ANXIETY, BOUNDARIES & SELF-ABANDONMENT
I’m writing to say more about the gray areas of anxiety, boundaries, and emotional wounds.
It’s taken me two weeks to write this post because I got stuck navigating the direction to take this topic. I started off with the question: “Is it anxiety or is it personal boundaries?”. In my draft last, I found myself wanting to infuse OCD and ERP treatment into the topic of anxiety and personal boundaries. I want to acknowledge that this entry would be a different post with OCD in mind. To say this topic is nuanced might be an understatement. The area that I’ve landed on for now, is the intersection of anxiety, boundaries, and emotional processing. I may expand on this topic in future writings, since it’s now clear to me how much more time this heading deserves. Thanks in advance for you patience with me as a new writer and your support in reading!
Note: The cultural perspective I am writing from is Westernized, US American Woman (white bodied, cis). I acknowledge my privilege and know my perspective isn’t going to be relatable to everyone. In this writing, I use the phrase “our culture” to reference the shared culture of living in the U.S. during this time in history and the societal/systemic impacts. That being said, please know I try my best to be sensitive, humble, and a lifelong learner.
*Disclaimer: My posts here are not intended to be a replacement for individual psychotherapy; the content is my opinion based on my life experiences and education; and, the content is not going to be ‘a one-size fits all’ model. If you are suffering, please reach out to your supports, seek out a therapist of your own, and contact crisis lines like 988 if needed.
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Maybe it was the 2016 election, maybe it was the visibility of civil unrest, maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it’s ongoing global crises…but many people have felt an increase in anxiety and relationship issues in the past several years. Generally, it seems like more than ever there’s a self-awareness about mental health issues in our culture. I’m glad for the awareness and insight growing among people in this country. Yet, I feel that there is a tendency to label, or diagnose, problems as an ending point, rather than a beginning. Labels are an invitation to learn more and to invest time in uncovering reasons for its existence, which requires a personal responsibility to making inner/outer changes. Whether anxiety is biological, environmental, socially or situationally created it’s yours to understand and manage. This is hard to accept. This is painful to accept. It requires labor from the sufferer.
Anxiety itself may actually be a symptom of something else: a lack of social skills, attachment wounds, boundary violations (or a lack of boundaries altogether), co-dependency, communication issues, emotional neglect, fused thinking, harmful or highly conflictual relationships, issues with self-worth, lack of coping skills, limiting self-beliefs, low frustration or distress tolerance, self-abandonment, and thinking errors. Emotional and relational issues might be a cycle in which anxiety, fear, and self-criticism are abundant. To me, what’s exciting about considering the issues listed above as the potential drivers of anxiety is all the advocacy, choice, and personal empowerment that exists there: so much potential for healing.
It may seem a bit like a chicken-egg scenario and in some ways, that’s a fair description. So how do we make sense of this?
Here’s my way of scaffolding this big topic:
Experiences of anxiety symptoms
Reframing the presence of anxiety
Exploring & identifying emotional drivers
Full body listening
Needs and boundaries
Self-beliefs
Self-compassion
Practice authentic self-expression for well-being
A place to start self-discovering and unpacking anxiety roots might be to first think of some real life examples of when anxiety was strong in you. When does anxiety visit you? What was a situation you were not looking forward to? Identify some specific contexts, body language, communications, dynamics, environments, events, factors, interactions, peoples, and situations in which anxiety is abundant for you. What do you notice? There may be important information to reflect on.
A self-compassion technique called “full body listening” encourages information gathering (and later attending to) on sensations in the body during emotional moments. This self-compassion technique is from Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer who wrote the Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. The idea being the body can be a guide for understanding and processing difficult emotions.
One way to “listen with the body”:
When you think of ____ (insert a specific difficult person in your life, dinner invite, receiving a lengthy text message, or other anxiety-inducing component), what do you notice happening within your body? Is it heavy? Is it hot/cold? Is there a lump in your throat? Is it feeling like a rock in your stomach? What would that part of your body that’s calling out with anxiety say?
Sometimes the body knows something isn’t okay, before the mind catches up. It’s hard to discern worry from wisdom.
