One Saturday evening when I was in my mid-twenties my then girlfriend and I were relaxing on the sofa watching TV after dinner. We’d recently moved in together, and having lived alone for the previous few years, I was enjoying the comfort and familiarity of being in a fulfilling relationship. Suddenly, my mobile phone rang, and I saw that the caller was my mother. Immediately, I was concerned that something was wrong, because there was no other reason for my mother to call me so late in the day.
Within an instant of answering the phone, I realized that my mother certainly wasn’t OK. She was slightly hysterical, and before she could get her words out, I’d guessed that the call would be about my sister.
My sister’s mental health and behavioral issues hadn’t improved since childhood, and in more recent years she’d received diagnoses of borderline personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. Her relationship with my mother was very destructive and abusive, and my many attempts to help unravel this – including supporting my sister and my mother separately and trying to guide and educate them toward a more functional way of relating to each other – had failed to have an impact.
A few years previously, while I was going through my therapeutic training, I’d called my sister almost daily for a year to share what I was learning. But as soon as I stopped doing the work for her, she stopped engaging. I’d realized that she liked the regular contact and energy I was giving her, but she’d no meaningful desire to change.
That evening as I sat on the sofa with my heart feeling increasingly heavy, my mother explained that my sister had become violent, smashing up part of the house, before leaving saying she was going to walk back to her home nearly 100 miles away. My mother was upset and fearful of my sister coming back, but also deeply concerned about a vulnerable person walking the streets in the middle of the night.
I had very mixed emotions. I felt empathy for my mother and concern for my sister but also deep frustration. This was the latest in a very long line of similar events, and we were stuck in a classic drama triangle in which my mother was the victim, my sister was the perpetrator, and I was the rescuer.
Knowing what I did about psychology, I was aware of how unhealthy this situation was for all concerned. And, given that my genuine attempts to try and help the relationship between my mother and sister consistently fell on deaf ears, I found myself in an impossible situation. Effectively, my quality of life was tied to the actions of others who were stuck in a destructive dynamic with no committed action to doing anything different.
However, as I listened to my mother in her desperation, my rescuer pattern once again took over, and I told her I’d be with her as quickly as possible. On putting down the phone, I realized that it was too late to catch the last train from London, and as I didn’t own a car at the time, the only option was to call a taxi. And so, I spent a small fortune on a 90-minute taxi ride, arriving at my mother’s house around midnight.
My mum was still distraught and had been in touch with the police; however, busy as they were dealing with the usual Saturday night adventures, they hadn’t seemed particularly interested. I decided that my first action would be to head to the local train station, which was a few miles away, and so I drove there in my mother’s car. In a stroke of luck, I found my sister pacing up and down the platform, with the next train not due until 5 a.m., which was four hours away. I managed to persuade her to get in the car and then we made the two-hour journey to where she lived, which was in the opposite direction to my home.
By the time we arrived it was 3 a.m., so I slept for a few hours on my sister’s sofa before driving my mother’s car back to her house and then getting a train home to arrive in time for Sunday brunch. During my drive and train journey, I made some long overdue, and very difficult, decisions.
The bottom line was that being the rescuer was doing nothing to help my mother and sister, but it was doing a lot to damage my life. It wasn’t that I was unwilling to give up my Saturday night to support those I loved; the problem was that this was a cycle that would never end, and my actions were likely perpetuating it.
I became increasingly aware that my endless patience and willingness to help rescue situations such as this were a stop gap that prevented things from ever becoming bad enough that more fundamental change might take place. In some ways, in my attempts to rescue them both, I was part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
So, I decided that I needed to start prioritizing my own happiness, stability, and quality of life over being at the end of the phone for my sister’s endless problems and my mother’s failed attempts to fix them. Put simply, to say yes to myself, I was going to have to say no to my family.
Prioritizing my own needs didn’t come easily to me, but after years of the alternative, I also knew I had no other choice. I called my mother and explained to her firmly and clearly that I was no longer available to rescue her and my sister. I loved them both, I said, but I also needed to love myself and so she should no longer call me to help in such situations.
Although it was partly fueled by a deep frustration, it wasn’t an easy conversation to have. I knew that for my mother it seemed as if I was saying I didn’t love her. And there were no words I could use that would make her realize that what I was doing was, ultimately, right. I also knew that my actions would leave a vulnerable person whom I loved in an even more vulnerable place. But just because doing hard things is hard, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them.
The coming months were not an easy transition. The liberation I felt at my initial action was soon replaced by the reality of having to say no to helping in some difficult and upsetting moments. As is the case with putting any new boundary in place, I was regularly and brutally tested in my resolve. But I knew why I was doing it.
