Boundaries – A Way to Give Yourself A Break
Published on Tuesday, August 13th, 2024
Written by Connor Molloy, Psychotherapist, MSW, LICSW
Community, work, and family are important to everyone, but they are particularly important for Afghans. With those things come a lot of different relationships and relationships are rarely perfect. While you have choices about how you treat other people, you cannot control how other people treat you. If you do not like how you feel in a relationship with someone, you can always try to tell them, but they may not listen to what you say. Because of this, you may need to make personal choices that alter the way a relationship looks, and in the U.S. we call those “boundaries,” like the boundaries around a country that help to define what that country looks like and the fact there may be rules about crossing that boundary.
Maybe your cousin talks too much about politics, you can choose not to go over to his house during the election. Maybe your aunt critiques your cooking, you can invite her over for tea instead of lunch. Maybe your brother teases you for not being married, you can come up with a short joke that moves the conversation on to another topic. Maybe a friend brings up mutual friend or acquaintances’ personal life that you don’t feel comfortable discussing, you can simply say: “ I would prefer to hear that information from them.” and politely change the subject. Notice how these are all choices that YOU can make.
Sometimes boundaries can be set more explicitly. For example, you may have an American coworker who is fascinated with Afghanistan, so wants to talk about it with you, but it brings up many stressful memories. To set an explicit boundary, five steps can be taken:
1. Instead of thinking of what you want your boundary to keep out, think what you want to keep in. Maybe you like your coworker, so you want to keep in the relationship, but you want to keep out the chats about Afghanistan.
2. Next, identify where the challenges are coming from. Maybe you have to communicate with your coworker for your job, so daily communication of some sort really does need to be part of your relationship.
3. Next, clarify if you want this to be a flexible boundary or a rigid boundary. Maybe you love your country, so you are happy to answer your coworker’s questions about Afghanistan, but if he starts to talk about a news article he read, you don’t want that conversation to be a part of your work day.
4. Next, communicate your boundary. Sometimes we like to think that other people can magically guess what we are thinking or what we want, but since that is never the case, if you want a boundary to become a reality, you have to tell it to the other person. Sometimes this can be the most intimidating part of setting a boundary. But it need not be a big deal, in this example you could say something like, “I’m happy to talk about Afghanistan once in a while, but at work I don’t want to talk about the current situation in-depth or every day.”
5. Lastly, prepare for push-back. Most times you make changes to a pre-existing relationship, the other person will initially not like it. Sometimes they will get over it quickly and sometimes slowly. (One positive sign of a friendship is that the person listens to you and allows you to change.) Regardless, you should not let this phase of boundary setting stop you from saying what it is you want to say.
Remember, that your feelings and state of mind are worth protecting, and boundaries are one way you can help to do that.