Boundaries
Boundaries and Boundary Setting is a fundamental skill that every person should have. It is imperative to your survival and proper healthy functioning. Boundaries, protects oneself and facilitates being treated in a respectful way, resulting in healthy relationships.
Setting personal boundaries is to protect the Self (“I”) from the abuse of others!
Boundary setting for me has been very easy since I was a child and it came very naturally and unconsciously, at least that is what I thought was boundary setting… I soon discovered that it was control, destructive and certainly not healthy boundaries. I had to undo this mis learned behaviour part of me and learn a new way, where boundary setting was constructive rather than destructive. This was something that I had to learn and define for myself, so that I could write about it and to teach it. I used to just do it and then suffer the consequences, when used negatively. When I changed it to a positive and constructive way, I always had marvellous results.
There is a process of development one must go through to fully understand boundaries and to be able to apply them effectively being, recognizing what is your stuff and who you are and what is other peoples stuff, why and when do you give away your power to other people, what is your feelings when you are triggered, and that you have called back your power from others that you gave it to. once you have got these under your belt you can apply boundaries very effectively.
There are three primary areas we must master to have a healthier relationship with one-Self and others, these are: ability to set boundaries, emotional honesty, and emotional responsibility. The most important of these is emotional responsibility. Here you must learn what is yours and yours to fix, and what belongs to others and you have no responsibility to fix or resolve. You must take personal responsibility to sort out yours. Nobody else is going to do it for you. The second most important area is emotional honesty with self, no matter how painful. I often talk to clients about commandment number 11 here; Thou shalt not bull-shit thyself! No denial, no cover up, no ducking and diving, no running away from, no putting your head in the sand, no avoiding, nothing … just straight looking in the eye and seeing it for what it is. From here setting boundaries becomes so much easier as you can now see what yours is and what is others’ stuff. You are not responsible for others in anyway. All three of these are closely inter related.
We need to change our relationship with life and ourselves, this is vital to make any long-term changes in our relationships with our selves and others, and to interrelate in a healthy way. It is vital to learn to love, respect, and honour our-Selves first, so that we can awaken to the need to have boundaries and to set boundaries. If we cannot do this on ourselves, we have no hope of getting it right with others. Boundaries let other people know that they cannot take away our power, or abuse us in some way, and that we deserve and demand their respect in their interaction with us. Failure to do that will result in no further cooperation or interaction from us! If it continues we will leave. Nothing less is acceptable. We will be treated with respect. We know that respect is a subset of love, therefore we demand to be treated with respect and love, pure and simple. Boundary setting just works this the way!
In my interaction with clients, they immediately understand when I say, “What is so powerful and effective about the boundary setting process is, as we learn to apply it, it changes our core relationship with ourselves and others”. When we have a more loving relationship with ourselves, everything changes as it fundamentally affects every area in our lives. When we reach that stage when we naturally set boundaries with others when required, speak our truth, be who we are, and stand by own our right to be here and alive, we will naturally be treated with respect and dignity.
The process of teaching boundaries is preceded by discovering where and why you lost your power to others, what are your triggers? We must resolve these triggers first, and then recall our power through the “recall our power process”. In this process we discover the inner “I” of ourselves and how we lost it and what happens when we call it back. Once done we explain that boundary setting is about using your power, the “I” of you, fully in a constructive way to protect yourself. Protecting yourself is in fact loving yourself fully.
To try and learn how to set boundaries and assert yourself, without changing the core relationship within yourself, will ultimately not work, for you personally or in any relationship you care most about, or in any other relationship. It is relatively easy to start setting boundaries in relationships that don't mean much to you, however it is in the relationships that mean the most to you that it is so difficult. That is because in those relationships (family, romantic, etc.), that our inner child wounds are the most powerful and get triggered. Resolving the triggers removes the fear!
The little child within us may not feel worthy, could feel defective, or perhaps shameful, and is terrified of setting boundaries for fear that everyone will leave, not love them, reject them and/or abandon them. Sometimes they feel that they have to please, over protect, be responsible for, be the doormat, be abused, be used, controlled, allow themselves to be manipulated, etc. and so the list goes on and on.
The other extreme of this phenomena is when we throw up huge walls (barriers) around us to try to keep people from getting too close in a bid to protect ourselves. When we do this, we sabotage any possibility of a relationship that starts becoming too intimate for comfort. We subconsciously do this to protect the wounded child within from being hurt or the possibility of being further hurt.
