3 Tips for Creating Boundaries With Family

I had an argument with my mom. Over the course of my life we've argued a lot. Usually over the same things. I could dive into that, but let's just say that being the oldest child of a handicapped parent who deals with abandonment issues and is a card carrying member of "but that's your (insert family member)" club is not for the weak.

I remember being in therapy in 2015 and I described my life as a car. Since a young age, I have sat behind the wheel of my life. Then there was my mother, driving from the passenger's seat (we'll talk about why that was problematic in a different post), and my brother in the back seat. I was responsible for the upkeep and care of my car, but I wasn't allowed to choose the direction or which passengers were welcome. The purpose of my car was only meant to serve me to the extent that it served others, even if that meant sometimes it didn't serve me at all. The trauma I faced walking the tightrope of staying in a child's place while managing the finances, emotions, relationships, and well being of myself and everyone else in my life was a lot of responsibility for a child, but I knew I'd be well prepared to drive my car as an adult. I went to college in 2010 and for the first time I was in my car alone and I loved every minute of it. Driving where I wanted to go and choosing passengers as I pleased to go on this journey with me. I met a guy I wanted to "buy a new car" with. Maybe upgrade to a family truck. And I did. My senior year, we gave birth to my oldest son. I was full of joy. My (then) husband and I were driving our truck together-- more like flying a plane-- and while having two co-captains can come with its set of problems, it was worth it because we chose to be there together and had a shared destination.

But life happened, and soon, my mother was living with us. She was back in my car, fighting to drive from the backseat. Having my mom with us saved us thousands on childcare, but created even more traumas that my family and I are still recovering from. During my marriage, I often felt like I was fighting to maintain my two pilot plane with a third pilot, one who didn’t have credentials or resources, fighting for dominance. I carried a lot of guilt around my inability to maintain the standards of how I wanted my children to be raised because they spent so much time with her. I feared that her refusal to respect the standards of what my husband and I desired for our children would have adverse effects on who they became, and it did. I feared that her choices in how she handles conflict and her needs would cause chasms in my relationship, and it did. When my husband and I bought our first home, I was finally free again to pilot my vehicle the way I chose, just him and I, at least for a little while. I soon found myself divorced and now my mother and I live together again. Meanwhile, she is “employed” by my children’s father to watch them while he works. You can only imagine the  kind of headache this causes. Ultimately, my vision for my life has shifted slightly and I am doing everything in my power to protect it, so I find myself fighting these days to maintain my boundaries. 

Boundaries are not ultimatums or preferences. They are the stakes that create the wrought iron fence surrounding our lives. They protect us and help to guide our decision making as we use them to determine which relationships and situations we should avoid and which ones we should participate in. I’ve spent many years in therapy and self-reflection to determine what my boundaries are and I have three guidelines that helped me through that process. 

1. Establish your goals for the relationship.

When you’re young, you often don’t get to decide what your relationships look like. Your dependence on the adults in your life sometimes requires you to be placed in situations that make you feel uncomfortable or even may bring you harm. Your friendships with your peers are managed by the adults in your life. When you’re an adult, you have the autonomy to determine and manage those things on your own and while it can be hard sometimes, knowing who you are and how you show up in the world helps to determine what your relationships should look like. 

I’m an introvert who deeply values autonomy while still seeing the importance of community and connectedness. I also am a mom of four children for whom I am responsible. It is my duty to raise them to love God, themselves, and their neighbor. I want them to be strong and gentle and intelligent and wise and intuitive and emotional and successful adults. They are only children for a little while, so I spend increasing amounts of time investing in the relationship I hope to have with them when they are adults than I invest in who they are as children. I want my children to be interdependent and secure, feeling confident in their decisions and identity while still feeling my support and love. I want them to come to me when they need help, but to never feel helpless. I want them to trust me with their secrets without feeling obligated to share them with me. I

