Lived Experience Forum

[cloudcore]

BOUNDARIES: Week long discussion

Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that you create to identify acceptable and safe ways for other people to behave towards you and how you will respond when someone breaches those limits. However setting and maintaining boundaries is a skill!

We are holding a week long discussion in lead up to our next Topic Tuesday on Healthy Relationships in Lockdown on the 31st of August. Each weekday from the 23rd-27th of August 2021, we will be posting a new question in the morning to this discussion for the community to share their thoughts on.

This discussion will hold space for us to explore what boundaries mean for us, and share experiences around setting and maintaining boundaries. This discussion may contain topics that could be upsetting or potentially triggering, however this topic is an important one for our real life and online relationships because each of us will have different boundaries that may be valuable for another to implement or change in their own lives. If there is anything in this dicussion that is upsetting, please reach out to the SANE Help Centre for support. Before joining this discussion, we would also encourage you to familiarise yourself with the community guidelines so we can make sure that this is an open and respectful space to hold all of our experiences.

How can you get involved?
There are tons of ways to show your support and get involved:
1. Check back in each morning to see the new question and post your response.
2. If you see a response that you resonate with, click the “support” button to show you are listening
3. Tag members who you feel might be interested to contribute to the discussion
4. Share resources that you have found helpful or that might be educational for those reading along

[NatureLover]

@cloudcore  and the Community Managers and Peer Support Workers - thank you for this. I know at times boundaries have been confusing for me, especially on the forums here where we are discussing such sensitive stuff. And I know the guidelines and still boundaries can be confusing, so I appreciate your week long discussion on this and will be attending every day if I am able. 🙂

[Shaz51]

@cloudcore , @NatureLover  will be here too when I can ❤❤❤

[LostAngel]

thank you and it definetly is a skill ,I at times have trouble with being consistent with boundaries wth people although have gotten better at picking and choosing what information to share with who and when I need my own space thanks for the invitation

[Powderfinger]

Good topic. 

I'm very much over my boundaries being completely ignored and being punished for laying boundaries. People don't like boundaries. It scares me actually the way people have treated me when I have layed boundaries. Temper tantrums, rage, anger, complete ignorance, punishment and the list goes on. It's tiring. 

[Shaz51]

@Faith-and-Hope 😀❤

[Faith-and-Hope]

Morning @cloudcore @Shaz51 @Powderfinger @LostAngel @NatureLover ..... anyone else

around 👋

Sorry, this is an essay, but I have learned a lot in this direction so I hope it's helpful to others here.

I had to learn, and fast, how to shore up

my boundaries when I married into a family whose members didn't respect them ...... the problem was that they had appeared to be be so close and loving and inclusive of me in the beginning that I had let my boundaries down, thinking that they were safe relationships to invest in.  Not only was the information and ideas I shared with them used to identify my weaknesses and create double-binds, when I did re-establish boundaries or create new ones, they just walked all over them and made fun of me in the process.

Cutting myself off from them wasn't an option because it would have cost me my marriage (gone now anyway, but not until after I had raised my children) but the potential to use my children as pawns was huge and would, I believe, have been much more damaging than what eventuated.  Demonstrating to my kids how to face up to the challenge was not only important then, but also now, where they are being used as pawns, but it is up to them to apply their own boundaries, which they are with mixed success ...... it's a work in progress.

My tips are:

Establish whether having a healthy sit-down discussion and arriving at agreements about  situation where you feel boundaries are not being respected is going to be fruitful, or a complete waste of time, perhaps setting you up for worse outcomes.  If it's workable, this is best case scenario 💕

If not, most people who don't respect boundaries are what I refer to as 'transactional people', meaning that they will only respect boundaries if there is something in it for them, or it's not worth their while to challenge them.  You can generally identify these people because they tend to throw tantrums in reaponse to boundary-setting, or become vindictive, perhaps in passive-aggressive ways.

It is your prerogative to simply ignore any unwanted responses, and shoring your your ability to do that is a very helpful thing to practice.

Also, I rthink commend practicing in your mind (role-playing) how to politely and firmly request that a known boundary be respected, or outline a new boundary, without going into any lengthy explanation about why you feel it's necessary.

