I have dysfunctional boundaries
Reading Pia Mellody’s work has got me thinking a lot about boundaries — something I’ve heard people talk about in the past but never took seriously.
I remember last year in March (almost 18 months ago now), I went to a group therapy workshop led by Brent Charleton. His work is based in large part off Pia Mellody’s ideas. The workshop was three days, and we spent at least half a day on boundaries. He emphasized they were among the most important things he was teaching us that weekend. But I didn’t take him seriously and only half paid attention.
Since then I’ve heard a few different teachers talk about boundaries — notably the two somatic meditation teachers I’ve followed. They both argued against boundaries. Their perspective made a lot of sense to me.
Their work is all about discovering how the body holds tension and keeps feelings locked away under that tension. It’s about how we use tension in our bodies to “protect” ourselves from feelings and from experiences. Tension allows us not to feel.
“Tension is the boundary of the subconscious” says one of them. If you can recognize that tension and release it, you gain access to depths of feeling you didn’t know were there.
Based on this way of thinking, boundaries seemed to me unhealthy. Boundaries are meant to block things coming in from the outside and contain things (thoughts, feelings, and behavior) on the inside. But the only way I could conceive of that being done was through tension.
I equivocated the two. To create or maintain a boundary agains the outside world was, to me, to deliberately hold tension in the body. And that seemed entirely counterproductive to my interest in letting go of as much tension as possible.
I’m beginning to think about them differently. I’m still figuring out what it really means to set boundaries (whether it is a purely psychological and emotional thing, or if does in fact require physiological tension). But I am starting to see the value in them more and more.
I look back on the last five years of my life or so and I see how I used boundaries without even knowing it.
For a good three of those years, I was completely walled off. I was anti-social. I was afraid of people, really. I was rigidly and anxiously focused on my career. I was striving so hard to be perfect and do my job to the best of my abilities. I was weightlifting all the time and intermittent fasting. I was focused on being “rational” at the expense of being sensitive to my body and my emotions.
I held massive tension physically. And emotionally I was completely walled off from the world. And being walled off, I felt like I couldn’t express myself either. I felt incredibly stifled. I wanted to yell, to laugh, to cry. But I held it all in. I had almost no one to talk to, and I was harsh and judgmental with myself. I couldn’t even be there for me.
In late 2017 and through 2018 I hit a wall. I’d had enough of being walled off from other people. So I swung in the opposite direction. I ran to the other side of the extreme. I didn’t want to have ANY boundaries. I wanted to express myself as fully as possible and without restraint. I wanted to engage and connect with everyone I could.
I got really interested in polyamory (non-monogamy) during this time. After so many years of having no relationships, I didn’t want to limit myself with the “arbitrary” boundaries of committing to one person. To commit like that, I thought, meant shutting down or ignoring my desires and impulses to connect with all the people I encountered in my life. And because my years of disconnection had been so painful, I wanted to do things as differently as possible.
So I took acting and improv classes. I pushed myself socially and tried to meet way more people. I did things and pursued experiences that — while I don’t regret them — I realize weren’t really necessary. I wrote poetry.
I swung from having walls for boundaries to having almost no boundaries at all.
Now I’m trying to find the middle.