Healthy Boundary

After reading my last blog, you may be sensing that some of your relationships with others may not have a healthy boundary. There may be unresolved emotional trauma lingering from the past creating unhealthy relationships with those who are living and those who have died in the physical world and transitioned to the other side. This old residue sits in your body impacting the relationships you have with everyone around you. When relationships aren’t healthy, you likely receive messages from your unconscious mind through relationship difficulties, you experience physical or mental health issues, you are challenged with financial difficulties, you wander through life feeling spiritually lost, or you feel like an emotional mess. Oh, you don’t bother with those pesky emotions? Please read on.

What Messages?

While engaged in our human experience, it is often difficult to link or piece together these messages from the unconscious mind – the messages sent to us as symptoms from the body. We are lead to belief the rational conscious mind is everything. Sometimes we may need a little outside guidance to help us learn to piece it all together. That’s the work I do with my clients.   I am able to separate the messages from their unconscious mind from the chatter of the rational conscious mind. This is something you can learn to do for yourself. It’s part of learning self-love and what I call healing.

I prefer to call the communication from the unconscious mind “benevolent messages”, rather than “symptoms”. People continually speak of fighting their symptoms, doing battle with their symptoms, or conquering their systems. That is language that extends from the “Might Makes Right” era of human development. The world has shifted. Might is no longer considered right anywhere in the world. It’s time for us to shift too.

I encourage others to befriend these messages from the unconscious mind, not fight them. Internal conflict often leads to unwellness and weakening of the immune system. However, we get caught in the rigid limits of the medical world and its vocabulary. You can call them symptoms or messages, whatever suits you. When boundaries are unhealthy, the cells of your body stew in a malignant soup of ingredients – anger, rage, regret, pain, resentment, shame, guilt, anxiety, depression, unhappiness, sorrow, grief – the list is long. We all need to explore these heavy emotions during our life journey to understand the lighter aspects on the same spectrums, such as joy, happiness, love, peace, abundance, and prosperity. When these heavy emotions linger beyond their usefulness, keep relationships from being life giving, then it is time to evaluate our boundary.

What Boundary You Ask?

When you learn to develop a strong healthy boundary, you learn to care for yourself first. This means you stay out of agency with others. You learn to put your needs before the needs of others in everything you do. This isn’t selfish behaviour – it’s healthy self-love.

Energetic Entanglements

Energetic entanglements that are not serving you well mess with your ability to maintain a healthy boundary. You may attain insight about these entanglements through systemic constellations.  Developing a healthy boundary means severing any unhealthy energetic entanglements. It means shifting unhealthy relationships with the living or dead into healthy relationships. You may consciously or unconsciously maintain these entanglements out of love and loyalty to your family system. The children in family systems sacrifice themselves all the time in this way. Creating a healthy boundary means acknowledging when you are carrying or sharing a burden with your parents, ancestors, or other family members. Remember these family members or relationships may or may not be related to you through blood. They may be energetic family members. They may not just be individuals but whole groups of people as well. They are individuals, events, institutions, or situations that created unresolved emotional family or ancestral trauma or wounds.

Examples of these family members include:

• Aborted or miscarried children
• Anyone who died young or tragically
• Perpetrators of harm done to you
• People you have harmed or bullied in the home, schools, workplaces, religious institutions, etc.
• Former significant partners in your life, the lives of your parents, or the lives of your grandparents or great grandparents
• Significant unrequited love interests
• Excluded, shunned, forgotten, or missing family members
• Those institutionalized in orphanages, residential schools, prisons, or mental health centres
• Unacknowledged children
• Anyone not mourned in a complete way
• Suicides
• Religious institutions that create fear or exclusion
• Those comrades who died in war
• Situations of regret
• Any survivor guilt
• The “enemy” in any situation
• Those who gained or lost fortunes
• Those with addictive behaviours
• Injustice around inheritances
• The guilt of the bystander
• The bombs that dropped in violent situations
• Countries of origin
• Immigrants who suffered in their homeland
• Energetically harmful government regulation

Connecting to Self

If you’re not connected to your authentic core self within, you won’t be attuned to your boundary. In order to shift those entanglements around unresolved emotional trauma or wounds, you get connected to your body. You develop a strong healthy personal boundary. You learn to care for yourself first before considering the needs of others. This involves developing compassion for self or self-love, using self-soothing techniques, and learning to self-parent. This involves getting connected with the energy and emotions held in your body, whether it feels comfortable or uncomfortable inside. If you remain connected to your deep inner core, or routinely re-connect with it, you understand when to say yes and when to say no. You go inside to feel your emotional response to that decision. If you say yes, then begin to feel resentment or anger rising, then it’s likely time to shift that response to no. You listen to your body when it gets tight, contracted, feels tension or pressure, has aches or pains, is unable to take in air, feels tied in knots, gives you a headache, feels nauseated or sick, and so forth. These messages from the body are asking you to shift something in your life. Listen and take action. Your body will love you for it.  The first step is building a healthy relationship with yourself. If you haven’t done so already, develop one.

