Setting Boundaries With Yourself
There Are No Bad Parts, But Parts Can Do Bad Things! Here's How To Contain Our Parts That Might Harm Ourselves Or Harm Others.
If you’ve been following along with The Boundaries Handbook about relational IFS-informed boundaries, which I’m drip releasing for my paid subscribers (thanks y’all!), then you’ve learned a lot about how to set boundaries with other people. But what about protecting yourself from some parts of you which may not always have your best interests at heart? What about compassionately but firmly containing parts of you that sabotage your dreams, harm your health, get you addicted, hurt people you love, or otherwise run amok?
Some people misunderstand the IFS belief in “no bad parts.” That doesn’t mean parts don’t do bad things! It just means that their intentions for us are often benevolent, even if their actions hurt ourselves or other people. IFS is not intended to be used as an accountability bypass. We’re not meant to excuse other people’s bad behaviors because of no bad parts. And we’re not supposed to let ourselves off the hook of accountability just because our parts that might act out and cause self harm or harm to others have good intentions.
When we practice IFS, it’s important that we not bully our parts, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have boundaries with our own parts, lines we won’t let them cross behaviorally, even if we understand compassionately why they want to do what they typically do.
Many boundaryless people not only struggle to set and enforce boundaries with others; we also wrestle with setting boundaries with ourselves. This is why so many boundaryless people struggle with addictions, such as substance abuse, overeating, workaholism, gambling, sex or porn addiction, or even simple time management issues. If you are boundaryless with yourself, you likely struggle with discipline, task completion, showing up for your commitments on time, impulse control, keeping your word with others, and other ways we respect our own promises to ourselves.
In The Four Tendencies, Gretchen Rubin lays out four ways people relate to expectations- upholders, questioners, obligers, and rebels. Upholders want to know what should be done and they tend to uphold both inner and outer expectations. They’re inclined to meet deadlines other people set or show up on time for a lunch date (outer expectations), but they’re also self-motivated and keep their promises to themselves (inner expectations.) Questioners question all expectations; they’ll meet an expectation if they think it makes sense and meets their own inner standards — so they tend to follow inner expectations but are skeptical of outer expectations.
Obligers are typically compliant types. They’re inclined to meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet expectations they impose on themselves. Rebels resist all expectations. Whether dealing with someone else’s expectation of them or their own expectations of themselves, rebels reflexively protest all expectations, prioritizing freedom inside and out and feeling confined when expected to behave any certain way.
What Gretchen Rubin calls “tendencies” and sees as fixed, I see as parts and therefore, able to change if we get to know those parts and allow them to be Self-led.
If you struggle to keep inner boundaries, you may have trouble with impulse control or delaying gratification. You may struggle to keep your tongue in check, instead lashing out at others and wrestling with being respectful with your words. You may indulge in out of control sexual impulses and slide down the slippery slope from flirting to affairs. You may indulge addictive protector parts without Self-leadership. You may have trouble setting boundaries with yourself on spending money. You may struggle to accomplish your goals.
Then, to make things harder, you may have parts that judge, demonize, criticize, shame, and terrorize other parts for being out of control with your addictive, out of control, impulsive, reckless, undisciplined, boundaryless behavior. But that only makes things worse.
If you struggle with inner boundaries, you may try to tell yourself that if only willpower could do it, you’d finally get your behavior under control, but newsflash! Willpower alone won’t cut it. White knuckled willpower usually comes from manager parts that get exhausted. If you believe that all you need to do is go to war with yourself, to overpower the out of control parts and whip yourself into shape, you’re likely to just give ammunition to your reactive firefighter parts that can out-will many managers’ willpower. As they say in recovery programs, if you’re trying to white knuckle your way to sobriety, you’re this close to a relapse.
If white knuckling our way to keeping our boundaries with ourselves actually worked, we’d all keep our New Years Resolutions every year! Our desire to believe that do-it-yourself programs can help us control ourselves fuels a multi billion dollar industry of self help. But self-help only goes so far with boundary wounded people, who do not like admitting that we need support from others to attain better boundaries for ourselves. The reality is that most boundaryless people cannot do it ourselves. We need one another. We need support. We need help. We need accountability. And we need to love, understand, and forgive the parts of ourselves that keep slipping up- again and again and again.
One key part of setting boundaries with yourself is to boundary against unnecessarily abusive reactivity. This doesn’t mean you won’t have reactive parts. By all means, you will! It’s normal to react to triggering situations. The nuance is that if your Self has a safe, trusting, intimate relationship with your parts, then when your parts react, your Self is right there, ready to help those parts calm down before you take action.
You can almost always excuse yourself to the bathroom if you’re triggered. Take a time out in the restroom and use your trigger as a “trailhead” to go inside and find out which parts are upset and why. Let all your parts bitch and moan and complain and feel their feelings- to you, in Self. Then when you’ve composed yourself and gotten clear on what’s okay and what’s not okay, you have freed yourself from the control someone else might otherwise have over you. You can consider your feelings and consider theirs (without being controlled by their feelings or yours), and then you can respond in a mature, responsible way. The difference between reacting and responding is choice. When you are reacting, it’s reflexive. Your limbic brain is on fire, and you’re not able to use the restrain of your forebrain. You’re on auto-pilot. You’re not exercising your free will to make a choice about how you react. When you respond instead of react, you are exercising your free will, taking responsibility for your own parts without allowing them to reflexively blend.
With your own good boundaries in place, with your Self caring, curious, compassionate, calm, and ready to mediate on behalf of the upset parts, you can let all the reactive parts go off (on the inside) while Self witnesses the reactivity. But nobody else has to witness this, since it’s happening on the inside, in the safety of a bathroom or some other safe space. Then you can hear what those parts need from you, get clear if there’s a boundary that’s been violated by the one who upset you, and muster up the courage to try to restore your boundary- without blending with your reactive parts.
If you blend with reactive parts and get abusive with someone on the outside, you have allowed your own boundaries to collapse, and you have handed your agency to someone else, leaving you powerless and unboundaried. You can’t blame someone else for your boundarylessness, even if they’ve done something to make your parts legitimately upset. Their behavior may demand a response from you, but it’s possible to do it without abusive reactivity. If you’re screaming, name-calling, shaming someone, or otherwise causing harm with your words or your fists, this is your signal that you have to shore up your inner boundaries, perhaps by dialing the intimacy dial down a bit, so you are not as vulnerable to someone else’s irresponsible choices.
How Do You Set A Boundary With Yourself?
Many of our parts are young. They’re not adults. We set boundaries with our young indulgent, immature parts the same way good enough parents set boundaries with our kids. We don’t shame, bully, or humiliate them into good behavior. We reason with them, influence them, contain them, and try to help them understand why we impose the limits we do. Parts can be negotiated with, just like other people can be negotiated with. Here’s what that might look like.