Why We Need To Learn More Nuance About Healthy Boundaries

The Prologue To My Latest Unpublished Book The Boundaries Handbook

          

*During the pandemic, I wrote two books I don’t feel called to publish the traditional way. The first is The Boundaries Handbook, a book about IFS-informed boundary negotiations and how to protect ourselves while also protecting the relationships we hold dear, thereby avoiding the “doormat to diva” way of setting boundaries that tends to alienate people we love. I’ll be drip feeding that book here for my paid subscribers who need support around healthy boundaries. Here’s a preview of the prologue, in case you need help with your boundaries or know someone who might.

Excerpt From The Boundaries Handbook:

If you didn't realize before 2020 that a lot of people struggle with their boundaries, you probably see it now. I was stunned at how obviously boundary wounded so many people were. Days before San Francisco locked down in March of 2020, I was dancing with my Sunday morning dance church and the leader told us we wouldn't be touching in today's dance. Six feet. That's how much space she wanted between us.

            After the dance, we sat six feet apart in a circle to process how that felt for people. Some people were livid and felt entitled to touch people, even as a pandemic was spreading. They were angry at the group leader. "How dare you tell us what we can and can't do. You're not the boss of me!" Others said it was the best dance they'd ever had. For the first time, they hadn't needed to fend off unwanted touch from groping boundaryless people who weren't asking for consent.

            I had just finished spending ten years researching healers from around the world for my book Sacred Medicine: A Doctor’s Quest To Unravel The Mysteries of Healing, and I was struck by the six feet boundary. When I asked healers who could "read" energy how big a healthy human energy field was, they mostly described a human "aura" as about three feet all around. Three feet to the left. Three feet to the right. Three feet up and down. Three feet in front and in back. In other words, six feet between us. But not everyone has a healthy energy field, they'd tell me. Some people have their energy field squished right up against their skin. Others hoard space and squeeze out everyone else, taking up the whole room.       

            I thought a lot about that six foot boundary as the pandemic unfolded and boundary wounded people rebelled against public health guidelines, our boundary wounded President lied time after time, boundary wounded celebrity doctors were spreading misinformation all over the internet for self-interested reasons, and all of us were struggling to know what's okay and what's not okay in a time of great peril.

            During this time, I had started a three-way text thread with two other doctors who become my most trusted allies during two of the most challenging years of my life. One of them was a front line Covid ER doctor getting pummeled, with no PPE to boundary him from a raging virus. The other was an Ivy League psychiatrist, swamped with psychiatric inpatients whose coping strategies were failing to work in the face of back to back personal and global traumas.  Not only did we compare notes and try to make sense of the world as the pandemic unfolded, social injustices flew to the forefront of our consciousness, and our country's democracy began to fall apart; we also talked a lot about relationships and how we struggled with boundaries in our romances, friendships, family life, and professional relationships because of our boundary wounding in childhood. 

            As the public struggled to keep a six foot boundary around us, as people rebelled against public health boundaries, lockdowns, masking, and vaccine mandates, as Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) protested having their boundaries repetitively violated by law enforcement, as conspiracy theories and political polarizations put further strains on our relationships, and as both of my friend's romances fell apart like so many others during this troubling time, our conversations became more intimate.

            Like the volleyball cum best friend the Tom Hanks character in the movie Castaway named "Wilson" when he was stranded on a deserted island, these two long distance doctors became my Wilson, a lifeline of survival, love, support, friendship, companionship, resourcing, education, news, humor, and entertainment- all via my iPhone. We were all stranded on our own deserted islands, and the phone gave us a kind of boundary to separate us enough to stay safe but also connect us enough to ease some of the loneliness and social isolation all three of us were experiencing.

Although I’m still very close with the front line Covid ER doctor, it was mostly me and the Ivy League psychiatrist, who was also a writer, doing most of the texting. After taking a day off his phone while dealing with Covid on the front lines from his position as an Emergency Room physician, the third party in our three-way joked that he had missed 383 texts between me and the psychiatrist! We were trying to make sense of the world, but we were also holding onto each other as if our lives depended upon it. As the psychiatrist watched one suicide attempt and overdose after another fill up the psych hospital, as suicidal children were waiting in ER's for weeks at a time, waiting for an inpatient psych bed, I realized that perhaps our lives did actually depend on each other.

            Over the course of our two years of pandemic texting, I had shared some vulnerable disclosures of my own personal story with the psychiatrist, but he had revealed very little about himself. He always seemed compassionate and kind, but also cool, reserved, stoic, and detached. So I mostly kept my most private feelings to myself- because he didn't seem particularly available to hear them or reciprocate with vulnerability of his own.

