| Parenting - Boundaries |
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Article written by Deedee Anderson is mother in all directions: 6 biological children, 18 through the miracle of adoption, and one much loved daughter who came with her father, when they married. Boundaries What are They -- Why do I Need Them Enforcing appropriate boundaries is the single most powerful thing that you can do unilaterally to improve your life as human being and as a parent, and particularly as a parent of a child with attachment issues. In today’s society, many families have unhealthy boundaries, and lots of us are not aware of what constitutes healthy boundaries. Some of us, like me, until a few years ago, didn’t even know that we were supposed to have them! Add in adoption to the tangle of relationships and it can get mucky. As a parent, it is vital that you learn where you begin and end and where your children do as well. Many of our children come from different cultures, and even different countries were boundaries are different, and so is body language. Society gives us very confusing messages about parenting. There are many myths out there, and two that are really dangerous, in my opinion, are
It is our job, as parents to keep our children safe, help them grow in all the modalities of life (emotional, social, spiritual, physical and psychological.) And in my experience, both as a former counselor and therapist, as well as personal, as an adult adoptee, bio mom, birth mom and adoptive mom, one of the most precious gifts we can share with our beloved children revolves around boundaries. While parenting a child with attachment issues, it can mean the difference between keeping what little sanity and peace of mind is real and possible and failing ourselves and our children. Now what are they? Boundaries are lines that separate objects. In terms of people and human relationships, boundaries are invisible lines that separate people from each other. Their purpose is to help keep us safe. Boundaries come in many forms and protect various parts of us. These include physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, and relational. For instance, what is appropriate between a husband and a wife is not appropriate between a mother and a child. What is appropriate between a mother and child is inappropriate between employer and employee. Many of us can understand this a bit better by the use of a metaphor and here is my favorite on this subject. Many of us do well in understanding complex concepts through the use of metaphors. Here’s my favorite as it relates to boundaries. The Castle Metaphor I invite you to think of the walls around a castle. People live inside the castle. There is a moat around the castle with water and other obstacles inside it. (Let your imagination go with this one! Maybe alligators? Or stinky stuff? And as parents of children with attachment issues, we have way more experience with stinky stuff than we truly want, right? ) Imagine that there is a bridge across the moat that leads to a drawbridge. It can be made of wood, or metal, or even candy canes, what ever appeals to you! People use the drawbridge to enter or leave the castle. The castle is a safe place. Lots of things we love are inside. You can imagine our families, our favorite foods, sounds, music, smells, what ever most appeals to each of us. Maybe the smell of baking bread? Now at the farthest point of the drawbridge there is a very highly trained Guardsman at the drawbridge. He knows how to operate the special mechanism that raises or lowers the drawbridge. He knows who to let in, and what to keep out. The Guardsman knows who are enemies of those who live in the castle. He knows his job so well that people inside the castle are often unaware that he’s even there. Things go well. One day, though, a new Guardsman is hired. But the Head Guardsman is too busy, and somehow, no one else gives the new man any training in how to operate the mechanism for raising and lowering the drawbridge. No one teaches the new Guardsman who lives in the castle and who does not. No one tells the new Guardsman who the enemies are. So, obviously, this new man is confused. Although he has the best of intentions, and does his absolute best, he lets the wrong people in and keeps those who live in the castle on the outside. As a result bad things happen to the people who trusted the Head Guardsman and those who live in the castle. Like the new Guardsman, many of us didn’t get the right training to be an effective guardsman of our feelings, emotions and body. Were not sure what to allow in and what to keep out. Were not sure how to make the mechanism that opens the drawbridge work correctly. So, we leave it open when it should be closed, or leaving it closed when it should be open. Or it gets stuck half way open and half way closed, doing no one any good. In other words, we may allow many folks in our lives to take advantage of us. This causes them great pain and hurt. Or we don’t know how to say no to someone, or we share things with others that we should really keep to ourselves. Maybe we treat our child as a confidant, or friend, or we expect our spouse to mother us, or allow them to influence us to parent our spouse. Or maybe we give away all our personal power about how we feel, and what we do or don’t do, to a child with attachment issues. Our lives become a series of push me/pull you exercises, where every thought and feeling we have is related to how our child will or won’t respond. We stop going out as a family, or stop having friends who don’t understand our complex situation over to our home. We may begin to snap at our healthier children, or our spouse. What Boundaries Do for You Healthy boundaries can also be imagined as a sort of a majick bubble. This bubble surrounds you and keeps you safe. It allows oxygen and food and other good things inside to nourish you and allow you to feel, learn and grow in good ways. This majick bubble is invisible to others. This majick bubble gets larger, creating more space around you to give more distance between you and others for safety. To keep you from being hurt, it gets smaller, to allow others closer to you - intimacy. For those of you who enjoy Star Trek, this majick bubble is like a force field. It keeps all the meteors and other space debris from hitting the ship. It is permeable enough to allow air, food and other good things inside for the crew. It is strong enough to keep bad things, like photon torpedoes, out. The most basic physical boundary that we are all familiar with, is our skin. It is a barrier that protects our physical body. It keeps us safe. If our skin is violated, like a cut or scratch, we are open to infection, pain and even disease. Well, parenting a child with attachment issues, is violating at so many levels, that our pysche’s may respond as though we have a massive, systemic infection. No FUN! You have many tools to help you keep this majick bubble just the right size. Some of these tools are words, actions, facial expressions, the ability to move toward or away from another person. Learning which tool to use, and when, can be a new concept for us to consider, and takes time, repetition and patience. For our children, who may have come from another country at