Where Boundaries Intersect our Process: Exploring the Dimensions of Grief, Reciprocity, Vulnerability, and Openness

I have been thinking a lot about the special feeling I get in my Compassionate Inquiry dyads and triads, something that isn’t as present (or at least not as often) with my clients or with my therapists.  What is this magic that happens where we're together and we know each other's pain, we have resonated with the stories we share in common, we've watched each other sob, we've cried together, we've been deeply touched, because there's no expectation of some sort of boundary, there's no power differential, there's no hierarchy of any kind.  It feels a bit like communing, just taking turns holding space for one another.  There's a way it feels so sacred and healing and compelling, and the level of presence and vulnerability we can achieve when there's this full reciprocity, I can’t think of much that feels quite the same.

Francis Weller talks about how one of the deepest griefs we all carry is the absence of the village, the place we know in our bones we were meant to grieve.  I've begun thinking about this absence in my own life, and how to bring it back.  He also talks about how when we get out of thinking from an individual lens, it isn't about my grief or your grief, it's about the sharing of grief, where we feel and identify with one another fluidly in our interconnectedness, the boundaries of self become arbitrary, and the beauty we can feel just being in that space, whether we are holding grief, grieving, or both.

In an article she wrote called "Out of Bounds", Miriam Greenspan says "Personally, I have always chafed at the language of boundaries.  The imagery of relationships with hard borders between enclosed individuals does not make me feel safe.  On the contrary, it brings up feelings of isolation, exclusion, and disconnection." 

She goes on to talk about how boundaries now dominate our language in the healing professions, and how it's part of the hegemony of the 'distance model', of which the most appealing quality is "its appearance of objectivity, which makes it attractive to those who would like therapy to have the absolute authority of hard science. This approach enshrines the cult of the 'Expert', whose superior knowledge and power bring cure to the inherently defective, disordered, or sick patient. But the so-called scientific, value-free objectivity of the Expert is, on inspection, the hidden bias of the dominant culture. The neutrality of the Expert is the silent embodiment of our culture's fundamental and unquestioned assumptions.  The healing potential of therapy has less to do with pseudo-objective distance than it does with safe connection. It is not about detached neutrality; it is about passionate but trustworthy engagement. Compassion rather than distance is the prime mover of what is healing about therapy. And compassion---the willingness to identify and suffer with others---is by definition boundless; it crosses the divide between self and other."

In their article entitled "Relationships, Not Boundaries", Gene Combs and Jill Freedman propose that "when 'boundaries' is used as an organizing metaphor for the ethics of relationships, certain discourses are brought into play while others are crowded out. For example, the discourse of separation and individuation is valued at the expense of the discourses of interdependence, collaboration, and community that many feminist writers have argued for so persuasively".  They also write: "we agree with the prevailing view that particular ways of relating can be inappropriate or harmful. We believe therapists should attend closely to the relationships in which they participate. We hope to convince readers that orienting oneself by asking, 'Where must I draw and enforce my boundaries?' leads to perceiving a different world than the one we inhabit through asking, 'What sort of relationship does this situation call for?' and, 'What are the effects of my actions on this relationship and its members?' Furthermore, we hope to demonstrate that these different worlds call forth different emphases in ethical conduct. Our approach looks beyond the restrictions of rules about what not to do and asks, 'What better way of relating can everyone involved in this situation imagine, and how can we move toward that better way?'"

When I think of someone framing the way they would hold space for me when I need it, their suggestions resonate with me so much more, make me feel more valued as a real human being, not just someone who is receiving a service, on one side of a transaction, to be managed and bounded.  I read this and I'm like, "yeah, I *do* deserve that much consideration!"

They go on to say, "During our stay in South Africa, we noticed over and over how boundary language functions like apartheid. Boundaries are about separation. They invite us to relate to people on the other side as 'other', as foreign. It is hard for us to think about boundaries without thinking of the 'separate but equal' policies that flourished in the United States before Brown vs. the Board of Education and of the remnants of those policies that still affect our culture. The language of boundaries partakes of the discourses that support individual ownership of property and individual rights, and works against those discourses that support shared stewardship and the rights of communities. Making boundaries our central focus in deciding what is and is not ethical in our relationships can keep us from critically examining the effects of distance, withdrawal, non-participation, and related issues."

In the article they talk about some unconventional ways of being welcomed into the home and family of a local healer, as guests, and even their child was included in the connection.  The feeling they got there reminds me of the way Francis Weller talks about the way people who still exist embedded in the container of the village grieve together and in ritual.  There's a porosity between the "selves" of those involved, an assumption, a taking for granted, of everyone's welcome.

In Marc Lewis' book "Memoir of an Addicted Brain", he recalls a brief passing encounter with this native child, maybe 10 years old, standing there with his father, in the rainforest: "he regarded me with a face so open, so unclouded that it seemed to lie outside of the repertoire of the human. His eyes were a window between his body and the world outside him, uninterrupted by the opacity of self."  As Marc Lewis processes what he saw in that boy, he says "There was no flinching away in anxiety, no concern that he would do the wrong thing, and shatter the father-son detante. No contracting in shame, because the father knew him, and accepted him, completely. No concern about being too strong, because there is no way he would be taken as a challenge. No fear of being too weak, because his father, his family, his tribe, were there to protect him.... and reflecting later on what I'd seen in his posture and his face, I was left feeling amazed and hopeful. It was possible to be wide open and unafraid in this world. It was at least possible."

