other and give them a word or phrase to say. For example, those on the left say, “No,” and those on the right say, “Yes.” Back and forth they go, saying it softly, matter-of-factly, and later shouting it and stomping their feet. The purpose of this is to give people an experience saying or doing something they would not or could not do in real life.
In this same exercise, I move on to phrases such as “You will” and “I won’t.” We can explore any theme with this exercise. For example, if we want to explore people’s ability to say no to someone in need, I might have one group say, “Please help me,” and the other side responds with “Help yourself.”
