March 27, 2024

Free: You're not responsible for other people's feelings

Every so often I remove the paywall from a paid article, to give you all a peep behind the curtain, and to share a piece I'm proud of. That's what I'm doing this week. New content will return next week. This is free, so please feel free to share it with others.

This turned into a piece on boundaries and closure. TW for talk of estrangement from family

I saw a tiktok yesterday, which has since been taken down. It was of someone saying their older sister had left the home and cut contact 5-6 years ago. The tiktoker talked about how she’d reached out to her older sister multiple times, and still did to this day, despite her sister consistently blocking her.

There’s more there, obviously, but this led me to think about how we manage feelings. I was with a client last year and I reminded them that just because them setting boundaries triggers a feeling in someone else, it doesn’t make them responsible for that feeling.

Your boundaries are about you, not about other people

An aside on this: boundaries are things you draw around yourself. ‘I won’t continue this conversation if you keep talking to me like that’ is a boundary. You’ve told the person what behaviour you’re not going to accept. They’re free to do what they want with that information. The consequence isn’t punative, it’s you removing yourself from the situation. They might feel like it’s a punishment, but it isn’t.

‘Boundaries’ that police other’s behaviour aren’t boundaries, they’re rules. Something like Jonah Hill telling a partner that his boundary was her not surfing with men (she’s a professional surfer) is not him setting a boundary. A boundary in this case would’ve been him realising he wasn’t able to be in a relationship where this was part of his partner’s life, realising his partner wasn’t going to give up a career, and ending the relationship.

(Boundaries can be twisted to be abusive as well - like people who threaten to harm themselves if you leave them. That’s why I like the definition of a boundary from Where to Draw the Line: How to Set Healthy Boundaries Every Day, By Anne Katherine

A boundary is a limit. By the limits you set, you protect the integrity of your day, your energy and spirit, the health of your relationships, the pursuits of your heart.

It reminds us that boundaries are vital for our own integrity and wellbeing.)

This is what makes boundaries difficult.

You’ve got to figure out what you want to protect or maintain, then figure out what people are doing to cause harm, then figure out what actions you feel comfortable taking when people continue this behaviour and then communicate that to the people you need to. And then actually follow through if that boundary is crossed. It’s a whole lot of work.

Back to the tiktoker

The tiktoker is absolutely within her rights to feel sad, to grieve, to feel all the complex feelings her sister cutting contact caused.

As an oldest sibling who cut contact, I know how cutting contact affected me, and I’ve reflected and worked through what feelings my actions could have caused in my family. At the end of the day, those feelings are not my responsibility.

Did I, through my actions, cause them? Yes. I made my choice, and I knew there would be emotional fallout. Is it my responsibility to ‘fix’ them? No.

We can talk about closure and what’s owed family, but at the end of the day, you can only give closure to yourself. This is because closure requires you to sit with and move through your feelings, because something will have changed in your life, and finding answers isn’t the cure all.

Sometimes you’ll never get answers

Sometimes those answers won’t make sense or will be really hard to accept. Sometimes you’ll get answers but you still need to move on and grieve, and it turns out the search for an answer was actually just a way for you to put off accepting and working through your feelings.

Repeatedly pushing a boundary of no contact is a way to keep hope alive, to stop yourself from accepting and moving on. It’s hard to sit and feel your feelings and accept that someone no longer wants to be in your life if you keep reaching out and keep hoping they’ll respond. It’s not helping you or your estranged family member.

They’re constantly being reminded of what they’ve worked to get away from. My family only tried to reach out a couple of times since I cut contact, but each time absolutely messed me up for a couple of days. I still sometimes have nightmares about them reaching out. I once got a birthday card from my then partner’s family, and I wad convinced the handwriting was my mother’s. It took me a while to get up the nerve to open it, I almost waited for my upcoming therapy session. I felt sick with relief when it was innocuous.

On the family side, it’s the equivalent of poking at a wound. It’s actively stopping you from healing, because it’s constantly inflamed. You’re stirring up anger or sadness or feelings of abandonment, but not sitting with them and working through them. You’re turning them outwards into crossing a boundary. Every block or ignored message is adding more hurt to the pile.

I have a huge amount of empathy for the tiktoker, a bond she thought was strong and sure has been severed, and it’s entirely possible it wasn’t anything she did, and she was caught in the cross-fire. It’s possible she did do something that caused the sister to go no contact. Either way, her actions now are causing more harm to both her and her sister (and almost definitely are reaffirming her sister’s decision to cut contact).

Obviously I have a huge amount of empathy for - and identify with - the older sister. The pain and fear that can be caused by family forcing contact is fundamental, it hits at a deeper level than I expected. Maybe it comes from the knowledge that you can’t trust the people you’re meant to be able to trust more than anyone else. Maybe it’s a reflection of how difficult cutting contact is. Maybe it’s the trauma. Maybe some or all of the above.

The takeaway here is that other people’s boundaries aren’t about you. They’re not setting boundaries at you, or as a way to punish you (and if they are, they’re not true boundaries). You’re not going to get closure by getting answers. You’ll only get closure by sitting with and moving through your feelings.