Sylvie Shene - Articles - Boundaries of Codependents

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ARTICLES: BOUNDARIES OF CODEPENDENTS ANONYMOUS (CoDa)

What Are Boundaries?

Boundaries are things that separate one thing from another. A good example is our skin. It separate our insides from what in on the outside of our bodies. It’s good and keeps us alive. Types of boundaries that we or others disregard (or are unaware of) are sexual, spiritual, mental, (intellectual) and physical. Any type of boundary violation is spiritual because someone or something is trying to be our Higher Power or control us.

In codependents families, boundaries are never the same from day to day. Sometimes there are no boundaries at all. They shift and change depending on the emotional climate of the people in the that family.

Once we begin the journey of recovery, we begin to build our self esteem and become more aware of boundary violations. At first, we notice the obvious ones. Then as we grow and learn, we become aware of the more subtle violations.

Emotional Boundary Violation

This can happen to us at any age when someone or something “puts down” or discounts our emotions (feelings) as unimportant, unnecessary or wrong. Sometimes people will try to spare us from feeling our pain, fear, anger, guilt, joy, sadness or shame. Mostly, they will try to do this to spare us from hurt. They are trying to fix us and our feelings. Emotions (feelings) are not wrong or bad, they are. God gives us a gift at the end of every feeling. For example, after the pain comes the healing. We must first experience our pain so that we may heal. If we do not allow ourselves to experience our feelings they won’t go away. They will eventually come out in ways that may be more painful or when we least expect it. In order to give ourselves permission to feel our feelings, we need to create boundaries that feel safe. This will work two ways for us (as do all of our healthy boundaries).

First, it gives us permission to feel whatever we are feeling and have that be okay. Second, we allow others to be responsible and have their own feelings without trying to change them. When we become aware of our boundaries, we respect and value others’ boundaries, too. No one can make us feel anything we do not chose to feel.

As codependents, others who can not handle their own feelings will try do “dump” theirs on us. Often we do not realize this and carry around someone else’s emotions. Once again, the awareness of our emotional boundaries will remind us whose “stuff” is whose. Any time we have feelings that are overwhelming, some of those emotions belong to someone else. Our own feelings don’t overwhelm us.

Healthy Emotional Boundaries

We all have the God-given right to have our feelings. We are also responsible for what we do with them and how we show them. Other people are also entitled to their feelings and accountable for their behavior around them. Our responsibility in recovery is to not fix (with people, places or things) ours or other people’s feelings. The First Step (“We admitted we were powerless over others - that our lives had became unmanageable.”) is perfect here. Realizing our powerlessness over others, we speed our recovery by feeling our feelings and accepting the gift at the end.

Physical Boundary Violations

This can happen to us at any age when someone or something violates our body space in a physical manner. Sometimes people hug us when we don’t want to be hugged. People hit us. People continually touch us while they are talking to us. Sometimes these are in offensive ways, and sometimes they are well meaning. When people stand too close to us or look at us in a way that is uncomfortable, they are violating our physical boundaries. These are only a few ways in which we can have our physical boundaries violated.

Healthy Physical Boundaries

We have the God-given right to say when, how, where, why and who touches or gets close to our body.

Sexual Boundary Violation

This can happen to us at any age when someone or something speaks about or touches our body in a way that is sexually offensive, painful, frightening, embarrassing or shaming to us. The someone can be any member of our family, people close to our family, or someone we trust to take care of us, such as teacher, clergy or baby-sitters. The something can be movies, TV shows, lyrics, books, magazines or jokes.

This boundary is truly personal. Sexual boundary can be verbal, emotional and physical. A violation can be as horrible and terrifying as rape or as uncomfortable as an inappropriate use of the eyes such as staring or looking. Criticism of our gender and/or our sexual preference, threats, implied contact or physical seduction are other examples of sexual boundary violations. If we were never taught about sex or were told incorrect information, a sexual boundary was violated. We may not know that what happened to us was a violation, but we feel yucky, we feel dirty, and we feel used.

Healthy Sexual Boundaries

We have the God-given right to say when, how, why, where and who touches the sexual part of our being.

Mental (Intellectual) Boundary Violation

This can happen at any age when someone, an institution or a principle discounts what and how we think. One form of intellectual boundary violation is when people interrupt us when we are talking or otherwise invalidate our thoughts. As children, teens or adults, we have often heard that, “We shouldn’t think like that,” or, “that kind of thinking will get us nowhere.” To be told our thought processes are “less than” someone else’s is a boundary violation. When we experience this violation, we learn that to judge and be judged is okay and we end up violating other’s boundaries.

Healthy Mental (Intellectual) Boundaries

We have the God-given right to our own thinking. It is our choice to accept or reject what others say about what we think or say. To allow ourselves and others the right of thought and let those thoughts and communications of them belong to us will allow us to begin to make our own choices about how we think. The process of recovery has a lot of thinking in it and to be able to think and share those thoughts is scary at first. As we recovery and gain in our own self esteem, we have more faith that we are thinking in a spiritually sober way and we allow others to have their own thoughts, without interruption and without ridicule. Your thinking can only hurt me if I let it. The gift of owning our intellect is owning our growth.

Spiritual Boundary Violations

This can happen to us at any age when someone or something does not allow us to have our own God, as we understand God. Any type of boundary violation is a spiritual one. When others make choices for us, violate us physically or sexually, discount our feelings, challenge our concept of our Higher Power, ignore, abuse or invalidate our thinking, they are playing Higher Power and are interfering with the relationships of a Higher Power of our own understanding. As stated before---any boundary violation is a spiritual violation.

Healthy Spiritual Boundaries

We are exercising healthy boundaries any time we allow ourselves the right...

· to define our own God.

· to have our own feelings.

· to say how and when we are physically and sexually touched.

· to have our own thoughts.

We are also exercising healthy boundaries when we allow others to have these same rights.

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