With boundaries, as in every area of the healing process, change starts with awareness of self. One of my clients stated the following: “I had to hear about boundaries and start learning the concept, before I even realized that I didn't have any. I had to start getting some glimmer of the idea of what boundaries are and how to set them, in order to understand how hard they are for me to set, I also discovered how absolutely vital it is that I learn to “love” myself first before I can even understand why I need a boundary in the first place! I even struggled with the concept that I can, never mind supposed to put boundaries in place when my own boundaries have been transgressed. I thought that I just had to put up barriers in place to protect me, keep people at a distance, don’t let them in, etc. because that is the way I thought that I should operate to get through life. It was natural to me. I was amazed when I had discovered that there is another way, but that is how it was, and now finding out just how effective they are without using anger or antagonism. Amazing!”
Here are various quotes from Co-dependence, Dance of Wounded Souls
"Boundaries define limits, mark off dividing lines. The purpose of a boundary is to make clear separations between different turf, different territory. . . . you and me!
In relationship to recovery and the growth process, I am going to be talking about two primary types of boundaries. Natural boundaries that are part of the way life works - that are aligned with the reality of the rules that govern human dynamics such as boundaries on a property - and personal boundaries."
The process of boundary setting teaches us how to take down the walls and protect ourselves in healthy ways - by learning what healthy boundaries are, how to set them, and how to defend them. It teaches us to be discerning in our choices, to ask for what we need, and to be assertive and loving in meeting our own needs. (Of course, many of us have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for us to have needs.)
The purpose of having boundaries is to protect and take care of ourselves. We need to be able to tell other people when they are acting in ways that are not acceptable to us. A first step is starting to know that we have a right to protect and defend ourselves. It is our God given right. That we have not only the right, but the duty, to take responsibility for how we allow others to treat us.
We need to start becoming aware of what healthy behaviour and acceptable interaction dynamics looks like before we can start practicing them on ourselves and then on others - and demanding the proper treatment from others. We need to start learning how to be emotionally honest with ourselves, how to start owning our feelings, and how to communicate in a direct and honest manner with those feelings. Setting personal boundaries is vital part of healthy relationships - which are not possible without feelings communication.
The first thing that we need to learn to do is communicate without blaming. That means, stop saying things like: you make me so angry; you hurt me; you make me crazy; how could you do that to me after all I have done for you; etc. these are our own personal reactions that kick in when a situation arises. These are your reactions, you need to learn what they are and resolve them.
We know from the subconscious mind teaching that every reaction we have, has nothing to do with the person or incident in front of us. It is our stuff, which are the issues we took on about ourselves in childhood that has so warped our perspective on our own emotional responses.
We all went through life and encountered various experiences where we unconsciously gave away our power, took on wrong perceptions, and developed wounding’s of some sort. There was nobody around at the time, when we did this, that could explain to us, or had the insight or understanding to impart to us what is the right way or the incorrect way. We just had to magically figure it out for ourselves. When we did, we based this on the knowledge we had at the time and got is hopelessly wrong. We cannot blame anyone because those around us did not know either, for if they did, you would not be here learning this now.
In the process we had completely lost our “I”, that part of us that says: “this is who I am. This is me and that is you and you are separate from me. I am responsible for me and you are responsible for you”. We had in a sense given our power away or had given others the right for them to take our power away. We did this because we did not know any better.
To understand when your boundaries have been transgressed, is to check if there has been any personal cost to you in some way, be it in your wallet, personal energy, personal space, time, and depletion/belittling in the heated exchange. As soon as there is a cost from any one of these, then you know that your boundary has been transgressed. It is time to put a boundary in place.
Here is a classic example of our own internal boundaries being transgressed about ourselves. When we feel shameful about ourselves, it involves thinking that there is something wrong with whom we are. Guilt is another and, in my definition, involves our incorrect behaviour while shame is about our being.
Guilt is: I did something wrong? I made a mistake? I am bad!
Shame is: I am a mistake? Something is wrong with me?
