Lets explore professional and personal boundaries.
Experiencing a long-lasting friendship can be incredible. It feels great having someone in our corner, especially when we’re confident they’ll be there forever. It can be a beautiful experience to fall in love and explore life with someone.
Sometimes it is not so wonderful. Some people don’t want to be a part of the construction crew and build something new. They are content with jumping the wall and doing as they please. Others are life-long friends who we accidentally cast a blind eye toward, by allowing them to do something we would never tolerate with new friends.
Professional relationships are even trickier. As massage therapists we encounter all sorts of circumstances that are challenging to navigate.
The key to all relationships is to create bridges from one person’s palace walls to yours. You can invite them into your palace as a guest, but they can’t stay there. Each time you meet they must cross the bridge and obey the road signs. If they break the rules their entry is denied.
Every relationship bridge has different rules. The rules your significant other follows are much different than the ones you’ve set with your mother, father, or friend. In your personal life these boundaries are more difficult to define, but in the professional world they are clear cut laws.
Every bridge requires upkeep and understanding and must be built from a foundation of empathy and respect. Everyone in the world is an island and these bridges connect us. The stronger we build and upkeep them the less likely they are to crumble or burn.
In relationships we must maintain a vigilant eye on all the moving parts. Our primary focus should be our palace, because the most important relationship we have is with ourselves. Are we doing everything we can to live the highest quality of life, are we chasing our dreams, are we living our purpose, and are we taking care of our body?
We must know our wants and desires. Think about the existence you want to live and build boundaries to prevent others from pulling the carpet out from under your feet.
A vigilant eye will help us thrive, but other times we have to use it to simply survive. In the path of life we sometimes encounter people who escape definition, they seem so monstrous our ability to empathize fails, and once again we feel lost. This kind of creature swims through the waters of life like a hungry shark hunting wayward spirits. Sometimes they sink their teeth into anyone they can bite, but most seek to eat a special kind of treat. The worst monsters we can meet prowl the most vulnerable and desperate. They take the bad and boil it down until their victim’s experience nothing more than a hellish frown. They lie, cheat, steal and destroy for their own pleasure, often with little gain. They slice and stab their victim’s skin with their razor-sharp teeth, while smiling with a sadistic grin. These boundary breakers find their way to our lives, pick and pluck like a buzzard’s beak seeking to snip away our ability to see.
WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE MEET THESE UNFORTUNATE SOULS?
We stand our ground, remain rigid and strong and never allow these monsters to infect us with their message of wrong. It will hurt, this I know, but it is how these things must go. If we fail to keep them away from our palace walls they will smash, poison, and consume until our haven is in ruins.
OUR PERSONAL BOUNDARIES ARE NOT THE SAME FOR EVERYONE
When I was going through chemotherapy I was prohibited from hugging people. My immune system was so weak it was too risky to touch anyone. I had to be extremely careful about who and what I interacted with. The chemotherapy made me feel like death, so there was no way I was going to risk my life for a hug or a handshake.
I was coupled at the time and though I was told not to touch, there was no way I would deny myself love. Her hugs, kisses and the occasional massage were the only exceptions.
One day I was standing in line waiting to buy a delicious liquid refreshment at Picassos my favorite coffee house. I was chatting it up with a young man named Tello when a close friend of mine walked through the door. Immediately my friend wanted to give me a hug, but I had to quickly refuse and inform them I can no longer hug people.
Tello took this as a challenge. He said, “I’m going to give you a hug.”
I turned to him and with a stern voice commanded him not to touch me.
Strangely Tello ignored my demand and continued forward to embrace me. I was filled with a cocktail of anger and fear, my survival mechanism kicked in and I yelled. “If you try to hug me I am going to knock you to the floor!” I meant it. Though I hurt all over there was no way I was going to let him touch me without consequence.
His eyes locked with mine and his urgency slowed to a halt.
“If you ever try to touch me without permission, I will hurt you.” I warned Tello.
Thank goodness he saw the seriousness of my threat and restrained himself.
In a loving relationship our boundaries can be a gentle hand, encouraging words, even a stern look. We can secure our walls without weaponizing them. In most situations we don’t have to aggressively enforce our boundaries like I did with Tello.
In all situations we need to slow the world down with a little empathy. We need to take a moment to imagine what their intent was when they crossed your boundary. Were they trying to hurt and take advantage of you or was this a misunderstanding? Whatever the answer is we must make it clear to them they crossed the line.
Sometimes there are firm rules in life we must follow. In the instance of Tello I could not let him touch me. In the professional world, especially in massage there are firm laws as well. Touching is one of them. A client should never touch you during a massage. Though this is a firm rule, it doesn’t always require the same firmness I used with Tello. Sometimes the client’s hand falls off the table and it touches you because they were asleep, in these instances they are benign, but when they willfully reach out to touch you in a way that is inappropriate you must enforce your boundaries.
Empathy is essential when establishing and enforcing our personal boundaries. When we use the word empathy we are referring to intellectual empathy. What does that mean?
“Understanding the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others to genuinely understand them… It correlates with the ability to accurately reconstruct the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. This trait also requires that we remember occasions when we were wrong, despite an intense conviction that we were right, and consider that we might be similarly deceived in a case at hand.” (Paul, Richard, and A. J. A. Binker. Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World. Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2012.)
A challenging but useful exercise is to imagine yourself as someone else. Let your eyes find someone nearby, look at their shoes. Imagine what it would feel to be wearing those right now. How do you think they would feel? Now think about someone you know, perhaps one who’s hurt your feelings recently. Ignore your feelings and imagine being them. What do you think they were feeling when they hurt you? Why do think they were feeling this? What are some other emotions they could have been experiencing? Take a moment to reevaluate the circumstance, applying their feelings to each to see if your opinion of the encounter changes. Did it change, if not, why, and in the future what can you do to prevent them from breaking the boundary that hurt your feelings?
We are going to do an exercise, first I want you to write down the premise they were acting from when the event occurred. Next, what assumptions might they have been operating from and finally what do you think their thoughts, opinions and plans were?
Intellectual empathy is an effective critical thinking tool. When implemented correctly it serves as a valuable resource to establish and enforce personal boundaries. It also helps us identify the walls of others. With this information we improve our ability to treat others fairly while encouraging them to do the same.
