Many physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and relational conditions and symptoms create a boundary for an individual. This is especially evident when the individual doesn’t have a healthy strong energetic boundary in life. In its infinite wisdom, the unconscious mind, which is imprinted in the cells of the body, provides a symptom or condition that may be serving the individual’s highest good. It’s one of those gifts in strange wrapping.
It’s hard to envision many symptoms being benevolent, however, in the field of systemic healing that utilizes systemic constellations, many symptoms support the client. You might set up the first Rep as the Client and the second Rep as the Symptom. Another way to set up the constellation is to set the first Rep as the Symptom and the second Rep as the Message of the Symptom. The symptom may be a missing person in the family system, it may morph into a parent or grandparent there in support of the individual, or it may be highlighting an unhealthy relationship. Unhealthy relationships often reveal an energetic entanglement that needs to be separated. In showing the individual that they need to separate from these energetic entanglements, the symptoms create a boundary.
In my last two blog posts I discussed Systemic Healing and began exploring the topic of Boundaries. Boundaries are so important that I’ve continued to expand on them in this post. Let’s look at the origins of boundaries and how symptoms create a boundary.
Boundary With Mother
Systemic healing asks you to be very honest with yourself and to let down the façade you have build up around everyone in your world to serve your own needs. This can be a painful process. It can hurt to look deeply at the reality of a relationship.
If mother had no boundary with others, you likely have no boundary with others. It’s time to develop a strong healthy boundary. If she built a boundary of steel around herself so she wouldn’t have to feel, you likely have a boundary of steel around your heart and inner core. It’s time to soften the edges of the boundary to allow loved ones to get closer or to attain greater intimacy with others. If she unconsciously gained weight as a layer of emotional protection, you may also gain weight to unconsciously protect yourself emotionally. It’s time to develop a strong healthy boundary that is more life giving. The weight has served to support you until now and once you learn self-love and maintain a healthy boundary it may no longer be needed.
If mother felt worthless, you likely feel worthless or fear being worthless and likely compensate in your unconscious behaviours to keep from feeling worthless. You may work too much, take on too much responsibility, or live as a high achiever or perfectionist to prove you are enough. If mother felt alone and vulnerable, you likely feel alone and vulnerable or fear being alone and vulnerable and compensate in your unconscious behaviours to keep from feeling alone or vulnerable. You may stay in relationships that are not life giving or you may be overly independent so you don’t have to rely on anyone.
Our lives are filled with unconscious behaviours and emotional strategies to help us overcome our deepest fears. Wellness comes when we sort out our deepest core fears and stop living unconsciously and reactively through them. We can change these behaviours once we understand what is holding them in place or contributing to them. When behaviours and symptoms create a boundary, it usually entails exploring our family system for unhealthy relationships or missing persons, listening to the messages of our body, and sorting out the energetic entanglements in our life. Wellness comes when we take responsibility or take charge of our own wellbeing (notice I didn’t say take control) and stop letting our fears rule our life. Many symptoms recede or diminish when an individual develops a strong healthy boundary with others, connects with their deep inner core, releases burdens carried for others, releases fears and heavy emotions dragged through life, and engages in self-care, self-love, and self-parenting. This transition is about embracing emotional and spiritual maturity. If we are trapped in the narrow perspective of the child, remaining emotionally immature, we have a choice of shifting or stagnating. This generalization is made in recognition of all the beautiful loving children of the world who have transitioned to emotional maturity at an early age through their early life struggles and challenges.
Symptoms Deliver Messages
When symptoms create a boundary, we are experiencing the talents of the unconscious mind. The unconscious 90% of the mind seems to be there as a source of wellbeing. The rational 10% of the mind, with the ego along for the ride, loves the status quo and puts on the breaks at any sign of change or transition. You can choose to live solely through your analytical rational mind or you can learn to explore the wonders of your unconscious mind. The decision is up to you.
The unconscious mind is there to help you improve your life and the wellbeing of the greater family system. It is filled with a wealth of valuable knowledge and you need to learn how to tap into this pool of vital information. The unconscious will continue to provide messages as symptoms for you whether you ignore it or not. Listening to this inner voice, so denigrated the past few centuries, doesn’t come easily to many human beings today. They either listen to an external voice in their world or avoid listening altogether. It is the inner voice that speaks to you with unconditional love. If you ignore it indefinitely the symptoms and conditions will begin to appear. The more you ignore that inner voice, the worse the symptoms grow to be. When you ignore your deep inner voice indefinitely, the symptoms will multiple, metastasize, aggravate, intensify, increase, expand, return, worsen, and exacerbate – just to serve you and to get your attention. Even worse, your symptoms may travel down the generations to your children and grandchildren. When you have symptoms it’s time to take responsibility and pay attention to your body’s messages. Many individuals finally begin to explore when they receive no satisfactory answers from the medical and psychological establishments. Humans, with their ego firmly in place, love to resist change! That’s when it’s time to step outside the box.
Symptoms as Boundaries
If you have symptoms that show up on your skin such as rashes or other skin conditions, or symptoms that impact your appearance, your body may be setting up a boundary for you. The message for you may be to develop a strong healthy boundary and it may raise the need to deal with issues of unworthiness, low self-esteem, feeling not good enough, inadequacy, the need for external validation, non-acceptance of self, or feelings of invisibility. These symptoms want you to shift your way of showing up in the world. Your skin is your physical boundary with your environment and the world. What needs to shift? It might be time to accept your full birthright and breathe in your full life force energy from your mother. That’s the healthy life giving step that went missing at birth. It’s time for you to give yourself permission to take up space and to take care of yourself first.
