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“Love your neighbor as yourself but don’t take down your fence.” – Carl Sandburg
There’s been a lot of talk lately about building a wall. Love it or hate it, the idea has a sense of separation and finality. When you talk about people internally “putting walls up,” that also gives a sense of division. It infers a non-movable approach to communication. When someone shuts down, there’s a roadblock.
You never hear of putting up an emotional fence, but some people do. It’s called setting a boundary. You don’t learn about it in school. You don’t get paid to do it. It’s not a solid, permanent structure. It can be opaque in some areas and more translucent in others. Meaning to say, it is personal, changeable and sometimes hard to enforce.
The materials of an exterior wall are generally fixed. Steel, brick, stone, drywall, logs…think of the Three Little Pigs and you know which materials aren’t in the top ten for durability. The materials of emotional fences cannot be seen and are constructed in a very intangible (and sometimes not durable) way. Heart muscle and intellectual property come to mind.
Setting boundaries is truly an art. Not a God-given talent, but one that is learned, tested and reviewed for durability. Your boundaries are your limits and you may not know what those are until they are tested.
We’ve all been in that relationship – it starts out fun and exciting and the next thing you know, you’re the boiling frog. The temperature has risen out of control and you didn’t even notice.
Maybe your temperature (or poor temperament) did rise and it manifested itself into passive aggression, depression or resentment. Those three incapacitating emotions make it just as hard as slowly-boiling-water for you to jump out of the pot.
So how did you get there? Sometimes when you accept behaviors from someone else (that you normally would not accept), it starts of slowly, perhaps as a joke or a side-comment. Or maybe it is a touch that feels strange, but you don’t say anything. As you go along in the relationship, those behaviors continue and sometimes increase. At this point, it’s tough to tell someone to stop.
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Melissa Hardin Baysinger
