Understanding Boundaries

Emotional Freedom for Empaths who are Ready for Change.

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Early childhood foundations are the training ground for which we learn how to navigate our environment, the world and how we develop a sense of self. We learn through experience, and you may have developed a very highly attuned antennae that can pick up the emotions and energies of others and places if you experienced your environment as unsafe or chaotic.

If this was true for you, then the hypervigilance you developed may have shaped an ability to sense and feel the energy behind the words and actions of others - you may be adept at reading the room, attuning to others’ emotional states, and picking up on subtle energies in your environment.

This framed your inner landscape and taught you how to protect yourself in what may have been a very unsafe and chaotic environment. Therefore, you adapted your behaviour to survive this unpredictability. Thus, you may have internalised this chaos as something for you to fix or manage whereby you became emotionally responsible for the adults in your life. Like an emotional sponge, you may have taken these energies on as if to dispel the negativity or to manage the environment. This developed patterns of people pleasing and caregiver which was a survival response, and a way your nervous system protected you from harm.

You are not here to be an emotional sponge or hold anyone else’s pain.

The forgotten child…

This is often when the pattern begins - when your needs go unmet, you may learn that your worth is dependent on how you please and meet the needs of others. In many ways, you became the nervous system for your family - like an emotional container, you carry the unspoken wounds of your parents/family, the parts of themselves that they struggled to face or acknowledge in themselves. You become the mirror that holds up the truth of what has long been denied. Thus, as a child you may have felt unseen, unheard and unloved by one or both of your parents when nurturance, protection, and emotional support wasn’t available for you.

This is where the boundaries become blurred on a physical, energetical and emotional level. In learning to anticipate everything in your environment, your feelings and your needs become secondary and can often be suppressed. This was part of your survival, and it may have been the only way you felt some sense of safety or how you gained approval - it was painful especially if you were taught to push your own feelings down.

Where and how did you prioritise your parents/family emotional needs?

As an adult, you maybe still operating from the same unconscious programming you were trained to act and be as a child. Therefore, you may struggle to know where your energy ends and where another begins as you were so heavily trained to attend to the emotional needs of others. This might show up as you over functioning in relationships or feeling responsible for other people’s comfort. Early childhood experiences may have taught you that shrinking, soothing things over, or anticipating other’s needs protected you from conflict, rejection and the emotional turmoil.

This may have developed the first stages of when you started to abandon yourself as those early dynamics taught you that love had to be earned. This is the beginning of accepting conditionality over love and connection because you may have felt the need to seek approval and acceptance to feel loved. Ultimately, you were never shown that your feelings and needs mattered.

Identify your energy leaks: Where in your life do you feel drained, overwhelmed or taken for granted? Where/when do you over give in your relationships? How has this impacted your sense of self and establishing your own needs? 

Learning through the lens of The Nervous System

Our earlier programming becomes the lens through which the nervous system can assess levels of safety and make sense of its environment. In other words, as children we need co-regulation, so we attune to the nervous system of our parents. In fact, the boundaries lines may have become so blurred that you actually felt that their nervous system was actually your own, or you may have internalised the emotions that you were picking up. This is where we begin to take on the discomfort felt from others and try to manage it ourselves. It is where the child begins to lose their identity and their sense of self if they do not experience consistent co-regulation.

In many ways you can think of your nervous system as a surveillance system as it is always scanning for potential threat or perceived danger. In an environment that felt chaotic or unpredictable where maybe you experienced anxiety or trauma - the nervous system will often be on high alert, and this can lead to overwhelm.  This means that the nervous system was unable to deal with the threat and therefore you couldn’t respond appropriately. This is survival and often, we can stay in survival states for chronic periods of time without understanding that these earlier imprints of trauma may still be impacting you today.

It is possible to regulate and rewire the nervous system by training it to understand that calm can equal safety. To align with true safety is staying connected to yourself even when you can feel tension from others. It is having that emotional capacity to stay true to yourself without shrinking, managing or soothing anyone else. Additionally, supporting your inner child to understand this can be deeply healing.

Practices that can support Somatic healing.

1. Allowing space to feel into the body - this is ultimately the goal and to bring your energy back so that you can foster trust within yourself.  The emotions and sensations that your body remembers will reveal what was never acknowledged, expressed or safe to experience fully at the time of the trauma. This is the wisdom of the body and offers true freedom when we allow space to feel into what the body is communicating.

