Common Ways Boundary Wounded People Pair Up- Part 1

In a former post, I reviewed How To Spot A Boundary Wounded Person. You might recognize some of these behaviors from others in your life, or you might feel busted and realize you’ve engaged in some of these behaviors yourself. Either way, stay gentle. Remember- boundary wounding is caused by trauma, and all trauma deserves our self-compassion and the awareness that others who behave this way are not monsters; they’re hurt people.

Learning how to shore up your own boundaries will protect you a lot. But you’re also want to hone your discernment so you can spot other boundary-wounded people and take better care of yourself. You don’t have to harshly judge someone or run screaming in the other direction. You might just want to make a mental note, “This person is boundary wounded. This means having a healthy relationship with this person might require more diligence about keeping a greenhouse around my own flower bulbs. Plus, I might have to take extra care to make sure I don’t trample all over this person’s flower bulbs.”

Realizing someone else is boundary-wounded should just put you on guard a bit. It might feel good to relate with them in the beginning, but unless healthy boundaries can be put in place, it’s a set up for pain later on. Boundary-wounded people tend to pair up together, so let’s examine some of the common ways boundary-wounded folks might match up to needle each other’s core wounds and take a look at some of the dances boundaryless people can tango together, based on the pairings described in Townsend and Cloud’s Boundaries book, but through an IFS-informed lens, focusing on the four kinds of boundary-wounded parts- compliant parts, controlling parts, nonresponsive parts, and avoidant parts.

Obviously, with four different types of boundary injured parts that can pair up in countless ways, the variability and nuance in how boundaryless people may pair up is endless. But let’s unpack a few of the common ways boundary wounded people may match up, not just in romance, but in families, friendships, or even business relationships. In today’s post, we’ll focus on the compliant/ compliant relationship, the compliant/ aggressive controller relationship, and the compliant/ seductive manipulative controller relationship.

*Trigger warning: As a healthy boundary before we move on, let’s just acknowledge that this next part may be hard to read, especially if you’ve been the victim of narcissistic abuse or you’ve perpetrated narcissistic abuse. If it is, take breaks, remember to breathe and stay in your body, look around and orient yourself to the safety and beauty in your environment, feel your feet on the ground and your seat on a chair, give yourself a hug or ask someone you trust to help co-regulate you and help you feel your feelings, and try to keep coming back to open curiosity, boatloads of self-compassion, and a heaping helping of gentleness with your parts. If any of your parts get upset with me, you, or someone else, just let them have their feelings and hold them and listen to them, asking those parts what they need from you. Usually, they just want the love of your always generous, unconditionally loving Self to help co-regulate them and calm them down. Then they can let you learn how to relate in a healthier way in the future so they don’t get so hurt. 

Just as recovering addicts and enablers of addicts have to move through the pain, regret, remorse, grief, and anger they might feel towards themselves and others as the result of a 12 Step recovery program like AA, NA, AlAnon, or CODA, those of us healing from boundary wounding are likely to feel similar emotions as we navigate our own recovery. We can handle even the most overwhelming feelings if we keep our hearts open inside beautiful greenhouses. Part of the greenhouse is that Self needs to boundary against letting any of your parts hijack the bus as you consider all this. Bullying inner critic parts, perfectionist parts, judging parts, shaming parts, or other parts inside that might try to attack, shame, or harm other parts need to be mediated courageously and firmly by Self. 

In other words, it’s okay to have parts that feel bad about what you might read. It’s not okay to let your critical manager parts beat the crap out of other parts. All parts can have their opinions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and sensations, but you’ll need to mediate good boundaries between your parts so one part doesn’t harm another part and retraumatize you, just like you as an adult might meditate between one child who might bully another child.

Remember, we are all imperfectly human, we all just want to love and be loved, and it’s terribly sad that so many of us, myself included, were hurt in this way that makes relationships challenging. We can find some comfort as we explore these all too common boundary wounded pairings when we realize we are all in this together.

Compliant/Compliant Relationships

Two people with compliant parts who pair up can initially feel very harmonious. People with compliant parts tend to track one another and pay attention to what the other person likes, so it can feel very caring. You’re likely to each know how you like your coffee. You remember birthdays and are attuned to the other person’s love language, so you know how to make them feel special.  You extend yourself to please the other. They do the same for you. This can feel like love, especially if you’re the compliant type. But while it is caregiving, don’t mistake this for trauma-free love!

Over time, this dynamic becomes problematic. Because both parties in a parts-led compliant/compliant relationship cannot say no, each falls over backwards trying to appease the other, often abandoning his or her own needs, desires, preferences, and separateness. Inevitably, discontentment sets in, because none of us can abandon ourselves forever. This tendency to be compliant with each other is people-pleasing, approval-seeking, fear-based attachment at its most controlling. Because they can’t say no to each other, both people’s compliant parts try to please the other at the expense of their own boundaries and often their own sovereignty. They know and attune to the other person’s parts masterfully, but they may know hardly anything about their own parts inside. This makes each of them highly dependent on each other to get their needs met- or even know what is needed. This can lead to enmeshment, as we discussed here in The Difference Between Healthy Intimacy & Unhealthy Enmeshment.

As described in Healing Developmental Trauma, the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) version of this pattern is the “Attunement Survival Style.” (Review the NARM survival styles here.) Compliant parts often develop when our parents did not attune to us adequately, reading our needs and meeting them when we were so young we didn’t know how to care for ourselves. Because our parents were not attuned and because our needs went unmet, we do not learn to attune to our own needs but become exaggeratedly gifted at attuning to everyone else’s needs, especially those of our primary attachment figures, namely our parents first, and later, our romantic partners.

These folks often go on to become doctors, nurses, therapists, healers, and other kinds of caregivers, capitalizing on the gifts of this trauma, the ability to masterfully attune to other, but to the utter neglect of our own parts and their needs. This is why caregiving professionals so frequently burn out- because they cannot stand up for their own needs, collapsing and complying with the needs of others and getting rewarded for their martyrdom with plenty of approval, praise, and positive regard from those who like being taken care of and are happy to let someone else attune to their needs without expecting to get their own needs met in return.

Sadly for other parts in our systems, this is a fool’s bargain. While it was often a life-saving strategy in childhood for compliant parts to attune to the needs of the parents, prioritize other people’s needs, and let personal needs go unmet, that pattern outlives its usefulness and handicaps people later in life. At some point, our own needy parts rear up their suffering heads and we go the way of health, taking the pressure off those compliant parts and healing those parts, Self to parts. Or, as in a compliant/compliant pair up, we become dependent on someone else to attune to our needs for us. Yet, the latter is an unstable strategy and guaranteed to wobble over time.

As nice as it may seem in the short run, having two people depend on each other to attune to each other’s needs doesn’t tend to go well in the long run. Since compliant people disrespect their own boundaries as a way of keeping the peace, both may grow silently resentful, feeling less and less agency, autonomy, and power, while firefighters that lie just under the surface of compliant manager parts simmer, just waiting for a break in the system that allows reactive parts to blow through like a geyser. Raging parts, dissociative parts, psychotic parts, suicidal parts, addict parts, even parts that might use the body to break through with diagnoses like cancer- they’re all one cell layer under the surface of those compliant parts, putting that person’s internal family system- and their external relationship- at precarious risk. Usually, the one with the more power/ ego strength in the relationship will trend towards overpowering the other, even if it’s unintentional and subtle, and the seeds of dissatisfaction take root.

To Shift A Compliant/ Compliant Relationship Towards Healing