Boundaries: How Many Really Don't Understand the Concept?

In a normal, healthy environment, a child learns at a relatively-early age the difference between what is "mine" and what is "yours." First in the home, and then his neighborhood and school, he learns what belongs to him and what belongs to others-- other people's possessions, other people's personal space. When naturally socialized in this manner, he has a full grasp of the concept "This toy is mine- I will share it with you; This bag of cookies is mine- I will give you some." However, if this socialization does not take place when one is a child, he may go through life with blurred-to-nonexistent boundaries-- failing to ever differentiate between what is his and what is someone else's.

It is natural, normal and healthy for a person to have boundaries. On the material side of it, it is only common sense that a person wishes to feel secure in the knowledge that his personal possessions belong to him, and that others should not simply "take" them. In a good home environment, this knowledge begins within the family-- for example, if another family member wants to borrow something, they ask first; or in not lending out someone else's property without prior permission. In the family environment, helping oneself to someone else's personal possessions without the "o.k." of the owner generally causes some degree of trouble; but in adult life, if one still has not grasped the concept of "what belongs to you is not mine for the taking," the usual word for it is "stealing."

On a non-material side of the subject, not as tangible but equally if not more important, are such "possessions" as one's home, time, personal life. I rather like the line in Rabbi Harold Kushner's book "To Life" which reads "My home is my private domain, not open to the public." There is a certain sense of both security and freedom in the inviolability of one's own home; and it is at its best when both the people who live in it and those who do not, acknowledge the difference between "mine" and "yours." It is a matter of respect and of understanding boundaries when guests do not take "My house is Your house" literally.

Those who do not recognize boundaries on intangible forms of what constitutes "yours" or "mine," are not only unsocialized, but quite intrusive. It is intrusion to uniformly believe that someone else's home is open to you "24/7" if the person has not said so; or to "act as if" you actually live there; and those who are quite comfortable behaving in this manner frequently extend their intrusion to intruding into other people's time, other people's privacy, other people's families, other people's lives. Failing at being adequately socialized in childhood, they simply cannot comprehend-- or, in some instances, do not care-- that such intrusion is a violation of other people's basic rights.

When people have not grasped "what is yours and what is mine" boundaries, they are also usually prone to neither having limits and boundaries on their own behavior nor respecting the limits and boundaries that others do have. They generally exhibit a "no-holds-barred" attitude and behavior, often a grotesque degree of immaturity which, at its worst, includes labeling others "selfish" and/or "controlling" if they have boundaries and expect that they be respected. The key in understanding this type of individual is to keep in mind that it's only an "adult-aged child's" method of getting what he wants-- by "calling you some names" if he does not get what he wants. It is difficult enough to see such behavior in a playground bully who throws a temper-tantrum because he wants someone else's lunch and figures he has "the right" to have it-- but consider the implications of such bullies decades later when he still has not grasped the difference between "yours" and "mine."