Healthy boundaries are like a good garden fence

For those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember how I have likened our mental space to a garden, and psychotherapy to gardening.

Today I'd like to talk about boundaries, as it is one of the main subjects that come up in my work with clients and their relationships.

If you imagine that "you" are a plot of land that you are (hopefully lovingly) tending, of course that has to be protected from others, and you have lots of options for fencing it.

You could have just a line on the ground to delimitate your plot from your neighbours' ones. The advantage is that your neighbour can pop over all the time, which is also the disadvantage of course - it offers no protection from people with a less well-developed sense of where their plot stops and yours starts. After the hordes of elephants from their side have trampled your vegetables a number of times, you might decide to go the opposite extreme.

You build an elephant-high fence, potentially even with razor-wire and miradors with sharpshooters. No one will come over uninvited now! True, but trust me, even those whose visits you'd like won't come over anymore - who wants to makes friends with someone who shoots first and asks questions later!

The ideal fence is somewhere in the middle. A fence that lets you have a chat with your neighbour, establish relationships, pass a cup of tea over. Maybe a picket fence, low enough to see each other, but not so low that people mistake your garden for a public park where they can take their dogs to do their unmentionable things...

You get the gist. Healthy boundaries follow the same principle. They need to protect you, but not to the extent of keeping other people out completely.

This is the idea of vulnerability: in order to connect to others, the fence can't be made from concrete and be so high that no one can see you. Connection does require taking the risk of wolves or elephants attacking your garden and your chickens, but honestly, how often do these come around in the suburbia we live in?

The odds are that most people we meet are not very dangerous and as long as we have clear boundaries, they will not take advantage of us. The trick is to be consistent in defending our boundaries when someone does try to climb the fence or knock it over.

Don't forget to build in a couple of gates too, so you can invite in the people you like - ask yourself, how do you allow people to come closer into your life?