How to heal Hypervigilance, and establish Healthy trust and boundaries in relationships

Hypervigilance, Healthy trust and boundaries in Dating and Relationships:

What are boundaries? How can they help us release patterns of mistrust and hypervigilance?

One of the biggest reasons for hypervigilance in dating is lack of self-trust.

In order to trust others, we need to begin with trusting ourselves.

When we trust ourselves to show up for ourselves, tend to our needs and care for ourselves, we don't have to anticipate and watch out for harm compulsively.

A key aspect of boundary work is uncovering the wounding (often based in shame and trauma) that keeps us from directly expressing our needs, values and standards and also keeps us from holding firm to these when we face pushback, conflict or misunderstandings.

The second key aspect of boundary work is learning how to express our needs, values, priorities and boundaries, kindly and clearly.

The third and vital part is knowing where we end and other people begin, as Anne Katherine puts it.

One way I look at this is having an energetic line (can also be physical if needed) in place that demarcates what's ours (our thoughts, feelings, sensations, impulses, our space, our needs, beliefs, inner wisdom) from what isn't ours.

We are responsible for communicating our own needs, expectations and values, as well as responsible for prioritizing these.

So we are not absorbing other people's needs, feelings, concerns and agendas by taking them on as our own (often seen in the loving, doing, fixing too much behaviours in codependency) and as our responsibility.

This is how we end up losing ourselves (who we are, what matters to us, what makes us feel good, what makes us feel true belonging, which is very different from compromising our humanity to be liked or accepted) in the process.

Boundaries help us know what's ours, what we are responsible for expressing, preserving and nourishing and what we are not, and they help others know and communicate the same, verbally or nonverbally.

So boundaries can help us prioritize our needs and their fulfillment, without subordinating them to others' OR expecting others to subordinate theirs to ours.

A part of this that I addressed earlier in the authenticity and trust piece was not allowing others to define our inner and outer experience and also not defining or interpreting others' inner experience for them.

If you have feedback to offer, it needs to come from a boundaried place of respect and compassion.

For example, telling people things like "you have abandonment issues" or "you are reacting like the typical avoidant because you have x, y, z trauma" is a boundary violation.

Folks' trauma and their life experience is their business and not ours to interpret, analyze and impose on from our own lens.

Similarly, folks don't get to analyze and give nonconsensual feedback on our trauma, life experience, needs, feelings, thoughts and so on.

---------------------------

Shame, Blame and People- Pleasing:

We blame others because we feel vulnerable and unable to protect ourselves (often due to past boundary lapses, current boundary issues and personal history) if we were to be transparent about our hurts, insecurities and needs.

We may believe vulnerability, insecurities and needs make us less worthy and so feel the need to protect these by concealing them/obscuring them and responding through blame instead.

This is is another manifestation of boundary issues (rooted in shame and trauma) leading to mistrust.

When we feel we can't entrust our own safety and well being to ourselves, we are more likely to resort to blaming others as a form of feeling in control.

It's easier to say "it's all your fault" (and why I am being mistrustful from the get go) than to reflect on what's ours (our history, our own trauma, our pain, our needs, our feelings, thoughts and values), what part we have played in a conflict and our own responsibility to communicate from a place of self-responsibility, compassion and self-trust.

This is a big reason why criticism (a form of blame which reduces mistakes to people's characters) is one of the Four relationship destroying Horsemen identified by the Gottmans.

The biggest antidote to criticism is compassion (for ourselves and others) and expressing concerns with a soft-start up, or sharing needs, frustrations and complaints without blame (or personalizing a mistake by reducing it to a person's character and worthiness).

The more we trust ourselves to communicate our needs skillfully, the more self-compassion we develop, the kinder and more skilled we are in relating to others in healthy, intimate, loving ways.

-----------------------------------------------------

On the other hand, when we make ourselves responsible for other folks' flaws/mistakes (if they mistreat me, it must mean I am defective), feelings, thoughts and needs, it also comes from a place of mistrust in ourselves.

When we mistrust ourselves, we can't trust others healthily.

We may feel like we are not enough as we are (trust our own worthiness) and may feel we won't be able stay safe and be able to care for ourselves, if we expressed our own feelings, thoughts and expectations, had our own values and authentic identities.

Why?

It's because we may worry that being ourselves, having our own needs, vulnerabilities and standards, as well as insisting on these being as important as others', would get us rejected, disappointed or abandoned.

And we have histories of shame, traumatic or otherwise, where the prospect of rejection, even being disliked, or being told "no" can seem catastrophic, because all our nervous systems are already hardwired to perceive rejection as a threat.

On top of that we have unhealed wounding around our worthiness, and many of us haven't received the mirroring, secure bonding and acceptance that resources us to show up as our full selves, as people who can state needs and have these received kindly or say no and have that respected.

