Boundaries within Families

We are half-way through our Lent. Are you feeling discouraged by your attempts to change yet? Yes, me too. Unfortunately, every family of four will have four saboteurs, ourselves included. It seems to be human nature to resist change. But we “keep on keeping on” in hope and trust that we can improve.

This week let’s look at one building block of healthy families – boundaries.

According to Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin by Anne Katherine, a boundary is a limit or edge that defines you as separate from others, a limit that promotes integrity. Healthy boundaries build healthy families.

Here are some excerpts from this fascinating book:

Personal Boundaries:

We have different type of boundaries:

• Physical – Our skin is our boundary but we also maintain around us an invisible circle or comfort zone. Its size is fluid depending on relationships and culture.

• Emotional – We have a set of feelings and reactions that are distinctly ours. Feelings can be used to determine a course of action. They tell us when something seems dangerous or threatening or safe. A warm response brings your feelings back to you. You get to know yourself better. This combination—of effective feedback and knowing yourself better—creates an emotional boundary. It fills in the circle of who you are and creates a space outside of you of who you aren’t.

• Spiritual – We are the only ones who can discern the right spiritual path for ourselves.

• Sexual – We have a choice about who we interact with sexually and the extent of that interaction. Boundaries limit what is safe and appropriate sexual behavior from others.

• Relational – The roles we assume define the limits of appropriate interaction with others.

Boundaries and Children

Boundaries begin to form in infancy. In a healthy family a child is helped to individuate, to develop a self-concept separate and unique from the other family members.

Parental attention develops boundaries.

• Interest in a child’s activities helps the child value what she can do.

• Interest in a child’s thoughts helps the child expand his sense of his own mental processes.

• Guidance helps the child realize that certain choices are superior to others—an essential aspect of boundary development.

• Expressed concern communicates a boundary—that the child is nearing a limit.

• Physical affection communicates that the child belongs, that he or she is part of a unit. It helps the child develop the boundary of “us” and “not-us.”

• Both too much distance and too much closeness between parents and children lead to problems. To a child, too much distance means abandonment and emotional neglect. Too much closeness—enmeshment—prevents the child from developing his own individuality and can foster in him a feeling of being responsible for the well-being of his parents.

• Meeting feelings  with disapproval or harshness teaches children to push them down, to separate themselves from their feelings, and to ignore the valuable information they contain.

• Feelings met warmly, with encouragement to talk about them and help to identify them—when a parent correctly interprets children’s facial expressions, body language, and the feelings connected with them—develops children’s understanding of their inner selves. Learning about and connecting with feelings is essential for complete boundary development.

What strengthens emotional boundaries?

• The right to say no.

• The freedom to say yes.

• Respect for feelings.

• Support for personal process.

• Acceptance of differences.

• Enhancement of uniqueness.

• Permission for expression.

What harms emotional boundaries?

• Ridicule. Contempt. Derision.

• Sarcasm. Mockery. Scorn.

• Belittling feelings.

• Stifling communication.

• Insistence on conformity.

• Arbitrariness.

• The need to overpower.

• Heavy judgments.

• Any kind of abuse.

• Abandonment.

• Threat.

• Insecurity.

Boundaries in Marriage:

If, as children, we had to deny our true thoughts or feelings to be safe, as adults we are likely to continue to deny what’s true for us. If boundary development was severely harmed when we were children, therapy may be the most efficient route, in order to not carry boundary damage into our relationships.

Ideally, the marriage contains enough togetherness to preserve the boundary of “us” and “not-us” and enough separation to preserve each person’s individuality. In a healthy marriage, each person is whole and intact. They choose to live together. Each could still survive if something happened to the other.

Acceptable degrees of intimacy and distance can vary. Communication is the life-blood that keeps the partnership fluid and vital and clarifies each person’s needs for intimacy and separateness.

Intimacy comes from knowing each other very well, accepting shortcomings and differences, and loving each other anyway. Enmeshment, on the other hand, is attempting to feel and think as if you were the same person. If only one partner is set up to do the thinking and make the decisions, that partner (let’s say the husband) will see himself as more powerful and important, even if his wife is the one who keeps the show going. This imbalance can cause the supportive partner to feel less important, less sure of her value and the worth of her ideas, more dependent on her husband, and more enmeshed.

