Learn to Set Clear Boundaries
{35 minutes}
Learn to Set Clear Boundaries
Remembering how to say Stop!
In our research, we note a relationship between certain symptoms/ dis-eases, and lack of boundary clarity. Migraines, fibromyalgia, and auto-immune difficulties often correlate with challenges around boundary clarity. At an existential level, boundary clarity is about knowing what is mine, and what is yours. It is about knowing where I end, and where you begin. There is a particular defensive response that complicates this knowing. And in our research, the emergence of a correlation between this defensive response (the fawn response) and the afore-mentioned symptoms (migraines, fibromyalgia, auto-immune difficulties) is becoming more evident.
The fawn response, which, interestingly, is more common in women than men, involves using elements of our social engagement (Connection Systems) to turn towards a threat and disarm it. It is a hybrid neural platform, a threat response that utilizes social circuitry to disarm something dangerous. In her research on this response, Dr. Shelley Taylor suggests that the origins of this response, for women, exist in the biological paradox of having to defend children from violent males. If a woman has children, particularly if they are young, and their father threatens violence, the traditional defensive responses are not viable because they will not protect the children. A woman cannot escape, because she can’t carry her children with her and successfully run away. If she fights and is overpowered, the children may not survive. If she shuts down, again, the children won’t survive. So there was an evolutionary imperative for women, dealing with dangerous men, to learn how to disarm us by turning toward us. Unfortunately, while this solves survival problems, it is costly in other ways. The way that it is most costly is in terms of the loss of clarity about who is who, and where the edges of you end, and me begin.
In a way, developing the habit of turning towards a threat is a kind of splitting. In order to turn on biological circuitry designed to function when you feel safe during actual danger, there is a part of you that you have to veil or suppress. It requires that you not know part of yourself in order to function. In much the same way that to perform whiteness requires a doubleness (the knowing/ not knowing of white privilege, supremacy, and violence) the fawn response likewise requires a doubleness. I must know/ not know that you are a threat, because if I feel the threat biology strongly enough, I won’t be able to turn toward you. This creates the problematic habit of placing attention externally on disarming threat, rather than attending interoceptively to one’s own interior, where the response is actually happening. When people enact this defensive platform, there is a characteristic mis-direction of attention.
This creates problematic and seemingly paradoxical behavior. To be frank, we notice it most consistently in white women. I was standing not long ago in line outside a bakery in Stinson Beach, a tiny coastal town in Northern California, near where we live. It was very early on a spring morning, the sun was just rising, and I had come to be alone by the water. Stinson Beach has a local population, but also a fair number of tourists. I was giving very clear bodily signals that I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The white woman in front of me in line, who seemed like a tourist, kept orienting her body to try to line up with me, and I stepped back several times and turned slightly away. I’m not a person who does this, but if I carried a phone around with me, this is the moment I would have started staring into it. There was a clear sense that she needed or wanted something from me, that she was requesting my engagement with her to calm herself down. She was in her sixties, I’m guessing. I ignored her. At a certain point she began talking about how much she liked a ring I was wearing. I hadn’t said anything to her. I nodded slightly. I wasn’t trying to make her uncomfortable, but I wasn’t interested in accommodating this behavior. At this point she took two quick steps toward me, and literally tried to grab the hand with the ring.
This story will be familiar to most people of color, because that movement, in the opposite direction of what was appropriate, is the same movement that motivates white folk to try to touch black children’s hair. Instead of attending to her own discomfort, her own anxiety, and settling herself, she was trying to use me to regulate her own emotions. The distortional logic here is something like–If I can calm him down, I’ll feel better. The cure, for that lady, is to learn how to down-regulate her own anxiety. I have no idea what it was that made her nervous. I wasn’t standing close to her. I wasn’t being hostile. I was just making it clear that I didn’t want to engage. Rather than respect this boundary, her immediate and irrepressible urge was to violate it. When I pulled my hand back and gave her very clear boundary-setting eye contact, she recoiled as if bitten. I hadn’t physically responded other than pulling away, I hadn’t taken one step towards her, all I had done was stopped her with my eyes, but I assure you that she felt attacked. I could see it.
