Anger and Boundaries with Those We Love

Part 1: Parsing Emotional Boundaries

One

You’re at home, fast asleep, and it’s 2:35am. A window shatters in another bedroom and a pair of feet thud against creaky hardwood. You bolt upright, panicked.

Your mind darts to the jewelry box on your nightstand and Oreo, your new teacup kitten. Everything you love is in this house. Your breath catches in your throat as you weigh your options. In the other room, the intruder trips over a rug’s curled corner and tumbles to the floor in their haste, cracking their head against a dresser’s sharp corner. You rush in, bedside lamp held above your head, and find them lying still on the dark floor.

Emotional alchemy follows. Threat neutralized, your fear transforms into an equal-sized block of a new emotion—anger.

You start vibrating with rage. How could this stranger force their way into your safe space? What gives them the right to take what’s yours? You don’t have the stomach for it but you could imagine kneeling beside this man’s unconscious body and strangling him with your bare hands.

The intruder smells like cigarette smoke. You dial 9-1-1.

Two

You distractedly miss the keyhole on your front door a few times before finally unlocking it and swinging it open. You throw your shoes off and collapse on the couch, exhausted after another grueling day at work. Your spouse enters the room and senses your dejection. They probe you to talk, but you ask to decompress before discussing the day’s laundry list of professional torments.

Your spouse pushes, inching closer to the couch. They insist you’ll feel better if you just started venting. You push back again. You recognize their well-intentioned efforts, but you’re fatigued, frustrated, and feeling incompetent. The last thing you want is to leap into an animated montage of your boss’s and coworkers’ stupidities. Your spouse implores you to share for a third time, more aggressively now. “Why don’t you ever confide in me?” they guilt-trip, “I’ve been waiting for you for hours and I’m just to trying to help.”

You snap.

You raise your voice, telling them to back off for the last time. You jump off the couch and storm into the bedroom, slamming the door behind you. You stay there for the rest of the night, seething. The outburst isn’t your fault; you tried to be polite at first. Why couldn’t they just respect your wishes and give you some alone time? What gives them the right to pry into thoughts and feelings you weren’t ready to share?

You fall asleep on an empty stomach.

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In both examples above, boundaries were violated; one we can see, another we can’t. The physical boundary is easy to explain (and legally defend), but the emotional one the other is fickle, transient and mood-dependent.

Infringing a physical boundary is straightforward. There are walls and property lines to help us understand them. People can lay claim to physical things, creating finite ways a physical boundary can be threatened.

Our emotional universes, however, are infinitely more complex. Claim to familial, social, and professional territory is abstract and unpredictable, contingent on situation. This guarantees we will unknowingly infringe upon others’ emotional boundaries, just as they will inevitably infringe upon ours.

We’ve all had our emotional boundaries violated at some point, driving us to behave aggressively in an effort to protect ourselves. We’ve also violated others’ emotional boundaries, driving them to do the same. When we are bewildered by aggressive reactions, we must learn to recognize we’ve just stumbled onto someone’s emotional boundary. Angry reactions are beacons signaling the existence of a bound, and holding our boundaries flush against the outer limits of theirs is the beginning of planting our stake in the ground and claiming territory for ourselves.

Part 2: Boundaries as a Prerequisite for Healthy Development

As children, we emulate the adults around us. As we enter adulthood, we try to develop our own value system and this requires as much unlearning as it does learning. Maladaptive, unhelpful beliefs we all grow up with impede our progress and trap us in a life of childishness. Maturing necessitates establishing and adhering to our own value system, which often causes anger in those closest to us.

The most terrifying thing about growing up is establishing our own individuality amidst adults who expect us to continue thinking, feeling, and behaving like children. We disappoint and confuse the adults in our lives as we stray further away from the life they envisioned for us.

Adults in our lives love us and want to protect us, but their expectations for us can doom us to a life of monotony—safe, comfortable, and routine. It’s well-intentioned, but ignores that we want our lives to feel like a home we decorated, not a hotel room into which we have just checked in.

Many of us fall victim to this pressure, interrupting our own lives and denying our natural inclinations. We grow unhappy and resentful, living lives for our parents, our teachers, and our bosses. Adults who don’t nurture strong individuality in others were likely never allowed to set boundaries for themselves either, to unfortunate and everlasting consequences. They perpetuate the cycle in the name of culture, “normal” development, and respect, the same factors once used to control and inhibit them.

Part 3: The Relationship Between Setting Boundaries and Anger

Establishing boundaries is fundamentally conflict-prone. Setting a new boundary requires us to consciously expand our boundary to the point of contact with someone else’s, and then continue to push, advancing ours forward and, inevitably, forcing theirs back.

As we have already established, anger results when a boundary is infringed upon. The distance another adult’s boundary has been pushed back is directly proportionate to the anger. It’s a metabolite of the process. Pushing a boundary backwards is an exothermic reaction, releasing white hot rage.

We see visceral reactions to our efforts to establish boundaries and get frightened off. We convince ourselves the conflict isn’t worth it instead of internalizing the anger as a necessary byproduct. Put differently, if there is no anger, no territory has been claimed and no new boundary has been set.

We should mentally prepare to be met with anger during these difficult conversations and resist the temptation to mirror that energy back. Anger met with anger is an eruption, and eruptions are costly in the landscape of relationships. We should keep in mind the cost, however, of not establishing the boundary, which is a life devoid of personality and flooded with resentment, and learn to meet anger coolly and with a level head.

Establishing individuality is not heathen, having needs, not a nuisance. It’s impossible to feel at home in a mind that expends all its energy for others. It’s impossible to feel resentful and at home at the same time. So listen to your anger and the anger of others. It’s signaling where boundaries lie. Make your value system known by asserting your boundaries, even in the face of anger. Mentally equip yourself to push those boundaries back, and prepare for the fight.

Livid,
Vandan