Follow
BedPost Confessions
Buy Sadie’s Book
Sadie on YouTube
Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Sadie Says… Boundary, What is it Good For?
I am confronting the concept of boundaries lately and am learning that sometimes I have to draw them out with thick, deliberate strokes. Run my pencil back and forth along the plane -point to point- so that the lines I am asking not to be crossed become the crude illustration of a child.
Sometimes underlining something over and over again is the only way to get my point across.
My boundaries have been crossed time and time again over the last few years. Frankly, it’s part of why I decided my marriage should end, why the hurt had become so very indelible… absolutely impossible to erase. Because when you give the space for something to exist, ample space even, more than enough, really… and the person you’ve given that space to casts an even wider net, arching menacingly over the lines of the agreement and into territory that would have been much better left alone, which is of course why the territory was marked, inexplicably, with the letters KO for Keep Off in the first place… when you give that space and that space gets filled up and even more space is taken?
It pisses you off.
It pisses me off anyway.
And you would think I’d have learned by now. Learned how to set the proper boundaries so that I can keep manipulative, toxic people off of my front porch and the resulting anger such situations guarantee at bay. I haven’t figured it out, apparently. Because it’s still happening.
Or happened.
Perhaps this situation (my apologies for being so esoteric about the details, but this is not an I-got-fucked-over-and-wanna-tell-you-about-it sitch) … perhaps this situation is the teacher I needed to slap me on the hand with a wooden ruler, a merciless reminder to pay attention to red flags. I mean, I know better than to ignore the scarlet harbingers of doom. Especially when I watch them waving, ironically, cloyingly… inside my own home.
Yes. I will remember from now on. Set my boundaries in solid graphite and keep a watchful eye out for the red.
Reminders received and duly noted.
Thanks, teach.
Just ended an almost-8 year open relationship in December for the same reasons. The given an inch, taking a mile, awfully sorry game gets old. Here’s to having what we deserve – our boundaries recognized and respected!
You know, despite how vague this piece is about the specifics of… well any particular situations, I just nodded my way through it. I know this feeling so goddamn well. I need boundaries too. I need people not to step over them; but they do.
I suppose that the issue for e here is that without more information, I don’t know if I agree or not. I would want to know why certain boundaries exist, for example.
I am a proponent of self-improvement. I demand, of myself, to perpetually improve who I am, what kind of partner I am, and what I am capable of. As this process continues, my boundaries become more pourous and even fade away in some cases.
I don’t think that all kinds of boundaries need to be absolute, but I do think that if someone agrees to a strict boundary they are responsible for honoring it. For me, a red flag is absolute boundaries around things that are not about health/physical safety.
Again, without more detail, it’s hard to be sure if I would agree with you or not.
Shaun
Shaun,
What happened was that I drew a clear boundary about the possibility of a particular situation happening, it was crossed by two people, and the situation happened.
But, really, the issue is integrity. Crossing a boundary after promising not to calls into question the person’s integrity. Say I asked you not to go into my house when I wasn’t there because it made me uncomfortable. And you entered my home anyway. Is that okay? It depends upon what your belief is. I personally would not think that it was okay for you to enter my home when I wasn’t there after I’d explicitly asked you not to. Yet you might find it perfectly acceptable. This is not about right or wrong or agreeing with me or not. It’s about making my choice to surround myself with people who have the same definition of integrity as I do. It doesn’t work for me to operate otherwise.
Boundaries are easily breached when it’s two against one.
And we have all breached boundaries with someone at sometime in our lives.
Completely relate to this.
Loving the new site, too. Thanks for sharing.
Ya boundaries is an continuing issue. Seems I’m constantly sacrificing my own boundaries in order to respect everyone elses