As time passed, my mother and sister continued in their dynamic, but my life did become easier. At times I found it painful and challenging to observe their suffering without doing what I could to help. And I also knew that apart from being healthy and appropriate, my actions were the only way I could truly respect and care for my own heart and emotional needs and break the cycle of drama in my life. In a sense, I was having to teach my mother and sister a new way to treat me by building better boundaries.
As we discussed in Chapter 4, a boundary is a real or imagined line that indicates the limit or extent of something. A boundary separates self and other, inside and outside, and one nation and another. In the context of what we’re talking about here, a boundary is our ability to stand up for what we do and don’t want with others in our lives. Our boundaries can be crossed, or violated, in many ways – it might be someone standing too close to us and invading our physical or emotional space, or someone violating our time or energy by what they expect or demand of us. A boundary violation might also be the way that someone speaks to us, either in the words they use or the tone.
Creating appropriate and healthy boundaries in our relationships isn’t just critical to supporting our trauma healing; it’s also part of the antidote to further trauma in our future. If we don’t have healthy boundaries, we’re at risk of ending up in repetitive cycles of abusive relationship dynamics and finding a dysfunctional resonance with those who are looking to walk over other people’s boundaries.
One of the impacts of experiencing childhood trauma is that we’ll likely have grown up with unhealthy boundaries. This means we’ll have normalized to dynamics and patterns with those in our life that resonate with what we know from childhood. Almost by definition, the more dysfunctional our childhood relationships, the more likely we are to find ourselves in dysfunctional relationships as adults – unless, of course, we’ve made a proactive and deliberate choice to move toward something different.1,2
It’s our boundaries with others that tell them what’s OK with us, and what’s not. Our boundaries direct what we want more of, and what we want less of, and how it’s acceptable to treat us, and how it isn’t. Ultimately, healthy boundaries allow us to say yes to what we want more of, or no to what we want less of. It’s our boundaries that allow us to walk toward or away from the people in our life and how they treat us.
Learning to have healthy boundaries with others isn’t just about making sure our relationships are healthy and supportive. To say yes to ourselves, we must be able to say no to other people. Put another way, to be able to make the time and space to listen to our own needs – which can be anything from focusing on our healing journey to pursuing hobbies that bring us joy – we need to be able to say no to the demands of others for our time, energy, and attention.
It might be that those demands are obvious and manageable, but for many of us they can feel relentless and overwhelming, which is all the more reason to work hard to create change in this part of our life. If we’re normalized to being in toxic relationships, the chances are we almost numb ourselves to the impact of the endless demands made on us, and consequently, we neglect our own needs and wants.
While I was working hard to free myself from my own toxic relationships with family, I noticed that one of the main reasons I’d get sucked in was my tendency to be over-responsible for other people. I realized that this was particularly problematic with people who didn’t take responsibility for themselves and their lives, as I’d find myself picking up the slack for them.
I remember one occasion when I was drawn into my unhealthy dynamic with my mother and sister, and I was working hard to try and support my sister to change her mood. I stepped back for a moment in total exasperation and asked myself, whose shit is this? In truth, the problem was with her, not me, but I was working far harder than she was to try and change it.
If we’ve a tendency toward a helper pattern (see Chapter 8), it makes us all the more vulnerable to finding ourselves in imbalanced relationships where we take on too much responsibility. In a sense, where there’s a person who isn’t taking responsibility in their life, there’s an opportunity for us to step in and attempt to meet our core emotional needs by helping them.
A useful way to think about this is as a continuum of responsibility. On one end of the continuum there are people who take no responsibility at all for themselves and their life, which could also be seen as being a victim who has no ability to influence or change what’s happening. On the other end, there’s taking responsibility for everything and everyone, which isn’t just a guaranteed recipe for stress, but also deeply unhealthy.
If you find yourself taking too much responsibility for others, it may be that you tend to allow others to manipulate you. And if you’re someone who doesn’t take enough responsibility, it may be that part of establishing healthier boundaries is taking more ownership of yourself and your life.
To help us identify when we need to establish a new or stronger boundary, we must first have an early warning system for when our boundaries are being crossed. This is particularly important given how normalized we can become to the process.
A good place to start is to notice what happens in our physical and emotional bodies when our boundaries are violated. Just because we’ve normalized to not noticing the impact, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I know that for me, one clear sign is that my nervous system starts to activate a stress response, and another is that I feel awkward and uncomfortable, with a slightly irritated feeling.
