The Boundary You May Not Realize You're Missing

The Importance Of Boundaries That Protect Other People From Your Lack Of Containment

Typically, when people talk about boundaries, especially with regard to the link between boundaries and physical or mental health, we understandably tend to think of how we can protect ourselves from other people, or external boundaries. Protecting our own boundaries and keeping our parts safe from boundaryless individuals is absolutely crucial and necessary for self care and self love. Boundaries are not walls, so it’s important to distinguish between boundaries that are porous, fluid and flexible, which let love, intimacy and feedback in, while keeping toxicity and abuse out.

But there’s another equally important kind of boundary we tend to talk about less, which are internal boundaries that protect other people from ourselves or protect us from taking in too much of other people. Internal boundaries could be broken down into subsets, like how we contain ourselves from spilling all over the place so we don’t indiscriminately crash through the boundaries of others. But also how we protect ourselves from letting too much of another person’s criticism or emotions bleed into our own energy field, self talk, or ideas about the world. Our internal boundaries might also help us discipline ourselves so we can keep our word- to ourselves- without bullying ourselves or indulging harsh, perfectionistic inner critic parts.

In her recovery work at The Meadows, Pia Mellody talks about two general kinds of boundary wounds- lack of protection and lack of containment. Lack of protection tends to put us at risk of being victimized, while lack of containment makes us more likely to perpetrate harm on someone else. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on the lack of containment wounding. It’s the “too much” kind of boundary, and those of you who feel like you trigger other people because you’re “too much” might know what I’m talking about here.

In The Intimacy Factor, Pia Mellody writes, “When we become boundaryless, we allow in too much from another person or send out too much from ourselves. We may be too loud, too sexual, too emotional, or too overwhelming with our opinions or learning. When we are sending out too much stuff and bombarding our partner, she becomes vulnerable, victimized, resentful, and miserable. We have broken through her safety zone and caused her discomfort and pain. On the other hand, when there is too much containment, we protect the self so carefully that nothing reaches us. We have constructed walls for boundaries and made ourselves invulnerable. Your partner might tell you he cannot trust you. You are unmoved. He touches you affectionately, and you have no reaction. He shares his opinions with you, and you seem not to have heard. You have gone and stepped out of relationship. Without outside intervention, such as seeing a therapist, there is no possibility of change. With walls for boundaries, there is no such thing as a relationship. Intimacy has been denied.”

Pia Mellody’s distinctions between internal and external boundaries are nuanced, and I don’t want to cross any boundaries by misquoting her, so you can read about these distinctions here. But regardless of semantics, let’s talk about how to protect other people from our violation of their boundaries.

Some people feel entitled to being too much, without regard for how our “too muchness” might land on other people. For example, I really love this article by Ev’Yan Whitney, I Am A “Too Much” Woman. This kind of entitlement to self-expression can be just the right medicine for those with the “not enough” wound who contain themselves too much and don’t give themselves permission to take up space or self express. But I suspect that women who feel like we’re “too much” might feel that way because we might be sometimes guilty of taking up more than our fair share of space. We quite literally are “too much” for some people, who have a right to feel that way.

The truth is that if we want to be healthy with our boundaries, we have to find the Goldilocks spot- not “too much,” not “not enough.” Because we’re not actually entitled to take up more space or intrude upon other people’s boundaries just because we’re “being ourselves.” It’s our responsibility to work on containment, just like it’s our responsibility to work on protecting ourselves from others who might be too intrusive, entitled, exploitative, or boundary violating.

I am particularly guilty of this kind of boundaryless spill- because of the spillage of my mother and how it normalized a lack of containment. This lack of containment wounding has been a major trailhead in my own IFS therapy- how to contain some of my parts that might take up too much space, be too intrusive, behave in ways that are too entitled, or have unreasonable expectations of both myself and others.

For example, my mother used to stay with my family for two months every winter after my father passed, and when she came, she quite literally took over the house. She was neurotically neat freak OCD on the one hand, but she was also guilty of boundaryless house sprawl. She was a scrapbooking aficionado, and this meant when she came, we lost the dining room table- because it became the hub of scrapbooking sprawl. She had her own room at our house- and she had a scrapbooking table we set up in there so she could scrapbook to her heart’s content without disturbing anyone. But she said she got lonely being all by herself, and she wanted to scrapbook where the action was. Thus the lost dining room table and the advent of eating on the sofa with food in our laps.

I didn’t even register this behavior as distressing. It’s how I grew up. But it made my partner absolutely batshit. He would (justifiably) be all over me to contain my mother, which I had no idea how to do. When she was with us, she would rearrange everything in our kitchen cabinets (she was “cleaning” them and “helping” us.) She would throw out whatever she thought we didn’t need without checking with us. (“Mom, where is my favorite pet lizard drawing?”) She would spill all of the family secrets she discovered while living with us and we’d read about ourselves in her tell-all Christmas letters, which she’d sent to all of my ex’es without asking me first. She would overdisclose things about me in front of my friends without any attunement to how it might land on me or my friends. This kind of lack of containment was my entire childhood, so for me, that’s just what mothers do. I had no idea how to protect myself.

Because things like this get passed down generationally, people tend to either mimic their parents or rebel and become just the opposite. So I’ve been given feedback by those who love me that I can be a bit like my mother sometimes. And that horrifies me, as much as I loved my mother!

So this post is for those of you who are more like me- or my mother. If you’re still working on taking up space, centering yourself, asking for what you need, and feeling entitled, in a healthy way, to self expression, this post if not so much for you, unless it’s to warn you of when you might swing too far in the opposite direction on your road to recovery or help you understand why some “too much” people might justifiably trigger you, the way my mother triggered my partner.

To help flesh out this idea, let’s unpack it and itemize how the “too much” wound might show up in a variety of unhealthily entitled ways- and how you can do learn to contain yourself or help someone you love contain themselves.