knowing your boundaries :: freedom is waiting

Editor's Note: during the month of June, members of my Story Sessions community will be posting about what it means to pursue dreams, engage in self-care and practice active boundaries. They had free reign on what they wrote, and the topics come from my 30 Days of Prompts. I'm so excited about the wisdom these ladies will share with you, and I know you'll be inspired. Note - today's post may hold trigger warnings for physical and emotional abuse. Proceed with caution if those upset you.

xoxo,

Elora Nicole

//

I didn't always know what boundaries were.

 Not the relational kind, anyway.  Up until a few years ago, if I ever used the phrase "personal space," it was only to be ironic.

Probably because I didn't know what personal space was.  Probably because, in the house I grew up in, there were no boundaries.

Instead, my entire life lay open to my parents.  The kind of enforced openness that violates.  Nothing was sacred.  Nothing was my own.

In that house, a closed door meant nothing.  On more than one occasion, my parents threatened to remove the door entirely from my room. 

A differing opinion was a betrayal.

As a child, I told my father that I did not believe he was telling the truth about a certain situation and received a palm cracking across my cheek. 

I was taught to ignore my emotions, and any expression of independence was severely squashed.  The result was that I was unable to think for myself, unable to dream.  To have my own identity was a sin.

My achievements were only valued in how they made my parents appear.  My purpose in life, it was made clear, was to be quiet and to make them feel good about themselves. Whenever I stumbled, I paid for the embarrassment it cost them. 

My mother thought my father loved me too much, with a wrong kind of love.  She envied me.  I only wished to be left alone, to be given a space that I was denied.

My body was not respected.  Together, my parents regularly pushed, punched, slapped, and kicked me around my bedroom at night.  At the end of the ordeal, nearly every surface, shelf, and drawer would have been emptied onto the floor, and I would shiver in the dark amidst the mess that I was not allowed to clean up.  Tough love, my father called it.

And I believed him, believed them both. 

I believed that it was okay for these two people to treat me in this way.

I thought that I deserved it.  I thought that if anyone was in the wrong, it was me.

I thought that I was bad.  I thought I was a problem.  The problem.

I won't pretend -- sharing these ugly details of my growing up time scares me.  I tremble at what it might mean to shed light on these too dark years.

But I share it anyway in the hope that maybe the one who needs to will recognize her story in my own and feel that powerful, healing knowing begin to reverberate strength back into her brittled bones -- the truth that she is not alone.

And if that is you, you must also know that it is not okay for you to be treated like this.  It is not okay to have your identity, your very self, eaten up to ease another person's insecurity or pain or brokenness. 

It is not okay if your body or your belongings are regularly mistreated.

It is not okay if your ears are constantly filled with only the wrong sort of words.

It is not okay if you are unable to have your own opinions or thoughts or feelings or plans or dreams.

No matter what they or he or she may tell you, this is not normal, not healthy.

And, if this is your story, if this is or was your truth . . . you need to know that you are not bad.  You are not a problem, or the problem.  It is not your fault.  You deserved better.

There is a term for a family without boundaries, a family in which the self is suffocated and a single identity is meant to fit more than one individual -- enmeshed.

Boundaries are an impossibility in an enmeshed relationship.  And when boundaries are missing, growth and personhood and hope die, and are too easily replaced by depression and despair and disease. 

But if this is your story . . . this does not have to be where it ends. 

You can find freedom.  You can find hope.  You can still find the person who you were forced to stop becoming. 

You can.  You can, sweet one.

I am.  The progress toward my self and the healing from my boundary-less childhood has been a slow and difficult march, but my heart is being transformed.  The One Who Wants To is repaying me for the years that the locusts have eaten.  While that does not make the deficit I experienced hurt any less, it does give the hurt meaning, and that in turn lends me strength and returns my hope.

I am healing.  Let us heal together, friends.

So shout your rebellious words.  Launch upon your own adventure.  Experiment, create, as much as possible.  Recruit a therapist that you love, if you can.  Feel all of the feelings, even the hard ones.  Express with abandon.  Let loose your tied down hair and let the wind style it wild.  And please, please, if you can and as you can, tell your story, too. 

Freedom is waiting. 

//

Beth is a wife, mama, artist, writer, stillbirth survivor, recovery warrior, photographer, dog wrangler, word devourer, & Jesus lover (not necessarily in that order), writing about finding beauty and truth among the thorny tangles of life at www.bethmorey.com. She is the artist behind Epiphany Art Studio, where she creates healing mixed media artwork (www.epiphanyartstudio.etsy.com).