How Incest Survivors Can Find Healthy Relationship Boundaries
When I was nine, I didn’t realize playing strip poker with my thirteen-year-old brother and his friends was inappropriate. Being included in their game in a basement bedroom made me feel giddy. Sure, my gut told me it was wrong to remove my panties, but after that first time, I layered on shirts, jackets, and gloves, even during summer, to avoid nudity’s vulnerability. There was no touching in strip poker, though, only leering, and uncomfortable laughter. Unlike my encounters with my brother since I was seven, in the locked bathroom of that same basement.
Survivors of incest or other childhood sexual assault often struggle to set boundaries that allow them to feel safe in relationships. Abuse by an older, stronger individual puts the child in a powerless position which typically results in a lost sense of self. The victim may lose her feelings of worth and doubt the importance of her needs and wishes. Psychotherapist Tom Whitehead, wrote, “Maladaptive boundaries are a crippling long-term consequence of abuse. Adults abused as children commonly experience repetitions of the abuse throughout their lives … repeatedly entering relationships where they are re-abused… They are split off from their intuition … tune out messages from their inner selves.” If someone is incapable of trusting her own judgment, unable to respond to a lack of safety or an impending violation of her rights, she is likely to allow poor treatment. Her experience of being exploited taught her to behave contrary to her feelings. 1
What is a boundary? Saprea, formerly The Younique Foundation, defines it as a line that separates what you’re okay with from what you’re not, like a fence with a gate. Everything inside the fence is what you want in your life while everything outside is what you don’t want. Quality fences have gates that have flexibility in who can come in. They attend to changing relationships, circumstances, and healing. Rigid fences lead to isolation, while weak ones may result in trespassing. 2 Believing that others’ wants and needs are more important than our own makes it difficult to claim personal power.
Rebecca Mitchell (survivor/counselor, Into the Light video) stated that a survivor’s boundaries can be severely affected by sexual abuse, but “boundaries exist to let good in and keep bad out.” 3 A survivor might erect wall-like boundaries to protect herself from further harm or disappointment, and to avoid being close to anyone. This is necessary in some situations, but unyielding barriers can make it difficult for survivors to create new relationships, foster trust, and develop a support network.
An individual with rigid boundaries uses them to control others and says “no” to things that are outside of her comfort zone. She is likely overprotective of personal information, and believes her boundaries are more important than those of others.
Someone with weak boundaries is inclined to accept disrespect or abuse (possibly thinking she deserves it) and doesn’t say “no” even when uncomfortable or overwhelmed by a situation. She tends to overshare details of past trauma (even with new acquaintances), and either uses inconsistent boundaries or none at all.
A divorced survivor friend was intrigued by a man on a dating website but found him abrupt on the phone. Disregarding this, she spent a day with him. She felt chemistry with him but had vowed not to become intimate until she had seen recent negative STD results. He searched a lockbox for his test results, but to no avail. Deciding she was being overly cautious, she slept with him. Within two weeks, she had a vaginal discharge, was tested and found to have gonorrhea. Had she listened to her gut feelings (twice) and maintained her boundaries, she could have avoided that unfortunate situation.
According to Saprea, healthy boundaries lie between rigid and weak ones, enabling us to set limits that provide security while allowing flexibility to adjust as circumstances and relationships change, to open the gate to new people, friendships, or support systems. Persons with healthy boundaries often stand up for personal values and don’t compromise out of fear or doubt. They firmly reinforce their boundaries, and place trust in those people who have earned it.
Whitehead explains that boundaries keep us healthy by alerting us to harmful intrusions and mobilizing our resources to deal with them. He believes healthy boundaries equip us to make accurate judgments about people, things, and events in our lives, to act to limit intrusions and offenses by others, and to control our own offenses against others.
Boundaries are learned as a child grows up, from parents/caregivers, through trying behaviors out, and from social interactions at school and in the community. Good caregivers model boundaries, respect others’ boundaries, stop people when they try to violate their children’s boundaries, and prevent their children from violating others’ boundaries. Whitehead adds that “Maintenance of appropriate boundaries is not normally just left to the individual. Everyone in the social field helps maintain everyone else’s boundaries. To the extent that our courage permits, we act to prevent breach, to affirm and support boundaries. A significant part of the damage after abuse is the clouding of the violated boundary by the perpetrator, so the violation won’t be recognized.” He tells the child they’re having sex because of special love or because the child is provocative and wants it.
