Boundaries between you and others

MakersDozn wrote:Because our sense of self is so fragile that we need some sense of who we are as individuals. For us the trigger of not being able to tell ourselves apart is also a reminder of not knowing the boundaries between us and the people who traumatized us.

Selfhood is everything. Self is at the heart, the center circle, of the Circles of Trust. If you don't have a sense of self, what do you have to build on?

MDs

The MDs wrote this in the "More than one version of me?" post. https://www.psychforums.com/dissociative-identity/topic215864-10.html .

It made me think about something my T said a while back; that wrapping a blanket around yourself helps to feel the boundaries of your body: where you end.
She was also quite surprised that I sometimes feel feelings outside of my body, just in space somewhere...
Does anyone share experiences like this? Is it inherent to dissociation?

I generally feel a lot more derealization than depersonalization, so generally I do have pretty good body awareness. And yet I do need more "input" than others seem to need, in order to continue to feel like that. I use blankets, a brush to run over skin, exercizing that involves sudden pressure (e.g. from falling) and body tension to sort of keep the body awareness constant.

So, somehow I am confused about the boundaries of the body.

Hi fireheart....

We're glad that our post was helpful.

To clarify, while we certainly experience issues with physical boundaries, we were mainly referring to relational boundaries in our original post. We grew up developing zero interpersonal skills, and we didn't know what a healthy relationship was. We didn't know what we "owed" people in a relationship, nor what we had a right to expect from them. Our best guess was, respectively, everything and nothing.

Only during our healing journey (1996-present) have we begun to deal with these issues. It's painful challenging old assumptions, but we're better off for doing so.

MDs

we used to struggle with feeling the body boundaries. We did a lot of crazy workout to help us feel the body. and we used to be super sensitive to the emotions of others, almost like those could just come wash into our being.
I kind of believe that a lot of the emotional stuff got better as we learned how to be ourselves separate from other people. and distance ourselves from the responsibility for their emotion.
the body stuff is having a breakthrough right now. with the body work exercises we go all the time the body awareness now starts to stick and it is spreading. so its not for the whole body all the time but when we do our exercises and for most of the day. our solution is so boring. we do orientation and grounding until we can stand it anymore.
one of the basic ideas is that we are probably doing some kind of structural dissociation there, separating from the body, so the path has to be one of integration of body awareness back to the person. that is why all the DBT skills and the sports don't help for long, they just bridge the gap for a short time, they don't create capacity for being more integrated with the body. well, at least that is the theory.

birdsong87 wrote: we used to be super sensitive to the emotions of others, almost like those could just come wash into our being.[...]I kind of believe that a lot of the emotional stuff got better as we learned how to be ourselves separate from other people. and distance ourselves from the responsibility for their emotion.

This really resonates with us. One of Charity's biggest concerns is her own tendency to be super-sensitive to others' emotions, to the point where she loses all sense of boundary between herself as an individual and the person(s) originating the emotions. Learning to maintain some distance--perhaps as the "observer" that you so often blog about--would be a big help for her/us toward resolving this issue.

Thanks,

Mary and Allegra

it probably sounds weird, but I don't think it was the distant observer that did the trick for us.
as far as I can see it, it was allowing ourselves to become angry in response to other peoples feelings. screw the empathy. the anger says: this is your problem, I hate that you bother me with it. I want that feeling stuff to go back to you where it belongs. So I will raise a boundary here and you and your feelings stay out. trespassers will be eaten

birdsong87 wrote:So I will raise a boundary here and you and your feelings stay out. trespassers will be eaten

Here's how we handled this in a similar way. Our apartment complex has a laundry room. Prior to living in this complex we lived in apartments in private homes, and we had to go to a public laundromat. Laundromats always posted signs saying that if a customer leaves completed laundry in a machine and another customer needs to use the machine, the second customer has every right to move the first customer's laundry out of the machine and into one of the carts provided.

So at our current place, the laundry room has five drivers, four of which have a long cycle and one which has a short cycle. All of the dryers are hotter than what we're used to, even on low. So we always use the short-cycle dryer.

One night that dryer was full after completing someone's load, and we had no way of knowing when the person would return. So we did what would be considered normal in any other laundromat that we've known.

Well, no sooner had we cleared out the dryer than the other person showed up and had a whole herd of cows, ripping into us and saying that now she had to re-wash everything. We refused to engage with her. When she saw that we weren't apologizing, or even reacting, she lit into us again and we replied, "I'm not going to take on your anger."

Well, long story short, she did re-wash her laundry, but by the time ours was dry, she'd had a chance to go back to her apartment and vent to her teenage children, who'd replied, "Mom, it's only laundry." She later apologized for yelling at us, and we told her that we indeed could have waited, and that we would not make the mistake of touching anybody else's laundry again.

We felt good about not taking on her anger, though.

MDs