Where you end and I begin

You're fortunate to have come very far.

When it comes to boundaries I think I can occasionally be over-bearing. For example, I text my friends a lot. Also, when I like someone I consciously have to resist that urge to bombard them with messages.

Unfortunately, I have diarrhea of the mouth and mind.

 

Yeah, you're still new.

Welcome to the forum, btw.

 

Yuppers!

 

Your title very much resonates with me.

Sometimes I'm not even sure, why I am feeling this or that way. Is it my own emotion or am I taking up somebody else's? I tend to people please. Yet, the irony is, as I discovered, this behaviour usually pleases nobody. Instead it comes across as very inauthentic. People might even feel betrayed or lied to, because there is no security with you. Your word never quite counts. Once somebody else talks to you, you change your mind again. All you are is a leaf in the wind when you have no boundaries. It's like what @Wyote said

Co-dependency is a problem with me as well.

 

@soulareclipse, I found wisdom within your post; thank you.

I'm in my early 30's and only now am I learning the importance of boundaries.

I always strive to have the deepest, most-honest relationships with the few people I choose to be close with in life. As a result, I always saw boundaries as barriers against authentic relationships. I guess I learnt that this is certainly not the case in the hardest way possible; by having my heart broken a couple of times [cue the violins, haha].

I guess I was only listening to and catering to the needs of my heart and soul, which are able to love unconditionally. I was ignoring my body. It's only when I actually felt like my body was giving up on life that I realised I also need to respect the needs of it too.

The thing that matters most to me in life is still having the best of relationships. But whereas before this was focused on my relationship with others, I now actively work on the relationship with myself too. I'm still finding that balance though.

I wish you further spiritual growth and happiness.

 

This does resonate with me, but I'll have to think about how much I'm willing to share in public, since I'm also aware of my tendency to share too much. Or more like there's a cork in the bottle and if I remove it, everything comes out at once.

Some time ago I read a book called Intimacy and Solitude by Stephanie Dowrick, and before leaving it out for someone else to read I wrote down several passages to reread later. I shouldn't copy big chunks of text here for copyright reasons, but here are some bits I found useful:

Spoiler: Intimacy and Solitude

p. 160:

At the core of loneliness often lies a fear of abandonment, usually experienced as a fear that the loneliness - the feeling of not being wanted by someone, of not being recognised, or understood, or sought after, or appreciated - will go on forever...

...And behind the fear of abandonment is something else: a lack of trust in your own self. (Do I exist in any meaningful way? Does my existence matter?)

p. 189:

*You develop the capacity to be alone when you feel safe in the company of someone else (usually your mother)
*You develop the capacity to feel safe with someone else, and to be your own self in someone else's presence, when you also have the capacity to be alone without undue anxiety.
*Through good contact with someone else, you come increasingly to know yourself.

p. 229:

Being intimate means, I think, being true to yourself in the presence of someone else and accepting the other person being their own self in your presence.

Being intimate does not mean:
*behaving as though you were one person
*dictating how the other person should behave
*expecting the other person to take care of your needs
*denigrating the other person because you believe they have no choice but to take it.

That kind of pseudo-intimacy is often horribly damaging, not least because it erodes the sense of personal power which is crucial to a comfortable relationship with others, and with yourself.

In pseudo-intimacy several things are likely to happen:
*your sense of I diminishes rather than grows
*you feel increasingly dependent upon 'your other half'
*your sense of who is in charge of your life becomes muddled
*your sense of the larger world shrinks.

p. 230:

Most of us know whether or not we have a sense of 'boundary' in our relationships with other people:
*Your boundaries allow you to sense where you end and where I begin.
*Your boundaries allow you to feel for me when I hurt, to share my hurt, but to know that it is my hurt - and not yours.
*Your boundaries allow you to understand that when I am angry it is not necessarily because of something you have done, and to know that when I am depressed it is not necessarily your responsibilty to 'cheer me up'.
*Your boundaries allow you to know that when you are angry or depressed or anxious that it is not my fault, and that the effects your anger or depression or anxiety should not be laid at my feet or poured over my head.
(p. 231)
In other words, if you and I are in a relationship together we can, with our boundaries in place, feel a great deal for each other, while also acknowledging that neither of us is responsible for the emotional happiness of the other.

This does not mean that I cannot make you unhappy, or that you cannot brighten my day immeasurably. Of course that can happen. Two or more people who relate closely to each other will have continuous and often dramatic effects on each other's feelings: and part of intimacy is being aware of and respectful of that.

What is not intimacy is the feeling that my happiness is dependent on you; or that because we live side by side you have the right to make me unhappy.

 

Great thread, @soulareclipse.

There's lots to think about and say here, but I'll just put in one aspect of my experience with this.

I think the majority of people probably have issues with boundaries, but a lot of the time those issues are very hard to perceive, especially if you have supposedly 'good boundaries' in other ways.

For example, while I have no problem with actually saying 'no' when I don't want to do something, I do struggle with oversharing.

I realised that it was linked to my sense of self worth: if I don't tell you my weaknesses and the things I've done that made me feel ashamed (don't worry, nothing bad) then I'll feel like I'm being inauthentic; that I'm 'lying' to you and that I'm presenting a false front. If I don't share these things, and you seem to like me, I might feel that the 'real me' doesn't deserve to be liked, and so the oversharing is to preempt that feeling. It's to say: here I am in all my shittiness... do you still like me?

