I’ve Got You Under … another brick in the Wall

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness… stand together yet not too near together… the pillars of the temple stand apart.”

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

 I’ve so loved this from Kahlil Gibran .. I come back to it often, a sort of guiding principle for me as I didn’t learn about boundaries growing up. Those around me were either very boundaryless or sat behind a broadsheet paper, impermeable. They couldn’t teach what they didn’t know, couldn’t model what was never modelled to them. Children arrive in the world completely porous so every feeling in the room is taken in: the tensions and moods of others the space they play in. Over time, with good-enough parenting, children can learn: that is yours, this is mine. Here is where I end. Here is where you begin. This is what we can negotiate. So they grow a skin, a membrane.

Some of us didn’t get that sort of parenting or got it very unevenly. Some of us had a skin growing and then something happened that wore it thin or forced it away

Clarissa Pinkola Estés (oh I love her work!) writes about those of us who arrive in adulthood without that layer. She talks about the task of learning it late and growing it from scratch slowly and painfully, stumblingly..

I learned the hard way, and swung like a pendulum: years of saying yes when I meant no and taking on other people’s feelings and responsibilities as if they were mine to carry and fix. I look back at how I lost who I actually was underneath all the accommodating. “Do I like this? I’m not sure.. do you? Ok I do too”. Ouch Other times I built the wall so thick and high like Rupunzels tower, looking so self-sufficient from the outside. I hid shut down and withdrew. It took me ages to get that these are both survival strategies in a world that felt unsafe to me.

AuDHD and the Boundary Problem

Being AuDHD adds its own particular flavour as my nervous system processes intensity differently. Sensory, emotional and social input comes in louder and faster than the neuronoemative wiring. To look at it this way I see my protective responses make complete sense. On top and intertwined with relational wounding of course I learned to wall off or fawn and overgive. These strategies are logical instinctive responses!

My lived experience is also one of hyper-empathy where other people’s emotional states don’t just register but land in my body. Your anxiety or sadness becomes my anxiety. I can walk into a room feeling completely fine and leave carrying a weight. My limbic and nervous system attunes to danger and threat deeply.. so boundarylessness happens as there’s no filter it. The neuroscience points to dense neural connectivity so more connections firing across more of the brain at once, taking in more signal with fewer automatic filters paradoxically, gives less sense of self. I’m so exquisitely tuned to everyone around and quietly lost inside your own body. Masking to fit in to neuronormative society is also a nightmare for setting boundaries. My experience of abandoning myself over and over in tiny increments.. yours?

The Golden Light (and the Orange)

Over the years I’ve practiced a conscious visualisation practice.. setting up an imaginary protective field I experience mine as a warm golden light, or a dome of plexiglass or a shimmering mirrored cloak. Words from others that aren’t true, or words said in anger or judgment rather than connection, just ping off it. I like that I can raise it and lower it as I wish, it’s not a wall, and i can lower it when i choose, when the perceived danger has passed. Easier with people I don’t know and easier said than done. I can’t and don’t want to put up impermeable walls when I care about the person underneath the words, ping is not the answer long term. Those instances I imagine a waiting room.. the words can come in and I’ll ruminate a while, maybe chat it through with a therapist or trusted other then.. sometimes out it goes ! .. other times it may be I need to work on repair with the person.

Terry Real uses the image of an orange to describe what healthy boundaries feel like from the inside. The outer skin filters what comes in, protecting me from the world. The white inner pith holds the juice of what goes out (a containing boundary protecting the world from me, helping me regulate before I react).

When One Person Walls Off and the Other Reaches out

The gap between a walled-off partner and a boundaryless one is so painful.. we need each other to help co regulated and our nervous systems need consistency and predictability to settle. The body reads emotional unavailability as danger. Cortisol rises, the heart rate climbs, the whole system goes on alert.

In IFS terms, both people are blended. lThe tragedy is that the very strategies each person uses to feel safer and protect themselves make the other person feel less safe.

Toni Herbine-Blank, with her IFIO model, often tells the story of the porcupines in the cold winter shuffling toward each other for warmth, then pulling back when their spines make contact. Shuffling in again then pulling back. Finding, slowly, the distance that is close enough to share heat but far enough apart not to draw blood. Clearly negotiation (tender, clumsy and ongoing!), is maybe what relational health is all about, the space between as Martin Buber talked about

The Relationship Grid and Boundaries

Terry Real’s horizontal axis in the Relationship Grid he created has walled off at one end, boundaryless at the other. The Centre of Health sits in the middle, not as a fixed destination, as a quality of presence. I don’t know about you but I move along the line depending on how blended I am, the company I’m in, what’s been triggered in me, and how safe i feel, how full my stress bucket is. Practicing coming back to Centre, practicing putting in a boundary if I’m over giving (or im feeling impinged and wanting to wall off) is my daily thing to practice. Boundaries keep me out of resentment, When I can say no and mean it, my yes means something. Stepping forward when I’m too behind my wall, noticing when the danger has passed, remembering that most of my protective strategy is a ghost from the past .. the danger isn’t happening now .. I’m an adult! Maybe I have to update some of my parts who still think I’m 10!

A word about trees: Aspens

The massive Aspen grove “Pando” in Utah at extraordinary scale are thousands of trees all connected underground. In fact they are one organism. I think about that image a lot, how we are connected and need each other, each rooted, standing in their own light, but connected at a depth that doesn’t require constant contact to be real. I’m sensing that’s what Kahlil Gibran points at (what do you think?) and maybe what the porcupines are slowly, painfully, tenderly negotiating. maybe that what the Centre of Health actually feels like when you find it.Separate enough to be real. Connected enough to matter.

Something to Sit With

Where do you tend to sit on that axis? In your closest relationships, do you wall off, or do you lose your edges?

Was this modelled for you, growing up? What did you learn about where you ended and others began? I’d love to know.

ND note: for those of us with rejection sensitivity, demand avoidance, or sensory processing differences, the wall and the open gate can also both be nervous system responses rather than choices. The swing between them is exhausting and very common. Wiring explains but does not excuse, and the membrane can be grown, slowly and with care.