want them to respect my choices on what I do, and where I go, and even my relationships, and I want to offer them the same. I want my children to know me as a woman, but connect with me as their mother. I want us to respect each other’s personhood while investing in the relationship we are building. So I share my experiences with them– good, bad, or ugly– in age-appropriate ways. I communicate with them my need for personal time and space and I respect their requests for privacy and autonomy. I listen to their stories without judgment, which doesn’t mean I agree with everything they do, but rather I let them know my thoughts and feelings while reminding them that no matter their choice, I’ll still be there for them. I give them advice when I have it, and practice humility when I don’t. I allow them to correct me when I am wrong. I do not allow them to access the comforting parts of our relationship if they’ve harmed me until they have taken accountability and we've made plans for how we can avoid this behavior. My forgiveness is unlimited, but it is not automatic or owed. I protect my time away from them (when they should be under the care of their father) no matter the cost, making sure to articulate to them the importance that their father and I share equal responsibility in all things concerning them. My hope is that when they are adults, they will still come to me because they want to, not because they feel they have to, so my boundaries protect us both from codependency.

2. Set standards based on your values, not your trauma.

This one is hard. The trauma and triggers we carry are such an integral part of who we are and how we perceive the world. We avoid certain people and situations, even if they aren’t inherently harmful, because of our traumas. Until we’ve healed, our triggers force us to see threats where, sometimes, there are none. So we take those traumas and decide that all people who are in certain categories have no place in our lives. We rob ourselves of being challenged to grow in situations that trigger us. We fight or flee when we should simply stand firm in the boundaries that we create, and as new traumas come, we build more walls. But the best way to create boundaries isn't in response to our trauma. In fact, it isn't in response to anything. Boundaries are proactive. We must consider the things we need in order to feel safe and secure and valued and allow those things to determine what we will and won't tolerate. When we create our boundaries as a response to trauma, as we heal our boundaries will change and we will have missed out on opportunities and relationships that would have benefited us in the past because we saw them as threats. However, when we choose our boundaries based on our values, our boundaries are less likely to change because who we are at the core doesn't change very much, it is simply unveiled to us as we continue to live. Furthermore, building boundaries based on values makes it harder for people to manipulate us by using our triggers and traumas as weapons. We are less likely to have those kinds of people who would do that in our circle when we choose relationships and situations based on our values instead of our trauma.

I am a Black Christian woman who loves God and values black people, culture, and history. I could never work for any institution or practice vulnerability and intimacy with any person that forces me to swallow my love for any part of my identity. I'm a mom of four, and my children mean the world to me. No job and no relationship will ever be more important than my children. I will choose them every time. I value my autonomy. Nobody can tell me what to do. You can give me advice, but you can't make up my mind. I value my independence, my time, and my energy for myself. I hate feeling crowded and I hate when people feel entitled to me, so if I no longer feel like interacting, I will end the interaction and I don't need a reason other than my being done with this part of the shared moment. It's not about being rude. It's about making sure that I can continue showing up as my best self instead of allowing others to drain me so that I have nothing left to give myself or my other relationships. Unless it is an emergency, I probably won't answer the phone a lot of times, not because I don't love them or don't want to hear from them, but because sometimes it can feel like a time suck that distracts me from more urgent matters. But I will pull up in a hot minute and just sit with you, no matter what we're doing together, because my physical presence means I'm choosing you over wherever else I could be in the world, including with myself. Now none of this is to say that I practice cutting people off. There has to be a lot of things wrong in order for me to eliminate access to me, but the degree to which I engage in any relationship or opportunity depends on the extent to which my own values are able to be freely maintained and even shared. 

3. Remember that boundaries are for you to enforce, not for others to maintain. 

It's very simple. Your boundaries are for you, not for anyone else. When we require people to do things for us in exchange for something from us, that's not a boundary. That's an ultimatum. And it's very likely that you will not stand on that, so no one will take you seriously. Our boundaries also can't control other people's actions. Our boundaries simply inform people that their actions do have consequences, both good and bad. Our boundaries can be as simple as communicating how much time we have to help a person or to entertain a phone call, or they can be as complex as helping someone understand the tone of voice you will listen and respond to and which ones

you will ignore. 

