Boundaries
by Dr. Danna Bodenheimer, LCSW
I don’t know anyone who isn’t talking about boundaries these days. It seems that, somehow, the obsessive talk about self-care has morphed into a hyper focus on boundaries, instead.
Let me be clear. I think that’s a good thing. However, similar to the oversaturation of writing around self-care, something about what boundaries actually mean and how we can honor them seems to have gotten lost.
Trust me when I say that I am not an expert on the whole thing. But I have been thinking of truly writing about the struggle to set boundaries, some fallacies about boundaries, and my own struggles to keep boundaries intact as not only a social worker, but as just a plain old person.
All Boundaries Are Not the Same
It seems important to note that not all boundaries are the same. There are the boundaries that we hold with clients. These include our loyalty to the frame of our work, the ethical mandates set forth from the NASW around dual relationships, making use of supervision, and integrity around good documentation.
Then there are our own personal boundaries, which show up for us, pervasively, both at work and in our personal lives. These are the boundaries that make self-preservation possible, that allow us to have passions and families, that give us space to move our bodies. These are the trickier boundaries, the ones that require us to put ourselves first, the ones that we waver on when we need them the most.
I, myself, have decent clinical boundaries. However, I am someone who has always thought of myself as being “bad with boundaries,” often operating in a haze around my own limitations and internal resources. While I have gotten better at “boundaries” over time, I have significant envy for those who seem to have “good” boundaries. So, I have been thinking lately: what does it mean to have bad boundaries and what are good ones, and how can I get some and keep them?
And why is this so damn hard?
To begin, I have come to realize that the act of setting boundaries is profound in that it acknowledges that there is a place where I begin and someone else ends. Fundamentally, two people can never be one person. Having grown up in a highly emmeshed environment, I had parents who acted like this wasn’t true. We were together all the time, told each other everything, talked openly about more than we should have. When I went to sleep away-camp and there was a rule that we couldn’t talk to our parents for the first week, I was sure that my parents were dead.
The idea of separateness, the practicing of this idea, is not something that everyone has had modeled for them. I certainly didn’t. In fact, when you have been raised to act in a way that defies your own individuality, the act of setting boundaries is extraordinarily challenging.
Boundaries also signify that we have accepted the fact that we can never be in more than one place at a time. While that seems simple theoretically, it is certainly something that I have struggled with. I had two parents who worked full time, got to most of my softball practices, travelled every weekend, had a huge group of friends, kept up with all doctor appointments, and somehow paid for college. I got the idea, from their seemingly infinite resources, that I could be everywhere and do everything at once.
Of course, this is a fantasy that is based on a selective set of memories. The truth is that my parents were anxious all the time, fought quite a bit, and were terrified about money constantly. But that is not the information that I took in, at least consciously.
Instead, I got the idea that highly unrealistic levels of functionality were possible. Perhaps this is because I was defended against seeing things more fully in my own home. Or, it was because I was just trying to keep up with what I thought my parents expected of me. Either way, I have never been comfortable with the simple truth of there only being one of me. I find myself double booking things, taking on more clients than I have hours for, deciding that I will just figure it out later when I have multiple requests for different events on the same day. Somehow, I am always procrastinating on admitting to myself, and those around me, that I can only ever be in one place at one time.
Which leads me to another fear that the setting of boundaries evokes for me. I am absolutely terrified of disappointing people. And when I say terrified, I literally mean that I think that it might kill me. I might actually die of it.
To set a boundary is to guarantee that someone will be disappointed. To set a boundary is to make your own subjective experience take precedence over what you feel people around you are feeling. To set a boundary is to essentially say to another person that your own needs don’t have to make sense to them; they only need to make sense to you.
My parents never gave me the idea that they could survive me individuating, living a life radically different from theirs, or that it would be okay for me to make choices that felt foreign to them. In fact, my mom is even surprised if I like a spice that she doesn’t. We can be trained out of knowing our own boundaries. This renders the sensation of being different from another, claiming that, and setting boundaries around it a radical psychological act.
The Need and the Talent for Our Work
Andrea Celenza, an analyst in Boston, hypothesized that therapists and social workers practice out of both a need and a talent. She goes on to say that our “empathic capacity” has arisen from “early childhood wounds and deficits that draw us to the profession in the first place and sustain our commitment to it over time” (Celenza, 2010, p. 60-69). As a social worker with a childhood, just like all of you, I cannot imagine truer words.
I have a talent for this work, for sure. I also have a need for it. Part of that need has been born out of the necessity to master central psychological tasks. For me, the central task is to create and sustain boundaries.
Three Boundaries I Set for Myself
The first boundary that I tried to set for myself was two years ago, when I decided to start taking spin classes. I decided that I wanted to take 4 a week. The truth is that I typically do 3, but even that has been no small feat. I guard those classes with my life. I guard those classes with my life because I have learned that I cannot be flexible about them. If I let a boundary be porous, it will be. There is always something that competes with my workout schedule. I have had to engage in a form of rigidity that feels completely foreign to me, yet like a muscle that I must tend to the growth of. I do this for myself, for my family, and for my clients. I need it to stay sane and to think clearly. I need to create the actual time to make that possible.
The second boundary that I have tried to set for myself has been two-fold. The first part is to not take any new clients, knowing that my administrative responsibilities outweigh my capacity for increased clinical work. This has felt nearly impossible for me given that I love clinical work, I love meeting new clients, and I hate to say no. I hear from new clients several times a week and have had to literally hand over the responsibility of listening to voicemail, so as to not transgress my own commitment to myself. The second part is to never see clients on Fridays, so I can have time set aside to attend to strictly doing administrative work. The fact is that this has worked about 70% of the time, if not less. I can always find a reason to bend the rule and to make an exception. My process around this boundary and the clearing of time and space remains utterly imperfect. That’s okay.
Finally, I have tried to create formal time to write, if not every day, at least every week. This means that I need to honor my own creative process over disappointing others, my own addiction to work and saying yes, my own fear around my separateness from others. I have planned myself multiple writing retreats and subsequently canceled them for some need or another of someone other than me. I have one coming up in a few weeks, May 2nd to be exact. I have watched invitations and requests for that weekend come and go. And I have kept it, in black heavy Sharpie ink, in my datebook - guarding it with utter ferocity.
I know that these sound like small things. I know they are really personal, too. But we all struggle with boundaries. And our struggles have etiologies that harken back to life themes that have us, brutally, in their grasp. While we are promised that boundaries offer us safety, that doesn’t mean they don’t make us shake with terror.
And you know what? That terror is because of our empathy. We all became social workers because of our empathy, which, by definition, is our ability to access and feel the psychological worlds of others. This is not a boundaried act; instead, it speaks to our porousness. While this porousness is absolutely a strength, weak perimeters around what matters most will keep us from being able to sustain a healthy level of empathy - the very empathy that represents our talent, rather than our need for this work.
Reference
Celenza, A. (2010). The analyst’s need and desire. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 20(1), 60-69.
Dr. Danna Bodenheimer, LCSW, is the founder of Walnut Psychotherapy Center, and the executive director of the Walnut Wellness Fund. She is the author of Real World Clinical Social Work: Find Your Voice and Find Your Way and On Clinical Social Work: Meditations and Truths From the Field (The New Social Worker Press).