various ages, and with various experiences, this learning time can be confusing. If they don’t have the language to share their experiences, trauma can and often does result. If they come to us after having been traumatized, the tapestry can become snarled, full of knots, holes, or with mismatched weaving styles. Boundaries are a fascinating concept for many of us when we are first learning about them. Many of us, for what ever reasons, have poor or less than effective boundaries. Many of us have boundaries that are of the all or nothing kind.. either full walls, layers thick that an atomic bomb couldn’t dint, or nothing, nada, zilch.. This is often a legacy from dysfunctional families of origin where our sense of self was not allowed to develop in a healthy way. Boundaries are supposed to be elastic, stretching out to give us more space and distance, or shrinking in to allow those we care about close to us, called intimacy. If we’ve never seen this modeled in a healthy way, we can feel very confused about how to respond. The child with an attachment issue will take advantage of our confusion to create large amounts of chaos, because that’s where they feel ‘safe’, in the midst of chaos and confusion. Empathy is a skill that in some professions is valued, like nursing, counseling, and others where being able to walk in the other guys/gals shoes gives us valuable information and insight that allows us to provide support to them during times of conflict or crisis. Empathy can have negative outcomes and be an unhealthy thing, if we put the others needs higher on our priority list than our own, while never quite getting to looking after our own needs and wants. As parents it is even more critical to look after ourselves, our relationships (for those of us who are married or living in a partnership relationship). If we can’t look after us, we have a harder time looking after our children. And eventually, simply giving and giving, without replenishing, leaves us feeling empty, worn out, exhausted, unappreciated, or a wide range of feelings. But we often simply don’t feel good about ourselves or our parenting. And we are all aware of how hard it is to feel good when every minute is a struggle with a child who has an attachment disorder. If we are not sure where we begin and end and the others in our lives begin and end, it might be possible to have some sort of connection or heightened awareness of what is going on for them, or for others. This can outweigh our ability to care for ourselves, or leave us always doing for others, and seldom doing for ourselves. It comes down to balance and health, I think. (And again, my opinion is worth exactly what’ya paid for it! You are all free to ignore anything I’m writing. But please feel free to use the parts that ‘fit’ for you, and discard the rest). Asking the following questions might give us a sense of where were at and where we might choose to go to get healthier or stay healthier. Do I have a good grasp of my own sense of self? Do I ensure that my needs and wants get at least equal attention and time? Do they get met often? Never? Only when time and circumstance permit? In the same way, if we are injured in other boundary places, we carry scars and places of vulnerability. These may be almost invisible to others. By learning to set appropriate and healthy boundaries, we begin to repair the damage we’ve sustained over our lives. It is crucial as parents that we teach our children how to be individuals, how to recognize their own needs. It is critical that we not see them as an extension of ourselves, or as minnie mes. Many us of may have explored the ideas and concept of connectedness that is not based on biology, and passed down inside families created by biology. With children whom we bring to our families through adoption, this can be a larger concept, and one that is harder to deal with. But one of the first building blocks of creating the kind of relationship we desire with our children, can and should be, in my experience, in learning healthy boundaries for ourselves, and then in modeling this to and for our children. To do this, we may have to over come a lifetime of obstacles to do so. Some of us many have grown up with an abusive parent, or in a home where feelings weren’t recognized as important friends. Perhaps we had a parent who expected a child to meet the parents needs in an inappropriate manner or where the child’s needs were unrecognized and unimportant. Like the guardsman who didn’t know how to do his job, many of us haven’t learned the skills they needed to set appropriate and healthy boundaries. It is important to remember, that as a human being you have certain rights. These are your rights, even if you learned something different, formally or informally, in your family of birth. And becoming aware of WHERE you learned that particular lesson is often the most important step towards evolving a healthier relationship with our family of creation. Our lives are a Journey of exploration and experience overlaid by our perceptions. Our perceptions help us make meaning of the Tapestry we are weaving of our lives. When we haven’t had a lot of practice in learning or teaching healthy boundaries, establishing a boundary may seem intimidating at first. This involves deciding what is acceptable behavior for you to engage or participate in, and setting a limit or consequence about what you will do if that boundary is not respected. Some suggestions: You might want to take some time and make a list of the most serious issues you have (both your own personally and as a parent). Then put them in order of how important they are to you. Then make a plan, and work on one thing a day, and a new one each week. I’ve found that putting sticky notes up where I can see them often (computer, kitchen, bathroom, day book) helps me focus. Focusing on ONE thing per day, and one task per week, is, I find, a more manageable way of creating change. If our perception is that we ‘can’t’ achieve something, it can be very hard to make it happen! Baby steps towards change, and the ability to pick ourselves up when we fall down are valuable skills and much needed when parenting a child with attachment challenges. In my opinion, maintaining appropriate spiritual and emotional boundaries are no less important to your long term well being. Boundaries are not punishments against your child for their bad behavior. What you do have a right to, as a parent, is to determine what you choose to expose yourself to and your limits as to what you will put up with. And sometimes it’s the parent who needs some ‘time out’ to recharge. So what can you do? You can begin to learn to establish a healthy boundary. Establishing a boundary may seem intimidating at first. This involves deciding what is acceptable behavior for you to engage or participate in, and setting a limit or consequence about what you will do if that boundary is not respected. I believe we can all achieve changes, that help us be more effective as parents, and help our beloved children heal. Good luck! Deedee Deedee Anderson You may contact Deedee through her website as well as This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  Link to this article | Views: 466
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