Let’s be clear here, when you were created (way, way back in time), you were created by God! God does not make mistakes! It is us who has diminished our view of ourselves. This is our transgression of our own internal boundary. There can never be anything wrong with you. It is impossible! Yes, there probably are things that you need to learn, but that does not mean that there is something wrong with you, it just means that there is a skill or two that you need to learn. That’s it! Regarding “Guilt”, we all have made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes, that is how we learn. This is how education came about. Education is the culmination and summation of knowledge gained from learning about our mistakes over time, it is a short cut to help you from preventing mistakes to happen again. Education helps us to learn from others who have already made these mistakes. We do not feel guilty about learning education, by the same token we don’t have to feel “Guilty” about making our mistakes. If we made one, take responsibility for it, learn from it, make restitution where necessary and then you can move on. Period.
On an emotional level, the dance of recovery of shame is: owning and honouring the emotional wounds (belief systems) so that we can release the grief energy, the pain, rage, terror, the shame that is driving us. That shame is toxic and is not ours. It never was! We did nothing to be ashamed of, we were just little kids, just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, by their parents before them, etc., etc. This shame about being human has been passed down from generation to generation. You are a product of that passing on. There is no blame here and there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and scrambled minds.
In order to stop giving the toxic shame so much power, we must to learn to detach from my own reactive process enough to start being able to set a boundary between being and behaviour. We must stop judging ourselves and other people based on behaviour. We must learn how to observe behaviour without making judgments about ourselves and others. There is a huge difference between judgment, in my definition, and observation. We can observe another person’s behaviour, we don’t have to condone, overlook, or even accept it if it is unacceptable to us. It also does not mean we need to make a value judgment about them being based on their behaviour, but just to accept that they are behaving this way, for they do not know any better. If they did they would not be acting this way. If you need to put a boundary in place do it, but don’t judge it. This is compassion in action.
Judgment is saying, "That person is a jerk." Observation is saying: "That person seems to be really full of anger and “I” prefer not to be involved with them." When I use the term "judge" I am talking about making judgments about our own or other people being, based on behaviour. In other words: I did something bad therefore I am a bad person; I made a mistake therefore I am a mistake or stupid or I must carry the shame. That is what toxic shame is all about - feeling that something is wrong with our being, that we are somehow defective because we inherited a status, or we have human drives, or human weaknesses and human imperfections.
There may be behaviour in which we have engaged in, that we feel ashamed of, but that does not make us shameful beings. We may need to make judgments about whether our behaviour is healthy and appropriate or not, but that does not mean that we must judge our essential self, our being, because of this behaviour. Our behaviour has been dictated by our belief systems, by our childhood wounds and it does not mean that we are bad or defective as beings. All it means is that we are human and that we are wounded. We all are! We must all learn and grow and resolve our wounding’s.
It is important for us to understand the difference between boundaries and barriers. Barriers are when we want to hide away from the world - we don’t want to interact with the world due some fear that we have, and we want to protect ourselves from being exposed. Barriers create walls around us, they cut us off from people, we become isolated, we are unable to develop heart to heart contact with people. Boundaries on the other hand are about having a open heart that enables us to have heart to heart connections with others, it is about being present and remaining there, it is about protecting ourselves by putting the boundary in place, in the moment, when someone wants to abuse us in some way. We set a firm boundary with the person and we stop further abuse from taking place. When the job is done we can relax our boundary and it allows us to then continue with heart to heart relationships.
With healthy boundaries in place, we can freely interact with the world knowing that we can put a boundary in place whenever the need arises. This gives us great freedom to be ourselves, be present, in every aspect.
When we set a boundary with anyone, it is important to know that when you do that, they cannot take your energy. That person with whom we have placed the boundary on, automatically generates respect for you, whether they like it or not. They can’t help it; they and we all are just hard wired this way. It is a natural built in reaction. They may then choose to override it with another harmful behaviour, but that respect is still there. If you keep applying boundaries with that person, they will eventually be forced to treat you with respect, that is our ultimate goal.
It is also important to set a boundary between you as a being and your own behaviour. All humans have equal Divine value as beings - no matter what our behaviour. Our behaviour, on the other hand, is learned and/or reactive to physical or physiological conditions from our growing up years. We must differentiate between our being and our behaviour. Our learned behaviour and attitude dictate our behaviour, they are learned or adopted defenses designed to allow us to survive in the hostile, emotionally repressive, dysfunctional environments into which we were born.
We use three metaphors to explain boundaries. They work very well. We end the session with you being able to place boundaries in place with people easily and effectively. This is an incredibly powerful tool and skill, that everyone should learn. If boundary setting were more prevalent in the world, there would not be as much dysfunction around as there is today. Boundaries promote healthy functional relationships and interaction, and the lack of boundaries promotes dysfunction, conflict, and disharmony everywhere!
