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Chapter 4 - Boundaries (Part 1)
Most men come in to counseling because they have experienced an involuntary and sudden separation from a mother object. Initiatory separation will always involve some separation from what seems comfortable and secure. This separation triggers great fear and desperation in the boy within the man. He is being separated from what is familiar emotionally, from what he thought he could always count on, from what he thought he should always have.
Unfortunately, many men react to this pain like an uninitiated boy. Many men run from this pain toward a substitute mother figure, in another woman or in an addiction. Less frequently they remain in a stuck depression, feeling the powerless victim of fate, feeling numb. Since most men have no elders around to guide and interpret this separation experience they will usually squander another opportunity to be initiated. They will then continue to be stuck in a revolving door of separation and regression. Regression is the psychological equivalent of backtracking to the safety of the village.
A healthy response to separation involves the learning of psychological boundaries. At the beginning of counseling I invariably start talking to a man about the how's and why's of boundary setting.
Space And The Final Frontier
The term boundary became popularized from the family systems theory explanation of human behavior. Much of the addictions literature, especially that of the adult children of alcoholics movement, stresses the need for boundary setting in relationships, especially between addict and codependent. Boundaries emerge when psychology studies the connection between relationships and personal psychology. The rule is that wherever two or three are gathered together there are boundary problems in the midst of them. Families happen to be any person's first and most powerful experience with relationships and with the need for boundaries.
When a family has loose boundaries or no boundaries then "everyone lives in each other's pockets". There is nothing that is allowed to be personal and private. In fact, in a dysfunctional family, anything that is private or personally different is seen as a separation and betrayal. Being different or not agreeing with family attitudes is seen as a threat to the family existence. In this type of family there is no exit door, there is no way to separate and grow personally. For people coming out of this family background, any relationship from then on is a life sentence. Any thought of separation is fearful.
Boundaries to people are like fences for property owners. They are psychological lines denoting what is personal, both physically and psychologically. Good psychological fences not only make good neighbors they also make good marriages and friendships. However, to a society that is afraid of deep separation and initiation, boundaries have little meaning.
Often when a man is in a relationship he feels smothered. He feels engulfed. He doesn't know why, but he feels he needs "space". Space is often an unconscious code word for boundaries. The man is really incoherently yearning for an initiatory separation, a movement away from the mother complex. He is yearning for the frontier, the wilderness. He is looking for a boundary to mark the end of the mother complex's property and the beginning of his own. He is looking for more of a balance between his personal life and his relationship life.
However, if a man is not guided by elders he will invariably succumb to his abandonment fears once he takes or is given his space. If he is actually abandoned by his loved one, the fear becomes terror. In either case he will fearfully give up his boundary. He will abandon his separation experience with no elders there to block his way back.
Psychological boundaries are voluntary emotional separations. They cut negative emotional connections that a man has with those he relates to, be they loved ones, friends, bosses, or neighbors. Mostly they sever unhealthy emotional dependencies that keep a man a boy. Boundaries help a man stand up for himself, not in a macho adolescent way, but in a way that announces what he stands for.
Healthy boundaries are ways of saying "no" to people and things that are destructive. They also say "no" to the young, dependent boy inside who needs to be blocked from going back to the hut. In many situations boundaries take an involuntary separation and turn it into a voluntary one. As such, boundaries turn a negative into a positive. In other situations they free a man dependently bound to a love one, freeing both of them from an unhealthy relationship.
In either case, boundary setting gives a man breathing room, creating a space where he can learn to understand the meaning of separation and what he needs to do with it.
Abandonment: David
David came back to counseling after having seen me for about six months two years before. Those first six months he was in the middle of breaking up with his wife, while dating a woman he said he loved. This double dating situation is always a red flag. If a man cannot go through one separation totally before connecting to another loved one he is not really separating. He is more than likely transferring from one mother object to another, and defending against separation. This was the case with David.
David experienced enough separation fears in the process of going between wife and girlfriend that he initially came for help. However, since he was mostly numb to his inner life, any talk of separation from both women made no sense to him. Talk of mother objects felt foreign to him. Unconsciously he came to me to find a painless decision for him. I could not accommodate. He could not yet hear.
When he returned for counseling two years later, he had divorced his wife and had been living with his girlfriend. He found out through living with her that his girlfriend, Diana, had not been a woman who identified with the mother archetype. She did not live to give him understanding and pleasure. In fact, David's main complaint was that Diana was cold to him sexually and didn't give him the attention he felt he needed. David had a woman as his mother object who didn't want to play that role. It was a case of mistaken identity.