            Then in the summer of 2021, something shifted. After months of what was mostly heady, flowery, intellectual banter between two professional writers, the psychiatrist began to disclose some shockingly traumatic events that led to the dissolution of the romance he had just ended. He also started opening up about some very disturbing childhood traumas from his family of origin. When he began to tell me his stories, all of which were a surprise to me given that I had known him for years by this point but didn't know any of these stories, I dropped everything and made him the center of my full attention. He drip fed me these stories, text after text, paragraph after paragraph, all in written form, while I strung plumeria flowers into leis in Hawaii where I was teaching a Zoom workshop for doctors right after we all got vaccinated and Hawaii opened its doors. The scent of the flowers was a balm as I felt shock after shock as my friend disclosed the horrors of what had happened to him.

            This series of reveals went on for days, then weeks, then months, drip by drip, story by story, shock by shock. I cried a lot of empathic tears during those months as I heard about all the tragedy my beautiful friend had endured, and I began opening up more of my own stories to him too. Our third physician friend, who witnessed much of this text exchange from the sidelines, said "I feel like I'm watching the Williams sisters at a Wimbledon match, volleying back and forth. Lissa, you've met your match." That felt true to me. The psychiatrist could keep up with me in a way few men ever had. Both of us demonstrated great emotional endurance during that months long volley.

            Then one day, over the telephone, he said, "That's all. Now you know everything." We were exhausted, but the outpouring of love and intimacy between us had sustained us, like an energy transfusion. We were weary, but our hearts were full.

            I was stunned and felt enormously privileged to be trusted this much with stories so raw, precious, harrowing, and heart-breaking from someone who appeared so put together on the outside. I held onto those stories with kid gloves, and he held onto mine. Our stories needed a nest, someplace soft to land, in the heart of someone who could love the storyteller delicately. I was uncomfortably aware that he had just given me every bit of information I would need if I ever wanted to weaponize his vulnerability and use it against him- and vice versa. I set the intention to put a boundary around that possibility. It would be cruel to ever use his vulnerability against him the way others had done to me. His stories deserved a pillow of kindness and the protection of someone trauma-informed like me, but I had my dark side too. I didn't want my dark side to slip out sideways- like a fart- and stink bomb him. I hoped he would be equally tender and gentle with me. I risked trusting that he would.

            As part of that disclosure process, my friend said, "Obviously, I have a lot to learn about boundaries."

            I think I spit out my tea when he said that. It was the understatement of the year. He had allowed those close to him to try to kill him, to steal from him, to abuse him, to intrude upon his privacy in every possible way, to control everything from what he wore to what hotel he could stay in to how he spent his money to how he told his story. He let his girlfriend read his emails and texts and didn't protest when he found out she had blocked the mother of his children and important business colleagues from his phone and email so they couldn't contact him. He even let his abusive girlfriend coerce him into breaking contact with his kids, who he loved. Like cult leaders do, any relationship that she perceived as a threat to her domination was serially destroyed. If anyone needed to learn a thing or two about boundaries, it was the Ivy League psychiatrist. I could sense maybe a glimmer of embarrassment around that hole in his extensive and impressive education, but his drive to learn, grow, and heal- and his profound humility- shone through any emotions that might have silenced his curiosity.

            I confessed that he wasn't the only boundary wounded trauma survivor. I'd had crappy boundaries for most of my life, and I had been in therapy on and off since my twenties. But it wasn't until I got into the best trauma therapy of my life after my mother died in 2017 that I started to learn a thing or two about healthy boundaries. I think my therapist must have seen me as someone hemorrhaging through the holes in my boundaries, so the first thing she did was put a few quick stitches in the gaping wounds. But the process of actually helping me restore my own ability to protect myself from abusive, ruthless, exploitative, and unkind people- and to contain myself within my own boundary and protect others from me hurting them in return- took much longer. I only recently terminated my treatment because my beloved therapist got sick, so it took six years.

            My friend said, "Can you give me the Cliff Notes and tell me what you've learned?"

            It felt like such a tender and vulnerable question, and I held the question for a while, like a prayer. Here was this psychiatrist practicing at the most highly respected academic medical institution in the world, and he was asking me the most basic question about the very foundation of our mental health- our right to a safe, protected, individuated personhood deserving of being treated with kindness, dignity, and respect. If an Ivy League psychiatrist didn't know anything about boundaries, how could the rest of us ever be expected to get this right?

            I realized, with a sense of awe, that I had learned a lot about boundaries in the trauma treatment I’d received since my mother had died. As a gift to my friend, I decided to sit down and write what I had learned. Most of what I wrote poured out of me as a labor of love in one tireless month, and then I spent the next few months adding bits and bobs here and there as I reflected on the nuances of such a complex topic. I never intended for anyone else to read it. This was a labor of love for my friend. He was my muse for what came out, and it was very personal.

