Setting healthy boundaries with the people around us is synonymous with mental health. A way to feel more assertive in the face of emotional blackmail and any form of psychological manipulation.
Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.
Last update: February 18, 2022
Establishing healthy, clear and precise boundaries is tantamount to maintaining good mental health. Not only that: our interpersonal relationships will improve, making it clear what is and what is not acceptable to us. This daily exercise also allows you to make clear your identity, your values ​​and to exercise highly effective assertiveness, with which you can feel safe in any situation.
Now, remember that personal limits are a two-way street. When others identify and understand our direction, the rest will follow its path with millimeter respect. However, as we all know, this is not always the case.
Whether we like it or not, there will always be that profile capable of invading the spaces of others and questioning psychological and emotional frontiers. For this reason, it is not enough just to delimit those personal barriers, it is also necessary to know how to keep them in place, essential for the rest of the investments in our mental health to bear fruit.
This is precisely what Edward T. Hall and Robert Sommer explained. These anthropologists and psychiatrists were among the pioneers of the study of personal space. Their research, which began in 1969, already speaks to us of those limits within which a person moves and in which something more than a physical territory inhabits.
It is a place where we feel physically, mentally and emotionally protected, a refuge where no one can hurt us with their comments or behaviors. Yet, as important as it seems to us, these experts have revealed that borders are often drawn in our daily life, barriers that we do not always protect with the attention and resources necessary to avoid falling. Let's see how to do it.
Good fences make good neighbors.
-Robert Frost-
4 strategies for setting healthy boundaries
1. Honesty: the oxygen of healthy boundaries
Honesty is an attitude driven by the intention of truth and transparency. Nothing is so necessary to arrive at solid and safe personal limits to include in our personal drawer of conduct or dispositions. To do this, we must take into account the following points:
- The impossibility of establishing healthy borders if not we make it clear in advance that violating you will have consequences. For example, in a romantic relationship, the partner must understand that if it undermines our self-esteem, our values ​​and our dignity, that bond will break down.
- We try to be consistent. It is difficult to pretend that others do not violate our borders when we first do not do so or that they do not get lost when the sanctions we impose are not proportionate to the actions they perpetrate.
- Being honest also implies the ability to maintain a balance between what you say and what you do, between what you ask for and what you offer.
At the same time, healthy borders they require enforcement and protection work. It is not worth giving up, it is not worth leaving open a crack through which blackmail can penetrate and sneak that request to which we will say "yes" rather than a dry "no".
2. Establish healthy boundaries against micro-aggression
Micro-aggressions are like drops of cyanide in which we end up diluting our daily life almost without realizing it. We refer to the sarcastic phrase of a friend, to a macho but "funny" comment, with which he ends up laughing; is that joke disguised as affection we make to our partner or even that comment of our mother that does nothing but judge us ...
All of these examples are actually the subtle stings of everyday microaggression. If we want to review those little shocks one after the other, those little thorns that sting us every other day, there will also come a time when the pain will make its appearance and so will the wound.
We must not allow it: it is necessary to establish healthy and solid boundaries, through which aggressions cannot penetrate, regardless of the extent of the same.
3. We are responsible for ourselves: let us respect ourselves every day
We all demand respect from others, but do we respect ourselves? As surprising as it may be, the answer is clear: not always.
- University of Virginia psychologists Timothy D. Wilson and Elizabeth W. Dunn conducted a 2004 study in which they found that one of the main mistakes of the population in the psychological field is not working on self-knowledge.
- If we are not able to deepen this architecture deprived of needs, desires, fragility, fears and identities, we will hardly be able to establish solid limits to protect ourselves from others. Because what should I protect if I don't know what are the characteristics that define me, what is permissible for me or what hurts me or makes me indignant?
This task, that of self-knowledge, belongs only to ourselves. If we demand respect from others, we must start by respecting ourselves, listening to our inner voice to know what we need.
4. Detachment to exercise one's own psychic space
Often we find it hard to say "no" to that person dear to us, because we have an emotional bond with them. Dimensions such as closeness, friendship, affection, or even simple respect for someone prevent us from setting healthy and solid boundaries with ease. Almost without knowing how, we end up giving in, saying yes, when we wanted to say “no”, and we discover that certain people end up undermining our barriers.
We must be clear about one thing: the best way to create a safe psychological space is detachment. Establish a distance between feelings or emotional loyalty with respect to our identity and our real needs. At the same time, we cannot put aside one obvious aspect: those who truly respect us will never invade or undermine our emotional and psychological barriers.
As we can see, once healthy boundaries have been set, we must first focus on working on ourselves. Self-knowledge, the exercise of self-esteem, self-responsibility and detachment are the fundamental ingredients with which we can create a safe haven resistant to intrusion.
