Boundaries

Personal boundaries are the rules and limits you create for yourself that define what is acceptable behavior from others towards you.

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The worst person you know is in therapy getting told their feelings are valid.

Daisy on the Block

In 1984 I had a paranormal experience, which I’ll describe in more detail in another post.  Reduced to its baldest terms, however, I left my body and had a conversation with someone or something - call it what you will - who convinced me that we are all interconnected, and here to support each other. 

A few months later I lucked into Martin Buber, the Hasidic philosopher, and was able to shape a life around his I-It/I-Thou premise.  Reduced to its baldest terms, it goes as follows.  You can relate to people and things as either an ‘It’ or a ‘Thou’.  The ‘It’ is separate from yourself, while the ‘Thou’ is ‘where you meet the other with your ‘whole being’, in many spheres, including nature, humans, and the divine’.  In recent years I’ve seen two documentaries that summed this up for me – ‘My Octopus Teacher’ and ‘Fantastic Fungi’.  I mean, who knew one could be captivated by an octopus, let alone a mushroom?  ‘So much more than a pizza topping’ as one reviewer put it.   

People, however, remain an ongoing challenge.  When I suggested to a philandering colleague that an affair with me would downgrade his wife to an ‘It’, he assured me that ‘It wouldn’t mind’.  I laughed, despite knowing first-hand how it felt to be the unwitting ‘It’ in a love triangle.  Definitely no laughing matter, but back then I believed we were born good, and rationalized bad behavior with extenuating circumstances.  Clearly, no one on Death Row had a happy childhood and, if you ever read a biography of Charles Manson, you’d weep for the child he was.  I also felt sorry for Timothy McVeigh, and was not surprised when he opted for execution, because how do you live after killing 19 babies?  

For all that, there were still individuals I hated, and for whom I refused to offer any mitigation or connection.  Obviously, the Nazis and their ilk, but there are plenty of oddballs to give us pause: troublemakers whose histories don’t justify their hostility - one of which was a man I met while temping in London. 

In the winter of 1988, I was sent to a luxury fashion house to replace a woman who’d had a nervous breakdown.  There I witnessed their CEO trap a cowering secretary in a corner, threatening her with dismissal if she didn’t immediately find his chauffeur.  I was one desk away at the photocopy machine and the encounter was so loud, so unexpected, and so violent, my legs liquefied. and I had to grope for a seat to avoid wetting my pants.

If you temp, you’re thrown into a variety of situations and learn to be flexible, but there was no doubt in my mind that this guy was dangerous.  As it turned out, he was the reason for my predecessor’s nervous breakdown, and I quit the same week rather than wait around for a similar drubbing.  Worse than that, I suspected he was evil.  I don’t say this lightly, because at that point in my journey I thought evil was a joke: Oil Can Harry tying Fanny Zilch to the railroad tracks, while twirling his moustache.  And yet here it was, manifested in human form, towering over a small blonde girl with corkscrew curls, and screaming like a banshee.

Even then, I second guessed myself.  Who was I to judge?  And maybe I’d met him on his worst day?  There are chapters of my own life I’m not keen to revisit.  I’m as mean and petty as the next person, I’ve wanted more than a few people dead, and ‘Shut the fuck up!’ hovers almost permanently on the end of my tongue.  But you know it when you see it, and my body confirmed it.

 A couple of years on from the bellowing CEO, I worked with a woman with an equally horrible hair-trigger temper.  No complaints or documentation made any difference, until she exploded on senior management and was fired on the spot.  I wish I’d had the courage to stand up to her because, left unchecked, anti-social personalities self-sort to the top as they did In Nazi Germany.   But a business office is not Nazi Germany, and bullies don’t play by the rules.   They ride roughshod over boundaries, escalate when challenged, and have no better nature to appeal to.  Ask anyone who’s been targeted.   

Nor was Martin Buber any help.  His eternal dialogue with God collapsed with the arrival of Hitler, and in 1937 he relocated to Palestine deciding there could be no I/Thou relationship between victim and attacker, and that the Jews should fight back. 

But fighting back is easier said than done, especially with an adversary who pulls no punches.  We retreated into silence with this woman, bad-mouthing her in private but shaking and gibbering in cross-legged terror face-to-face.  In the end she was brought down by her own inability to set limits, locking horns with one of the partners and escorted from the premises in minutes.  We celebrated her dismissal with margaritas, and then returned to work as normal.  But, after a truly miserable 12 months, I now accepted the concept of small-scale evil and the harm it can cause.  I was outraged that we’d had to put up with this crackpot, and uninterested in any excuses from her, or HR. 

Ashamed of my negativity however, I moved on seeking connection and the Thou in everyone I met.  It was an exhausting and embittering period.  I weathered a second bout of depression with the aid of meds, surfacing only when I got pregnant and found myself, for the first time, completely and blissfully content.  In fact, the next 20 years were the best of my life: mothering in my little bubble, happy as a sand boy, and 100% sure of my purpose.  

