Not punishment and not walls
A woman came in a while back who had a best friend of a couple decades and couldn’t bring herself to ask the friend to call before coming over. The friend had a key and used it, and would let herself in and go through whatever was sitting on the counter and settle in for as long as she felt like staying. Any time there was ever a question about any of it, the answer came back the same way. I thought we were closer than that.
When I asked her what she thought would happen if she said something about it, she went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. She said she wouldn’t know who she was. She had been somebody’s best friend since she was nineteen years old, and the arrangement where the other person had unrestricted access to her at all times was the whole of what the friendship was.
Robert Kegan built an entire developmental theory to explain that answer. His argument is that we grow by moving things from one category to another, from the areas of life we are so far inside of that we cannot see them, over into the areas we can hold out at arm’s length and look at. He called the stage where most adults spend most of their lives the socialized mind. In it your relationships are the material you are made out of, and there is no place available to stand that sits outside of them. That makes a boundary unavailable rather than merely difficult, because setting one would mean acting against your own material.
So when people tell me they know exactly what they need to say and cannot make themselves say it, I believe them and I have stopped treating it as a problem of nerve. What is missing is somebody home who could survive the conversation.
Boundary has become a loose enough word that it now covers almost anything a person does when they are finally done being treated a certain way. Somebody tells me they set a boundary with their cousin, and what they go on to describe is nine weeks of no contact with no explanation offered, which the cousin experienced as a disappearance. Somebody else says the same sentence and then reads me the text message they sent, which was written to leave a mark. One of them withdrew and the other one struck, and both of them stopped absorbing what they had been absorbing for years, which is real and which cost them something. Whether either one actually set a boundary depends on what the word is supposed to mean, so it is worth settling that before going any further.
The simplest version I have found is that a boundary is a statement about what you are going to do, said out loud to somebody about something that affects you, and it carries no requirement that they agree with it. It describes your own conduct. I need to know when somebody is coming into my house is a boundary. You need to stop being so inconsiderate is a complaint, and the difference between those two matters a great deal, because the first one is yours to keep and the second one puts your whole outcome in somebody else’s hands.
When a boundary comes out as punishment, what has usually happened is that a part of the person finally got a turn. Richard Schwartz built his whole model on the idea that each of us runs as a collection of distinct pieces rather than one unified self, and that a lot of those pieces picked up a job somewhere back in childhood and have never put it down. Almost everybody who has been treated badly for a long stretch has one in there that has been absorbing it the entire time and keeping a detailed account of every instance. It knows the dates. It has been overruled every single time somebody decided that keeping the peace mattered more than whatever it was trying to say, and it has been building its case the whole time it was being overruled. When the dam gives, that part walks into the room with the entire file and starts reading from it.
What comes out is accurate and it is also aimed. The consequence gets chosen for how hard it will land rather than for what it will protect, and you can tell which one you are doing from the inside. A boundary that protects something tends to leave you tired. A boundary that protects something tends to leave you tired, while a boundary that punishes somebody leaves you satisfied, and that satisfaction is worth paying close attention to because it is the clearest available signal that something other than you is driving the bus.
The wall is the other way this goes wrong, and it is harder to name because it looks like strength and it usually gets applause. Among those pieces holding old jobs, the ones Schwartz calls protectors have a single assignment, which is keeping you from getting hurt the way you once were. One of them decides that the only safe amount of access is none at all, and the gate comes down on the whole category of people rather than on the particular person who did the particular thing. Everybody gets held at the same distance regardless of what they have or have not done, which is efficient and which is also why walls tend to produce a life that gets smaller every year.
A wall can go up without the person having grown an inch, and that took me a long time to understand. Pain by itself is enough to build one so a wall is available to anybody who has simply had enough. So somebody can be cut off from half the people they once loved and still be exactly where that woman with the house key was. Kegan would say those relationships are still the material they are made out of, because none of them ever got moved out to arm’s length where it could be looked at. The relationship got removed instead, which settles the problem without solving any of it.
