Boundaries After Growing Up In A Dysfunctional Family
In dysfunctional families, caregivers violate the boundaries of their children.
Caregivers from these families do not respect their children's personal freedom and privacy, they discount their children's feelings, do not honour their attempts at independent thinking and decision-making, and do not allow them to experience their innate impulses toward creativity, spirituality and self actualization.
This is often as a result of their own traumatic childhoods that they have not had the support or ability or wish to heal.
These deficits in the children's development are able to be seen in the present day by problems in their adult relationships and careers, health, self relationship and with raising their own families.
When parents disrespect a child's boundaries, the child's sense of self—his or her autonomy, self-respect, feelings of effectiveness and of making a difference—are compromised. They will disconnect from their true Self, the present moment and their body in order to self protect their vulnerability.
In place of a healthy sense of self, children may come to feel they are "damaged goods": unworthy, inferior, inherently bad, incompetent, stupid, or ugly. Essentially they internalise a shame based identity that the psyche and nervous system protect with multiple patterns of bracing and defence in the body, and our personality parts mobilise and develop to protect our vulnerability, rather than be able to flourish and grow from inner self esteem.
We may develop protective personality parts; a ferocious inner critic, or an achiever, or an over worker, or a people pleaser, a helper part and/or patterns of soothing with substances, sex, food, deprivation (often extreme diets or detox extremes are ways of managing shame) or distraction. This can include the distraction of our physical symptoms that can serve to keep our attention away from the true emotional pain underneath. This is all temporary until we come to Befriend ourselves and heal our mind body system with kind intention and attention.
The negative conditioning from the unhealthy family system limits what they believe they are capable of doing, being, and having throughout their lives. They are then further pathologised as adults by the mental health industry who label them with various diagnosis that re-affirms to them ‘see, there is something wrong with me’ - which is tragic as it just replays the conditioned program installed in childhood. Then when therapy does not help, the person blames themselves. Until we truly understand what happened to us in mind and body, we will blame ourselves.
It is a story so often told to me in my practice. Part of our healing comes from understanding that our present conditions in our mind body system are all normal adaptions to an abnormal environment. That the pathologising of the individual was and is wrong. We need to be looking a the pathology of the systems around us and its impact on a vulnerable rapidly developing nervous system, body and psyche. The child was innocent, and as an adult the child within us continues to be innocent. We must stop pathologising them and instead turn towards all parts of ourselves with empathy and understanding. This is healing. It is why psychoeducation is so crucial and an evidence based way for healing to begin.
One of the central priorities of the recovery process must be to reconstruct our damaged self-esteem.
Boundaries are broached in different ways.
In the physical or sexual abusing family, the child's physical boundaries are violated.
In families where there is insanity or serious illness of a parent, the child's emotional boundaries are infringed upon, and the child may be forced into the role of surrogate spouse for the other parent, or required to act as the ill parent's caretaker or sometimes a sibling or other close figure.
In the substance abusing family, the volatile and immature behavior of an intoxicated parent creates confusion about appropriate boundaries in interpersonal roles.
As there are no models of rational or predictable behavior, there is breakdown of honest communication, a lack of emotional stability and nurturing by the parents, and a lack of safety that would permit trust, self disclosure and intimacy to develop.
In the fundamentalist, dogmatic, or authoritarian family, parents trespass on children's right to think for themselves (mental boundaries).
They also violate children's rights to make their own decisions (volitional boundaries), to interpret and act upon their own conscience (moral boundaries), and to experience and express their innate spirituality, creativity, and quest for meaning and value (spiritual boundaries).
In the narcissistic family, differentiation of identity is not allowed. The natural age for this in teenage years is often thwarted or not even attempted due to the amount of emotional manipulation, enmeshment and the need of the narcissist to control the image of the family unit with children just being players in that show rather than autonomous actors.
Another priority for recovering adult children from these dysfunctional families must be to rebuild appropriate boundaries.
They must relearn what is appropriate for their unique felt sense of sexuality, in terms of brakes, accelerators and establishing safety and communication. This will look and feel different for all
To learn what are legitimate ways to express displeasure or anger without injuring others or themselves. To learn anger is not scary and is part of healthy purpose and self protection, and indeed part of a greater sense of vitality.
They must re-empower themselves to say no to relationships they do not want and that are not good for them, no to demands that they are not able to handle.