And, when I did finally raise my head above the firing line, the world had discovered Narcissism, and was countering that with boundaries.  This was an Oh-My-God moment for me.  Questions I’d wrestled with my entire life scrolled through my brain in an infinite regress, and were answered with this one word.  Come to find out, some people occupy a different reality and this reality is incompatible with that of decent human beings.  

James Dobson, with whom I usually have nothing in common, has a wonderful lesson on Seagulls and Geese. Sea gulls are loners, he says; scavengers who will peck another bird to death for a French fry, while geese live collectively, prioritizing the youngest and oldest members of the flock.  Patricia Evans describes the same dynamic as Power Over (All is fair in love and war) versus Power through mutuality and respect.  And the mistake this last group makes is continuing to look for consensus with the Power Over folks, who think we are idiots and ripe for the picking.  So, first order of business is to recognize this division, and eliminate them from our circle.

But how?  I mean, it’s not as if they’re clustered on the wrong side of town, easily identified and avoided.  They come in all shapes, sizes and colors, intermingled with us, hiding their true intentions, and have to be corralled one at a time.  Once you know there’s a diagnosis however, it’s tempting to categorize friends and relatives, and I spent a delightful few days doing just that, never considering that someone from my own past was weighing me up from the same list.  But, let’s face it, while not every ex is a narcissist, the criteria are uncannily accurate.  

And yet, I struggled to believe they did what they did deliberately, and with malice aforethought.  I couldn’t wrap my head around that.  But, if their reality is Me-based while ours is We-based, it stands to reason they can.   And even if it’s down to bad potty training, plenty of us learned to self-regulate, and didn’t wind up a Manson or McVeigh.

Then there’s the issue that they can’t be fixed.  That worried me too.  Most religions acknowledge soulless people, but Christianity does not, and I'm still working on that.  Nonetheless, I accept that Narcissism exists, although luckily for me all my possibles are now dead, or have self-imploded.

Of course, sometimes they drop themselves in it inadvertently like the guy who on a first date reached by me to grab the last slice of German chocolate cake, leaving me with no dessert.  Not so much as a ‘Can we split it?  Or, ‘Do you want a bite?  A big red flag for a woman raised on the allegory of the long spoons, which is summarized in this quote:

In each location, the inhabitants are given access to food, but the utensils are too unwieldy to serve oneself with. In hell, the people cannot cooperate, and consequently starve. In heaven, the diners feed one another across the table and are sated.

Did I dump him for it?  Absolutely not.  He was very good looking, and that outweighed any clues that he might also be greedy and selfish.  Plus, I had no idea about Narcissism and co-dependency back then, and probably wouldn’t have listened if I did. 

But years of open-heartedness had nearly destroyed me and I had to do something.  I began with a gentle whittling of the Takers, not answering the phone, being less available.  I drifted from the moochers I’d supported through thick and thin, who then left me high and dry during my own major crisis. ‘Lack of reciprocity’ in Jung’s parlance.  ‘Information you use to recalibrate the relationship.’ This took enormous courage, in that it reduced my circle by half, many of whom were fun to have lunch with or catch a movie.  I’m now down to a rock-solid group of women with whom I’m in basic alignment and who live locally, thank God.

For all that, I still lean towards conflict avoidance and people pleasing.  Those I hate are mostly oblivious, if they think of me at all.  But what they have in common are minor transgressions that shocked me to the core.  The silent but intentional betrayals: a mocking smile caught in the rearview mirror, a snide comment, a pattern of lying; premeditation masked by a warm and welcoming demeanor.  Not exactly the crime of the century, because the crime of the century at least inspires respect.  Just small, sneaky and devious; masquerading as a friend, while undermining me behind my back. 

But even today, I remain committed to Buber’s philosophy and to questioning the whole boundaries issue.  To counter this, I remind myself that Jesus set boundaries, ‘prioritizing his personal needs, withdrawing to pray, speaking honestly and directly, and refusing to let others steer him away from his mission.’  He also told his disciples to move on from factions that showed no interest in their message.  But, as I have pointed out in previous blogs, the message is inconsistent and a few pages later He sends us off in the opposite direction, urging us to turn the other cheek and forgive 70 times seven.  And we all know how the Romans responded to that.   

Buber, also, was no match for the Nazis.  You cannot apply his teachings to mass organizations, or those for whom power and cruelty are a way of life.   Nor was Gandhi any better.  He advocated surrender over force, and would’ve handed India to Hitler on a plate.  On a personal level, therefore, I’m still muddling through whether boundaries are a religious cop-out although, in this current political climate, I see keeping a deliberate distance from some individuals as a relief and a blessing.