Personally, I have never had good boundaries for myself. I am generally a very easy going person with a lot of patience. I love helping others and making others happy. Therefore, I often struggle with people taking advantage of me. It was therefore, quite easy, for my ex-husband to manipulate me into doing more than my fair share of everything. I could never see that people were behaving in a negative way towards me, because I always saw the good in them and take them at their word. For me, I had never felt like boundaries had been crossed by my ex-husband, until we had our three foster girls.
Why Boundaries Can Be Hard
It is so important to remember that boundaries look different for different people based on their capacities (and these capacities may shift with time or given circumstances). It is also important to remember that trauma that people have experienced also impacts their ability to draw these boundary lines for many of the reasons listed below:
- You may be a people pleaser who just prefers to keep the peace and make everyone around you happy
- You may have a lack of self-confidence and struggle with enforcing your boundaries
- You may struggle with having self-respect and don’t respect your own time or well-being
- Past experiences showed you that setting boundaries equaled anger/abuse from those you cared about
How I Drew My Line
For me, because I had been experiencing narcissistic abuse for such a long period of time, I was very conditioned to not speak out regarding my own boundaries. When I would take even a small stance it often resulted in very angry and intense emotions coming my direction. However, caring for others, especially children is in my nature. Seeing how my ex-husband treating our foster girls poorly made me draw a line. I had to protect them. That is where my morals and values stand. The girls helped me to define that line that I could not let him cross. From that moment forward I would not let him lie to me and I would not let him say that we could accept another long term placement into our home.
When you draw your line, it is so important to have open communication with your partner/friend/co-worker/family member. You need to clearly define your boundaries and express them. I communicated very clearly with my ex-husband what my expectations were. I also communicated what I needed to see from him in order for us to continue our relationship. Unfortunately for me, my spouse decided to break my boundaries even further than he had before until I had to draw the ultimate line and run away.
