Personal boundaries

Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify for him- or herself what are reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave around him or her and how he or she will respond when someone steps outside those limits.[1] They are built out of a mix of beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning.[2]

Personal boundaries define you as an individual, outlining your likes and dislikes, and setting the distances you allow others to approach.[3] They include physical, mental, psychological and spiritual boundaries, involving beliefs, emotions, intuitions and self-esteem.[4]Jacques Lacan considered them to be layered in a hierarchy, reflecting “all the successive envelopes of the biological and social status of the person”[5] from the most primitive to the most advanced.

Types

According to Nina Brown,[6] there are four main types of psychological boundary:

Gestalt therapy uses the parameters confluence/withdrawal to denote personal boundaries, the ideal of being able to move between connection and separation at will be jeopardised by either weak boundaries (and enforced confluence) or over-rigid boundaries (enforced withdrawal).[7]

Narcissism and boundaries

According to Hotchkiss,[8]narcissists do not recognize that they have boundaries and that others are separate and are not extensions of themselves. Others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all. Those who provide narcissistic supply to the narcissist will be treated as if they are part of the narcissist and be expected to live up to those expectations. In the mind of a narcissist there is no boundary between self and other.

As one ex put it, “If you had firm boundaries in the face of a narcissist, the relationship wouldn't last”.[9]

Rebuilding boundaries

While a healthy relationship depends on the emotional space provided by personal boundaries,[10]co-dependent personalities have difficulties in setting such limits, so that defining and protecting boundaries efficiently may be for them a vital part of regaining mental health.[11]

Family therapists can help family members to develop clearer boundaries, by behaving in a well-defined way when treating them, drawing lines, and treating different generations in different compartments[12] - something especially pertinent families where unhealthy enmeshment overrides normal personal boundaries.[13]

However, the establishment of personal boundaries in such instances may produce a negative fall-out,[14] if the pathological state of interdependence had been a central facet of the relationship.[15]

Loss of boundaries

Freud, following Gustave Le Bon, described the loss of conscious boundaries that could occur when an individual was caught up in a unified, fast-moving crowd.[16]

Almost a century later, Steven Pinker took up the theme of the loss of personal boundaries in a communal experience, noting that such occurrences could be triggered by intense shared ordeals like hunger, fear or pain, and that such methods were traditionally used to create liminal conditions in initiation rites.[17]Jung had described this as the absorption of identity into the collective unconscious.[18]

Rave culture has also been said to involve a dissolution of personal boundaries, and a merger into a binding sense of communality.[19]

In psychosis

The loss of personal boundaries, and the absorption of the self into a quasi-public world, is one of the key features associated with psychosis.[20]

Such boundary loss can move from the patient to the therapist in turn, to produce a temporary kind of countertransference psychosis: Carl Rogers has movingly described how in one such instance he “literally lost my "self", lost the boundaries of myself...and I became convinced (and I think with some reason) that I was going insane”.[21]

Even on a lesser scale, without boundaries our identities become diffused – controlled by the definitions offered by others.[22]

Criticism

What some call the pop psychology truism that love requires firm personal boundaries has been criticised for promoting a kind of normalised eroticism[23] - for ignoring the role of what Bataille called 'transgressions' and 'limit-experiences' in erotic life.[24]

See also

References

  1. ^ Boundaries definition, Outofthefog.net[unreliable source?]
  2. ^ Vanessa Rogers, Working with Young Men (2010) p. 80
  3. ^ G. B. and J. S. Lundberg, I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better (2000) p. 13. ISBN 978-0-670-88485-8
  4. ^ Timothy Porter-O'Grady/Kathy Malloch, Quantum Leadership (2003) p. 135
  5. ^ Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (1997) p. 16-7
  6. ^ Brown, Nina W., Coping With Infuriating, Mean, Critical People - The Destructive Narcissistic Pattern 2006. ISBN 978-0-275-98984-2
  7. ^ G. M. Yontef, Awareness, Dialogue and Process (1993) p. 375
  8. ^ Hotchkiss, Sandy & Masterson, James F. Why Is It Always About You? : The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism (2003)
  9. ^ 'Claire', in Simon Crompton, All About Me: Loving a Narcissist (London 2007) p. 105. ISBN 978-0-00-724795-0
  10. ^ Patrick Casement, Further Learning from the Patient (London 1990) p. 160
  11. ^ Janae B. Weinhold et al, Breaking Free of the Co-Dependency Trap (2008) p. 198
  12. ^ Robin Skinner/John Cleese, Families and How to Survive Them (London 1993) p. 93 and p. 213
  13. ^ Weinhold, p. 192
  14. ^ Weinhold, p. 198
  15. ^ Richard G. Abell, Own Your Own Life (1977) p. 119-122
  16. ^ Sigmund Freud, 'Le Bon's Description of the Group Mind', in Civilization, Society and Religion (PFL 12) p. 98-109
  17. ^ Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought (2007) p. 403
  18. ^ C. G. Jung ed., Man and his Symbols (1978) p. 123
  19. ^ Carole Jones, Disappearing Men (2009) p. 176
  20. ^ R. D. Laing, Self and Others (Penguin 1972) p. 36
  21. ^ Carl R. Rogers, Becoming Partners (London 1973) p. 35
  22. ^ Patricia Evans, Controlling People (Avon 2002) p. 33-7
  23. ^ C. D. C. Reeve, Love's Confusions (2007) p. 168-171
  24. ^ Gary Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 22-4

Further reading

External links

Positive reinforcement - appetitive stimulus
Positive reinforcement - aversive stimulus
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