They must rehabilitate their ability to trust, to feel and share their feelings, to self disclose and establish intimate relations. To once again in baby steps trust the world again that it can be a safer place than it was. This is dual work with nervous system regulation and working with our defensive parts to help them trust us to be a safe adult leader for our system.
They must reestablish their ability to think for themselves, and to make their own decisions, confusing and scary as that might be. This often needs and always deserves support.
Children of narcissists have to learn to spot their habitual self gaslighting and self invalidation to learn not to self abandon. To instead learn to self validate, self soothe, trust themselves. Self trust too is not getting it ‘right’. It is staying with ourselves for the good, and for the fuck ups. That we will not self abandon and only be kind to ourselves when we are ‘good’ as this replays our family dynamics of reward when we were ‘good’ and punishment when we were ‘bad’. We learn to be human beings essentially, not human doings or human earnings.
They must re-own a coherent and meaningful set of moral values by which to govern their lives, and to take responsibility for their behavior.
The must learn to connect from their authenticity and not earn connection through people pleasing, helping, fawning, appeasing - which takes cultivating felt nervous system safety as adults and an understanding of present moment choice available in ways it was not in childhood
They must learn to nourish their own self esteem and begin to teach their child parts to look in kinder mirrors than the reflection they see of themselves in the mirror of their dysfunctional family systems. This grows inner boundaries/scaffolding of self support, self nurture and ability to take in nourishment and praise from others.
Play, rest, nourishment are not lazy. They need to learn to gift themselves these crucial facets of healing and thriving. Most adult children from dysfunctional families did not and do not do these things enough. These often need felt safety in the nervous system first, and also baby steps of skill learning and titrating the slowing down, rest, play into life so it feels safe enough to practice. Baby steps are courageous leaps for a healing nervous system.
And finally, they must renew their connection and relationship with a sense of spirituality (not religion necessarily at all - all interpretations and cultures are welcome), that provides for them a sense of guidance, a road map, a set of principles from which they may confidently and courageously live their lives and feel held.
None of this is easy. But the experience of numerous people who have survived growing up in these families, and have embarked upon a program of recovery, let us know that it is possible to regain their sanity and peace of mind, despite their painful and abusive past.
We also know that if an adult who grew up in these types of families does not address these powerful and poignant issues, it is likely that he or she will unwittingly continue these patterns of abuse into a new generation. For example, the child of an authoritarian parent may perpetuate the cycle of tyranny, passing on intolerant and repressive values to his or her children. The generation I work with most are the cycle breakers in often strong ancestral/familial patterns of trauma. This is deep work, gentle work, and deserves a tremendous amount of support.
This familial transmission does not stop unless we break the pattern, and find a way to heal the wounds that have been inflicted upon us, and resolve that we will not repeat the past: not in our lives, not in our children's lives.
I have such a particular love of working with cycle breakers. We may not heal like some of the speedy stories you see online (of which most I think are lies just by the way from my many years of experience and witnessing people wire over trauma and it come back and bite them in the bottom so they could turn and heal it!) but we heal deeply and truly in ways that unlock our ancestral strengths, our innate gifts, that accept our sensitivity and learn how to harness it, and make us such safe and present people for others as we have had to learn to be that for ourselves.
To everyone that identifies with this post, please know you are not alone. Some of our most isolating emotions and experiences are ones that so many others share. We just have lost our way as community in sharing and healing together. The ‘healing space’ especially on social media is strikingly individualistic with somatic exercises to do solo, programs to do solo. This very Western way is not what our ancient technologies taught us truly heals us. It is connection that empowers us to heal. It helps us undo our deep aloneness by championing the innate healing capacity of neuroplasticity in a safe, attached relationship or community. This is something I hope to remedy in 2023 with increasing group and retreat work.
Resources
Adult Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents
When The Body Says No - Dr Gabor Maté
Dr Daniel Siegel - The Whole Brain Child
Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk - The Body Keeps The Score
The Drama Of The Gifted Child - Alice Miller
The True Drama Of The Gifted Child - This is by Alice Miller’s son. She wrote so incredibly on the damage inflicted upon her by her narcissist parent, and her work helped so many. And at the same time she was unable to see the cycle she perpetuated onto her son. It is startling to read and understand just how dislocated we can get from our pain that parts of us can write so beautifully to heal others whilst parts of us we can be unaware of are perpetrating still.