So David took the relationship for granted and started covertly seeing Denise. Again David defended against separation by having two women, one always as "home base", the mother who would always be there. David's problem was that Diana found out about the affair from a jealous Denise. Diana left home base and refused to return. This time transference didn't work. David finally experienced the Great Separation after realizing "Diana was the best thing that ever happened to me."
Like most men in his situation he was devastated. The woman who provided his emotional security was gone. His first reaction was to get my help to get her back. He wanted me to give him the key words to persuade her to return. He called her regularly, trying to play it cool and macho. Yet by the end of every call he would be begging Diana to come back. She would not. Then he cried a lot and started the cycle over. Finally, after he realized she would not come back, he found the strength to listen more closely about separation and boundaries.
I then talked to him about the need to cooperate with the separation. I asked him to end his contact voluntarily. I asked him to set a boundary. He would not call. He would wait for her to call. He would endure the pain of disconnection. By setting his boundary he would also respect her legitimate boundary of ending the relationship.
I then talked to him about using the separation time to look at how he came to be in this untenable situation. If he kept to his pattern he would never find peace within himself or within a relationship. I talked about separating from Diana, or any woman, as the fantasy source of all his good feeling. I talked of his next initiatory steps. I told him that maybe an initiated David could then start a healthy relationship with her.
Like David, an uninitiated man will react to separation abandonment by desperately trying anything to keep his partner close. He will promise anything, restore his passionate dating behaviors, give uncharacteristic attention and support. He will forget his own needs, values, and life direction in order to keep connected to a maternal figure. He will do anything to relieve the pain.
When a man is encouraged to look more closely into his pain, he will find that the uninitiated young boy inside feels terrified because he sees all support and understanding slipping away. It will feel like physical withdrawal from drugs as he envisions a world devoid of warm, physical closeness. He feels he will fall apart if she is not around. This feeling in the boy is not the yearning for sexual closeness as much as the yearning for the soothing presence of physical, body closeness. This is very much like a young boy's need for holding his mother's hand or lying close to her when he is frightened at night.
The uninitiated boy will also feel terrified in a world where his physical needs are not being met. How will he feed himself? Who will keep his clothes clean? Who will get him to his friends? These fears seem irrational to an adult. But deep inside every desperate man these unspoken feelings are very real.
Most men who suffer the Great Separation have profound abandonment fears, buried in their own psyches. They are terrified of being alone. These feelings erupt from their inner life, no longer able to be defended against, at the time of separation. As with all boundaries, David had to say no to pursuing Diana in order to work on his abandonment issues. He needed space. He needed to give her space. He needed to attend to that little boy inside.
Engulfment: James
David felt his abandonment feelings suddenly in the middle of the Great Separation. As I have said, other men are in the limbo before intense separation. They are uncomfortable within their dependency yet are unconsciously afraid of separation. They feel engulfed and stuck. They have not yet faced the Great Separation but are starting to feel the increasing discomfort of staying in the village too long. They blame their stuckness on their loved one. Numbness is a sign of their limbo.
For these men boundaries take on a different face. They force the man himself to run the risk of physical separation by setting a boundary, often in the face of an angry partner. Boundary setting always risks total separation. In this situation that risk becomes clear.
James was married with two children. He had always seen himself as a very responsible man and put a great deal of importance on being a good father. In fact, he had to be responsible from a young age because of his father's death when James was 12. James was the oldest of 4 children and had to do much of the household chores around the house to help his working mother. He also had to take care of younger children and even comfort his mother when she was overwhelmed. As we will see with many men stuck in limbo, James had to act like a man much too early in his life.
James was also very responsible with his own family. He spent all of his free time at home either with the children or doing household chores. In many ways he transferred his adolescent sense of responsibility to his new family. He acted like a man to his wife and children just like he had when home with his mother.
James' wife, Wanda, was the youngest in a wealthy family where mother could stay home and even hire housekeeping help. She always wanted to be a mother like her mother. She had to do little around the house when she was young and could devote her time to her passions, reading and being with friends. She always dreamed of marrying a handsome, responsible man like her father.
The couple married after starting solid careers. Both wanted children right away. After the first child came along their life started changing. The first child can trigger mother issues in both the man and the woman. Wanda quit her job to take care of their daughter. She started to become more and more a mother, identifying strongly with the mother archetype inside. James felt the heavy responsibility of financially supporting the family alone, even though he had agreed that it would be good for Wanda to be a full-time mother. James didn't realize he was falling into an old family pattern and an old, unfulfilling role. James also didn't realize that he was feeling more alone as Wanda mothered their child more than him.
