I've been reading some really good books lately which have cleared up some confusion in my life. All of them are about how to take healthy ownership over our lives, and knowing what we are responsible for and what we are not. I grew up in a household where I learned that I was expected to bear the burden of another person's innappropriate behavior, that other people's needs were all that counted, mine didn't. But now I have learned that I have emotional boundaries that no one has a right to violate. I am the one who gets to decide who touches me, what they can say to me, how much they will know about my life, and what I will believe. No one has a right to force any of those things on me, and when I allow them to, I am telling myself that my needs don't count and anyone can do whatever they want to me.
Now I understand why the childfree issue has weighed so heavily on my heart the past few years. Someone in my church thought his spiritual authority gave him the right to invade my territory and push responsibilty on me that I wasn't emotionally equipped for. And had I given in to that, I would have repeated the same dysfunctional patterns with my children that I learned as a child. It's just like when my mother thought because I was her child, that made me her property and she could invade my privacy, my thoughts, and my space as she saw fit. And in my adult life, I have always felt the need to justify myself for not letting someone violate me emotionally. Now that I have learned exactly what my emotional boundaries are, and that what I learned from my mother is false, I feel free and no longer need to justify myself.
Emotional boundaries have also helped me to make sense of why some people think it's their right to push parenthood on others. Many people place the burden of their unmet emotional needs on their children -- and children are not wired for that, because they are the ones who are in need. They do not learn to meet their own emotional needs as adults, because they were too busy paying the price for their parents' unmet needs. I would have done this to my own children. If I had given in to people's demands to bear children, my children would be paying the price right now. When someone insists that I should have children, it indicates to me that they think children only exist to meet adult's needs, and that they don't know the concept of proper boundaries. They think it is their right to encroach on my terriory. And I don't have to tolerate it, or justify myself. I can just tell them it's none of their business, period, end of discussion. And it is not my problem that they don't like my choices, that is their issue to deal with.
Now I understand why the childfree issue has weighed so heavily on my heart the past few years. Someone in my church thought his spiritual authority gave him the right to invade my territory and push responsibilty on me that I wasn't emotionally equipped for. And had I given in to that, I would have repeated the same dysfunctional patterns with my children that I learned as a child. It's just like when my mother thought because I was her child, that made me her property and she could invade my privacy, my thoughts, and my space as she saw fit. And in my adult life, I have always felt the need to justify myself for not letting someone violate me emotionally. Now that I have learned exactly what my emotional boundaries are, and that what I learned from my mother is false, I feel free and no longer need to justify myself.
Emotional boundaries have also helped me to make sense of why some people think it's their right to push parenthood on others. Many people place the burden of their unmet emotional needs on their children -- and children are not wired for that, because they are the ones who are in need. They do not learn to meet their own emotional needs as adults, because they were too busy paying the price for their parents' unmet needs. I would have done this to my own children. If I had given in to people's demands to bear children, my children would be paying the price right now. When someone insists that I should have children, it indicates to me that they think children only exist to meet adult's needs, and that they don't know the concept of proper boundaries. They think it is their right to encroach on my terriory. And I don't have to tolerate it, or justify myself. I can just tell them it's none of their business, period, end of discussion. And it is not my problem that they don't like my choices, that is their issue to deal with.
