Boundaries, Love & Community

 

Your identity is the sum of your boundaries: the things to which you say “Yes,” and the things which you say “No.”

What is your favorite food? Your answer is a preference, a boundary, a piece of your selfhood. 

To tell you, “No, that’s not your favorite food,” is to gaslight you.

To tell you, “That’s not a very good choice,” may shame you.

To tell you, “You must choose something else instead,” is to violate you – by violating your boundaries. 

Boundary violation is so painful because it is an attack on our right to selfhood, identity, and ego. When you say “I,” you are referring to your collection of boundaries, which are your preferences. Some of those preferences are needs – which may include physical sovereignty (for example, not being attacked). Some of those preferences are wants – which may include getting to eat your favorite food every day. Needs are rigid boundaries which, when compromised, leave you feeling like less of yourself – less of a whole human being. Wants are soft boundaries which are flexible, workable, shiftable; unmet wants don’t lead to feeling like your selfhood is ruptured.

Your “I” is always partially obscured – still being uncovered by you as your emotions serve as a guidance system, reflecting back to you your personal truths. It can never be wholly seen at once because it is in flux. As you learn, your preferences in life evolve. Sometimes a good friend may respectfully question your boundaries, helping reflect your choices back to yourself. Something such as our “favorite food” will likely change many times. Yet our most critical needs – such as nourishment and compassion – remain constant.

The archetypal notion of codependency is sacrificing critical needs – fundamental parts of your selfhood – in order to experience confluence with someone else. The archetypal notion of narcissism is being unwilling to bend – even about your wants – even if bending could support someone else’s needs. Both perspectives fail to find the deepest intimacy which is found when both parties can put their whole selves forward. The largest difference between the two is that narcissists don’t believe real love is possible for them – or that it even exists at all.

Love is including someone else in your selfhood: to evaluate, prioritize, and consider another person’s boundaries alongside your boundaries. Instead of “you versus them,” the evaluation process becomes, “this need,” versus “that need.” It doesn’t matter whose needs they are, but only how important each need is to the wellbeing of all the networked beings who share love for one another.

Loving requires understanding. You can not include someone else’s needs as part of your own needs if you don’t understand their needs. If you assume that other beings need the same things as you, then you will kill your fish by tucking it into your bed, and you will kill your dog by feeding it chocolate, and you will kill your spouse by starving them of the true intimacy that can only come from truly knowing them.

A loving marriage is built on knowing each other deeply – as completely as possible – and utilizing that knowledge to be able to take their needs into account with every action you take. When choosing a vocation or vacation, ask how this affects your wife. When choosing to meditate or medicate, ask how this affects your husband. Whether you’re arranging your calendar or your closet, ask how this affects your spouse.

A community is built on every community member showing every other member this same love: to learn about them, to come to understand them, to advocate for them. Community takes every person’s boundaries – both needs and wants – and cares for all of them together.

Community doesn’t assume that all people are equal. When it comes to any skill, individuals can be ranked on their ability to perform that skill. This ranking creates hierarchies. Hierarchies of capability aren’t inherently dangerous, but many people instinctively balk at anything which proposes some people are somehow “better” than others – because all too often this is conflated with “more deserving.” Yet true belonging in a community isn’t determined by the sum of your skills: your merit isn’t what makes your needs valid. Community assumes that all of its members have equally valid selfhood, and thus, equally valid boundaries.

Community isn’t built by everyone choking back their feelings and self-sacrificing. Neither community nor marriage can be healthy through compromise – where everyone cuts a piece of their identity away for “the greater good.” If everyone is bleeding from the wounds of their damaged selfhood, it is “a greater bad.” Instead of compromising ourselves for each other, we can instead vulnerably express the truth of our beings and work toward true consensus.

Consensus is the process of understanding, validating, and prioritizing the boundaries of every member of a group – which could be a family, a polycule, a tribe, a village, a team, or a company. When one person in the group says, “This is unacceptable to me,” we must respond with curiosity and compassion. Their “No” may be, in turn, a “No” for us, but we must set that aside for the moment and learn more about their position. We can’t not respond to their truth with love until we understand.