One of my boundaries, as previously stated, is that I do not engage in intimacy where there is unrepentant sin against me. If you know you've hurt me, whether I've communicated that or not, you simply cannot have the intricacies of my service and love. That doesn't mean that I will be unkind or that I will seek revenge, but the relationship is broken and must be repaired in order for us to move forward. Otherwise, you will lose access to certain parts of me. If you tell my business to someone without my permission, that doesn't mean we can't hang out. It just means I won't be telling you anymore of my business. If you bring up the list of things you've done for me in an effort to get me to do something for you that makes me feel uncomfortable, I will never allow you to do anything for me again. I will refuse your help, even if that means inconveniencing myself. If you try to manipulate me, I will distance myself from you. I will not trust you and my help will depend more on what I can afford to lose and less on what you say you need. This made a huge difference when thinking about the type of partner I might have wanted to be with.

I used to believe that I could never date a man who didn't go to therapy. The choice to go to therapy is personal and is not relevant to creating and maintaining a relationship. I can't control another person’s actions, so making somebody spend their time doing something for themselves to make me feel comfortable could never be a boundary. It's a preference. What I have decided instead is that if I am to partner with someone, I cannot be the perpetual punching bag of their unhealed traumas. How they deal with those traumas is their choice, but they will not project their insecurities onto me and maintain intimacy with me. Their stress and anxiety will not be an excuse for speaking to me with disrespect. Their low view of self or low view of women will not dictate what I wear, what I post, who I'm friends with, or my own view of self. Every action toward me should be done with a high view of me in mind as well as a high view of self. Whether he develops that through gaming, or sports, or prayer and meditation, or therapy is his choice, but if he chooses not to develop it at all and instead requires me to bend to accommodate it in ways that are harmful to me, then I'm choosing me, and I'm hoping my partner would maintain the same boundaries for themselves when it comes to me. 

Because of this, I have a balanced view of my relationships that doesn't leave me constantly feeling empty and rejected because I don't punish people when they make choices I don't agree with. I still value them and the space that they hold in my life, but I don't give anyone more of myself than I should, which would leave me feeling constantly empty, and I try not to take more from other people than they are offering, which would leave me feeling perpetually disappointed.

These three guidelines for how I choose my boundaries have saved me a ton of headache and heartache. Because my boundaries are not based on other people, I can walk away from situations knowing that even if I have caused a person emotional pain by maintaining my boundaries, they were fully aware of what they did and how they could have chosen something differently in order to avoid whatever consequence they received. I can also be sure that the maintaining of my boundary wasn't an attempt to be vindictive or manipulative because my boundaries don't change in any relationship. I need the same things to feel safe with my mother as I need from my friends and my romantic partner so no one gets special treatment when it comes to my boundaries. It also leaves the people in my life freer to be themselves around me because my boundaries are only about me. I'm not a smoker, but I have friends who are. I don't require them to stop smoking in order to be my friend. I just don't allow them to smoke in my house. They can smoke before they come and they can smoke after they leave and we can have a good time. They can smoke in their own house when I'm there and I won’t mind. They can smoke on a plane or on a train, and I will not judge them for it. If I don't want to be around it at the moment, I will leave, but that doesn't make them any less kind or intelligent or useful or wise or fun to be around. And I get to enjoy all of it because I don't stop them from being who they are in order to maintain a relationship with me, I simply decide which parts of them we will share and what that looks like. Likewise, they still get to enjoy the parts of me that they value without having to sacrifice themselves.

Boundaries are ultimately very simple, but the first step is knowing who you are and what you need. The hard part is protecting that, but if you love your people and they love you, it will get easier with time. 

So what are some boundaries you have and how do you stand firm?