            I had my own selfish reasons for wanting to communicate to him what I had learned in therapy, because I was growing very attached to him, and I wanted to protect us both and make sure our attachment to each other was reasonably safe. I had already worked very hard on healing the traumas that wounded my boundaries in early childhood. After a lifetime of being groomed to tolerate abuse, prioritizing everyone else's needs above my own, and martyring myself in the name of "unconditional love," my friend was right. I had been gifted a huge blessing in therapy when it comes to boundaries, and I was uncomfortably aware of what a privilege it was to be able to afford all that therapy and have access to some of the best therapists on the planet because of my position as a public figure.

            As a result of all that hard and often painful inner work examining my own shadow and realizing that I had been an active participant in creating abusive dynamics when I had previously cast myself as the helpless, powerless victim, I had changed the very foundation of who I am and how I show up in relationships. I learned in therapy how to increase my self awareness so I could recognize what I needed, vulnerably ask for what I need, communicate my desires and fears, say no when necessary and mean yes when I say it, protect myself with care for my own wellbeing from those who might try to overpower or exploit me, and contain myself so as not to overpower or exploit someone else. I am definitely still a work in progress, and learning good boundaries will likely be a lifelong effort I will never fully achieve, but I am 90% better than I was right after my mother died.

            I realized as my intimate friendship with the psychiatrist was flourishing that, as much as he might know intellectually about mental health, the reality was that, because of his trauma history and through no fault of his own, he was at a disadvantage in our relationship. I sincerely wanted to equalize the playing field. I realized that in order to be safely close to me without me bulldozing right through his boundaries, my friend would need to learn how to communicate with me what's okay and what's not okay in a kind, gentle, and respectful way. He had revealed enough about his former relationships to demonstrate to me how compliant he was when he was attached to someone. I wasn't even sure I could trust him to give me true consent if I asked him for anything. Would his yes be a real yes? Could he say no to me and trust that I wouldn't abandon or attack him if he didn't do what I wanted? As his attachment to me grew, would he feel safe enough to disappoint me, or would he only appease and accommodate me like he had done with others who had not wished him well?

            I was already saying no and protesting when he sometimes plowed through my boundaries like an earnest golden retriever puppy who doesn't understand the impact of his big paws. But if he couldn't do the same with me, we would have a hard time in the dance of intimacy without one of us taking the lead and the other following. I didn't want to lead or follow. Been there, done that. So had he. We all know that way of relating might be intoxicating for a while, but ultimately, it fails to satisfy our craving to truly know and be known in a way that allows us to accept one another at the deepest level without failing to hold each other accountable for the ways we hurt each other.

            Because I cared so much about protecting our growing attachment to each other, I was highly motivated to respond to his vulnerable question about what I had learned about boundaries. The two of us had something precious and largely unfamiliar to me. We had great potential in the way we related to each other, but there was still room for us to grow. His expertise in the psychiatrist's gift of holding space and co-regulation helped me heal some of the wounds my therapy with women therapists couldn't touch. His attunement to me, his ability to witness and mirror and validate my feelings and my stories the way my parents never could, his willingness to say "I'm sorry" when he accidentally hurts me, his desire not to hurt me in the first place, and his tolerance for rupture and repair with me when I got upset with him- without defensiveness, denial, withdrawal, attack, or emotional stonewalling- was unprecedented in my relationships with men. I had never met a man who could listen generously without interrupting me, avoid cutting me off with his own defensiveness, and withhold any temptation he might have to argue with me, attack me, silence me, gaslight me, deny my feelings or otherwise interfere with our ability to quickly and easily repair when I felt my boundaries were getting overstepped with him. I didn't expect anyone not to make mistakes in my relationships with them. I just wanted to trust that we could heal the micro-ruptures so they didn't become macro-ruptures that threatened to destroy the trust and intimacy we had worked hard to earn with one another.

            As masterful as he was at holding space for me when I got upset, I also wanted to trust that he would confront me if I overstepped bounds with him too, and I did not yet trust that he would do this or even know how to do so. How could I know if the reason he was so kind with me when I was upset with him was a side effect of his boundary wounding? Maybe he felt just as enraged, defensive, and hostile towards me when I protested what I considered mistreatment but he wasn't saying so. How could I be sure he hadn't just learned how to appease and calm down women who were freaking out as an adaptation to protect even the most unhealthy attachment in a boundaryless and appeasing way?

            Whether it was healthy and reciprocal or not, something about this relationship with the psychiatrist was touching something deep within me. They say that wounds that happen in relationship must be healed in relationship. Something about my friendship with him was healing something in my relationships with men, starting with my physician father, that no other relationship had been able to heal.

