Lack of boundaries, repairing and relearning

When there is trauma, there is rupture of boundaries.

Lack of boundaries often start early in life, from family conditioning and childhood trauma.

A child who grows up in an unpredictable environment, where caregivers have unstable emotions and behaviours, learn very early on to read the room, picking up on other people’s emotions and environmental cues of safety or the lack thereof.

Children from unstable environments tend to become the “grown ups” in the family. Trying to help the adults to feel better, so that the child themselves can finally feel cared for, protected and loved. This is a natural (unconscious) survival strategy. A way children find to self-protect. They attempt to prevent any melt down from adults and often try to be a very “good” boy/girl, pleasing the caregivers to promote peace in the home.

This of course is not the job of any child. Needless to say that it’s beyond their cognitive and emotional abilities to take responsibility for caregivers’ emotions and behaviours.

Later on, such children often become people pleasers, overly independent, finding it hard to ask for help, struggle to trust themselves and others and having trouble forming long-term healthy relationships.

Additionally, the early formed habit of reading the room, can then pass as intuition, psychic abilities, being an empath, and/or overly sensitivity to sensory stimuli, such as sounds, light, touch etc...

The good news is that as adults we can rewrite these unhelpful patterns, relearning boundaries. These ingrained behaviours are buried deep down in parts of the brain, that’s why talk therapy, although helpful, is often not enough to reach these deep areas of the brain and body/psyche.

We can improve these patterns and symptoms by:

• Working with the nervous system, releasing old fight/flight/freeze/shutdown incomplete responses. The responses the child were not able to act on is stored in the system until it can be processed.

• Repairing boundaries, somatically.

• Teaching the body to feel safe again.

• Disidentifying the parts of you that are identified with your caregivers.

• Strengthening your sense of self.

• Integrating your “Traumatised and Surviving parts”

There is hope. Please share this post with anyone who needs to know this.