The move Kegan describes is from being your relationships to having them. He called the far side of it the self-authoring mind, and the word authoring is the important one because what shows up is the ability to write your own position instead of inheriting one from whoever you happen to be standing next to. The relationship becomes something you hold and consider and make decisions about. It stops being the floor you are standing on.
Once that shift happens, something changes about the boundary that is almost impossible to appreciate from the other side of it. The boundary no longer has to be a weapon, because you are not fighting for your own existence when you set it. The friendship has stopped being the thing holding you up, so you can ask it to change without the request feeling like self-destruction, and that single difference is what separates a boundary from a threat.
Then there is the question of who does the talking. The part of you that kept the twenty-year account has information nobody else in you has and it is right about every fact in the file, and it is also the worst possible negotiator you could send into the room. If you hand it the terms you get the punishing version, and if you overrule it the way it has always been overruled you get nothing for a while and then you get the wall about six months later when it finally quits asking.
Integration means that part gets heard all the way through without getting the wheel. You take the file seriously and let it tell you every instance it has recorded, and then you are the one who decides what to ask for, with everything it gave you in hand and the part itself is no longer running the conversation.
That is also what makes a boundary possible to keep. A boundary set by an activated part lasts exactly as long as the activation does. The anger burns off in a week or two and the old arrangement comes right back, which is why people set the same boundary with the same person four separate times and conclude there is something wrong with them. A decision doesn’t require you to stay angry in order to hold it.
The woman with the house key took about five months to get anywhere with any of this. What she eventually said was a good deal smaller than anything either of us had rehearsed. She asked her friend to send a text before coming over.
Her friend said I thought we were closer than that.
She had been waiting twenty-two years for that sentence, and this time she had an answer for it. She told her they were close, and that she wanted to keep it that way, and that she needed to know when somebody was coming into her house. She didn’t explain it three different ways or apologize for needing it, and she also didn’t go cold while she was saying it. She stayed warm the entire time, which is the part people find hardest to believe is even available.
Her friend was hurt for a couple of weeks and pushed harder before she adjusted, which is what any system does when one person changes their part in an old arrangement. The pressure to go back to the previous version always comes in strongest from the people who liked that version the most. It is worth knowing in advance that the pushback is coming, so that it doesn’t get read as evidence that you were wrong.
Not every one of these lands the way hers did. Some people will refuse the smallest request available, and will treat a text message before coming over as an insult requiring an apology, and will keep testing it for a year to see whether you meant it. When a relationship cannot survive being asked for anything at all, that information was already true and you have only found a way to surface it. Distance is sometimes the only arrangement left, and from the outside that distance looks identical to a wall. The difference is in who decided it and from where. A wall goes up because a frightened part ran out of ideas. Distance arrives as a decision made with all of you present, after you asked for something small and paid attention to what came back.
What she told me months afterward was that the hard part had almost nothing to do with the friend. The hard part was finding out that she could want the friendship and want the key back at the same time, and that holding both of those at once didn’t tear anything in half.
Integration is the word for what has to happen first. A boundary that arrives as punishment is one part of you getting the floor at last, and a wall is another part deciding the whole operation is too dangerous to keep running, and in both cases one of them is acting on behalf of the entire person. Schwartz’s claim is that underneath all of those parts there is something he calls the Self, and that it is the only thing in you able to hear all of them at once without being taken over by any of them. The boundary that holds gets set from there, with the furious one and the one who loves her and the one who has been scared of this conversation since 1994 all in the room for it, and the Self doing the talking.
What she worked out somewhere in the middle of all this is something I keep running into. The friend letting herself in was real and it needed to change, and almost none of the heat she had been carrying about it for two decades belonged to the friend. The charge was her own, coming from a part inside her who had been trying to get her attention since long before she ever met that woman.
When somebody gets under your skin, the irritation is a part of you asking to be known, and the other person is mostly the occasion for the asking. You can go deal with them, and usually you should, and what you get to keep afterward is whatever you learned about the one inside you who was doing the asking. Get to know enough of them and more of you ends up in the room than was there before, and that is what being integrated actually amounts to.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Love Without Submission
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
