Personal Boundaries and Their Violations

Invasions of Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Energetic Space

Introduction

The running theme of many of my articles presents knowledge of our Nervous System, and how it responds under fear and stress, as a vital lens and toolkit towards not only understanding ourselves, and our suffering, but also for understanding the current problems in our society. The format these articles tend to follow is first to explore an aspect of our Nervous System, or stress and fear responses, and then apply what we have learned as the lens through which to understand what is happening in the world, and hopefully also to develop tools which can help us navigate these situations better.

However, there is so much to say about the topic which we seek to cover here, on the themes of boundaries, violations, abuse, and human suffering vs flourishing, that it deserves two parts. So in this first part, we will mainly just cover the background and the concepts, and then in a subsequent article we will look through this lens more at the modern world.

Personal Boundary Systems

Perspectives from the “Co-Dependency” Literature

Pia Mellody’s short article “Co-dependence: The 5 Core Symptoms”, from which the quotes below are taken, and which we started to look at in

The Fawning and Appeasement Survival Responses

is a good introductory source for the concepts I want to cover.

“A personal boundary system is a mechanism that both protects as well as contains an individual’s body, mind, emotions and behaviour. It has three purposes:

1. to help an individual prevent themself from being victimized;

2. to prevent an individual from being an offender;

3. to give an individual a sense of self.”

This is the first vital point: a compromised personal boundary makes us more susceptible to both being abused or victimized by others, and also to becoming a violator of other’s boundaries, i.e. an abuser. Note: herein “abuse” has a very general meaning, covering neglect, abandonment, physical or emotional distancing by caregivers, to more direct physical, verbal, emotional, sexual or spiritual abuse, and forms of energy vampirism.

“The physical part of our external boundary controls our distance from others and whether or not we choose to be touched. This is our personal space. As we ask others to acknowledge and respect our physical boundaries, we know to ask permission to touch other people. In a similar way, our sexual boundary controls sexual distance and touch. We are able to choose how, when, where and with whom we are sexual.”

Likewise, internal boundaries protect our mental and emotional space.

“Our internal boundary protects our thinking, feelings and behaviors and keeps them functional. When we are using our internal boundary, we take responsibility for our thoughts and actions. We stop blaming others for what we think, feel and do. Our internal boundary also allows us to stop taking responsibility for the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of others.”

So the second vital point is that things like personal responsibility, shaming, and blaming are indelibly linked to the concepts of personal boundaries and their violations.

“Children are born without boundaries. They possess no internal way of protecting themselves from abuse or to avoid being abusive towards others. Boundaries must be taught. People with non-existent boundaries not only lack protection, but also have no ability to recognize another person's right to have boundaries. A [person] with nonexistent boundaries moves through other people's, unaware that he or she is doing something inappropriate. Damaged boundaries may cause a person to take responsibility for someone else's feelings, thoughts or behaviours.”

So healthy personal boundaries are installed in early childhood, through appropriate caregiving, role-modelling, and instruction. Conversely, compromised or non-existent personal boundaries are also [de]constructed early in life, due to abuses, neglect, lack of role-modelling, or inappropriate caregiving styles and techniques of all kinds.

Perspectives from the Developmental Trauma Literature

In the book “Healing Developmental Trauma” by Dr Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre, the authors also provide an alternative clear explanation of these concepts in terms of what they refer to as “damaged energetic boundaries”, and “boundary impingements”, which we began to explore in

How Other People's Physiology Affects Our Emotions and Internal States

The following quotes are from their book.

“The word boundaries is widely used in psychology and somatic psychotherapy, but its meaning is often unclear. Our skin is a boundary; it is our physical boundary. There is also an energetic dimension to boundaries. Because energetic boundaries are invisible, it is not generally understood that they are real and have profound implications in our lives. Energetic boundaries buffer us from the outside world and help us regulate our interface with other people. Each of us has a sense of our own space and what is comfortable to us within and around that space.”

“And just as a cut or a blow to the skin is painful, we experience an energetic boundary impingement or rupture as threatening and anxiety provoking.”

“Intact energetic boundaries are accompanied by a feeling of personal safety and a capacity to set appropriate limits.”

So another vital aspect of personal boundaries is that they are intimately connected with an ability to say “no” and to require consent. Conversely, abuse and violations occur when someone impinges on another persons space, when that person has not given consent, and especially when they have explicitly said “no”.

“Examples of healthy energetic boundaries:

• feeling comfortable in one’s own body;

• feeling an implicit sense of safety in the world;

• feeling a clear sense of self and other;

• being able to say no and set limits;

• knowing the difference between self and other.

Examples of compromised energetic boundaries:

• extreme sensitivity to other people’s emotions;

• a raw feeling of walking around without “skin”;

• energetic merging with other people, animals, and the environment

• the sense that danger can come from anywhere at anytime;

• hypervigilance and/or hypovigilance in general or in specific directional vectors such as from behind;

• environmental sensitivities and allergies;

• feeling uncomfortable in groups or crowds;

• agoraphobia.

Again, the origin of the compromised energetic boundaries is due to adverse experiences in early life:

“when there is chronic early threat, boundaries often never form adequately and become severely compromised; when boundaries are compromised or missing, we become symptomatic… in the [early] stage of development, trauma compromises boundary development and creates boundary ruptures.”

