boundaries

When I was growing up, I lived in a home with no boundaries. What that meant is that the children's bodies were not their own. Our minds and our souls were not our own either. I had 4 siblings and we learned from those dysfunctional adults around us, that other people's bodies were there to touch whenever an impulse struck. Of course, at the time, as a child I did not hold this awareness. The touch could be sexual or just physically abusive--a pinch, a tight squeeze, a smack, a slap, a punch.

Yesterday morning I lay in bed, connecting the dots in my mind and remembered some abusive moments in my life as a young child of 3 or 4. These revelations are devastating because they are the proof of the lack of boundaries I grew up with. However, in a way they are also liberating, but only when I allow myself to believe and trust. The denial of my youth is always breathing down my neck.

Recently I have begun to try and notice boundary issues and realize they are a big trigger for me.

Today, my son took the power strip I was using in my room. He wanted to hook up his keyboard to play downstairs. However, when I went in my room to plug in my laptop and the power strip was gone, I went bananas. I yelled/no--screamed--at him. I most definitely over-reacted. It was only until I took some time to reflect, that I realized that what I was reacting to was his crossing of my boundary....my personal space. And really it was not his crossing but the crossing long ago when I was too little to defend myself.

I think that when we notice those things that trigger deep emotion, then we are actively healing some small portion of the deep hurt inside.

I totally agree! there's a book that talks about this at length. The name of the book is ''Parenting from the Inside Out' In fact, I'd be very interested in a thread where we could post our reactions to our children and how we were able to connect the dots of our current emotional reactivity to a historical experience with same emotional content.