What You Need to Know About Boundaries at Home
When it comes to tough skills, a little background info can often be helpful. Resilience, or being able to bounce back from stressors, includes six domains, of which meaning/conceptual understanding is one (the others are: collaboration, vision, composure, health, and tenacity).
Setting boundaries requires TREMENDOUS resilience, especially with the folks in your family.
For that reason, here are 5 component parts that add up to really tough stuff when it comes to setting boundaries at home.
Hierarchy! Hierarchy happens in each and every family, and the specifics vary from home to home and from culture to culture. Hierarchies can be incredibly helpful in some cases and less so in others, largely depending on the emotional maturity of the folks involved at the top of the pyramid. If you're not sure about the hierarchy structure in your family, think through the last 5 decisions made in your home or family. Who made the final call? Who pulled the most weight in solidifying/changing that decision? Who were the other contributing actors? Now you've got a pretty good sense of the family hierarchy.
Emotions. Obviously. We all deal with stressors differently. Anxiety comes up in one family member but not another. Grief shows up as an outward display for one, but another is stoic and subdued. One feels (and follows) the pull of their heart, another diagrams pros, cons, and every conceivable cost before making a choice. To each their own, though in families, each’s own may be at odds.
Proximity. This may refer to physical proximity or emotional proximity (decades-long relationships, regardless of quality). Boundaries are about creating a space, and various types of proximity can obviously complicate the process.
Expectations. This goes hand in hand with hierarchy, above, and patterns, below. When you start getting in there and setting boundaries, all bets are off when it comes to expectations, which makes keeping boundaries so, so rough. Unspoken expectations are the stickiest to work around. A good way to start is to think through routines in your family: what happens in the morning? Evening? Where do you tend to get upset with your family members in the course of a day? Where do other members tend to get upset in the course of the day?
Patterns. This is perhaps superfluous, as it's implied in all of the above, but is worth explicitly naming. Family units have patterns, and each individual has their own patterns. We're talking daily routines, emotional patterns, hierarchy of relationships, known annoyances... all the things, really.
So, now you have a base of background knowledge.
Ready to learn the next level and actually set some effective boundaries at home?