Envision Your Boundary

Set a healthy boundary around yourself, feeling it like a tropical island of love, and then decide who gets to come to the shoreline of your island and who would you prefer to have anchor further offshore. Sometimes there are people who you sense intentionally drain your energy or perhaps mean to harm you in some way. You might want to keep those people away from your island altogether. The shoreline of the island is your healthy energetic boundary. You want it to be porous like a sandy beach or soft enough to allow those you love to come closer, yet firm enough to keep the ones who make you feel tense and unwell, further away. If you have built a twenty-foot fence around your island to keep everyone out, you likely have some boundary work to do to soften that rigid position. If you built a solid fortress on your island to protect yourself, you may have to soften your emotional armour to be in relationships with others. We are meant to be in relationships during our human experience. If you let everyone party like crazy on your island whenever they want, you may want to do some boundary work to create a boundary where one presently doesn’t exist.

Listen to your inner voice. Are you suddenly asking, “Where did I get this boundary?”  Perhaps the question is “Why don’t I have a boundary?”

Our current boundary setting habits were set in our early relationship with our biological mother, whether you were raised by her or not, and then it was likely reinforced by other caregivers. Our core fears and energetic boundary are intertwined with mother and her emotional wellbeing. There is no blame or judgment as we look back; rather we work to develop compassion for all those who came before us. What was mother experiencing emotionally when you were in the womb, at birth, or in early childhood? What was she carrying emotionally and energetically for her family system? What fears do you carry in life that impact everything you do?

Perhaps you had an emotionally unavailable mother. She may not have felt supported by her partner or she had unresolved emotional trauma of her own through her family system. You may have unconsciously felt abandoned in early childhood. She may have been there physically but absent emotionally. That’s a common feeling for many people. This is not about blame or judging mother. In fact, it’s about honouring and gaining compassion for mother and her journey. It’s about acknowledging what you experienced and learning from it, then letting the rest go.  You take what you learn from the past to shift the present and influence the future.  You would have developed emotional response strategies to survive that feeling of abandonment.

Too Little or Too Much

If you feel like you got too little from mother, you likely continued to self-abandon through childhood and into adulthood. Remember those core fears and perceptions. I’m worthless. I’m not good enough. I’m alone. I don’t deserve love. I’m not wanted. I’m no one. I’m afraid to show up. I’m invisible. I’m vulnerable. I’m a fraud. I’m overwhelmed. I’m not worthy of love. Our boundary is defined by the fears we carry in our body.   In response to feelings of abandonment, you may continually draw in others to have your emotional needs met. It’s time to minimize the impact of those fears in your life.

On the other hand, if you got too much of mother such as in situations where mother never let go energetically to you – helicopter parents are a good example today – then you may have developed a feeling of being flooded emotionally by mother and/or father. If you unconsciously carried their emotional burdens for them, or attempted to hold their marriage together when you unconsciously felt their pain, you may feel like you got too much of them energetically. You are energetically too close. You are still trapped within their energetic boundaries without one of your own. You may respond to relationships by pushing others away or avoid being in relationships altogether.

Practise Practise!

A strong healthy boundary is flexible enough to allow you to interact with others, porous enough when needed to let loved ones in, and firm enough to keep others out when the answer is no. We need to have healthy boundaries with both the living and the dead. I suggest boundary awareness and boundary setting to my clients as a daily practice in life with everyone who enters their energy field. Just like a musician who has to practise daily to master their instrument, each human being needs to practise boundary setting daily until they become masters at listening to the messages of their own body. But why aren’t we born with healthy boundaries? Learning boundary setting is a part of the spiritual development and growth we wanted to experience in this lifetime. In the spiritual realms we experience unconditional love. We choose a human lifetime to experience separation, emotional trauma, fears, woundedness, exclusion, and other human conditions.

Love Yourself

You learn to maintain a strong healthy boundary to protect your inner core self. When you stop seeking your emotional wellbeing from the outside world, you find it within. Your unconscious mind begins to trust that you will listen to the messages it communicates to you and that you will respond in a healthy way.

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