In the Bill of Rights drawn up by IRIS (In Recognition of Incest Survivors), # 7 is “the right to set our boundaries, to change them when necessary, and to insist that others respect them. They are some of the most important healing tools we can cultivate. When we think about the messages we were given about boundaries by significant adults and how our boundaries were compromised, we build respectful relationships with ourselves and extend this respectful relationship to others by honoring their boundaries and expecting them to respect ours. This evens out the power dynamics in relationships.” 4 IRIS claim that incest victims’ boundaries are obliterated by perpetrators, setting up complications in one’s relationship to oneself and to others. The connections survivors achieve when boundaries are re-established are more equitable and authentic.
IRIS stresses that when survivors are aware of ourselves, we can maintain the semi-permeable membrane of healthy boundaries…”so that what flows out from us to other people is benign and appropriate, and what we allow into our inner sanctum from other people also is benign and appropriate. We can keep ourselves from being dangerously vulnerable, yet we do not erect barricades that keep us from experiencing positive interactions with other people.”
Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, in The Courage to Heal, wrote, “In child assault prevention programs, children are taught to identify the voice inside that warns them that something isn’t right. They refer to this voice, intuition, as the uh-oh feeling. With encouragement, children easily recognize this feeling as danger—uh-oh, something’s wrong here.” 5 Adult survivors must re-acquaint ourselves with and listen to that built-in warning system. Even though we may feel comfortable with people similar to our abusers, we should flee from them. My brother used flattery and bribes to garner my cooperation. Even though people who use those strategies to get close feel familiar to me, I must heed the caution bell in my gut. The alternative is allowing defective boundaries to guide decisions that perpetuate misery, that repeat of cycle of abuse.
Saprea says, “Our experiences with others have a significant impact on our day-to-day life. The relationships we foster shape who we are and guide our social behavior, self-beliefs, emotional needs, and empathy. With each new interaction, we learn things about ourselves, those we engage with, and relationships in general.” Most people can reconstruct healthy boundaries, a fence with a gate that allows parts of themselves to flow out to others and parts of others to flow in.
Rebecca Mitchell asks survivors if they’re able to speak up if they disagree with their partner, or to state where they want to eat out or vacation. She suggests that boundaries may be a litmus test for our relationships; if we can’t speak up, maybe we should re-assess certain relationships.
The following recommendations for re-building healthy boundaries were gleaned from resources cited below, my work in school psychology, and Al-Anon.
Properly label the abuse you endured as a violation of your boundaries.
Silence the insecure voice in your head that allows you to be revictimized; tell it, “Never again!”
Part of healing damaged boundaries is rediscovering how to attend to messages from within, and how to act appropriately on them. Listen to the intuition that values your worth and safety.
Draw a line separating things that will be fulfilling and safe from those that will not.
Establish touch boundaries: give or refuse permission for others to touch you. This empowers you to initiate or decline sexual touch.
Set sexual boundaries in a conversation by saying something like, “I’m looking forward to taking the next step in our relationship, but I’d like to talk about what that might look like.” Say up front what you are and are not comfortable with. 6
Reduce or eliminate contact with people who violate your boundaries. People who don’t respect your boundaries don’t respect you.
Keep this acronym in mind: JADE. You don’t have to Justify, Argue about, Defend, or Explain your boundaries. They exist for your safety and emotional well-being.
Call the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673 for support.
If you need assistance, find a trauma informed therapist to help you heal from abuse and re-establish healthy relationship boundaries.
1 Whitehead, T. (1993). Boundaries and psychotherapy Part 1: boundary distortion and its consequences. Forum, 10, 7-16.
2 The Younique Foundation. Healing Resources for Child Sexual Assault Survivors: Practicing Boundaries (2022)
3 Mitchell, Rebecca, Looking at Issues for Survivors: Boundaries. (www.Into the Light.orgUK) (2012)
4 In Recognition of Incest Survivors (IRIS), (2012). Unshattered: a bill of rights for incest survivors and their families. (http://www.healingincest.org)
5 Bass, Ellen and Davis, Laura. The Courage to Heal: A guide for women survivors of sexual abuse. New York, Harper and Row, 1988.
6 Psych Central, (https://psychcentral.com) (2022)
