Monday, May 17, 2010

Love is boundaries.

For all the throw-aways said during sessions, the one that comes back to me more than any other is, "love is boundaries". It gets said often because there's about twenty different meanings depending on the context and all of them are essential truths.
Love really is boundaries. Love acknowledges that you and I are separate psychologically distinct beings with enormous power to effect each other.
Whether its setting a framework for your teen you bump up against and ultimately not conquer, or most importantly confronting where you begin and end so that your emotional experience is separate and distinct and therefore not controlled by someone else...
Love really is boundaries. 
Its a part of the power of the therapy, that the boundaries are clearly delineated and maintained through the work in order to give the relationship the power to heal you. 
Moments of boundary loss in relationship is a gorgeous thing. For some its an almost religious experience of connectedness... its just not the thing to build the relationship around.
If you really want to be close to someone, you have to know where you begin and end, and where they do, and then you have to see the space in between you as a field of intimacy. It's a kind of paradox that can only be made sense of  when its felt. .. and it seems it often gets felt in the therapy. Without that field there is no room for empathy and no space to make connections from self to other. Its intense.