I used to think that I was just solidly honest when I did this and therefore absolutely unashamed of who I was, but actually there's an insecurity which drives behaviour like this: a irrational fear that 'if you knew me, then you would hate me'.

 

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly, but you seem to say that both oversharing and being reticent are signs that you're inauthentic, which implies that true authenticity is somewhere in the middle. And you base this on the experience you have of yourself. But surely that cannot be the only reason, your subjective experience of authenticity that has been different in the past and may yet change again?

You didn't make it explicit, but I'm guessing that you mean that if there are motives you aren't aware of, a person cannot be authentic to others. That's sort of implied in saying that there's insecurity behind it all. However, I believe that not one of us is fully conscious of our motives. Does it mean we're all inauthentic? Then the whole concept of authenticity would lose its meaning. You may not agree with me on my assumption of incomplete awareness, but you need more than the experience you have of yourself to refute it. Unless you're a solipsist of course .

Personally I feel that whether I'm being too quiet or oversharing, both are expressions of my true self, assuming I have no intention of deceiving anyone. I'm simply expressing myself differently with different people. I don't believe it's insecurity that would by necessity drive the tendency to overshare. Could be just the need to find a human connection. And the longer you've been without an adequate connection, the more eager you are to share who you are, sometimes to the point of seeming weird. Perhaps even 'oversharing' is not a good word. It just means that you have so much to say that you forget what is customary. It doesn't always mean that you have weak boundaries. I've even felt that I've overshared because I've been so confident of my boundaries, and the confidence has made me forget that others keep their boundaries closer to their selves, and that they're not comfortable even knowing about my stuff, let alone sharing their own. Every relationship is a sort of dance and a negotiation around these issues, because our boundaries are never quite in the same place.

Overall I've found answering your posts a bit difficult, because even when you give advice with good intentions, it looks like you often assume that everybody is like you. The bit I quoted is an example of that. You think you've found insecurity in yourself, and now you assume that everyone is driven by the same motives. I've seen you exhibit the same kind of attitude when advising people to be more courageous when dating. But not everyone is like you, and what may seem like a small obstacle to you is not so small to others. So even though you started the post here by saying you'll share a personal experience, you ended up claiming it's universal. After a statement like that it's hard to continue, because I'm reluctant to have a debate with someone who takes such a position of authority. But staying quiet is not being inauthentic, nor is it fear. It just means that the way you present things makes me feel that I'd only end up in a pointless argument with someone who thinks he's already figured out how things stand.

And why do I get this impression? Because you said: "actually there's an insecurity" instead of "there may be an insecurity". The latter formulation would give room for other opinions, the first one just announces a truth that the reader may or may not accept, but it doesn't give the impression that you'd be willing to discuss it.

 

Damn, looks like I forgot to click 'Reply' and hit 'Submit for Peer Review' instead

I'm walking rn, but I'll try to clarify thoughts later on.

 

Okay . I don't mean to criticise all the things you stand for. I do believe you have good intentions, but I pay a lot of attention to how things are said, which verb forms are used, are people being considerate etc., and so it happens that if someone chooses a word that doesn't quite reflect what they intend, I may start digging for what's behind it all, what's the real message. And that may turn into a little essay

 

No, no, man, it's great that you do that! Funnily enough, though, there was a hidden motive behind my post, and so I wonder if that's what you picked up in my lack of coherence.

Essentially the only reason I contributed to this thread was because 'boundaries' is an issue that's important to my girlfriend @Puzzlenuzzle, and so I'm interested in it, too, and wish to support the people that are having issues with it. However, I can't really come into a thread and start talking about her feelings on the subject, because it's not my truth to tell, and she's a member of the forum herself. In addition, I think it's sometimes a bit lame just to post 'I SUPORT YOO GUYZ!!!' without contributing to the discussion, and so my post was just a way of showing support, really, by promoting the flow of discussion (and to keep the thread bumped), while engaging with an aspect of it that I could empathise with (because others had said that they overshared, too) and had some personal experience of.

Don't worry, I spoke to Nuzzles and she said it was OK that I mention this, but yeah it's interesting that you seemed to pick up on the ulterior motives that way. In her case, she has a hard time stopping and asking 'what do I need', in addition to 'what do I want' and 'how do I feel'.

In my case, the common thread was the concept of 'boundaries' and how we each might overstep them, fail to enforce them or otherwise interact with them based upon deeper insecurities which we might not even be aware of (as @soulareclipse pointed out in her 'Who cares?' anecdote), so that's how they are linked conceptually in my mind.

I do overshare, and so I contraposed my usual narrative about why I 'overshare' - which was 'I am completely unashamed of who I am and I'd like you to know the real me' - with a narrative that hinted at some deeper insecurity which could be equally true - about a fear of being liked only for my persona and not my 'true self', and things related to that. In fact, now that I write that down, this could have contributed to my struggles over type - that even though I might come across as 'rational', I wanted to be understood for what I feel is my 'true self', which is my feely heart.

 

Yeah INTJs are big softies really. Most of my friends in middle/high school, and thus my oldest friends now, have been INTJs (at least one officially tested), and they don't really fit the internet stereotype of chess masters planning for world domination. But I haven't really seen them at work, maybe that's where the chess master comes out.