For me, as a white man, there was no cost in this interaction beyond my irritation. But people of color are having the police called on them for stuff like this all the time. That white lady’s lack of boundary clarity, her lack of ability to self-regulate, will cause her neuroception to be faulty, and she will predictably mis-perceive my response, which would have come at great cost if I were a person of color. People of color who do not cooperate and appease white folk often end up in jail or worse. The failure to collaborate with a white woman who wants to be appeased could be death. It has been for centuries. This form of physiological servitude–of having to perform, to accommodate–of being deprived the sovereignty of choosing how to deploy one’s attention is an on-going artifact of white supremacy, a form of enslavement still alive and well. While the cost to people of color is evident, what I want to turn attention back to here is the cost to white people themselves, for this same response pattern is making us very sick.
Misplaced survival energy has to go somewhere. Karin Locher, a founder of Spatial medicine, reminds us that cancer is a verb. What is an auto-immune disorder, other than an immune system that can no longer differentiate what is part of me and what is not? At its most existential layer, our immune system is what differentiates what is part of me from what isn’t. If I can’t tell that, how will my immune system be able to? As the white lady reaches toward me rather than calming herself, she is enacting a failure to understand the difference between she and I. She is trying to exert control over something that is not within the domain of her control (me). Does it not make sense to you that her immune system might not be able to tell the difference between what is and what isn’t her? 21.5 million Americans suffer from auto-immune disorders. These are disorders where the immune system turns on itself, starts attacking itself. What do you think this means? In addition, according to research by the Migraine Research Foundation, in the US, 28 million women suffer from migraines. 85% of chronic migraine sufferers are women. 3 million people suffer from fibromyalgia. What if all of these disorders are being systematically mis-diagnosed? Doctors often point to the genetics of these diseases and point out that they run in families. Yet trauma-coping mechanisms also run in families. Defensive threat response patterns run in families. We are acculturated, in families, to respond to threats in particular ways.
Developing boundary clarity is about learning to tune into and experience, at a visceral level, the direct energy of the defensive responses. If your response to stress is to become controlling of others, or if you have a hard time getting in touch with your own anger, there is likely an opportunity for you to do some work here. With defensive responses, we want to be able to feel the survival energy directly. Much of the time, the way that we cope with these energies is beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, shaped by our early familial experiences, as well as our acculturation and socialization within the various community and cultural milieus in which we are situated. If I can’t feel angry, if I can’t get in touch with anger at a biological level, it is an indicator that I’m doing something at a biological level to inhibit that response. If, as a child, it wasn’t safe for me to be angry–if, for example, I grew up with a violent father, I may have learned at an embodied level that it was too costly to experience that state, and consequently permanently taken it off the menu. Although it is painful and frightening to confront and address this, the cost of not doing so is likely greater.
When I was studying Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing modality, the section on the fight response was fascinating. Our instructor, Steven Hoskinson, taught in a way that was remarkably experiential. Several days into the training, I started to notice that everyone was pissed off. Groups of normally studious and agreeable trainees had neared the point of rebellion. Everyone was filled with complaint about Steve. He was pissing all of us off. I remember realizing, all of a sudden, that he was creating a safe enough space for us to get in touch with our fight responses, and all of us were directing them at him. Here, many years later, a deep bow, Sir. It’s one thing to allow anger to come up toward someone, and another thing entire to express it. Steve sat there, smiling, standing in for all of our dads, yet unlike them allowing us to point our anger at him. For me, despite my social location, my childhood experience was one where my father, who was young when he had me, was himself still angry about a lot of things, and this anger wasn’t tempered with skill. In my house, growing up, my dad got to be angry, my mom was an appeaser, and us kids could be angry at mom, but not dad. My dad couldn’t receive our anger without reacting. If you got angry at him, he got angrier back at you. And although he wasn’t physically violent, he was bigger, and unpredictable when angry. It frightened me. When I was putting all of this together I had studied meditation for many years without realizing I was using it for state regulation, self-hypnotically, to re-purpose energy I couldn’t metabolize. Allowing myself to actually feel angry was terrifying to me. I was a meditator, a calm dude, a peaceful guy. This identity prop conveniently allowed me to not have to address the core of the physiological dysregulation I was carrying.
