Know Your Wounded Boundary Hooks & Become “Slippery”

How To Be Less Vulnerable To Getting Manipulated By Boundary Wounded People

Whatever your boundary wounding or boundary violating tendency, boundary wounded people have a tendency to snare one another with a variety of conscious or unconscious “hooks.” When you’re dealing with Boundaries 1.0 (the basics are reviewed here), it’s critical to recognize where you’re vulnerable to being hooked and also where you might be tempted to hook others. This will help make you a safer person in relationships.

The Specialness Hook

A common hook is being vulnerable to someone who love bombs you and makes you feel special or chosen, especially if you felt neglected, abandoned, unspecial, or unchosen as a child. You might be easily seduced by someone who throws money at you and offers you financial security or generous gifts and expensive opportunities if you grew up financially insecure.

The Power Hungry Hook

You might be power hungry because you grew up powerless and will be easily hooked by promises of spiritual power, healing power, financial power, the power of fame or celebrity, political power, or the kind of power you might earn through your ambitious parts.

The Smart People/ Talented People/ Beautiful People Hook

You might be hooked by a highly intelligent or talented person who seduces you with their intellect or prodigy talent- because some people learn how to overcome various insecurities by playing up certain skills or talents. Similarly, you might be hooked by a beautiful person or the promise of sex with someone who makes you feel like a valuable person with higher status.

The Perfect Mommy/ Perfect Daddy Hook

If you lacked good parenting, you might be hooked by someone in a position of power- a professor or boss or otherwise powerful person who might offer you a Mommy or Daddy substitute or promise you special favors as a way to exert control over you and alleviate their own insecurities.

The Rescuer/ Hero Hook

You might get a rush off being needed and get hooked through a needy person you might be able to influence or control hooking your “savior complex.”  Someone might hook you by promising to help you realize a dream or accomplish an activist mission to help others.

The Guilt Trip Hook

While promises of good things can be especially seductive, threats of negative outcomes can also be used to hook you.  You might get hooked by someone laying on a guilt trip so you’ll collapse a boundary or comply with what someone wants of you.

It helps to recognize when someone else is trying to snare you into violating your boundaries by laying on a guilt trip. Remember, guilt trips are usually anger in disguise, covering up hurt and sadness. If guilt successfully hooks you, this is your responsibility, not the person who is laying on the guilt trip. Let them lay it on as thick as they want. Just stay slippery.

The Self Harm/ Suicide Hook

You might get manipulated by someone threatening to harm themselves if you don’t comply with their unreasonable demands.

The Abandonment Hook

You might get hooked through your fear that you’ll be abandoned if you don’t comply with entitled expectations.

The Empath Hook

Your hook might be your fear of sitting with someone else’s uncomfortable feelings because you have a hard time separating your feelings from theirs.  Others are likely to have feelings about your boundaries and that’s okay. Their feelings are their feelings, and it’s appropriate to care about their feelings and potentially to help co-regulate their feelings. You can use your care and your sensitive heart to express compassion and empathize with the distress your boundaries may cause in others, but that doesn’t mean you need to collapse your boundaries. Their distress is their distress. You can stay present with their distress, and you can keep your flower bulb heart lovingly open but firmly protected by your greenhouse of boundaries. 

Staying Slippery

We all have our hooks, but once we know where they are, once we realize where we’re vulnerable, we can learn to be “slippery,” so the hooks will still come flying at you, but they don’t stick or sink into you. You may still notice your attraction to a beauty hook or a love bombing hook or a power hungry hook. You may still fear someone else’s reaction to your boundary, activating the guilt trip hook or empath hook.

You may still feel the hook, but you don’t have to respond to it or cave in. You can just set your healthy boundaries, work with the parts that are vulnerable to being hooked, and practice Self-leadership, so you don’t get hijacked by parts that are vulnerable to all those hooks that can cause you to collapse your boundaries or crash through someone else’s. 

If others have the power to get you to loosen your boundaries by guilting you, threatening to abandon you, or telling you they plan to harm you or harm themselves if you hold your boundaries firm, you have let them inside your greenhouse and they are now violating your boundaries, using their emotional power to control you. If you don’t want to be controlled, stay slippery. Respond but don’t react.

If they can’t get your goat, they’ll realize that you’re serious about setting and enforcing boundaries and at some point, they’ll either stop throwing the hooks and respect your boundaries- or they might follow through on threats of abandoning you, and that will hurt your tender parts, so they’ll need your Self to hold them gently. Take some space for yourself if you must so you can keep your own center of gravity. Get help from others if you need help not backing down. When you’re learning a new way of relating, you won’t be able to do this alone. You may need backup. Call upon your reinforcements if you feel tempted to collapse. You can do this.

Part of holding your boundary may require resisting the temptation to see what you want instead of what is real. Recognize that you may have been perceiving your relationships through a distorted filter and using complicated rationalizations to keep your distortions in place. Be willing to see the “is-ness” of your reality with clear vision, even if you don’t like what you see. 

*Art by Delilah