It’s about learning what are healthy boundaries. How to protect ourselves, our identity, our health, our mental state.
Boundaries work two ways – us protecting ourselves from others who don’t respect our boundaries; and us learning to respect other’s boundaries.
Often those with mental health illnesses have never learnt to build boundaries that protect them from people, situations and emotions around them. We have allowed others to crash our boundaries, giving up our rights and identity to others.
But more than that, eating disorders being the nature they are, are another unwanted crasher of boundaries. We can learn to push back people who would treat us like this, but will still allow the eating disorder to destroy and deny us every human right and life itself.
Recovery encompasses learning to build healthy, loving boundaries that respect us as people and keep us safe. We learn to set limits on the people who hurt and deny us, but we also learn to set boundaries on the eating disorder. We learn to tell it “you cannot come here again”.
Like all boundary building this takes time. It is not easy learning to build boundaries. We feel like we may be selfish or manipulative but building boundaries are not like that. It is critical, healthy and right to do so. It takes time and practice to build the boundaries. To tell people they cannot talk or treat you like this. And most importantly for those with an ED, that it is no longer welcome. You will not give it the time of day, it cannot continue to treat you this way or destroy you life.