Setting personal boundaries is to protect the Self (“I”) from the abuse of others!
Boundary setting for me has been very easy since I was a child and it came very naturally and unconsciously, at least that is what I thought was boundary setting… I soon discovered that it was control, destructive and certainly not healthy boundaries. I had to undo this mis learned behaviour part of me and learn a new way, where boundary setting was constructive rather than destructive. This was something that I had to learn and define for myself, so that I could write about it and to teach it. I used to just do it and then suffer the consequences, when used negatively. When I changed it to a positive and constructive way, I always had marvellous results.
There is a process of development one must go through to fully understand boundaries and to be able to apply them effectively being, recognizing what is your stuff and who you are and what is other peoples stuff, why and when do you give away your power to other people, what is your feelings when you are triggered, and that you have called back your power from others that you gave it to. once you have got these under your belt you can apply boundaries very effectively.
There are three primary areas we must master to have a healthier relationship with one-Self and others, these are: ability to set boundaries, emotional honesty, and emotional responsibility. The most important of these is emotional responsibility. Here you must learn what is yours and yours to fix, and what belongs to others and you have no responsibility to fix or resolve. You must take personal responsibility to sort out yours. Nobody else is going to do it for you. The second most important area is emotional honesty with self, no matter how painful. I often talk to clients about commandment number 11 here; Thou shalt not bull-shit thyself! No denial, no cover up, no ducking and diving, no running away from, no putting your head in the sand, no avoiding, nothing … just straight looking in the eye and seeing it for what it is. From here setting boundaries becomes so much easier as you can now see what yours is and what is others’ stuff. You are not responsible for others in anyway. All three of these are closely inter related.
We need to change our relationship with life and ourselves, this is vital to make any long-term changes in our relationships with our selves and others, and to interrelate in a healthy way. It is vital to learn to love, respect, and honour our-Selves first, so that we can awaken to the need to have boundaries and to set boundaries. If we cannot do this on ourselves, we have no hope of getting it right with others. Boundaries let other people know that they cannot take away our power, or abuse us in some way, and that we deserve and demand their respect in their interaction with us. Failure to do that will result in no further cooperation or interaction from us! If it continues we will leave. Nothing less is acceptable. We will be treated with respect. We know that respect is a subset of love, therefore we demand to be treated with respect and love, pure and simple. Boundary setting just works this the way!
In my interaction with clients, they immediately understand when I say, “What is so powerful and effective about the boundary setting process is, as we learn to apply it, it changes our core relationship with ourselves and others”. When we have a more loving relationship with ourselves, everything changes as it fundamentally affects every area in our lives. When we reach that stage when we naturally set boundaries with others when required, speak our truth, be who we are, and stand by own our right to be here and alive, we will naturally be treated with respect and dignity.
The process of teaching boundaries is preceded by discovering where and why you lost your power to others, what are your triggers? We must resolve these triggers first, and then recall our power through the “recall our power process”. In this process we discover the inner “I” of ourselves and how we lost it and what happens when we call it back. Once done we explain that boundary setting is about using your power, the “I” of you, fully in a constructive way to protect yourself. Protecting yourself is in fact loving yourself fully.
To try and learn how to set boundaries and assert yourself, without changing the core relationship within yourself, will ultimately not work, for you personally or in any relationship you care most about, or in any other relationship. It is relatively easy to start setting boundaries in relationships that don't mean much to you, however it is in the relationships that mean the most to you that it is so difficult. That is because in those relationships (family, romantic, etc.), that our inner child wounds are the most powerful and get triggered. Resolving the triggers removes the fear!
The little child within us may not feel worthy, could feel defective, or perhaps shameful, and is terrified of setting boundaries for fear that everyone will leave, not love them, reject them and/or abandon them. Sometimes they feel that they have to please, over protect, be responsible for, be the doormat, be abused, be used, controlled, allow themselves to be manipulated, etc. and so the list goes on and on.
The other extreme of this phenomena is when we throw up huge walls (barriers) around us to try to keep people from getting too close in a bid to protect ourselves. When we do this, we sabotage any possibility of a relationship that starts becoming too intimate for comfort. We subconsciously do this to protect the wounded child within from being hurt or the possibility of being further hurt.
