The Gift of Boundaries

By Padma Gordon

In this week’s Women’s Empowerment Circle, we explored boundaries as acts of self-love. For raregivers, boundaries protect your peace and allow you to tend to yourself so you can continue tending to others. Internal boundaries matter just as much as interpersonal ones. For example, you might set a boundary around comparing your Rare child to neurotypical nieces and nephews, especially when they are hitting milestones your child may never reach. There’s a phrase, “compare and despair,” and it’s true, comparison almost always leads to suffering. When you notice you are comparing, that’s your cue to gently turn back toward your own life and your own child, loving and accepting them exactly as they are.

We also talked about setting boundaries with your own mind, especially around rumination, worry, and catastrophic thinking. When your brain starts spinning into a future that doesn’t exist, it pulls you out of the only thing that’s real, this moment. When you are present, you can give quality attention to yourself, your partner, your Rare child, and any neurotypical children you may have. Sometimes this means setting a boundary with yourself before reacting, noticing the gap between stimulus and response, pausing before you speak and letting yourself feel. If someone’s anger triggers yours, you can pause. If someone else’s emotions start pulling you into reactivity, you can pause. That pause is the boundary.

A practice we explored that directly supports this is sensation tracking. Sensation tracking is simply observing your physical sensations one breath at a time, without analyzing, fixing, or judging them, not why they’re happening, not whether they should or shouldn’t be happening. When you observe sensations from moment to moment, you become more present and your nervous system becomes more regulated. Try this, for two minutes each day, close your eyes and say out loud, “What I am experiencing right now is…” and name the sensation. Take a breath and feel it. Then move on to the next sensation. No story. No explanation. Just sensation, breath, and presence. Notice how you feel after doing this once a day for 2 minutes. It does take practice.

Finally, we named how worry, grief, and fear can overtake you, and how boundaries here mean turning toward rather than away. If your mind is catastrophizing, pause and face the fear beneath it. Ultimately, you are facing mortality, your own and your family’s, and arriving at the truth that none of us will live forever and we can only control so much. If you are grieving, turn toward the grief and feel. And sometimes, boundaries are external, “I get that you’re upset, and I’m going to take a short walk and come back so we can talk when we’re both calmer.” This is not avoidance, it’s wisdom. You will thank yourself for practicing this, and your family will thank you too. And remember, boundaries are a gift to you and those around you.

Coming Up Next Week: Acknowledging You Have Needs (Stage 4: Brutal Realities of Full-time Care)

When your Rare child is in need of full-time care, your life changes drastically. You may need to stop working or increase your work hours due to greater financial demands. When you stop working, you may lose touch with work contacts and feel isolated. You have less time for yourself and the relationships with your partner and your other children. Oftentimes, raregivers find that they are completely skipping over themselves and the idea of working out or sitting quietly fades from view.

It’s important to recognize you have needs and that your needs matter because when your needs go untended, your capacity to care for your Rare child and family will suffer. In this session, you will learn how to discern what you need and practice the building blocks for making skillful requests.

Please Join Us for the Women's Empowerment Circle every Tuesday at 10am PST.

You may not realize how much you need the Raregivers community until you find it.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84782918881

We look forward to being with you soon.𓆩♡𓆪 𓆩♡𓆪 𓆩♡𓆪