James also started feeling more and more of the responsibility for keeping the house ordered and clean. James felt Wanda spent all her time at home and couldn't understand why Wanda could not raise their child and keep house, too. He expected a different kind of mother. James felt more and more of his time consumed with a full-time job plus a housekeeping job when he came home. When he complained to Wanda she would accuse him of being sexist and of not understanding what motherhood was about. She expected him home to do some chores as a "liberated man" should.
Wanda also had a habit of impulse buying, mostly for the children. She was used to having money and could not understand why they didn't have enough to cover their expenses. Credit cards solved that problem for her. James' anxiety increased as each monthly statement appeared. James felt controlled by her bills. He was continually reminded of how poor and unhappy his family was after his father's death and how responsible he felt to somehow make the financial situation better. He felt as helpless as an adult as he felt as an adolescent. Wanda seemed unconcerned by debt, expecting someone would pay like they always did.
James reacted to Wanda's expectations like most uninitiated men. He alternately became angry or withdrawn. It was the emotional withdrawal that hurt Wanda. She would react with anger, herself, accusing him of being a typical controlling male. Sometimes she would withdraw into "shopping days" alone or with friends. She felt him uncaring and unappreciative. She felt rejected by his withdrawal, demeaned by his anger. Meanwhile, James felt she was demanding and irresponsible, not the partner he wanted. The two uninitiated people became estranged.
James came to counseling because he was miserable. Like most men who feel engulfed, his numbness was starting to wear off, to be replaced by depression. Luckily, there were no signs his depression had done damage to his body.
I quickly found out James had no life outside of his family. Wanda provided him a family and direction in his life. His family gave him security and instant identity. He had never been allowed to find an identity outside of family. He had never left the village. He had never been alone. Wanda provided a safe 'home base' even though home was often a depressing place.
The first boundary James needed to set was around his own time. He needed to be able to spend time to explore his inner life, especially his lost adolescence. He needed to separate from the common life of his family to find his own life outside the village. He needed to find out that his problem was not Wanda but his regressive need for Wanda, and his need to finally "save" his mother object so he could get on with his adolescent life.
James was actually afraid, at first, to take free time. He was afraid to tell Wanda that he was going to take time even if she didn't agree. It was because of his wife's anger. He was afraid that his demands would make her more angry and further erode the marriage. He was afraid he couldn't face the separation of divorce that might come from her anger. He was also afraid to hurt the very fragile mother he was trying to help.
When he looked more closely he found he was afraid because he didn't know what to do with his free time. He had never had this adolescent time before. In fact he was unconsciously afraid of two aspects of initiation: separation and ordeal. Separation would mean he was alone. The ordeal would mean he would have to find his true identity by himself instead of being given his identity by his mother object. He was experiencing the boy in every man who secretly wishes to be initiated by his mother, so he doesn't have to face the hard world of men.
Men such as James talk of feeling "selfish" when thinking of setting boundaries, especially time boundaries. They feel that they don't deserve their own time. As we will see in coming chapters, part of this feeling comes from the patriarchy, the father's world,. Men are providers and protectors. They must spend their time making the world safe for their wives and families. This is their full time job. This job makes them the "disposable sex", disposable to society, disposable to themselves. Their mission provides no time for their own life. The patriarchy is not interested in a man's individual identity or personal search. That is not in the manual. That does the patriarchy no good.
Selfishness is also a word the dark mother uses. She is not interested in the boy leaving. Through her eyes separation is disloyal, a betrayal, just as in a dysfunctional family. A man who feels selfish in setting boundaries is seeing the world through the eyes of the dark mother. He is feeling her feelings, not his own. He is staying unconscious to his own inner life.
James did set a boundary by taking one week-end day every two weeks for his time. He didn't know exactly what he would do with the time. But he wanted to find out. He offered the same time boundary to his wife. She was angry. He momentarily wavered, then stuck to his boundary. He felt less engulfed and more free to explore what life held for him outside the village of his family. This was his first step toward ordeal. He had started his initiatory journey. Paradoxically, as in most men's ordeal, he also started to become a better husband and father.
A man who is feeling engulfed will feel he is in a no-win situation. He is right. He may rage or withdraw but he will still be stuck. He will blame the world but his dependency is inside him.
The engulfed man is really engulfed by his own misguided needs. Often his loved one is just as lost as he is. As in James' case Wanda was looking for a father as much as he was looking for a mother. He was a paradoxical combination of little boy and father. Wendy was the combination of little girl and mother. In most cases, neither is the villain. Both must go through the feeling of separation and feeling alone, even within a relationship. Each must go through an initiatory process, though a woman's is different from a man's. Each can only do their 50%. I will speak of the process of managing this kind of growth in a relationship in the chapter Alone Together.
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Larry Pesavento ©2004
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