“The inability to develop adequate energetic boundaries has profound implications. Many of the psychological and physiological symptoms of [chronic conditions] can be better understood from the perspective of compromised energetic boundaries.”

This is indeed profound, that those with compromised or non-existent personal boundaries are prone to developing symptoms of chronic conditions in later life. Pia Mellody also makes this connections with symptoms in adulthood. See

Adverse Experiences, Stressful Episodes and Chronic Diseases

for a detailed exploration of all the different types of early life adverse scenarios which can compromise the formation of healthy boundaries, and correlate with increasing the risk of developing a chronic illness in later life.

Trauma healing therefore necessarily entails [re]building healthy personal boundaries, the setting of appropriate limits, and the ability to say no.

Carrying Other Peoples Negative Emotions

One of the important things I gleaned from reading Pia Mellody's book “Facing Codependence”, was the concept of "Carried Emotions or Feelings", which spoke to me at some deep level. The concepts of “transference” and “projection” are hence also intricately entwined with personal boundary violations.

In the book, Pia Mellody talks about parents transferring or inducing their own negative emotions (shame, guilt, fear, anger/rage, [self-]hate, blame) onto or into children through inappropriate caregiving behaviours or abuses (recall here our very general meaning of “abuse” to include neglect, abandonment, physical or emotional distancing, physical, verbal, emotional, sexual or spiritual abuse).

“We learn to experience an induced feeling as a result of being abused. Whenever a major caregiver is abusing a child while denying or being irresponsible with his or her own feelings, the negative feelings are very likely induced in the child who becomes overwhelmed by the caregiver's adult feelings. The only thing which could stop this transference from happening would be for the child to have adequate boundary defences [at an autonomous adult level], but since the internal boundaries are not yet fully developed they cannot keep from taking on the feelings of the adult. If the caregiver repeatedly acts irresponsibly with their feelings or denies them, these feelings keep getting shifted onto the child and become part of his/her core of feelings”.

Pia Mellody goes on to explain how we can tell the difference between our own feelings and emotions from those of others we may be carrying:

“one way to tell the difference between carried negative feelings and our own healthy ones is that the carried ones overwhelm us, whereas our own are not so intense… when we experience carried anger, we rage, carried fear, we panic, carried pain, we become hopeless, carried shame, we lose self-esteem and self-compassion.”

However, in my own experience these concepts hold true in later life too, especially in those of us who have already suffered some form of developmental trauma. I see this as a very common factor in many of us with chronic conditions. It is like we are emotional sponges, soaking up the responsibility for the negative feelings/energies of others. Indeed, I noted this quite some time ago in an article I wrote for people with Parkinson's Disease:

“… what I feel a lot of carers miss is that their own energy impacts hugely on people with Parkinson’s; we are like sponges, absorbing and reflecting from the environment around us; the energies of other people amplify us greatly, either through constructive or destructive resonance..."

It is as if, once we learned to carry a primary caregiver's emotions in childhood, we carry that ability to absorb forward into our adult relationships too. Moreover, we may tend to seek out, and are attracted to people, who have negative emotions they are needing to transfer or dump on another. I know this is true from my own toxic relationships. I married a women who would explicitly or implicitly constantly blame and make me at fault for any negative emotion she felt, and responsible for all her unhappiness [which was actually due to her own severe unresolved childhood traumas], abusing and exploiting my capacity for absorbing guilt and shame. Chronic criticism and constant evaluation seems to be a major mechanism for these adult forms of transference and projection.

Indeed, I have had to do an awful lot of work unburdening and unhooking myself from all the carried guilt and emotions, and toxic shame, I have absorbed from others during my life. This, together with learning how to set appropriate boundaries and limits, has definitely been the largest part of my healing, and I am particularly grateful for my therapist,

Lilian Sjøberg

of

The HOPE shortcut

for her help in this regard.

I also believe that this transference/carrying of other peoples negative emotions, which is so pernicious to those of us with early trauma in particular, goes much deeper in our society, and we also become the unwitting carriers for the guilt, blame, shame, fear, anger of our school teachers, spiritual leaders, bosses and managers, politicians and journalists, who are more than ready and willing to dump on us so. However, this is now straying in to the territory of the forthcoming part two.

Summary of the “Personal Boundary Violation” Lens

We have seen that early life experiences determine whether we have healthy, compromised, or non-existent personal boundaries as adults. Healthy personal boundaries need to be taught or role-modelled during childhood, but can still be built and constructed in later life, through healing the trauma. Environmental failures in childhood, such as abuse, neglect, or inappropriate parenting or education systems, set us up to more likely be both victims of abuse, and abusers of others, as adults, and also dramatically increases our risk of eventually manifesting symptoms of chronic illnesses. I strongly recommend Louis Weinstock’s book

Book Review: “How the World is Making Our Children Mad, and What to Do About It: A field guide to raising empowered children and growing a more beautiful world"

for a caregiving/parenting system which optimally creates resilient adults with intact personal boundaries.

Looking forward to part two, where we will apply what we have learned to modern society and the cultural level, one thing I think the above provides is an objective framework for morality/ethics: crossing personal boundaries, especially when consent is not given, or has been explicitly withdrawn, invasions of other peoples space, projection and transference of negative emotions on to others, are all objectively abuses and violations. They are morally and ethically wrong. When such breaches or impingements systemically occur, especially when they are institutionally perpetuated, we have a societal level failure in our morality and system of ethics.