It's all of the above which builds our inner resources to be resilient to instances where sharing our needs may get us rejected or saying no result in pushback. We find rejection catastrophic, because we associate it with personal lack rather than folks consenting to what works/doesn't work for them.

We may find being disliked unbearable because we take in someone else's disapproval (boundary lapse) as meaning we are the problem.

So many of us are so afraid of being disappointed (triggers shame) that we don't ask for what we need at all (our boundaries and expectations are ours to communicate) or don't insist on our needs, backing down when we face pushback, or try to get our needs met in indirect ways, where we over-do or over-caretake or adapt to lack in the hopes our unspoken needs will be anticipated and reciprocated if we are just agreeable or useful enough.

Sometimes, this comes from histories of childhood abuse/neglect where we had to be vigilant to our caregivers' needs and moods, anticipating and meeting them in advance to protect ourselves.

Then, it became a template for how we interact in love - anticipating and meeting needs almost to the point of perfecting it (people-pleasing) and hoping folks will anticipate and meet our needs too, without us having to be truly vulnerable and transparent about them and risk rejection, disapproval or abandonment.

When we do this, we lose even more trust in ourselves (because we aren't able to take the steps to risk being seen and thus are not getting our needs met even when they could be).

So learning what our feelings, thoughts and sensations are (which inform us of our needs and expectations), communicating these, what our expectations and standards are and the skills to communicate these, as well as confidently maneuvering pushback, without taking it personally, is crucial to building healthy trust.

Another thing that helps, especially with reducing mistrust, is taking small chances to connect with folks (like calling a friend and asking if they'd like to hang out, while being prepared for a no and telling ourselves their no is not our business, and not a negative reflection on us), working with a good trauma informed therapist (this is essential in fact), a trauma informed coach, where accessible, and other more with good kind people in our lives who remind us of the possibilities of goodness and safety that are available to us.

When I say this, folks sometimes tell me "I don't know who is good/kind".

The answer is, since we are not omniscient, the only way to know is to observe and to make bids for (attempts to) connect and reach out to folks as well as learning what trustworthiness looks like (A key aspect of it is congruence or ethical words aligning with ethical actions).

If folks treat us with compassion, are attuned and interested in our lives, are honest and transparent about their intentions, we can get to know them better and get an embodied (felt in the body) sense of what trust feels like.

If we have any trusted friends or family or even public figures whose values deeply align with ours and who move with integrity, we can sometimes connect with folks through them (without of course making them responsible for any individual's behaviour).

Once we start to better understand the mechanics of boundaries (what they are), our pattern of boundary lapses and what caused them, how to communicate our needs, expectations and standards firmly and kindly, we start creating choice points from which trust can grow with more ease.

When we know we can get our needs met and co-create safety in relationship (which also means we can ALL learn how/when to assert ourselves with kindness and more firmness when needed and also when to cut our losses and move in a different direction), we don't feel like we have to protect our vulnerabilities, our soft inner cores with disproportionate vigilance or compromise our needs by concealing them or placating others at our expense.

We can learn to ease and release mistrust, rigid boundaries, having hidden agendas where we try to get our needs met indirectly via pleasing and appeasing) or through blame and defensiveness (if I keep people away or keep them around only on my terms, without regard for their boundaries, I will be safe).

We can learn to find more delight, acceptance, pleasure and fulfillment, experience deeply grounding and soothing forms of trust and security, as well as committed, joyful and intimate relationships.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

In dating, start with returning to the present moment, the here and now, to your body, when you start to focus on negative possibilities about dates ("they'll just hurt me, and if I show them who I am, they will break my heart and leave me"). Remind yourself it's the anxious part of yourself trying to protect you from harm, and remind yourself that thoughts are not destiny.

You can offer assurance to that part of yourself, letting it know you are resourcing yourself to take better more effective care of yourself. And if rejection or disappointment occurs, as much as it can hurt, you will heal from it as you have in the past.

Noticing bodily sensations, thoughts and feelings, in the moment, can slow down reactivity. Remind yourself healthy trust and evaluating for the same is a skill you can learn, and you can keep yourself safe, and even if things take an unexpected turn, you can trust yourself to take care of your needs and prevent further hurt by choosing a different direction, this time.

State your needs, preferences, priorities, values and goals up front. The less hidden agendas and hidden needs we have, the better situated we are to evaluate if folks are aligned and compatible with us, as well as if they are trustworthy.

And remember, dating is about observation and that means creating space and time for folks to unfold and witness them over time. You don't have to make any snap judgments or decisions, so there's no emergency here. You are safe, here and now. You can and will gain nervous system supportive skills and capacity for developing healthy trust and evaluate others for the same

We can grow and learn, and that's why we are on this journey.

Like everything else that has to do with healthy relating, learning the dynamics of healthy trust takes practice, psychoeducation and self-awareness.