When Boundaries Feel “Selfish”
How many times have you thought about setting a boundary with someone only to be slapped in the face by the thought “that’s selfish!”? I can see a few hands going up in my minds eye.
We have such a challenged relationship to our own boundaries that many of us end up giving in before we’ve even begun. Many of you who are reading this have likely felt overly responsible for the well-being of others and their emotions, feeling as though you were the glue holding it all together. The notion of taking care of yourself by having healthy boundaries has probably felt similar to stealing from someone you care about: Wrong, inappropriate, and doomed to destroy the relationship.
This is a funny thing: We are so afraid that we’ll become selfish or narcissistic that we can’t even see how narcissistic it is to assume we’re responsible for everyone else! There’s a tendency here to inflate our sense of importance to those around us, even when it isn’t being asked of us to begin with.
Severing ties with a belief system you’ve lived with for most of your life, even if at the expense of yourself, is actually a painful process. We have to come face to face with the reality that we’re not that powerful, nor have we ever been. Sure, there might have been times when sacrificing yourself for the needs of others actually did serve you and your relationship, but is that really sustainable?
If you peer a little closer at this habit, what do you see happening? It usually starts out like this: We have a need, our mind then see’s the face of the person whom we have to “disappoint” or “let down” (I’m quoting these words to emphasize how suggestive they are in our minds), and then we immediately feel guilt, a sense of responsibility, or anxiety at the prospect of both wanting to meet our own needs and not wanting to “disappoint” the other. The fear or shame of potentially disappointing another, leaves us feeling as though we have no other choice but to put down our own needs and “keep the peace” (which is more like saying, “maintain a fantasy”).
Within this fear and shame system, we attempt to regulate our anxiety about having needs or boundaries by regulating the reaction of someone else. Make sense? Put another way, the power gets placed entirely onto someone else, creating a dynamic where our needs have to pass through an external source before they are validated.
We’re so afraid of others having their own feelings about our choices, that we do whatever it takes to keep said feelings under wraps. Often, this comes at the expense of ourselves. We do a lot of mental and emotional maneuvering to avoid experiencing the perceived negative feelings of others.
I have a lot of empathy for this.
Often times these behaviors and beliefs come from a very painful memory of, usually, a parent experiencing a feeling that scared us or acting on a feeling in a destructive way. As children, we don’t have the adult capacity to set limits, walk away, move five states over, or change our relationships. We have to rely on the people that we live with so that we are taken care of. And the people that take care of us must be functional enough so that our survival stays intact.
Brilliantly, as children, we learn how to regulate our caregivers, which keeps us feeling safe, by siphoning off our needs in favor of being what we think our caregivers need us to be. That can often lead children to people pleasing, over-giving, self-denial, and “fawning”, which is a nervous system response to a perceived threat (the threat being the other person’s reactions).
Many adults are still living through that lens, not realizing that they have a whole other arsenal at the ready to take care of themselves. The problem, however, is that this belief system is directly tied to our human attachment system. We will often prioritize our attachments at the expense of our own truth and needs because our needs feel like threats to the attachment system.
For adult children of narcissists, boundaries feel like miniature ruptures in our most essential relationships. Under this belief system, boundaries will be seen as threats to our sense of safety and connection with important attachment figures.
The problem, however, is that without boundaries we run the risk of becoming resentful, bitter, easily irritated, and reacting in ways that will make us feel worse in the long run. We are actually safer when we have healthy boundaries. Think about it: When you lock your door at night, you are emphasizing a physical boundary that makes you feel safe. Our emotional and other physical boundaries do the same thing.
This is where almost everyone on the planet says collectively (myself included), “I know this logically, but…”.
This is a cop-out.
We default to this place of acknowledging the logic, but then immediately discounting it. Can you imagine if we did this for everything else? What if you broke your leg? Would you say “logically I know I should go to the hospital with this broken leg, but…”? Hell to the no! You’d be at the E.R. in no time.
However, I recognize that with lifelong, emotionally entrenched patterns that are associated with a sense of safety, it’s hard to trust the logic part (logically, I get why this is hard). We have an equal, if not stronger, force inside that is sending out a massive alarm against this healthy, albeit difficult, practice of honoring our own needs. It’s as if some part inside of us is screaming: “boundaries are a very bad idea!!!!!”. And this is where being compassionate, yet rational, with ourselves is so crucial.
The rational part is about recognizing when we are in a reactive state and gently bringing in a new kind of awareness.
To access more a rational part of the mind, you might ask yourself a few of these questions:
What is the cost to myself, f I don’t honor my needs or set boundaries?
What beliefs am I having about boundaries that are getting in my way?
Are there alternative perspectives or beliefs I could entertain that might enhance my will to set boundaries and honor my needs?
Is it true, that setting this boundary will cause a rupture? How do I know it’s true? Where is the evidence that the person I’m going to boundary up with is going to retaliate? (If there is HARD evidence that this person is oriented to boundaries in this way, then read THIS post).
What other outcomes are there from me setting my boundaries?
Will setting boundaries and acknowledging my needs bring me closer to the person I want to be or further from him/her/them?
As you can see, there are a few ways of checking out the beliefs we have around setting boundaries. Let’s take the belief that boundaries are selfish and put it through the ringer of questions. I may include a few new questions here.
Belief: “Boundaries are selfish.”
Says who? Where am I getting this information from? (hint: if a parent told you that your boundaries are selfish, then it’s time to really question if they are the most valid source to take life skills from)
How is it selfish to take care of my limits?
Would I tell anyone else that their boundaries are selfish? Why or why not?
Does it serve me to believe this narrative? Why or why not?
The thing is, without our boundaries, we are much more likely to act out in ways that end up making us feel worse than “selfish” would. For many of us, we’ve been programmed to give, give, give, and when we stop and do the same for ourselves, it can feel really new and unfamiliar.
Fear and novelty go hand in hand, so it makes sense that giving back to ourselves in the form of healthy boundaries can trigger a fear response. But this is something that can be overridden with a healthy perspective and desire to recognize that our boundaries and needs are important to us.
If you’d like a few statements to activate the parts of your brain that can help you feel assertive, caring, and connected to your own sense of authority, practice saying this statement everyday at some point.
“I want to honor my boundaries because I care about how I feel. It is important to me to listen to my own inner authority and stay connected with myself in a way that creates harmony and well-being. I want to care for myself through the use of setting healthy and consistent boundaries. It is my choice to be caring toward myself in this way. I am the agent of my own life and I choose my choice to honor my needs.”