Too much distance in a relationship leads to a cooling of romantic interest. Surprisingly, enmeshment can do the same. Enmeshment means someone’s individuality is being squashed. An enmeshed person is not known. True intimacy, in which each person is well known, leads to emotional closeness and easily into physical closeness. If partners aren’t talking about problems, feelings, needs, and wants, they’ll feel less known, and distance will grow between them.

Intimacy takes work.

Boundary violations, whether too distant or too close, can be healed right away if the sufferer tells the intruder that a boundary has been violated and the intruder immediately apologizes or somehow expresses concern about the violation. Note the two parts to this. The one whose limits have been breached must make the offense known and the offender must respect the limit.

So, what’s the goal of a person who wants to be healthy? To form boundaries that have some flexibility and some definite limits, boundaries that move appropriately in response to situations—out for strangers, in for intimates. Boundaries should be distinct enough to preserve our individuality yet open enough to admit new ideas and perspectives. They should be firm enough to keep our values and priorities clear, open enough to communicate our priorities to the right people. With good boundaries, we can have the wonderful assurance that comes from knowing we can and will protect ourselves from the ignorance, meanness, or thoughtlessness of others.

Boundaries bring order to our lives. As we learn to strengthen our boundaries, we gain a clearer sense of ourselves and our relationship to others.

Intact, clear boundaries enhance the family and prepare children for healthy adulthood.

Blessings on your week!

Betty

Unconditional Love

Welcome to this new Lenten series of 4 Minutes for Growth!

This year we concentrate on the family.

John Powell, S.J., starts us off with his timeless book, Unconditional Love: Love without Limits. I chose this book because unconditional love must be the basis of family life. Though we all fall short at times, loving without preconditions should be our goal—the type of love we continually strive to achieve and maintain. Unconditional love says, “No matter what, I will not reject you. I’m committed to your growth and happiness. I will always love you.”

Powell reminds us that love is not a feeling, but rather a decision and a choice. We choose to place another’s welfare on the same level as, and sometimes even above, our own. By so doing we bring true meaning to our lives. Such meaning, or self-fulfillment, is an elusive quality which we can’t capture by direct pursuit but only attain as a by-product of loving.

Unconditional love says: I will love you, I will encourage you by helping you to be aware of your strengths, and when necessary I will challenge you to grow.

Most times this love will be tender and gentle, but not always. Sometimes unconditional love must be tough love, when truly wanting what is best for someone’s growth and happiness means not giving them what they want, but rather what is essential. A spouse may need to firmly point out a loved one’s self-destructive choices, or a parent will set limits to protect a child who is not ready for the independence he or she demands. A wife might ask her husband to cut back on his time away from home, or a mother might forbid a son to attend a party that “everyone else” is allowed to attend. Love is not unconditional if it weakly allows poor choices in order to avoid uncomfortable confrontation.

However, even tough love is not harsh. Sometimes as parents we think we need to constantly correct in order to assure our children’s proper growth. But a child does not flourish under criticism. Rather, Powell contends:

There is nothing else that can expand the human soul, actualize the human potential for growth, or bring a person into the full possession of life more than a love which is unconditional. […] Unconditional love is liberating. It frees the loved one to be authentic and real.

I think most people would agree that our children deserve unconditional love. We parents know we fall short, but we remain determined to love our children no matter what they do. It gets harder, though, when we turn it around. Shouldn’t we love our parents unconditionally, too? They weren’t perfect, but neither are we. And, even more difficult, what about our siblings? Heaven knows, siblings can find and attack our vulnerabilities. Do I need to love them unconditionally after what they did… or continue to do?

(Apologies to my two brothers. I’m speaking generally here, not specifically. Though I also apologize for when I didn’t treat you with the love I should have.)

Granted, not all family members are healthy to be around. Sadly, some are caustic, and boundaries must be raised in order to protect our emotional well-being. We mustn’t fear that loving another unconditionally will mean losing ourselves. In fact, in order to love another we must first love ourselves, as much as we are able, unconditionally. God has made us and declared us good and he has shown us we are loveable and worthy of the greatest sacrifice. So we come to love others, not out of weakness, but out of strength and awareness of our worth. It would be unloving to allow others to treat us with disrespect.

