This is Why “Boundaries” is My 2020 Power Word

Every year I pick a power word as a way to guide my goals and progress each year, and this year my word is boundaries. Not a fan of resolutions, I find having one word gives me the laser focus I need not only in my personal life but also in business and writing.

Establishing healthy boundaries is a critical part of our everyday lives, regardless of whether we are survivors of abuse or not. However, due to the myriad of different ways abuse survivors develop survival skills, we may not even realize we allow people to push our boundaries because we’ve not thought about what these boundaries are.

For this article, I’m discussing boundaries we can set in ‘safe’ life situations, not abusive situations.

If you are currently in a dangerous or abusive situation, where setting a boundary with a partner can cause you physical harm, please get help. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline  – their advocates are available 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) in more than 200 languages. All calls are free and confidential.

What Are Boundaries?

Boundaries can be demonstrated in five ways: body, thinking, feeling, behavioral, and now, digital. Let’s define this further:

Boundaries represent physical and emotional limits that you don’t want other people to cross. They help define your sense of self by separating your needs, desires, thoughts, and feelings from those of others’. Boundaries are the dividing lines between you and everyone else and they help make you an individual from the group. 

Boundaries also help you know your limits about how much “baggage” you can take on from other people. When you set strong and appropriate boundaries, you will help other people know how to treat you.  You will essentially be teaching them what is ok and what is not ok to do and say around you. Boundaries also give measure to the amount of time, money, emotional resources, or energy you can afford to give. (Source: Therapy in Philadephia.)

I love this definition because it so clearly states what boundaries are and how they work. In my work on #SexAbuseChat (every Tuesday 6 pm pst/9 pm est), as well as one-on-one discussions, many adult survivors find this definition terrifying. Why? Many reasons, of course; the most common is defying the authority figure (usually a parent) who is still involved in their lives, whether or not that person abused them.

In my case, an adult neighbor dad abused me at age eleven. Despite serving a less than two-year sentence, my family and his continued to live next door to one another. Once I moved away for college, I only saw him or his family when I returned home to visit my folks (quite often, since my uni was in the same city), and had no interaction with them, other than their glares at me.

Like any child who grows into an adult, I experienced the need to separate from my own parents. See the world. Be independent. Live life on my own. Visiting them less frequently helped me move away from seeing my abuser as well.

Setting a Foundation

Why is this my power word now, thirty years later, now that I’m in my mid-fifties? So much of my life has come full-circle. I moved to another coast alone in my late twenties to escape the town where my neighbor abused me, pursued a corporate career,  married for love, had two children, divorced after two decades, started my own business, wrote six books (so far), and more. Now I’m back living in a quiet suburb of the same area where I grew up.

My parents moved from that house (thankfully), and I now live with my own family about a mile away from my folks. I absolutely had to set boundaries when I moved back here. Like what?

• No popping over unannounced.
• No spending every holiday, birthday, and minor Jewish holidays nobody’s ever heard of together.
• No getting up in each other’s business.

This foundation has helped quite a bit, though it’s not always been entirely successful (she chuckles ruefully to herself). My older sister and her husband also moved back to this area around the same time I did. Same rules apply. We do the best we can.

Setting boundaries in real life or our online lives helps us decide what behaviors we will accept from others, and even ourselves. If the way someone treats us is unacceptable, we need to realize it’s okay, and perfectly acceptable, to say no to spending time with that person because we are adults now.

What may have been out of our control when we were children now is up to us to decide. 

Ways to Set Boundaries

If setting boundaries is a goal for you, here are the tips I use and am currently working on:

• Don’t Worry What Others Think

Just as I coach writers to #WriteWhatScaresYou, and to not worry if someone is upset with our truths, the same rule applies here. If others aren’t accepting of my boundaries, that’s not my issue. I’m an adult woman, and I’m allowed to make my own decisions. Sometimes, when people come at me unhappy with a boundary I’ve stated, it’s difficult. I am human, after all. It does affect me, however, I have to do what’s right for me and my own mental health.

Self-care isn’t selfish.

Example: After my divorce, things got tense, as these things often do. Due to abusive actions by my ex, I cut off all contact with him, with the exception of email, so we could still discuss any custody specifics (drop-offs, pick-ups, etc.). Other than that, I’ve blocked him on text, social media…basically, everywhere. His issues are no longer my issues.

