Are you a person that hasn’t really defined clearly what bothers you and you accept pretty much any behavior from others as long as you get approval from them? Or you have defined boundary around things that you want and you don’t want to accept from others, but you don’t express and defend that very much and you expect others to figure out whether they’ve crossed your boundary and if they cross it you get angry and mad at them, blaming them for crossing your boundary? Or you have clearly defined boundaries around about the things you allow, but you get very emotional when your boundaries get crossed? All these examples lead to not having a personal boundary (a healthy one).

What does it mean to have personal boundaries? How to have personal boundaries that are also healthy? Why it is important to have healthy personal boundaries within different context of your life (relationships, family, business, etc). These are some of the questions that I want to cover and provide some answers.

Not having a clear boundary

Here is an example of a person that doesn’t have defined a clear personal boundary or a person that has holes in his/her boundary. As you can see on the picture from the right side, the person is easily vulnerable and there are many holes through which someone can intrude their personal “territory”. Usually people with such boundaries are “approval seekers”, who tend to lower their standards or to not have any just to get a piece of acknowledgment by others, a piece of recognition, a piece of attention …

In addition, in this category belong persons that have boundaries, but they don’t defend them enough and allow other people to cross them easily. When that happens they don’t take responsibility for it and they blame others for crossing their boundary. An example would be a female person that doesn’t want to be abused in a relationship, yet allowing that to happen repeatedly 

Getting too emotional about your boundaries

Other type of person are persons that have a huge concentration of negative emotions around their boundaries and get easily emotional (angry, mad, frustrated, depressed, etc etc) when their boundaries are crossed. The problem with such people is that they react with negative emotions to the persons crossing their boundaries and by doing that they tent to attract more of these person that will try to cross their boundary. This is simply because of the principle of FOCUS which says that what ever we focus on, we tend to get more of that!

Having healthy personal boundary

To have a healthy personal boundary means to have clearly defined standard about what you accept from others, what kind of behavior and to not allow second class behavior bellow that standard. Also when someone crosses your boundary you let them know that this is not allowed by you, that you won’t tolerate it and you also don’t get to emotional about it, which means you keep concentrating on the things you want, not on the thing you don’t want as in this case someone crossing your boundary. As simple as it sounds still many people don’t quite get it, especially the communicating part where they have to communicate to others when their boundary has been crossed.

The communication doesn’t have to be verbal. It’s well known that the content of the communication (verbal) brings only 7% of the whole communication. The 38% is the auditive part, the tonality of the voice of the communicator. And 55% is the kinestetic part, the body language, the posture, the facial expression etc. This means that in order to communicate sometimes it’s enough to send A LOOK :roll:  which communicates: “Hey, that’s not allowed”. Or even not giving any approval by ignoring the person that just crossed your boundaries with certain statement. Remember, even when you don’t communicate, you communicate that you don’t communicate So you are always communicating!!!

Having boundary doesn’t mean having EGO

Another problem people have is thinking that having a boundary implies having EGO. Well, in a certain way, they are right. By setting some boundaries we define a certain EGO, we define a certain ‘I’ or ‘Me’ and everything else or ‘Not I’ or ‘Not Me’. But still to have boundary doesn’t imply to be EGOIST or EGOCENTRIC. Even if we define boundary we have to respect other people’s boundaries too and to not allow ourselves to cross their boundaries. We also have to be aware that sometime our boundary will get crossed by other people intentionally or not and to not take that personally when it happens, being aware that people do make mistakes as well as you do and that mistakes are to be taken as feedback or correction for the next time. This implies forgiveness to yourself and others (no negative emotions).

Conclusion

Define healthy personal boundary, have standards in your life and you will tend to attract only people that correspond to these standards!

Also give what you want to receive. “Be the change you want to see in others” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Tags: NLP, Personal boundary, personality, psychology, relationship