With boundaries, as in every area of the healing process, change starts with awareness of self. One of my clients stated the following: “I had to hear about boundaries and start learning the concept, before I even realized that I didn't have any. I had to start getting some glimmer of the idea of what boundaries are and how to set them, in order to understand how hard they are for me to set, I also discovered how absolutely vital it is that I learn to “love” myself first before I can even understand why I need a boundary in the first place! I even struggled with the concept that I can, never mind supposed to put boundaries in place when my own boundaries have been transgressed. I thought that I just had to put up barriers in place to protect me, keep people at a distance, don’t let them in, etc. because that is the way I thought that I should operate to get through life. It was natural to me. I was amazed when I had discovered that there is another way, but that is how it was, and now finding out just how effective they are without using anger or antagonism. Amazing!”
Here are various quotes from Co-dependence, Dance of Wounded Souls
"Boundaries define limits, mark off dividing lines. The purpose of a boundary is to make clear separations between different turf, different territory. . . . you and me!
In relationship to recovery and the growth process, I am going to be talking about two primary types of boundaries. Natural boundaries that are part of the way life works - that are aligned with the reality of the rules that govern human dynamics such as boundaries on a property - and personal boundaries."
The process of boundary setting teaches us how to take down the walls and protect ourselves in healthy ways - by learning what healthy boundaries are, how to set them, and how to defend them. It teaches us to be discerning in our choices, to ask for what we need, and to be assertive and loving in meeting our own needs. (Of course, many of us have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for us to have needs.)
The purpose of having boundaries is to protect and take care of ourselves. We need to be able to tell other people when they are acting in ways that are not acceptable to us. A first step is starting to know that we have a right to protect and defend ourselves. It is our God given right. That we have not only the right, but the duty, to take responsibility for how we allow others to treat us.
We need to start becoming aware of what healthy behaviour and acceptable interaction dynamics looks like before we can start practicing them on ourselves and then on others - and demanding the proper treatment from others. We need to start learning how to be emotionally honest with ourselves, how to start owning our feelings, and how to communicate in a direct and honest manner with those feelings. Setting personal boundaries is vital part of healthy relationships - which are not possible without feelings communication.
The first thing that we need to learn to do is communicate without blaming. That means, stop saying things like: you make me so angry; you hurt me; you make me crazy; how could you do that to me after all I have done for you; etc. these are our own personal reactions that kick in when a situation arises. These are your reactions, you need to learn what they are and resolve them.
We know from the subconscious mind teaching that every reaction we have, has nothing to do with the person or incident in front of us. It is our stuff, which are the issues we took on about ourselves in childhood that has so warped our perspective on our own emotional responses.
We all went through life and encountered various experiences where we unconsciously gave away our power, took on wrong perceptions, and developed wounding’s of some sort. There was nobody around at the time, when we did this, that could explain to us, or had the insight or understanding to impart to us what is the right way or the incorrect way. We just had to magically figure it out for ourselves. When we did, we based this on the knowledge we had at the time and got is hopelessly wrong. We cannot blame anyone because those around us did not know either, for if they did, you would not be here learning this now.
In the process we had completely lost our “I”, that part of us that says: “this is who I am. This is me and that is you and you are separate from me. I am responsible for me and you are responsible for you”. We had in a sense given our power away or had given others the right for them to take our power away. We did this because we did not know any better.
To understand when your boundaries have been transgressed, is to check if there has been any personal cost to you in some way, be it in your wallet, personal energy, personal space, time, and depletion/belittling in the heated exchange. As soon as there is a cost from any one of these, then you know that your boundary has been transgressed. It is time to put a boundary in place.
Here is a classic example of our own internal boundaries being transgressed about ourselves. When we feel shameful about ourselves, it involves thinking that there is something wrong with whom we are. Guilt is another and, in my definition, involves our incorrect behaviour while shame is about our being.
Guilt is: I did something wrong? I made a mistake? I am bad!
Shame is: I am a mistake? Something is wrong with me?
Let’s be clear here, when you were created (way, way back in time), you were created by God! God does not make mistakes! It is us who has diminished our view of ourselves. This is our transgression of our own internal boundary. There can never be anything wrong with you. It is impossible! Yes, there probably are things that you need to learn, but that does not mean that there is something wrong with you, it just means that there is a skill or two that you need to learn. That’s it! Regarding “Guilt”, we all have made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes, that is how we learn. This is how education came about. Education is the culmination and summation of knowledge gained from learning about our mistakes over time, it is a short cut to help you from preventing mistakes to happen again. Education helps us to learn from others who have already made these mistakes. We do not feel guilty about learning education, by the same token we don’t have to feel “Guilty” about making our mistakes. If we made one, take responsibility for it, learn from it, make restitution where necessary and then you can move on. Period.
