Reply to Why DON'T you set boundaries?

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[quote=Anonymous]Your scenario, 23:46, sounds like a typical day with my in-laws, a large extended family. Everyone has to take sides, no boundaries are allowed, every gathering is complicated because there are 40 permutations of people who literally can't be in the room with each other because of imagined offenses. They're all in each others' intimate business, going through each others' things and reading each others' private (LOL) papers and badgering each other about every detail of their lives. A lot of this is cultural for them, but the family is also riddled with personality disorders and mental illness. Important detail: They consider this normal.

For years, we only had extremely limited dealings with them, and that seemed to be my husband's unconscious way of setting a kind of boundary--just be the black sheep who marries outside the culture and never takes part in family gatherings and follows no rules. I did not realize all those years that this made him feel terrible and hate himself. You can imagine the many ways that bled out into our lives.

Once we moved a bit closer, it all blew up, as he fell back into their web, and wanting to appease them and feel better about himself, he turned on me and started to view me and treat me as the vile outsider, which is part of what they all do as punishment for anyone who dares set boundaries or live their own lives. Shun, shame, negate.

It took years and much therapy before he started to see how destructive and miserable this all was, and how he hated himself as defined by them, and how horribly he'd been treating me. He's just beginning to learn to set boundaries, and it's very difficult for him. Everything he says and does, down to the tiniest thing, gets punished by them. It's been an epiphany for him to finally start to realize that if he sets a boundary and they don't like it, it's their problem.

And that's a glimpse into why people can have trouble setting boundaries in their family. It's just normal for them not to, and the fallout can be exhausting and nightmarish.

Those of us who grew up in families where boundaries are respected really have no idea. [/quote]

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