Setting boundaries
I want to talk a little bit about boundaries and trauma. And I give a trauma warning upfront. I’m going to be very blunt in this one, so if your nervous system is not in a place where you can handle that right now, you might want to come back to this later or just skip it entirely.
So something that a lot of people get wrong about boundaries is, for example, they might say, “Okay, I can’t tolerate noise, so therefore no one around me can make noise.” You’re not going to be able to actually enforce that.
That’s not something that you can uphold, because it depends upon other people’s actions, and reactions, and needs. So if you’re setting other people to do a thing as your boundary, you’re just going to end up being miserable. A reasonable boundary is always something that you can do. It’s about what I will and will not do.
That’s not something that you can uphold, because it depends upon other people’s actions, and reactions, and needs.
So you can look for how to set that up by asking, “What is the need that’s underlying the thing that I’m struggling with right now?” And in this case, it’s noise. So, it might not actually be that you need an absence of noise, but for you to feel safe in your nervous system. That’s the underlying need.
Now, I can see very easily where a lot of people get these two confused (and I did too when I was first working through this), because it makes sense that being safe in my nervous system would include an absence of noise, if that’s something that’s hurting me. And so it makes sense to go with, “Okay, so what I need is just everyone to be silent, everything to be silent.”
But what I’ve been learning is that there are always multiple ways to achieve a particular need when you’re looking at the underlying needs.
If you’re focusing on, “My nervous system needs to feel safe. My nervous system needs to feel calm. My nervous system needs to feel soothed.” There are multiple ways to achieve that, it doesn’t just have to be that everyone is silent all the time.
It could include noise canceling headphones. It could be noise-dampening thingies on the wall. Or other ways to either mask the noise, to block it. It could be turning off the thing. It could sometimes include actually reducing the noise. Hopefully that’s possible, but that’s not always possible or reasonable in a particular situation.
Feeling rejected
So here’s the thing, a lot of traumatized people, including myself just a few years ago, would say that, “If other people don’t reduce their noise, then I feel unloved or rejected.” But that’s a trauma response. And I say that very straightforwardly, and bluntly, and lovingly, because I’ve worked through that myself, I’ve come through that. But that is a trauma response.
Other people trying to meet our needs is good. It’s wonderful when they can do that, when they can be supportive in that way. But it’s not always possible. And if it’s not possible, that doesn’t mean that they don’t love us.
If it’s not possible, that doesn’t mean that they don’t love us.
If they’re just going “well eff you, I don’t care what you need”, that’s a different thing. That’s not necessarily a trauma response. That is trauma-inducing. So I want to be careful about that. But when people around us who love us and care about us genuinely, and are trying to be supportive, when they can’t always meet every need that we have, and then we feel unloved or rejected, that’s because of a history of our own trauma.
And one of the ways that we can come out of that is to start looking at other ways for us to meet our own needs, for us to to look at what is the actual underlying need. And that’s hard. It’s not an obvious thing. That’s not something that we’re taught how to do well in this society.
I would highly recommend looking at The Compassion Course Online by Thom Bond. He wrote an excellent yearlong email course, but he also put it last year into a book, so you can get it all at once in a book if you’d like.
But it’s about how to figure out what those underlying needs are, and to differentiate the more surface needs that we can identify from the underlying need that we can meet in a variety of ways. Okay, so I’d highly recommend that book, or the email course. Either versions are excellent.
Alright, I just heard my alarm. That’s my five-minute warning of an appointment coming up, so I need to go. I hope you got something useful out of this and that it wasn’t triggering. That was not my intention. Just to bring up an idea here. Okay, wishing you a neurowonderful day.