This forced him to comply with my boundaries. It’s also empowering!

• Maintain Communications If Necessary

In my example above, I set a boundary yet still maintained a form of necessary communication on my terms. With loved ones still in your life, it’s often helpful to set boundaries up front. With survivors, this doesn’t always happen due to our past experiences and the lack of the realization that we need established boundaries.

Working with survivors, many express they simply cannot tell significant others or family members, “No,” out of a fear of rejection, abusive behavior, or other fears of retribution (often valid). How do we go about setting boundaries around these fears? This is trickier, yet not impossible.

In my case, I didn’t set that boundary with my ex right away. For years, he would leave me constant texts about what I posted on social media and how that somehow was a dig at him. At one point, he attempted to use my memoirs, Broken Pieces and Broken Places, as examples in court of ‘how much she ‘hates men,’ to which my lawyer responded, ‘you realize she lives with a man, right?’ (Hilarious, but whatever).

Point is, regardless of this ridiculous back and forth, I couldn’t cut off communications completely, however much I wanted to.

• Breathe and Remain Calm

Telling someone you are unavailable to do whatever it is they desire can make our hearts race as if we are running an obstacle course of trip-wires and poison-dipped arrows waiting to pierce us. Why? Because we cannot predict the reaction we’ll get and also we anticipate a confrontation about it when there may not be one at all. It’s often easier to do whatever it is someone wants us to rather than assert our free will, which then leaves us deflated and filled with self-loathing.

Not fun. Not healthy. Not what we need.

Breathe, my lovelies.

Next time someone wants you to do something you don’t want to do, tell them no. I promise you, the world will not come to an end. If saying, “No,” feels too abrupt, instead say, “I have a conflict,” which is an easy out. Another is, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

Panic is not your friend here. Remain calm by knowing in advance what your boundaries are beforehand.

• Know Your Comfort Level

As survivors, we are often hit with triggers that come out of nowhere. Sometimes we know exactly what sets us off; other times, we don’t. Life, eh? Welcome to our lives.

When triggers slam into us, we face discomfort, horror, fear. We’re brought right back into that abuse headspace. We have no choice – just as we had no choice when our abusers abused us. We learn by walking through the fire exactly what we’re okay with and what we’re decidedly not. Triggers give us that, in a warped kind of ethereal gift from the universe.

Yet, I’m not talking only about triggers here. Actively working out how far we’re willing to push ourselves into a situation (or out of one) is critical to understanding our boundaries. This can be as simple as becoming comfortable with blocking trolls on Twitter to letting clients know you’re unavailable after 6 pm.

Whatever it is, create a list of your boundaries. Then you’ll know how to stick to them, and which may be negotiable.

• Change Your Paradigm

A man challenged me (shocker) on Twitter about ‘saying no,’ and boundaries, explaining 🙄 we are depriving ourselves of adventures and experiences, so instead we should say ‘yes’ to everything. I won’t go into the whole discussion about how men and women experience the world differently (duh), or defend the entire concept of the well-documented mental health value of creating boundaries for ourselves, or that survivors and non-survivors experience the world in wildly different ways.

Pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones is one thing. A blanket statement explaining how “we need to say yes to everything” is uninformed.

I will say, however, there’s no shame in working through boundary and trust issues as survivors of sexual abuse. We absolutely deserve the right to receive love and support in these choices. Doesn’t mean people will give it, yet we also cannot control that.

Final Thoughts

Boundaries are important because they help us feel safe in a variety of circumstances. That said, it’s a fluid process. Once we’re comfortable telling people “no” in one situation, it will become easier in others. We may also become more comfortable saying yes once we’ve conquered a certain fear or time has passed.

Remember: This is your journey. You’re an adult. Don’t ever feel bad because you’ve set a boundary.

This is my power word for 2020, so you’ll see many blog posts, quotes, and articles in my social media feeds on the topic. I’m working on boundary issues in my own relationships with family and friends, and I’ll be sharing those experiences with you as I traverse these paths as well.

I’d love to know what your power word is for 2020. Please share, along with any comments or thoughts, below!

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Read more about Rachel’s experiences in the award-winning book, Broken Pieces.

She goes into more detail about living with PTSD and realizing the effects of how being a survivor affected her life in

Broken Places, available in print everywhere!