Yet, for spiritual and emotional health, unconditional love calls us to endeavor to forgive the wrongs of the past, even from a distance. That way, if the family member ever makes changes for the better, we will be ready to reconnect.

God’s word to us in the Bible is full of stories of unconditional love. We read of the prodigal son’s father, who knew unconditional love requires forgiveness and so ran to embrace his son at his penitent return. We believe that Jesus demonstrated unconditional love as he died for our sins and yet bid his Father, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

These are our models for building strong families. We must offer our family a lifetime of striving to love them unconditionally, forgiving them for their mistakes and asking forgiveness for our own, but always trying again to love, encourage, and challenge each other to be the best we each can be.

Next week we will turn to Building Christian Families, by Mitch and Kathy Finley.

Blessings on your first week of Lent!

The Best Version of Ourselves

Remember Matthew Kelly’s The Seven Levels of Intimacy I briefly listed two weeks ago? We spent a little time considering Level 4, Hopes and Dreams. Today I’d like us to talk about Level 7, Legitimate Needs. God gave us these needs as clues to help us thrive.

An ongoing theme in Kelly’s writing is his encouragement that we strive to become “the best version of ourselves.” To do so, we need to constantly grow in all four legitimate need areas:

1. Physical – Eat well, exercise, sleep regularly. Let each decision we make in this area (and all areas) be tested by asking ourselves, “Will this (cupcake, walk, bedtime) make me a better version of myself?”
2. Emotional – Give focus and priority to relationships. We talked about this last week in the concept of carefree timelessness. Spending time intended for simple enjoyment with the important people in our lives will enhance our relationships and bring us joy.
3. Intellectual – We become what we read. As individuals and societies, we become the stories we listen to. What stories occupy your time? If you are like me, we access our stories on television, in the newspaper, in the books we read, and the time we spend online. Do these stories portray heroes we’d like to emulate? Kelly recommends we choose our inputs wisely and give at least ten minutes a day to reading great books.
4. Spiritual – We spend particular focus on our spiritual growth during Lent. Yes, we may eat better, or exercise more as an attempt to be healthier, but these are disciplines we practice, and discipline is the road to growing spiritually. Kelly recommends we start our spiritual discipline with ten minutes per day spent in what he calls “the classroom of silence.”

When you stop to realize and truly believe that our God, who is All Powerful but also All Loving, yearns to have a one-on-one, face-to-face, heart-to-heart relationship with you, cares about you intimately, wants what is the very best for you, and would do and give everything toward that end, the experience of such intense love will light a spark within you. The spark will ignite a fire that is sometimes a warm glow and other times an encompassing inferno.

By human nature, even though we experience these moments of understanding when we are awed by the realization of God with us, before long we return to our mundane worries and cares. To counteract this and continue to grow in our relationship with God, we need to choose to keep returning to the awareness of his presence. To always be aware of God’s nearness is a wonderful goal but for now, let’s commit to drawing ourselves back to the spiritual with the discipline of setting aside time to refocus on God.

• We can reconnect to the loving presence by many routes. We can turn our thoughts to prayer at any time or place, even at red lights while our cars and spirits idle.
• We can inform our life decisions and our knowledge of God’s way by studying scripture and inspirational writing.
• Together with our faith family, we avail ourselves of God’s graces together in the sacraments of the Church. Do you sometimes agree with your children who complain that church is boring? If so, pray before the service that God will show you one way to become a better version of yourself. Then listen to the songs, the readings, the homily, and the voice in your heart. One phrase will excite you. Write it down in a small journal and pray about it. You’ll be amazed at how the Spirit has been reaching out to you at every service and you didn’t notice.

This doesn’t need to be a lone pursuit. Focus on helping loved ones achieve their legitimate needs and you will grow closer to God and each other.

Homework: Commit to the discipline of ten minutes of attention daily to each of the four areas of legitimate needs. If that seems overwhelming, start with one and add another each week.

May God bless you and your willingness to work toward growth!

You can learn more about Matthew Kelly at www.DynamicCatholic.com