This feeling of amazed and hopeful that he describes at the idea that maybe this "wide open" way of being is where our hearts truly belong, this is how I feel as I keep encountering this kind of writing, but also recalling experiences of my own.  

When I was 14 or 15 years old, my younger sister was very sick and I got used to spending time in the ICU waiting room of the children's oncology ward at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and for so many years I held shame around this secret I had no guidance or wisdom to help me frame: at the time when my heart was being wrenched at the constant fear of losing my sister, the conversations and tears that were shared in those waiting rooms with other families who were waiting for a treasured little one in their life to die, these have endured in my memory as some of the best memories of my life.  I held deep shame remembering those times and having this unexplainable longing to feel that again.  I couldn't understand it---was I longing for more tragedy, more heartache, just so I could have the experience of collective grief?  Clearly it was a sign I was damaged goods; twisted, warped, in some way.  So, no good trusting my impulses.

But I've begun to understand this differently.  In his book "The Wild Edge of Sorrow", after Francis Weller talks about how missing the container of the village is an ache we feel deep in our bones, he says, "The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can't give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog.  This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve.  On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows."  Now what I see is that I have so much pent-up grief, and those ICU waiting rooms were a place I had permission to grieve.  Now I see that I am, like so many others, just looking for permission to grieve, and the container of the village where I can do so, and where I can hold others' grief.  Francis Weller talks about the way that we become elders through grief.  I have begun to see my process right now as one not of becoming a certain profession within the bounds of some title, but an elder, in the fullness of my life.  There isn't the bounded professional me and the real, human, fully authentic me.  There's just one me.  And I'm becoming more fully me.  This entering into, as Francis Weller calls it, an "apprenticeship with grief" is proving to be quite the path for me.

Now, instead of asking myself "what career do I desire?", I'm asking myself, "who do I want to become?", "what experiences and proficiencies do I want my life to be made of?", and "what will make me feel whole?".  And then, as I find answers for these new questions, the follow-up question becomes, "what do I need to learn next to realize this?"

And in many ways for me right now, grief seems to be at the center of my path to discovery.  I love that quote from Annie Dillard who says, "How we spend our days is how we spend our lives."  Do I want to spend my days as a professional, erecting boundaries, receiving therapy where my therapist has erected boundaries of their own?  No.  I want to spend my days being fully alive, being present, being connected, being authentic, and sharing this with others.

So this brings me back to the reciprocity.  There's something happening in these Zoom rooms with the dyads and triads, that brings this experience, and it's akin to what Francis Weller describes happens in communal grieving rituals.  There's plenty more that CI does than simply establish a ritual where we grieve our undigested pain, of course.  But I'm interested in the dimension of reciprocity and why that feels so different from every other kind of therapy I've experienced.  The reciprocity goes beyond self-disclosure and fully abolishes any hierarchy or power structure.  And then, we grow closer, and the closeness feels reciprocal as well.  It's not just the sad, traumatized client who becomes attached to their therapist, who has a kindly but still-easily-construed-as-patronizing concern for their client.

In the CI literature I read early on, I noticed they say not to do CI with friends or family and I balked a little bit.  I thought, wow, we're going to gain all this wisdom and we can't even bring that to those we love the most?  And again the idea of boundaries and the formality of healing spaces existing in a pseudo-connected transactional environment feels like it's failing us, because this isn't creating a trauma-informed society, family, or community, it's still just creating trauma-informed practitioners who do everything in private rooms.  Perhaps that CI literature (saying not to do CI w/ friends/family) was intended to dissuade beginners, the same way that we read that people who are new to nonviolent communication often inadvertently rub people the wrong way until they become more skilled in its use.

Maybe it's that.  I'm not sure, honestly.  But I don't take it as a universal truth that healing must always happen between strangers.  If that were true, the village wouldn't work, and we wouldn't bother working toward trauma-informed communities because we'd know it would always fail at the scale of the family unit, in networks of friendships, and so forth.  It may be true that it's much harder for people with histories and habits of triggering one another to step out of those entrenched ways.  But I think the questions end up being the same as Combs & Freedman propose as more appropriate for framing the therapeutic relationship, especially, "What better way of relating can everyone involved in this situation imagine, and how can we move toward that better way?"  And I think it's important to acknowledge that in my dyads and triads, it's the establishment of a reciprocal relationship---that feels more and more like friendship the more time I spend with a given partner---that seems to make the experience all the more meaningful.  The more we know each other, the more fully seen we are, and (to quote my own song lyric) "how can I feel loved for parts of me that I have never shown?"  The development of that relationship creates that visibility, removes the "opacity of the self" / allows us to be "wide open and unafraid" (Marc Lewis' words) and lays bare our interconnectedness and shared struggles. 

The more I ponder all of this, the more I have to conclude, there are just people, and people need other people.  Real people.  The things we do within these therapeutic constructs, whatever we do that makes us less real, less human, less connected, less authentic, it's going to get in the way of what I've come to believe is such an important part of healing.  There may not be much documentation for this in the Western Psychology literature, but the ability to heal existed long before the advent of psychology or therapy. 

(AND THIS IS WHEN I FELL ASLEEP AND I NEED TO KEEP WORKING ON THIS!!!)

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349791510_Relationships_Not_Boundaries)