How To Restore Boundaries After Trauma
How Does Trauma Rupture/Impact Boundaries?
Your boundaries are ignored, disregarded, disrespected consistently by others and you accept this as the norm
Rigid boundaries
Fawning, folding, people pleasing AKA focusing on others and ignoring yourself
Over accommodating others at expense of self
Saying no is scary
Saying no is foreign
Saying yes automatically
Inappropriate responsibility
Blaming others 100%
Blaming yourself 100%
Taking on others’ problems and issues
Shutting down, freezing
Dissociation
Depersonalization
Derealization
Stuckness
Detaching from one’s body and emotions
Zoning out
Extreme distance and needing extreme space
Avoiding vulnerability
Difficulty with intimacy
Avoidance
Mistrust
Difficulty trusting others
Difficulty trusting self
And more
Signs of Ruptured Boundaries After Trauma
Feels like walking around without skin
raw, hurts, painful to the touch
Difficulty enforcing boundaries
asking for what you want, saying no without guilt
Difficulty viewing others’ boundaries with distance and objectivity
Extreme/binary boundaries
bad and good, yes or no, always or never, should or have to
Hypersensitive to rejection
whether real or perceived
And more
How To Restore Boundaries After Trauma
Education around trauma and how it impacts boundaries
Education around boundaries
Validation and acknowledgment of how trauma has ruptured boundaries
Titration or starting very small
Doing tiny steps toward saying no and yes
Increased sense of safety inside of one’s body
Setting limits and practicing this
Practicing saying no
Practicing saying “I don’t know”
Saying yes when you want to say yes
Physical boundary exercises such as pushing hands together, pushing wall with hands, etc.
Somatic work
Increased ability to name, sense, be aware of, acknowledge, and process emotions and sensations
Tracking sensations
Resourcing or grounding
Body work
Increased ability to notice one has a body
Increased ability for one to be touched by others and say no and yes and honor one’s boundaries
And more
Bob Scaer, The Body Bears the Burden, pg. 3.
“We all live in a small and safe world of our own defined by invisible but very real barriers, or boundaries.
These boundaries are formed by our collective experiences with the world around us, some of which are positive or rewarding, some negative or punishing.
All of our senses – smell, vision, hearing, vestibular input, taste, touch, nociception and proprioception – contribute to the formation of these boundaries that eventually tell us where we as a perceptual whole, and the rest of the world begins.
Our unconscious awareness of these boundaries allows us to move about in the world without literally impacting obstacles that are not part of our own self. As a developing infant and child, we receive positive or negative information from sensory experiences that contribute to our unconscious perception of our safe boundaries.
Painful or unpleasant feedback leads us to avoid moving beyond the boundary created by that experience, whereas positive feedback stimulates us to explore that boundary area more.
Based on this sensory feedback loop, we are continuously forming and reforming our boundaries based on our continuing life experiences and the sensory messages associated with them.
From these experiences, we form a very specific awareness of the safe extent to which we may challenge the world around us. eoretically, the perceptual concept of our boundaries could be equated at least partly to our sense of self.
Logically, the more positive our ongoing life experience is and the more intense the associated positive sensory experience is, the more solid our personal sense of boundary will become.
The more solid that our boundaries are, the more safe, secure, and effective we will be in dealing with the world outside of us. In many respects, this concept of boundary envisions an almost tangible, physiologically and perceptually based entity.”