Laying down Boundaries
***Recorded live from Berlin, Germany***
\n"Laying down a boundary involves informing those around us \u2013 colleagues, parents, children, lovers \u2013 of a given set of objectively reasonable things that we are going to require in order to feel respected and happy, while doing so in a way that conveys confidence, self-possession, warmth and a mixture of kindness and strength.
\nHowever, because most of us have not been educated in this byway of emotional maturity, the boundaries are either non-existent or else get thrown up in a jerky and destructive manner. As the technical language has it, we are either too compliant or too rigid.
\nInvariably, those who can\u2019t lay down boundaries have not, in their early lives, had their own boundaries respected. Someone didn\u2019t allow them to say when they were unhappy with a genuinely difficult situation; someone didn\u2019t give much of a damn about their hurt feelings or distinctive hopes. Someone insinuated that being good meant falling in line, always, immediately. No one modelled the skill of winning, graceful objection.
\nYet the alternative to lacking all boundaries is not violent defensiveness. We should not let boundary-building be undermined by its most zealous practitioners; there is always a means to make a sound case without reaching for a weapon.
\nIt takes a little self-confidence and courage to be able to notice just how bad we may be at the art of boundary-laying. We may have spent a large chunk of our lives already in an essentially passive relationship to everyday infringements by people close to us. But we aren\u2019t a piece of helpless flotsam on the river of others\u2019 wishes; we have agency, direction and \u2013 as it were \u2013 a rudder. The price to pay for affection isn\u2019t compliance."
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