I’d like you to take some time to explore what happens in your physical and emotional bodies when someone violates your boundaries. Which of the following signs do you notice? Remember, you can find a worksheet to help with this exercise as part of the free companion course at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
We’re all different in what happens inside us when we feel that our boundaries are being crossed, so please add your own examples to this list to reflect your experience.
A particularly tricky boundary violation is gaslighting – this is when someone attempts, in a coercive or manipulative way, to get us to question our own reality. The difference between gaslighting and healthy questioning is both the intention behind it and the way it’s being used. As we explored earlier, sometimes there can be a grain of truth in what our inner critic says about us, but that doesn’t warrant the character assassination that comes with it. The same is true of gaslighting – someone may take a small truth and use it to manipulate us into a position that’s simply not true. In a sense, what they’re doing is taking our core fear – that everything is our fault – and using it against us.
For example, let’s say we forgot to call a loved one when we’d promised we would. There wasn’t anything malicious behind it, we were simply overloaded with the other things happening in our life. But the person involved responds by weaponizing this small oversight, turning it into an entire narrative in which we’re a selfish and uncaring person.
Gaslighting can have many layers and it can take some time, skill, and even professional support to fully identify it. But a good starting point is to look for the signs we’ve just explored around what might happen when our boundaries are crossed. A particularly strong sign that we’re being gaslighted is also that we find ourselves feeling overly responsible, and something the other person has said has helped drive us toward this.
Now that we’ve examined what boundaries are, and how to know when they’re being violated, let’s consider what healthy boundaries look like, and how you can learn to put them in place. Establishing healthy boundaries might sound like a simple thing to do, but as any parent knows, it’s often rather tricky! Healthy boundaries have some key qualities; they are…
Now, learning to put such healthy boundaries in place is a practice and it takes time. Part of this is giving yourself permission to do so and knowing that no one has the right to treat you in an unkind or manipulative way. Often, what makes it particularly difficult to follow through is our inner critic, and if that’s the case for you, I encourage you to revisit Chapter 14. This may be particularly relevant when establishing healthy boundaries with parents, whose very voices are the original template for our inner critic.
At the heart of establishing a new boundary is being able to say no to someone. This is something we can hugely overthink, but usually the reality is far easier than the stories we tell ourselves in our head about what might happen. The key is to be calm, firm, and consistent.
If someone’s speaking to us in a way that isn’t respectful or isn’t acceptable in our model of the world (which may well be updating as you’re working through this book), then we need to tell them. Often, it may be as simple as saying, ‘Please don’t speak to me that way.’ As it is with the inner critic, the trick is to avoid getting sucked into the detail and just holding a clear and consistent boundary.
If the person’s response is to double down on their behavior and ignore your request for a boundary, that tells you some important things about them and your relationship. Indeed, it may well be a sign that you need to have more distance from this person.
To bring this to life for you, I’d like you to put a new boundary in place in the near future.
Make sure you are gentle and supportive of yourself while you’re putting your new boundary in place.
When you start to establish more boundaries in your life, and in doing so challenge the dynamics of your relationships, you’ll likely notice that people respond in one of three ways, which I like to think of as the dance of change. Let’s say that right now you’re dancing the foxtrot with someone in your life, and you’re in sync and step together. Then you decide you’re going to dance the tango. Your partner has the following choices:
My experience is that when we’re on a proactive path of inner growth and development, we’ll end up challenging many of our relationships in different ways at different points. As a result, we may find ourselves outgrowing and becoming distant from multiple people in our life.
It can feel a bit like we’ve cleared out all the old and outdated furniture in our house. But it takes time to fill the house with the right furniture for where we are now, and in the interim we must find peace with the emptiness and loneliness. This can be a difficult and painful part of the healing process, but if we’re to change, we must be proactive.
It can also be the case that as we’re figuring out what it looks, sounds, and feels like to put boundaries in place, we need to allow ourselves to go a bit too far the other way. Think of this as like a pendulum that’s been held back in one direction. When it’s finally released and allowed to swing, it’ll go past its point of rest and balance and spend a while swinging back and forth to find that balance point.
What this might look like for you is that you’ve been too accommodating and too quick to ignore your own needs in relationships, but then, as you work to find a new point of balance, you find yourself saying no to certain situations which, with hindsight, you decide you didn’t need to. You recognize that it was the pendulum swinging too far. But please don’t worry if this happens because it’s a sign of progress, and you just need some time to gradually find a new point of balance.
Of course, it isn’t only other people that we need to learn to have healthy boundaries with – it’s also ourselves. We’re now going to turn our attention to your internal boundaries and the importance of committing to your trauma healing.