In the context of this post, the body experiencing anxiety can be an indicator of a need and/or boundary. (This isn’t always true of body sensations and working with your therapist on this is a good idea.) Everyone has needs and boundaries. Where the body shows discomfort or resistance in stressful conditions can be a place to start. Although all humans have needs and boundaries, whether they are known or expressed is another thing. Remember, boundaries are not just for other people to follow, they are for you to follow, too. If you’re unclear what yours are, know that it’s OK and that it’s important for your well-being to further explore. This is the value of therapy and this is what a good therapist can support. It’s hard emotional labor and labor you don’t have to do alone.
A hypothesis I have is that anxiety can be created as a result of not being true to yourself (i.e. self-abandonment). If you are not expressing yourself, you may be more likely to feel anxiety. I’ll add a few words onto that last sentence, so it becomes even more enlightening: If you are not expressing yourself to the people you care about and who care about you, you may be more likely to feel anxiety around them.
If you give more than you are comfortable giving in relationships, this can cause anxiety and this is you violating your own boundaries (self-abandonment). Self-abandonment sounds like what it is: abandoning the self. It happens when a person seeks psychological safety by putting themselves second in a way that is actually harmful. This can be related to maladaptive coping and trauma surviving, too. Maybe this is where chicken and egg meet.
Sometimes in our culture, people receive the message that having needs is bad—selfish, a burden to others, unrealistic, “too much,” etc. People can internalize this messaging and in turn, create painful and limiting self-beliefs. It makes being aware of needs difficult. It makes identifying them, creating/enforcing boundaries and communicating effectively really difficult. Statements like, “I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings,” “I don’t want to bother them,” or “Saying how I truly feel would be rude” are indicating some areas to work on.
The choice of making someone else potentially uncomfortable/unhappy or tolerating a lot of anxiety yourself, is really a question about self-abandonment.
It may come as a surprise just how much depth there is to anxiety and the importance of authentic self-expression to well-being. The inner turmoil (anxiety) that gets stirred up when a boundary violation happens is an opportunity to make personal changes. Boundary violations can be experienced as someone harming (emotionally or physically) you (intentionally or not), someone doing or saying something you’ve expressed not wanting, and sometimes even being triggered unexpectedly. It’s possible to violate your own boundaries as well. When you violate your own boundaries by putting the feelings of others ahead of your own (in a way that causes you pain), you are self-abandoning.
Some examples of painful self-beliefs that can allow for boundary violations and self-abandonment are:
“The feelings of others matter more than my own.”
“My needs go unmet, so why bother trying to share what they are with others.”
“I’ve been hurt so much by other people, it’s best not to let them see/hear the real me.”
“If I’m truly myself, I could be rejected and the pain would be too much to bear.”
“If I don’t give everything I have to friendships/relationships (even though I don’t get much from them back), I’ll end up alone.”
“I’d rather suffer through this then deal with another person’s anger/emotions.”
A therapist once asked me, “Do you know—your feelings matter the most?” The implication was that my feelings should matter to me the most and behaviors can support that. It was a powerful moment.
While our culture may condition people to think centering ourselves as our priority is selfish and narcissistic, it’s not true. It might be very harmful to not center ourselves in our lives. The trick here is not to expect others to center us. While it’s important to be thoughtful and compassionate towards others, we cannot do this at the expense of ourselves. When the brain receives distress signals, even emotional and anxious ones, it causes physiological responses. This is why chronic stress is so damaging to people’s health. All of us have a responsibility, to ourselves, to cope with (regulate) feelings as they come up.
If reading this brought anything up for you emotionally, that would be expected and OK! It might be a signal to seek therapy and/or do more inner work independently. Here’s a couple recommended meditations that encourage self-compassion.
Anxiety therapy can encourage people to lean into discomfort—to tolerate anxiety is to manage anxiety. Leaning in is not always a healing path when anxiety is coming up due to emotional wounds. When you begin to center your own feelings and needs as a priority, there will be chances for vulnerable acts of authentic self-expression to take place. I hope this post helps you say something different in the presence of anxiety and to take opportunities to be your true self.
-Sarah
