A Closer Look at Emotional Boundaries and How to Establish Resilience

Our emotions, as elusive as they may seem, contribute to the bulk of our happiness and suffering in life. Yet, this complicated subject matter isn’t talked about nearly enough. Not in depth anyway.

If we are peaceful and compassionate beings at our core, stripping away the clutter we’ve accumulated, then by that logic, other than natural emotions that arise from circumstances, any other strong emotional responses are preprogrammed internally or taught by external environments.

My first observation of a taught emotional response occurred when I was 11 years old. Our family had just moved to California from Shanghai, China. Coming from the opposite side of the globe and an entirely different culture, I spent years in confusion trying to adapt to the cultural differences. 

I remember describing a girl as “chubby” in the 6th grade and having the entire table full of kids stunned, shushing me while I stared at them in confusion. There was another instance in college, where I addressed a white male classmate as “pale” without thinking but watched his face flush without understanding why. 

Where I was raised in Asia, the words “chubby” and “pale” are not only inoffensive but used almost as compliments to describe someone who is well-fed and attractive. Growing up, no one around me took offense to those words because there was a positive connotation associated with them. But in another area of the world, those words have a negative connotation and could send someone into rage or depression.

Somewhere down the biological timeline someone felt ashamed for being “chubby” or “pale”, “skinny” or “dark” and formed a negative association with those words, communicating those feelings to another person and the next generation who would otherwise be impartial. Sometime later, everyone in that family or an entire geographical area began to feel the same about those words. That can be described as Generational or Ancestral Trauma.

In our fast-paced information super world, there’s an overwhelming number of media outlets accessible to us 24/7. We are susceptible to absorbing everyone else’s traumas in a matter of minutes. On top of that, we can also absorb everyone else’s opinions and judgments on those traumas and how they should be handled. Our inner peace is constantly being challenged.

Our evolutionary task now, in a sense, is to learn to process emotions as fast as we absorb external information so we can maintain a healthy and peaceful ecosystem internally.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you sort through your emotional world:

Emotionally intense reactions are often associated with personal, generational, or ancestral traumas.

In our current day-to-day lives, there are few scenarios that would require a fight or flight response associated with heightened emotional intensity. We respond so intensely because something within us feels threatened. It could be our principles, beliefs, quality of life, the happiness of our loved ones, etc, most of which are taught by external sources.

The minute we were born, we began receiving information from people all around us, teaching and conditioning us to behave a certain way. As we get older and enter the workforce, we continue to become conditioned on how we should think, talk, dress, behave, and what certain words and behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable. Some of those conditions even challenge what we were taught in our childhood. Over time they become a force of habit and we begin to identify ourselves with those behaviors.

Others’ reactions are not your traumas, but your own reactions could be.

No two lives are exactly alike, because no two internal worlds are exactly alike. Therefore, even for two people who have been through a nearly identical situation, they can still experience them differently based on their own way of receiving external events.

If someone reacted strongly toward something you innocently said or did, it may be a result of previous personal trauma or even an ancestral one. If you react strongly toward his reactions, however, that could be a result of your own traumas. Perhaps you felt blamed from his strong reactions, and in childhood, getting blamed meant severe punishment. Or perhaps you felt fear from his reaction and the possibility of losing him.

It is important for us to identify which belongs to whom so that we don’t end up taking responsibility for past traumas that don’t belong to us.

It’s okay to have an emotional reaction as long as it doesn’t become an attack on someone else.

Expressing your emotions instead of suppressing them is healthy and allows them to come to the surface to be felt and understood. It’s important, however, to recognize that your emotions may be heightened and to not unleash them onto someone else. Be sure to own your reactions, not letting your emotions take over before you understand them thoroughly.

Verbalize your internal experience leading up to your emotional reactions without assigning blame.

It’s easy to blame the last person who triggered your emotions. He seems clearly at fault. After all, you would still be perfectly calm if he didn’t say what he said or do what he did. In such a moment, it is important to pause and not let your emotions take control of your reactions. If you pause long enough and dig a little deeper, you may see a long line of people in your past who caused you to feel this level of emotional intensity whenever a similar situation arose — a pattern.

Describe what happened physically as well as mentally in chronological order leading up to your emotional reaction. Did you feel your body tense up, a knot in your stomach, or your heart racing? Did you then feel anger, fear, hurt?

If you have crossed the line and reacted badly toward someone, it isn’t the end of the world.

Whenever we lose our balance and react hastily from our emotions, we usually feel remorse afterward. Our next common emotional reaction is to blame ourselves, and that can be detrimental to your relationship with others as well as with yourself. 

If you grew up severely reprimanded or made to feel humiliated whenever you made a mistake, this may feel irreversible to you. But that doesn’t have to be the case. A healthy way to approach this is to acknowledge you may have reacted badly toward a situation or unfairly toward another person. Communicate that to the other person and explain what you were going through internally and ask for their understanding. Respect their feelings and choices and let whatever their response is be okay. This is where ownership of your reaction ends and theirs begins. Understand that their reaction isn’t the end of the world, either.

For steps to establish your emotional boundaries, read more on 4 steps to establish emotional boundaries for highly sensitive people

If you are struggling with sensitivity, read more on How to embrace your sensitivity and turn it into strength