How Are Boundaries Like a House?

Having good boundaries is a topic that comes up constantly in my work with all ages of clients. I think it’s an issue that we all struggle with at various points in our lives. Boundaries can be difficult to think through without good metaphors, and I have a couple that I use regularly to help clients think through why they are having issues with the relationships in their lives.

What Even Are Boundaries Anyway?

At it’s most basic, a boundary is a place where one thing ends and another begins. When we apply this to relationships, it’s the understanding that we are each individuals with our own thoughts, feelings, goals, values, etc. I am me, and you are you. Boundaries can be loose, rigid, or somewhere in between. Relationships with basically no boundaries between the people involved are often said to be “enmeshed” or “co-dependent”.

When Boundaries Are Too Loose

·         Feeling overly responsible for the feelings of others

·         Feeling extremely affected by another’s feelings or mood

·         Oversharing personal business, especially early in a relationship

·         Feeling jealous

·         Going against personal values to make someone else happy

·         Difficulty identifying our own thoughts, feelings, values, beliefs

When Boundaries Are Too Rigid

·         Avoiding intimacy and close relationships

·         Unwilling to ask for help

·         Very protective of personal information bordering on paranoia

·         Keeping others at a distance

·         Seeming detached from others

My Favorite Boundary Metaphors

I sometimes joke that I have a master’s degree in metaphor because being able to translate a client’s individual experiences or issues into less emotionally charged language or images is a key skill in the therapy that I do. I’m always relating a client’s stories to other experiences they’ve had or to common human experiences. I’ll say, “So it’s like when you learned to drive a car and had no idea how you were supposed to pay attention to the road, and your speed, and your mirrors, and the other cars, but now you can drive down the interstate eating a hamburger and putting on make-up at the same time?”

When it comes to boundaries, a very common metaphor is comparing boundaries to a fence. I like this one because it’s very flexible and can be used to illustrate multiple points about healthy and unhealthy boundaries. Fences aren’t solid and permanent the way that walls are. You can see through them. They can be moved easier than walls. They can have gates that can be opened and closed. And then I can add in the elements of what is contained by the fence. Here in East Tennessee many people are familiar with the behaviors of livestock, so I can describe how cows will constantly test the structure of a fence-row to find any weaknesses.

A newer metaphor I’ve been using a lot lately is that of a house. I got this from Joe Dennis, who is an awesome therapist in Utah that you should follow on Instagram if you like this kind of thing. The house metaphor describes different levels of intimacy in relationships from people who you only visit with on the front porch to those who are allowed into the living room or kitchen to those who are allowed into your bedroom. I work with my clients to identify who in their lives are at which level of intimacy. Those with rigid boundaries will often have lots of people on the porch or even out on the sidewalk, and very few if any actually inside their houses. People with looser boundaries are naturally the opposite. Our house also has a closet to illustrate that we all have those parts of ourselves that we keep completely hidden except to share with our therapist and maybe our spouse. We wouldn’t drag out the stuff from our closet and put it on the dining room table or out on the front porch for everyone to see, would we?

The house metaphor is excellent for explaining this stuff to older kids or teenagers who tend to overshare with friends or on social media and are then crushed when they are the subject of rampant gossip or bullying. We can talk about the typical progression of deeper levels of intimacy in relationships over time and that not everyone should be allowed to wander around in our bedrooms without first earning that level of trust.

I hope this exploration of boundaries and a couple of my most used metaphors is helpful for some of you. You might want to think about the distribution of people in your “boundary house” and whether you feel good about the qualities of your relationships and your boundaries with the people in your life.

Take Care of Yourself,

Meghan

PS: Check out Joe Dennis on Instagram @joedennis.counsels and for further reading on boundaries check out Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend https://amzn.to/2Yw0rF5 for a Christian perspective and/or Codependent No More by Melody Beattie https://amzn.to/2Q1QmMP

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