Taking steps to cultivate safety within and in your body takes practice. If going within is too overwhelming, begin by making sense of your environment – what do you notice? what do you find soothing? Where are your eyes naturally drawn to? This exercise is a way to regulate and ground in the moment.

Please be gentle with yourself if you are struggling to connect with your body. There is nothing wrong with you, for your body found a way to survive. In cases where it was too overwhelming, you may have dissociated from your body so that you didn’t need to feel the pain.

You learned that it wasn’t safe to feel and shut down as a protective response. 

2. Learn how your nervous system has internalised threat - look to how and when you are triggered in your daily life. When you are in a state of fear, there may be a tendency to control aspects of your life or even others. For example, you may over give in order to feel recognised, and therefore fear may come from not feeling validated. Here, look to what this situation reminds you of and ask yourself, what is this teaching me? To create fulfilling change, you begin to take responsibility for your life through awareness and daily practice.

   
   

   These stories have been formed to keep you safe and accepted. When you begin to recognise the pattern, this awareness can support you in choosing how to respond to life and others differently, thus changing the story.

Our identity can be locked into the stories that have been woven throughout our life.

Reparenting yourself

It can be confusing to discern where your energy ends and where someone else's energy begins. This is because healthy boundaries were not modelled for you, or they may have been repeatedly violated. As an adult, this may have led to patterns of people-pleasing and over giving, which may leave you feeling resentful and often experiencing burnout.

Ultimately, you may find it difficult to tune into your own feelings or struggle to make decisions. When you begin to reparent yourself, you are then on a journey of discovery which is to know who you are beyond those stories and patterns. You are now learning to shift the internal structures to support the changes you would like to experience, thus by releasing yourself from those old identities and patterns that have been keeping you in a repetitive cycle.

It takes time to rediscover who you are under the layers of expectation and conditionality but just taking small steps can support emotional freedom where you begin to feel comfortable to express your own needs. I have often referred to this path as a reclamation of self - it is the you before the world taught you how to be. Initially, it may be difficult to communicate your needs, especially to others.

It may be helpful to write down your needs first for yourself for example, maybe you would like to have more alone time for yourself? maybe you don’t want to continue having lengthy chats with someone you find draining? maybe you want to change something that is no longer aligned?

Establish your needs: what do you enjoy or what activities would you like to do more of? What would you like to change? how can you be clear in your communication to others about your needs? 

Be gentle with yourself if you find it difficult to know or understand your needs, especially if you have been the emotional container for others.  There may be feelings of guilt for even contemplating your needs, but this is a big step in beginning to cultivate a deeper relationship with yourself.

Beginning to integrate aspects of yourself that have long been forgotten or abandoned can be helpful to access what parts want to be heard and acknowledged, this includes your inner child.  Your inner child is looking to you for love, and taking time to connect with them can allow you to understand their needs. You are not only establishing their/your needs, but you are also fostering a sense of safety within yourself. Start to include your inner child in daily activities or schedule time with them that allows for curiosity and connection.

I invite you to connect with your inner child: Find time to spend with them and ask your younger self - what do they need to feel seen, heard, loved and safe? How can you now start to give them what they need?

A Somatic Practice and Connecting with your Inner Child

1. Think of a memory which can be an old memory or a recent experience in which you could read the room and the emotions of others. You can also use this practice for when you feel triggered within certain dynamics in real time.

2. Now start to tune into what is happening in your body and notice any sensations. Then start to connect with what you are feeling emotionally. This awareness can then help you understand how your internal landscape has been shaped within these survival states.

3. Now connect with your inner child and ask them what they need to feel safe and heard. You can do this just by feeling into the energy of your inner child.  It can be helpful to use this time to reflect with your inner child about what they feel and then offer them that support and love that they are seeking. 

Take your time with this. When you tune into your body to understand your lived experiences, you are then taking those steps to change what has been repressed and unconscious by bringing them into the light. The body holds trauma, emotions, the stories and memories. The body remembers what you may have long forgotten or repressed - this is when you can open the door that leads to change.

To have boundaries is to know yourself and understand your needs. It is an act of self-love.

In many ways, it is a continual practice which requires compassion and patience with yourself. Understanding those internal core beliefs can be illuminating as you can then begin to understand what pattern or thought form has been instilled which is dictating how you respond or react in certain situations.  This becomes the road to freedom when you begin to honour and recognise your own feelings in any given situation. Look to how life is reflecting or mirroring back to you patterns that have yet to be acknowledged within yourself.