Boundaries Are Not for the Faint of Heart
What I learned about rescuing, guilt, motherhood, and loving people without carrying what belongs to them
Originally written June 30, 2024.
I woke up with the words “trauma dump” resonating in my head. And I woke up pissed off.
There was absolutely no reason for me to be pissed off. I wasn’t hot or twisted up in my blankets. I wasn’t claustrophobic from my CPAP mask. I wasn’t thinking about all the shit I had to do that day or replaying some situation with someone. I wasn’t coming out of an emotional dream.
Nothing.
I was just pissed off, with the words trauma dump sitting there. Once I acknowledged that I was pissed, more thoughts started tumbling in.
I started thinking about what I call trauma dumping—when somebody unloads their entire backstory, hurt, drama, anger, relationships, childhood, addiction, whatever it is, onto another person without really wanting anything except relief from carrying it for a little while.
And I started thinking about how often people like me have volunteered to be the dumpster. Caring people. Nurturers. Problem solvers. Empaths. People who have gone through some shit themselves and learned how to survive it.
We might as well have a sign hanging around our necks:
PLEASE EMPTY GARBAGE HERE.
Then, because apparently receiving the garbage isn’t enough, we start sorting it too.
Toxic relationship? That goes over here.
Generational trauma? Recyclables.
Everyday emotional garbage? We’ll store that at the landfill and deal with it later.
Except none of it was ours. That is something I had to learn the hard way.
I can recognize someone else’s garbage because I have dealt with plenty of my own. I may even recognize the smell. I may know exactly what it feels like to stand ankle-deep in it and have no idea how the hell you’re ever going to clean it up. But recognizing it does not make it mine, and knowing how I cleaned mine up doesn’t mean I’m supposed to clean up theirs.
The garbage man picks up the trash. He doesn’t climb inside your house and organize it for you. Hell, if the bag breaks while he’s dumping it into the truck, sometimes he doesn’t even pick up what fell out.
There may be a lesson in that.
For me, the harder part wasn’t learning that other people had their own work to do. The harder part was recognizing what I got out of doing it for them. Because there can be a little importance hidden inside helping.
They came to me because I’m strong.
I’m the only one who understands.
Nobody else is helping them.
They need me.
That can feel an awful lot like purpose when you are a nurturer. I know because I have lived there.
And nowhere has this been harder for me than with my children.
There is a particular kind of guilt that can come when your teenagers become adults and you begin seeing how your own unhealed shit affected them. I could see it in mine.
I learned ways to survive things in childhood that made sense for the child I was. But I carried some of those same coping skills into adulthood, where they didn’t always serve me anymore. I reacted to things from fight or flight. I made choices from places in me that were still unhealed. And I could eventually see how some of that had hurt my own kids.
Cue the guilt. Cue the shame. Cue the resentment toward my own parents.
Then cue years of trying to heal my children while I still had plenty of healing left to do myself.
My shit. My parents’ shit. My kids’ shit.
A family tradition of doing the best we can with what we know—and sometimes with what we absolutely do not know.
At some point, I had to metaphorically roll up my sleeves and say, I’m cleaning up my shit. Everybody else is going to have to wait a hot minute.
That can feel horribly selfish when you’re a mother, because somewhere in us is this idea that a good mother rescues. A good mother answers every cry. A good mother fixes it. If her child is hurting, she should be doing something—anything—to make the hurting stop.
I have learned that I cannot live that way anymore.
Watching one of your children make destructive choices from the other side of a boundary is excruciating. Watching your child destroy his body and mental health with drugs is excruciating. Seeing tools and resources around him that could help and watching him not use them is excruciating.
And knowing that pulling him back across my boundary might make me feel better for ten minutes doesn’t mean it helps him.
That one has taken me years to learn.
Rescuing used to relieve my guilt. Enabling made me feel better temporarily because at least I was doing something.
But I weakened, and I believe sometimes I weakened them too.
That doesn’t mean I stop loving.
I have driven past my homeless son while he was flying a cardboard sign and sleeping on the street. There are very real failures in the systems surrounding addiction, homelessness, mental illness, rehabilitation and incarceration, and I have watched my children move through some of them.
From the outside, I am sure I have looked like a horrible mother at times. But I know the difference now between abandoning someone and refusing to live their life for them. I brought my son water. I brought him something to sleep on so his hips didn't ache from sleeping on the concrete. Sometimes I answered the phone and simply listened.
And there is another reason I answer some of those calls.
I remember the last phone call I answered from his older brother while he was on the street. Not long afterward, my son died from an overdose.
So no, boundaries do not mean I have stopped caring. They mean I finally had to learn where I end and someone else begins.
That may be the hardest thing I have ever learned about holding space. For a long time I thought holding space meant thinking about somebody’s problems, helping them figure everything out, carrying their worry around with me and searching for answers.
Now I think about the actual word.
Space.
Space is empty.
I don’t have to fill it with plans, strategies, advice and things I’m going to do for another grown human being. Sometimes I can listen. Sometimes I can say, “That really fucking sucks.” Sometimes I can tell somebody what helped me when I was standing in my own pile of shit.
And then I can leave their shit with them.
That doesn’t feel cold to me anymore. It feels respectful.
Because nobody cleaned mine up for me. People helped me. People loved me. People gave me information. I read things. I asked questions. I had realizations. I fucked things up. I tried again.
But ultimately, I had to sort through my own dumpster.
And maybe that is why I am much less interested now in being anyone’s savior. I would rather be an example of what can happen when somebody finally decides to deal with their own stuff.
I can share pieces of my story. I can say, This is what happened to me. This is what I learned. This is where I finally stopped doing that because it was destroying me.
I can help. I can teach. I can show somebody what worked for me. But at some point, they have to do it themselves.
We teach our kids to wipe their own asses for a reason. There comes a point where continuing to do it for them isn’t loving—it’s keeping them dependent.
I wipe my ass. Now go wipe your own.
That’s crude, but honestly, that may be the whole damn lesson.
I can love someone deeply without making their shit mine.