Crossing My Line

A friend said, "I wish I could be less effected by the moods of other people. What's the secret to that?"  My off-the-cuff response was, "Cement this thought into your head, and recite it every time: "Her feeling is hers, not mine. My feeling is a gift to us both."


Maybe it's mostly the coffee kicking in, but this has me thinking.  People often do not understand one of the basics of healthy relationships: healthy boundaries.  In mental health circles, this has been discussed and hashed over and taught for decades.  But such things as developing healthy boundaries are learned from parent to child, in relatively functional family systems.  So the impact of this broad notion will take many generations to sink into our culture, and, of course, in many family trees, never will.


What is a healthy boundary?  I Googled it, of course, and the top thing on the list was this short PDF article, courtesy of someone at Mississippi State University (I think; MSState.edu?) that does a pretty good job of introducing this.  Those who are interested enough to read for just a couple of minutes would do well to take a look.


My thoughts as a retired mental health professional follow.  I remember a friend, mentor, and colleague who was the most assertive man I ever met.  "Assertiveness" has to do with boundaries.  Perfect assertiveness would be behavior that always protects one's own interests while completely allowing all others to protect theirs, and never being the source or the chooser of conflict.  The result of his model-assertive behavior was frequent conflict with others, usually coming from their side of his healthy boundary.  Generally speaking, people in our culture expect us to maintain an unhealthy, too-loose boundary of our own so that they can "get in" to us to whatever extent they want at the moment.  The same people often have a rigid, un-crossable boundary over which none may pass.


One of his patients provided an example of healthy boundaries and assertiveness that he often cited.  He worked for many years with men who had been referred by the courts for domestic violence, and was regarded in a large metropolitan area as the local expert.  This patient had learned well, and had come a long way.  After his treatment, the man's wife became very angry, in part because she could no longer cross his healthier boundary when she wanted to.  She became so enraged that she was out in the yard, violently destroying some of his favorite and most irreplaceable possessions.  She was making a lot of noise, and several neighbors had gathered to watch her.  For his own reasons, some of which should be obvious, he chose not to retaliate in kind.  Instead, he stood with the neighbors and watched, talking calmly with them about what she was doing.  He had no appropriate way to control her behavior -- indeed, none of us ever does, since each person is responsible for his own behavior -- so he had to accept what she was doing, for the moment, and maintain his own healthy boundary, assertively protecting his own interests -- to the extent that he could.  Funny thing (?) is, the less he did to respond to her inappropriately, the more enraged she became.  Perhaps she wound up behind bars that evening.


Reminds me of a ground-breaking philosopher and psychiatrist who wrote a poem that became the content of a best-selling poster in the 60's.  Known as the founder of Gestalt Psychology. his name was Frederick S. "Fritz" Perls.  He was writing about healthy boundaries, but he was far more honest and wise about them than the publishers of the poster.  They left out the last line:


Gestalt Prayer

I do my thing, and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you and I am I,
if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

If not, it can’t be helped.

~