Through a series of miscommunications, the result of my own sheer timidity, I sometimes find myself in sticky situations. I get myself backed into corners where I don’t want to be.
In retrospect, it is the result of my underdeveloped ability to establish healthy boundaries. To stand up for myself when it doesn’t feel safe to do so. Yes, I still struggle with this sometimes.
It often shows up in the form of one of the nasty 4F patterns you may have heard about. A response to life’s challenges that is woven into our physiology by the experience of trauma at a young age.
Most people know the fight, flight or freeze response.What you might not know is the fourth F, the fawn response. Fawning is the act of abasing oneself to get approval or acceptance. Or even just straight up safety.
Children raised with trauma have a poor and sometimes non-existent sense of Self and safety. And lacking this basic sense of Self and safety equals no boundaries.
We don’t know where we start and someone else ends. We don’t know that we have a right to our own thoughts and feelings. We don’t know that we have a right to defend those thoughts and feelings. And besides, it’s far too scary to stand up for them. Healthy boundaries and expectations were never mirrored for us.
We have never experienced autonomy.
What does that look like in terms of our behaviors now?
We’ve become so adept at sensing the emotional climate in a room, or in a person, we respond immediately with whatever coping mechanisms make us feel in control of the situation. Anything to bring back that sense of safety. No matter, that we give up our own thoughts and feelings to accomplish this. Safety is paramount.
We subconsciously study people and try to imitate them. This is a sort of “reverse mirroring.” As humans we instinctively know that if we are like another, they are more likely to accept us. A more insidious form of this is to not only act like them, but take on their thoughts and beliefs as well.
A dangerous game in the hands of a manipulator.
If you hang out with this for very long, you get sucked into someone else’s reality without even realizing you’ve been the victim of a mind game.
We look to others to give us that sense of Self that we crave. Which means accepting everything that we are told about who we are, both in words and actions. If we crave acceptance and get none, this becomes evidence that we are not worthy of acceptance. If we crave love, and we get none, this becomes evidence that we are not worthy of love.
And so the deck is stacked against us. Because this is the same old litany we learned as children. Repeated over and over again. Ouch.
How to extricate oneself from this mess?
Boundaries Boot Camp here we come.
In a series of upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing the steps for taking back your autonomy. I’ll give you the nuts and bolts information and tools to start developing healthier boundaries.
The bottom line?
This is a war. And you are declaring battle. For your sovereign rights as an individual. You couldn’t do that for yourself as a child. But you can do it now. It’s time for some serious training.
Boot Camp.
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