Personal boundaries are a set of rules that tell the people around you how you can behave and how you can’t. It’s where yours ends and someone else begins. When, for whatever reason, these rules are violated, a person feels discomfort and sometimes even pain. That’s why it’s important to stand up for yourself and not let others invade your personal space.
What Are Personal Boundaries?
Psychologists distinguish personal boundaries of two kinds:
- Physical. This type is the easiest to define. Each person understands for themselves who, how much, and when they can touch them, which tactile sensations are normal and which are not.
- Psychological. This type cannot be seen, they aren’t related to our body, so it’s more difficult to define these boundaries for ourselves. By setting psychological boundaries, we let other people know how close they can get to our inner world. Psychological boundaries can be emotional. They concern a person’s feelings, the right to express them, and with whom and to what extent he or she is ready to share his or her experiences and personal information.
Where Difficulties With Personal Boundaries Come From
The ability to build and defend our boundaries is developed in childhood. We look up to our parents, we learn things, we listen to their advice. Upbringing affects the ability to build personal boundaries. Next, this skill helps us avoid feeling ashamed while playing लाइव कैसीनो or having hobbies that seem meaningless to other people: we don’t let them affect our lifestyle and know how to protect our boundaries.
If parents could build the right idea of personal boundaries in their child, most likely they will not have problems with them. However, sometimes circumstances arise that contribute to the fact that children have difficulties in building boundaries.
Often parents suppress their children’s desires and try to impose their opinions on them. When this happens, children cannot express themselves. Adults can also suppress a child’s emotions by telling them that certain feelings are wrong.
These and many other actions toward children can disrupt the formation of personal boundaries. That’s why it’s important to respect your child’s personal boundaries and help build them, not violate them.
Signs That You Don’t Feel Personal Boundaries
If at least one of these points is about you, you are failing to keep your personal boundaries:
- Inability to say “no.”
- Rejecting your own opinions if they don’t agree with other people’s positions.
- Agreeing to a job you shouldn’t be doing and that makes you uncomfortable;
- Depreciation of feelings and yourself (“everybody puts up with it, and I put up with it”).
- Depreciation of other people. This is a sign that you don’t feel other people’s boundaries, and thus your own as well.
- Tacit acceptance of physical boundary violations.
How to Understand That Your Personal Boundaries Have Been Violated
If your personal boundaries are being violated by others around you, you are most likely:
- You are experiencing anger, anger, discomfort.
- It may also be powerlessness (if you feel you can’t do anything about it).
- You want to protect yourself.