Consensus may be reached through someone retracting a boundary they previously stated. However, in order for this to be a healthy choice, it must be something that is chosen through a profound internal shift. Something that was a “No” for you may become a “Yes” when your understanding of someone else’s need causes a change of heart for you. This transforms something that would have been a compromise – leading to resentment – into something you feel grateful you can give to another cherished being.

Giving something to another should feel warm and good. If, instead, it burns and feels bad, it is because we have confused giving with giving up. To give up part of ourselves – to violate our own boundaries – is not a gift. When you are including others as part of yourself, you can not crowd your selfhood out of the picture. Your wellbeing is connected to theirs, and thus, hurting yourself is also hurting them – and thus, you can not hurt yourself for their benefit. 

Life-affirming communal experience requires knowing the difference between your needs and wants, and being able to put the vulnerable truth of your needs on the table – as well as being flexible about your wants to make space for the needs of others. You must be able to weigh the boundaries of others – and your own – on the same scale. If everyone vulnerably shares their truth, we can work toward solutions that make everyone more whole. Only when everything is shared, and every idea is tried, can we establish whether there is a true incompatibility.

Incompatibility is when our deepest needs don’t align with someone else’s deepest needs. This creates an irreparable boundary conflict. In these cases, individuals may have to leave a job, marriage, or community. But if we are accustomed to the creative problem-solving required to reach true consensus, we may choose to change the context of how we relate to someone rather than cutting them from our lives. Maybe you stay with the company, but move to another position. Maybe you stay married, but create separate sleeping spaces. Maybe you stay in the community, but change the role you play within it.

Both codependency and narcissism believe incompatibility is the baseline reality. It is the belief that you can not be a self-actualized person and have connection, companionship, and community simultaneously. Codependency expresses this belief in incompatibility through self-sacrifice – preemptively violating one’s own boundaries in favor of smoothing relations with others. Narcissism believes that, in addition to being incompatible, connection is impossible, and thus a pure narcissist fails to bend any boundary for any reason. This belief in the conflict between self-actualization and connection is what I call the co-narc pattern. 

Self-actualization is bringing the authentic truth of your boundaries in alignment with the life you’re living. This doesn’t mean you have an epiphany about yourself and immediately abandon people you made commitments to, but it may mean that you tell them honestly about what you’ve realized about yourself and ask them if they see any way to accommodate your truth alongside theirs. This process is about working toward truly honoring yourself whilst also honoring all the creatures with whom you share a bond.

Honoring ourselves is both about having the integrity to listen to our own inner voices of truth and giving others who have become attached to us the opportunity to hear those truths and reflect upon them. Being honorable is listening to their input and needs – even if it seems inevitable that the best course is to change the roles we are playing in each other’s lives.

To be a person of integrity is to integrate our thoughts, emotions, and actions into an aligned stream all working together to uphold our boundaries. When integral, harmonious cooperation is available within the individual, then it is more readily expanded to dyadic bonds, their familial unit, and to their wider community. When people are integrating –  working for one another’s wholeness – great healing becomes possible.

Healing is experiencing the opposite of the pains we’ve been through. These pains consist of boundary violations: some which hurt us by enmeshing us and others which hurt us by abandoning us. Enmeshment traumas include invalidating, caging, and attacking. Abandonment traumas include betrayals, loneliness, and withdrawals. True loving slowly works to heal both kinds of wounds, as it both respects our autonomous, integral selves (soothing enmeshment wounds) whilst also offering the intimacy found in vulnerable consensus-making (soothing abandonment wounds).

Intimacy is seeing into others; loving is compassionately acting on what we see. When the staggering power of this is grasped, we can understand the wisdom in teachings such as loving thy neighbor as oneself – loving thy enemy as oneself. To love our spouse, our neighbor, and even our enemy is to understand, validate, and caretake their boundaries – their selfhood.

When we can caretake the boundaries of all beings in one grand, compassionate consensus process, then we can have world peace. We are “all one or none” – we suffer the consequences of everyone’s trauma. Every shooting, bombing, and war started with a child who suffered deeply and was cut off from connection. When the whole world becomes one community, then we will finally leave the narcissistic relationship we have with the planet, and begin healing the wounds we’ve left on Gaia herself.