On an emotional level, the dance of recovery of shame is: owning and honouring the emotional wounds (belief systems) so that we can release the grief energy, the pain, rage, terror, the shame that is driving us. That shame is toxic and is not ours. It never was! We did nothing to be ashamed of, we were just little kids, just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, by their parents before them, etc., etc. This shame about being human has been passed down from generation to generation. You are a product of that passing on. There is no blame here and there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and scrambled minds.
In order to stop giving the toxic shame so much power, we must to learn to detach from my own reactive process enough to start being able to set a boundary between being and behaviour. We must stop judging ourselves and other people based on behaviour. We must learn how to observe behaviour without making judgments about ourselves and others. There is a huge difference between judgment, in my definition, and observation. We can observe another person’s behaviour, we don’t have to condone, overlook, or even accept it if it is unacceptable to us. It also does not mean we need to make a value judgment about them being based on their behaviour, but just to accept that they are behaving this way, for they do not know any better. If they did they would not be acting this way. If you need to put a boundary in place do it, but don’t judge it. This is compassion in action.
Judgment is saying, "That person is a jerk." Observation is saying: "That person seems to be really full of anger and “I” prefer not to be involved with them." When I use the term "judge" I am talking about making judgments about our own or other people being, based on behaviour. In other words: I did something bad therefore I am a bad person; I made a mistake therefore I am a mistake or stupid or I must carry the shame. That is what toxic shame is all about - feeling that something is wrong with our being, that we are somehow defective because we inherited a status, or we have human drives, or human weaknesses and human imperfections.
There may be behaviour in which we have engaged in, that we feel ashamed of, but that does not make us shameful beings. We may need to make judgments about whether our behaviour is healthy and appropriate or not, but that does not mean that we must judge our essential self, our being, because of this behaviour. Our behaviour has been dictated by our belief systems, by our childhood wounds and it does not mean that we are bad or defective as beings. All it means is that we are human and that we are wounded. We all are! We must all learn and grow and resolve our wounding’s.
It is important for us to understand the difference between boundaries and barriers. Barriers are when we want to hide away from the world - we don’t want to interact with the world due some fear that we have, and we want to protect ourselves from being exposed. Barriers create walls around us, they cut us off from people, we become isolated, we are unable to develop heart to heart contact with people. Boundaries on the other hand are about having a open heart that enables us to have heart to heart connections with others, it is about being present and remaining there, it is about protecting ourselves by putting the boundary in place, in the moment, when someone wants to abuse us in some way. We set a firm boundary with the person and we stop further abuse from taking place. When the job is done we can relax our boundary and it allows us to then continue with heart to heart relationships.
With healthy boundaries in place, we can freely interact with the world knowing that we can put a boundary in place whenever the need arises. This gives us great freedom to be ourselves, be present, in every aspect.
When we set a boundary with anyone, it is important to know that when you do that, they cannot take your energy. That person with whom we have placed the boundary on, automatically generates respect for you, whether they like it or not. They can’t help it; they and we all are just hard wired this way. It is a natural built in reaction. They may then choose to override it with another harmful behaviour, but that respect is still there. If you keep applying boundaries with that person, they will eventually be forced to treat you with respect, that is our ultimate goal.
It is also important to set a boundary between you as a being and your own behaviour. All humans have equal Divine value as beings - no matter what our behaviour. Our behaviour, on the other hand, is learned and/or reactive to physical or physiological conditions from our growing up years. We must differentiate between our being and our behaviour. Our learned behaviour and attitude dictate our behaviour, they are learned or adopted defenses designed to allow us to survive in the hostile, emotionally repressive, dysfunctional environments into which we were born.
We use three metaphors to explain boundaries. They work very well. We end the session with you being able to place boundaries in place with people easily and effectively. This is an incredibly powerful tool and skill, that everyone should learn. If boundary setting were more prevalent in the world, there would not be as much dysfunction around as there is today. Boundaries promote healthy functional relationships and interaction, and the lack of boundaries promotes dysfunction, conflict, and disharmony everywhere!