            My therapist expressed awe in her experience of witnessing my dance of intimacy with the psychiatrist, which included bringing him to therapy with me a few times.

            "It feels like love," she said, time and time again.

            It felt like love to me too, and because he was too boundary wounded and early in his recovery from an abusive relationship to even consider dating anyone, it was a different kind of love than I had experienced with men before. In the Internal Family Systems (IFS) world, which is the trauma healing method my therapist practices with me, there's a light-hearted term "tor-mentor." A good "tor-mentor" is someone who mentors you by tormenting you. A good tor-mentor doesn't literally abuse you. We should boundary against those people! Instead, a good tor-mentor triggers you, and in doing so, reveals to you trailheads for traumatized "parts" of us that still need healing. The psychiatrist was a good tor-mentor for me, my therapist reflected back to me.

She was right. I was learning so much about myself and retrieving hurt, lost, and exiled parts of my being that were the result of my lifetime of boundary wounding. I was doing the same for him. We were serving as benchmarks for each other's healing, and there was something magnificent and spectacular about it, even though it was frequently emotionally intense, not always easy, and felt a bit like climbing Mount Everest.

            I craved a truly equal relationship with my friend, but I realized that his boundary wounding left him with a kind of unfair handicap.  I wanted my friendship with the psychiatrist to be one for the ages, a lifelong closeness that would stand the test of time and not be interrupted by future romances we might both have. I knew he wanted that too. Without healthy, relational, two-way boundaries, I knew that potential would never be realized. In the absence of good boundaries on both sides of our relationship, I knew what would inevitably happen. We were two powerful doctors and authors. One of us would wind up overpowering the other, whether we intended to or not. I didn't want to wind up in a power struggle with him. The game of power is a zero sum game. Even the winners lose. I wanted a whole new game. Although our hearts are strong and open with each other, the absence of good boundaries could only end one of two ways- with broken hearts or closed hearts. I wanted the power of love, the game that has no losers, and I wanted it with him. 

            What ensued were hours of boundary negotiations between us as I sat under the Golden Gate Bridge on my iPhone, using our relationship as a laboratory for exploration, discovery, modeling, and healing. Then I'd get off the phone and write about what I had just tried to model for him. Our relationship provided exactly the fodder I needed to crystallize what I wanted to share with him, as if orchestrated by a Divine symphony composer. Even if I were writing our love story as fiction, I couldn't have made up the way our reality unfolded in the Fall of 2021. Nobody would have ever believed me if I had tried to explain it, so I won't even try to make sense of the mystery.

            But looking back, I see that we were being guided, as if held in Great Arms of Love as we both tried to hold our own and each other's trauma histories with mutual delicacy. I realize now that my therapist gave me a great treasure, and this gave me the power to stop feeling like a victim and start being more proactive about making sure I stayed safe in relationships- and that others were safe to risk the tango of real intimacy with me too. Those teachings were a priceless gift I'll never be able to repay. But I could pay it forward.

So I wrote the psychiatrist a "how to" guidebook. It's the rule book I kept begging my therapists to steer me towards, but which nobody else has written in quite this way. All the other books I had read about boundaries let me down. They were helpful, sure. But some of them were mostly about how to teach disempowered victims how to overpower and dominate their abusers, from doormat to diva, using the boundary as a kind of weapon that might save your life but is likely to destroy the potential for any real intimacy. Others were more nuanced but still gave us rule books and communication scripts to memorize, most of which flies out the window when we're triggered. I wanted to write something that could actually begin to help heal the boundary wounding in the first place, at least cognitively, which is a useful first step in the recovery process, even if it’s not always sufficient on its own.

             I never intended to send this to a publisher, but on a whim, I sent it to my literary agent Michele, who asks to read everything substantial I might read. She read it and said, "This is not just for the psychiatrist. This is for me. This is for all of us. And I didn't feel a lick of judgment from you as you wrote it. I felt every ounce of love and care in your delivery of what could have been triggering information but wasn't triggering to me at all. On the contrary, I felt enlightened by it. I could feel your love for the psychiatrist in every nuance, and because of that, I could feel your love for me and every other person who will ever read this book. You've just written the book I've needed to read my whole life. You have to get this to all the rest of us whose boundaries were wounded in childhood."

            I thought about it, and to demonstrate good boundaries, I asked the psychiatrist if it would be okay to tell our story, and he said yes. And so, dear reader, I pay it forward- to you. I’ll be sharing the first part of the first chapter in the next installment.

*The photo is from a hiking trail just above my house with my dog Gaia who we call “Moose.” Since this newsletter is called The Body Is A Trailhead, I feel inspired to share photos of some of the gorgeous Northern California trails with you all.