Boundaries 101

by Charity and Mary

[Charity:]  The two of us have recently realized something.  We're decidedly unclear about what constitutes healthy boundaries in friendship.  For me in particular, this lack of clarity has had disastrously painful results that affect our system health to this day.

Our system defines its internal relationships as familial.  Many survivors that we've know are averse to doing so, even triggered by the idea.  Our aim is to reclaim familial relationships as something healthy.

Our problem as adults within the system has been our tendency to couch ourselves as parents, when we're really not.  We're more like adult siblings charged with taking care of minor siblings because of a lack of parents.  It's a lot of responsibility to put on a young adult.  (It's even more responsibility to put on teens having to act in the stead of young adults when the latter are non-functional.)

We're trying to be the adults that we need to be.  The two of us and Rachel, Deborah, and Drew.  We're at varying stages of healing now.  But none of us are ever going to like "adulting."  There's so much emotional baggage tied in with being responsible that it's like a bird trying to fly while tethered to a cement block.

That's our conundrum on a broader level.  Boundaries are an important part of it.  We've never been good at relationships in the outside world, and we're not as good at internal relationships as we thought we were.  The two of us see ourselves as cousins, yet our relationship is more like that of sisters or very close friends.  But we've realized that we're not clear on how to ensure that this relationship is a healthy one.

We have two concerns.  One is that I've had a history of falling into bouts of depression and neediness, and this places Mary in the role of caregiver rather than close friend.  Then I end up resenting her and others for being more emotionally stable than I feel.  Meanwhile, Mary ends up burdened, often to the point of exhaustion, and she often disappears for days or weeks on end.

[Mary:]  Charity's situation not withstanding, it's hard for me to maintain a sufficient energy level to stay present at the front for long periods of time.  I deal with stress by avoiding it.  I withdraw.  I isolate with books or other activities that keep me busy on the inside, and that's how I avoid getting hurt.

I want to do better than that.

I don't know how to maintain healthy relationships any more than Charity does.  It starts with us.  What are appropriate boundaries in close friendship?  How do we avoid issues like neediness and codependence?  How do we maintain balance with each other and with the outside world? We don't know, but we're both committed to making sure that it happens.