16 March 2022
Boundaries have been coming up everywhere. In my counselling psychology classes, amongst friends and family, and internationally. Boundaries are often an issue that arise within families suffering dysfunction or one of its variants, addiction.
The contemporary take on the professional variant of this concept arose from Salvador Minuchin (1974). Minuchin analogized the walls of a cell to the boundaries surrounding each member of a family. His analogy extended far enough to recognize the need for individual integrity, with the corollary recognition of the need for permeability. That permeability allows young people to acculturate, integrate, and meet belongingness needs, where impermeability is aloneness.
The source from which some of this arrives (Truscott & Crooks, 2021, p.143) states that “…if family role boundaries are too permeable, autonomous functioning is impeded through the denial of self-determination needs.” That’s an interesting statement.
Put another way, if parents act like children and children must substitute for parents (in some situations), then the ability of the child to know who she is and what she wants is hampered. For example, let’s imagine an incapacitated parent, unable to attend to financial matters, who asks the eldest child to do so for her. That child (falsely) believes that she has the ability and maturity to substitute for an adult. While she may be able to fulfill the tasks assigned her, standing in for an adult is not adulthood.
Adulthood is a state of consistently moderated behaviours based on a self-respecting choice of honoured values. Most of that definition is mine but, of course, I looked further afield as adulthood is a concept that intrigues me deeply. Nathaniel Branden, a controversially received psychotherapist, was known as the father of self-esteem. He wrote about psychological maturity, which is the closest my own library seems to come to adulthood. It is not a term that made it into most of my psychology texts. That’s interesting, too.
If adulthood is grasped as a volitional attainment, and not the sum of a number of years lived, some assumptions, or at least questions, arise. For example, How is adulthood attained? How is adulthood volitional? What parts are volitional, which parts are not? In fact, what are the parts? Let’s start with the parts.
We all have willpower to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the person, her wellness, and her habituation. (If, as too many people believe, we do not have free will, there’s not a lot of point in my writing about how we can improve our lives as, sans will, those lives will be what they will be.)
Willpower implies choice. I can focus on the things that annoy and preoccupy me or I can focus on moving toward the achievement of my freely chosen goals. To have chosen goals is to have valued one set of activities and practices over another. When those valuations are morally and rationally defensible to you, you’re entering adulthood. The next challenge is to apply those valuations (principles) evenly across your entire life: your choice of work, home, and community. In short, adulthood is self-responsibility as fully applied as your life allows.
With that definition in mind, what does the defaulting parent impose on the child whom he asks to be his stand in? Suddenly, that child has been accepted into a small realm of the adult world without having had enough time to experience, test, or identify her own values—so she adopts those of the adult society into which she has been temporarily accepted. Or she rebels and rejects them on emotional rather than thoughtful grounds. In either case—blind acceptance or blind rejection—that child has had her values skewed away from her own nature and journey by being a good (and naïve) enough person to stand in for a parent too many times. The result is that she starts seeing the world through a misshapen lens whose misshapenness is invisible to her.
In addictive families, boundaries are rarely respected. Like the adolescent above, a young person behaving addictively is constantly pushed to straighten out and behave like an “adult.” But if that person is behaving addictively, there is a good chance some of his own role models were less than adult, and unworthy of emulation. Underneath the addictive behaviour is a desire to be his own person, even if he (temporarily) sees addiction as the only route forward.
Contrast this with a situation in which parents accept (not endorse) their child’s choice to behave addictively, show love and compassion for that child, but define and defend boundaries that preclude intoxication or using in their home... One of the topics discussed in the SMART Recovery Family + Friends meetings is just this: I love you and will support any efforts you make toward recovery, not addiction. What I believe this does is allow the addicted child to feel accepted and connected, part of a greater whole with some true adults offering examples of real support and how to live adult lives. Where boundaries are not respected—in non-adult contexts—false selves develop and confusion reigns.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
Branden, N. (1980). The psychology of self-esteem. Bantam Books.
Morris, W. (Ed.) (1975). The Heritage illustrated dictionary of the English language. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.
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