Nobody wants to be hurt. Building boundaries helps with this until they turn into impenetrable walls that hide us not only from pain and disappointment, but also from love, happiness and new opportunities. Psychotherapist Audrey Sherman talks about this.
I often talk with clients about boundaries, why they are needed and how to build them, how they define our attitude towards ourselves and how we allow us to be treated with their help. Finding your place in life and building healthy relationships requires physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual boundaries.
One day I noticed that many do not see the difference between healthy boundaries and emotional walls. Walls are like borders grown on steroids, the brain builds them to protect us. Sometimes they are useful, but more often it looks like a reinsurance, as a result, the border turns into a blank wall that hides the world from us. Unlike dividing lines, which we consciously build to define our place in the world and among people, walls serve the purpose of protecting at all costs. What does it look like?
Imagine that you were hurt in a past relationship. And now you begin to behave in such a way that there is no opportunity to get into a new relationship: you convince yourself that you are too busy with work or children, or you come up with an excuse not to meet anyone.
The wall protects you from new disappointments, but at the same time you feel lonely.
In fact, you want love, but do not understand how to get it and not put yourself in danger. To protect yourself from potential pain, you fence yourself off from possible relationships. If your trust has been betrayed more than once, you are building another wall that does not allow you to open up to people. And although this protects you from new disappointments, at the same time you feel extremely lonely.
In this case, a healthy boundary would be to trust the other person, but at the same time say to yourself: «I trust him, but if he betrays me, everything will be over.» You leave the decision to yourself, but do not shut yourself off from the world.
In an attempt to protect yourself, you can even create an image of the ideal partner in your head, and the bar will be so high that no one will reach it. You can convince yourself that you need such a person and that the only problem is that you have not yet met him. In fact, you have built a wall that even the most worthy candidate cannot get over.
What would a healthy border look like in this case? You can set certain limits: how a partner should treat you, talk to you, what are his spiritual and emotional preferences, whether he agrees with you on political issues, whether your views on creating a family coincide, etc.
What is the main difference? Healthy boundaries leave room for joy and opportunity, while still allowing you to be at the helm of life. Emotional walls are usually limiting in some way, blocking us from new experiences and opportunities, making us feel like a victim of circumstances. Of course, borders cannot protect us from everything. Someone may hurt our feelings, a loved one may die or suffer greatly. Unfortunately, life sometimes throws us terrible tests. We cannot fully protect ourselves from them, but a life of fear limits us from all sides.
The skill of overcoming difficult events is vital, without it we will not understand how to cope with troubles.
It is better to develop the skills to cope with life’s challenges than to build protective walls out of fear that something bad might happen. The skill of overcoming difficult events is vital, without it we will not understand how to cope with troubles, depression and anger.
Often, attitudes from the past interfere with this: someone did not have the opportunity to develop this skill, someone in the family was instilled with a different attitude to life and emerging problems, and someone suffered so much in a dysfunctional relationship with their parents or partner that it does not allow to heal wounds and live on. The good news is that this can and should be learned in order to live a fulfilling life without being fenced off from the world by a wall.