These inner feelings tend to rise out of unresolved relationship issues with your biological mother. Sometimes the bonding separation wound can be very subtle, such as a week away from her in early life, or it can be more traumatizing. These issues seem to be common for individuals who are given up for adoption or fostering or not raised by mother. In many situations you become the overachiever to prove your worthiness over and over. Your body can only take these behaviours for so long until the message is clear that you have to make changes in your life. Whether mother was there physically but absent emotionally, or mother was absent physically in some way, you still have to sort through your unconscious emotional responses to that absence in your life, whether it is in your face or it doesn’t seem like a big deal. You need to make room in your heart for your biological mother since she is 50% of whom you are inside. That is one of the greatest challenges for many in systemic healing. Without making room in your heart for your biological mother, you are rejecting 50% of yourself and a great portion of your feminine lineage.
Symptoms That Remind
If you are an adult and you are still expecting a parent to change, or you are angry at a parent and expecting an apology, your body may provide you with repetitive relationship issues. If you have to control everything in life, you may have symptoms that tighten or contract your body in stubbornness or rigidity. Relationship issues often create boundaries for you if you don’t have a strong healthy boundary. You may reject the parent and attempt to do everything the opposite or you may unconsciously merge with characteristics of the parent. It’s time to develop a strong healthy boundary and relationship with that parent whether it is a physical shift or not. A healthy relationship with healthy boundaries comes when we develop compassion for the emotional journeys of our parents and grandparents and we accept them just the way they are or were.
Symptoms of Agency
If you have symptoms such as breast cancer or hand, wrist, elbow or arm issues, your body may be telling you to start taking care of your own needs first before you do things for others. You may be living in agency. Do you nurture everyone but yourself? Do you take care of the needs of everyone else and ignore your own needs? You may have come into the world feeling like it was your role to take care of your mother’s emotional needs and the pattern repeats itself in each new relationship. It’s time to develop a strong healthy boundary.
Symptoms of Inner Conflict
If you have immune system issues, you may have an internal conflict going on inside. Your body may be helping you to understand that you are rejecting mother or her family line, father or his family line, or both. Since your body is 50% mother and 50% father, a rejection of either or both is a rejection of self. Are you lacking compassion for those who came before you? Do you struggle to take mother or father into your heart regardless of what they may or may not have done? What you reject about your mother or father, you reject in your own body. Your body, through the use of your immune system, begins to reject itself with immune issues. These symptoms create a boundary. They are messages from the unconscious that an unhealthy relationship or an energetic entanglement is being held or maintained by a rigid, inflexible old inner image. Some of these inner images are residue of past lifetimes, however, you will usually find the same relationship images repeating in the current lifetime. In many situations you don’t have to explore a past life. When you listen to the unconscious language of your body you will usually find resolution within a couple current life generations. Many symptoms are maintained in the cells of the body by heavy energies such as fears, rage, worry, resentment, anger, pain, sorrow, grief, guilt, or shame. Many of these energies are aimed at parents or grandparents even if it is unconscious. You don’t usually have to look far to find the source of your unwellness. When you listen, the answers tend to be within you. Seek assistance if you have a difficult time separating the unconscious language from the conscious rational language. Sometimes it is difficult to see the family patterns when you live within them.
Listen and Change
If you have symptoms that make you feel tight, stiff, or contracted, then it may be time to open to the wonders of the unknown world around you. You may be living in a small world. If you have a condition or symptoms that make you want to stay home, go to bed to rest, keep you at home, keep you from socializing, then the symptoms create a boundary for you when one is absent. The important part to know is that unhealthy boundaries can be shifted and new healthy boundaries can be created and consistently maintained to achieve your highest good and wellness. Boundary setting is internal not external. If you have a healthy boundary with parents, siblings, children, extended family members, friends, clients, patients, or co-workers, you individuate well from them. That means you can be in relationship with others and still maintain a strong sense of inner core self. You don’t require others to provide external feedback to help you feel good about yourself at the deep inner core, or to know if you are emotionally well. The opinion of others is not relevant to your wellbeing. This is especially important for all the healers, helpers, and frontline workers of the world. Many of you are seeking to heal yourself through your work with others. Doesn’t it feel great when you help fix someone’s life! It’s time to do your own healing work. Remember that healthy boundaries can definitely be established with those who have died or transitioned to the other side.
Yes or No
Healthy boundaries allow you to say yes or no when you mean yes or no, as you feel pulled by external requests for your time, energy, and resources. You are able to listen to your deep inner voice and know what is right for you. You know it is right because you feel peaceful, calm, or excited in a healthy way within your body. There is no inner tension. There are no knots in your stomach. When you have a strong sense of self and you feel triggered emotionally by a person or an event, you will have a deep sense of how to self-soothe yourself to reduce the emotional charge. Self-love and self-care are at the basis of healthy boundaries. You will know if you have a healthy boundary because it feels good to stay in your body.
Stuck in Your Head
If you feel the desire to split off, fragment, dissociate, defend, rationalize, or intellectualize, you likely don’t have a healthy boundary or a strong sense of self in the moment. Defensiveness is used to take the place of a healthy self-boundary and getting stuck in your head intellectualizing is a type of defense. Intellectualizing is an escape from feeling. You don’t have to be in your body feeling your emotions if you are intellectualizing. So, developing a strong sense of your boundary involves getting out of your head. Let the constant chatter in your head go and feel your emotional response with your body. Having a strong boundary in relationship with others is vital to maintaining a strong sense of self. Having the capacity to remain comfortable with the feelings and emotions in your body as they arise and having a strong sense of self is essential to wellbeing and healing.
Catch my next blog for specific Boundary Setting Exercises.
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