If the boundary is not respected, coolly and politely removing yourself is the most effective approach I have found.  If you are visiting someone else's house or a public place, just pack up and leave, stating that you feel it's time you went.   This is harder if the 'offenders' are at your place, but you can get up from sitting and start tidying up, packing away, doing dishes, etc and giving them every indication that it is time for them to go.  Any push-back can be met with, "thank you for spending the time with me, but I really must start to get on with other things now ....."

Keeping a cool but polite emotional distance is the best defence I have found, because it is hard to attack or criticise politeness, and you don't owe anybody your confidence and attention.  It's a gift you can feeely give, or not.

@Zoe7 

[Powderfinger]

@Faith-and-Hope 

It is so hard. I can no longer deal with a person that gets enraged and manipulates, gaslights, throws temper tantrums and attempts to guilt me when I say no to things and try lay boundaries. It's literally robbing me of feeling anything. Just numb and tired. I've cut this person from my life. Blocked them from all social media accounts, unfortunately can't block from sending emails as need to keep gathering evidence in case I need to get an AVO. I'm really struggling to stay strong. I'm so tired. It's definitely beading towards an AVO. I can't deal with anymore of this. Sometimes people push you to breaking point. There are so many instances where boundaries just don't work. Healthy people respect boundaries though. Gosh I miss my boundaries being respected. I miss healthy. 

[Faith-and-Hope]

Hearing you @Powderfinger ..... 💜

I was married to someone who ticks every box for NPD, for over thirty years.  Apart from being a workaholic for the first 30 years which kept him out of the house for most of the time, his method of operation was to triangulate / enable others to override my boundaries ...... and who did I turn to for comfort and support and to discuss strategies with ??  Him, of course ..... 

Along with the fact that I was raising our five kids with no physical help from him, doing cartwheels to manage the household and extended family relationships, and I adored him ...... all equals 'servitude' and 'idolisation' to the NPD mindset.  Once the tide turned and we headed towards The Discard his true nature became apparent, but I thought it was the other way around, that he was the loveliest person ordinarily, and something was going terribly wrong with his personality ...... little did I know .... now I only communicate with him through lawyers who are quite stunned at his inability to respect boundaries.

Your situation sounds even more extreme, and I think I would be reaching for an AVO.  Please 

know you are not alone.  Abuse comes in many forms and it is important to slam down boundaries like an iron cage around that sort of crap !!  Good on you for what you have achieved so far.

Is it possible to block them as an email address, or are you required to keep their address open for some reason ?   I have to have a phone no. and email contact available to the ex because one of our kids has a disability and is the subject of guardianshio

 issues, of course .... :face_with_rolling_eyes:, but that person is not contacting me at all 🎉 ..... disabled one has a phone and calls their father periodically from another room with the door shut - my boundary there .....

Take heart, take courage ..... one foot after the other ..... baby steps .....

[Corny]

My contribution isn't of a personal nature today @cloudcore in the sense of me sharing what strategies I use to maintain boundaries in my personal life, I'm kind of sick of thinking about myself/my life today and prefer to focus outwardly on community. 

Volunteers and employees of Sane must have access to policy makers and people in government. If my memory is correct some board members are people of influence. I think on behalf of forum members that Sane could advocate for people with complex MI that are on the NDIS, and communicate to the NDIA that the lack of training in staff is destabilising to participants with psychoscoial disability. 

When it comes to boundaries the NDIS is a disaster, or widespread SI waiting to happen. Leaving the care of vulnerable people to market forces and private companies is quite in-Sane. I don't often watch free to air television but not long ago I did, and there was an advertisement for a private NDIS provider exclaiming that if you chose to use their services you wouldn't just receive disability support but you would receive on-going friendship from your support workers. I think that this is really dangerous.

Support workers should be supporting us to re-gain confidence to make our own friends, or choose not to if that is where we are in our recovery. A support worker I had told me about difficulties she was having with other clients, texting her and calling her outside of work hours and getting really angry if she didn't reply......I know that the NDIS is a work in progress, but how hard is it to give some basic training so clients aren't at risk of SH etc. To me support workers & NDIS participants should think of the relationship similarly as the one they have with their GP/Clin-Psych etc.....people are going to hurt themselves if education on this matter isn't addressed. Corny.