One day, shortly after the training about the fight response, I was driving on a windy two-lane road near my house when a dump truck came up behind me. The speed limit was 35, and I was doing the limit. The road was filled with switchbacks. I increased my speed a bit–now I was close to 40–and the driver behind pressed forward. Had I hit the breaks he would have slammed into the back of my car. There was so little space between us that I couldn’t pull off the road, and I couldn’t believe how aggressively he was driving. In the rearview I couldn’t see the driver, only the front bumper of the truck looming over me. I felt something building in me, a heat, an expansion, as this happened. At a biological level, the fight response is all about being able to successfully defend our space. Here was a biological encroachment. My heart began to pound. My hands got hot. He followed me like this for about three miles, winding through switchbacks. I had to regulate my breathing so that I didn’t pass out. The energy and heat built in me, stronger and stronger, fiercer and fiercer, until my entire body was shaking as I gripped the wheel. My arms and legs were pulsing. We went up and over a small mountain, winding down, him riding my tail the whole time, and I felt, deep within my throat, a yell beginning to materialize. At first it was vague, just an intimation of voice, but once we crested the ridge it began to solidify into a ball in my throat. It got clearer and stronger and more concrete, falling into rhythm with the pulse of my body. I was awake and shaking with anger, and clear. As we reached the valley, I braked quickly and the truck driver slammed on his brakes, stopping inches from the back of my car. I threw open the car door, wheeled around–I can feel it now as I write this– felt the ground beneath me, met the driver’s eyes, and in one coordinated movement roared at him, with all of my might, as I pushed my hands away from my body, BACK THE FUCK OFF!
What I think, in retrospect, was biologically important, was the way that he reacted. As I gestured and yelled, the man, sitting high up in the truck above me responded as if I’d physically shoved him across the room. His body recoiled and his head struck the back of the seat rest and bounced off. I pinned him with my eyes, and in that moment felt, flowing back into me, the biological energy of the ability to set a boundary, to defend my space. The truck driver apologized, he said whatever he had to say, but it didn’t really matter, because what had been liberated in me had very little to do with him beyond the visceral response. I got back in the car, and noted that he waited a good count of five before starting up again. I drove the rest of the way home, with plenty of space behind me, and although it was about noon, fell asleep for several hours. I was exhausted. When I woke up, I had a biological response back on my menu that I hadn’t had since childhood. That experience, of reclaiming my fight response, was worth the three year tuition of the course by itself.
I want to acknowledge here, again, my privileged social location as a white man, in relationship to this story. Had I been a woman, had I been a black man, or had I been a black woman, the interaction with the truck driver might have gone very differently. There are reasons of safety why some groups don’t express anger. What I want to assert here, without asserting that I know what it looks like, is the physiological need for all of us, in all locations, to have these responses back on the menu for our well-being. In our research, we have teams that are working on mapping this out in different communities. What does this look like, this kind of self-care, in the African-American community, for example. What are the specific ways that Black folks have been forced to accommodate, been socialized in this country, and what does it take to reclaim these responses physiologically? Some of this work we can do as a multi-cultural community, and it involves de-centering hegemonic structures at a felt level, a visceral level. Yet some of it is also work that needs to be done in caucus, in our communities. We, as white people, are in certain ways too systematically unsafe to support our brothers and sisters of color in some of these places. Yet this work needs to be done. Some of it is work that we need to do as white folk, and or as men, so as not to burden women with facets of our violence. Some of it is work that our sisters must do. As a white man, I’m not equipped to know what this work is like for a Black man, because I’ll never face the same social realities or have to navigate the same dangers. I can be an ally in that work, I can be in solidarity with it, but I’ll never really know it in my bones. But it is essential work. What I am sure of is that part of our healing requires that we create safe enough spaces–even if they are only islands right now–to allow these biological energies through. This is an explicit purpose of our courses. We watch it save and extend lives every day. We have the honor of watching people reclaim safety. A truly embodied sense of safety is itself the medicine.
Related Practices:
This is such a deep practice for creating more sovereignty in our lives. It is related to the practice of F*ck No, which is part of Coming out of Appease. In terms of self-reclaiming, see Core Neurobiological Self. Often, learning boundary setting brings us directly into the territory of grief, because learning boundary setting is connected to boundary violation. See Allow Yourself to Grieve. See Grief Tending. See Apprentice to Grief, see Descent. Regarding setting strong boundaries, see Coming out of Fight. See Boxing. For further exploration of emotions related to boundary-setting, see The Importance of Disgust and Working with Betrayal and Other Emotions that You Don't Want to Feel. See Dismantling the Construct of War. See 3 Steps: Assess, Down-Regulate, Connect. See Tracking. See The Science of Safety. See Turning on the Connection System.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.