PANDEMIC LIVING: When Being Together Drives You Further Apart.

Remember when your mate retired and they were suddenly at home all the time? Similar situations are happening all across the world as the COVID-19 pandemic causes many to stay indoors, often living in close quarters with others who we may or may not get along with. Kelly Ripa of television fame has been candid about how tension has increased because of their family having to live in such close proximity. And they live in more than ideal conditions. If you live in a smaller house or apartment, living with others all the time can drive one nuts. 
​
  1. A few ground rules solve many problems.
  2. Benefits of defining your personal boundaries extend into the handling of difficult social relationships.

Ground rules for living together in close quarters:

PRIVACY
Basically, fences make good neighbors.
When we live in close proximity the most difficult element is lack of privacy. Privacy can be re-established when you define your personal boundaries, your own rules for living together under stressful circumstances.
  • "Do not disturb" signs are worth their weight in gold. Put a sign on your door and enforce it. Or create a conditional rule: "When I come home after work, do not speak to me for 10 minutes. I need that time to recalibrate." It's very important that all people involved agree on the rules and really do not disturb that person unless it is an emergency.
  • Time boundaries, personal scheduling: "After 11am I will be in the garage." "3-5pm is my TV time."
  • Make clear agreements about anything that bothers you. Half our woes come from unspoken accords never deliberately agreed upon. Saying them out loud or writing them down provides so much clarity. Tension and stress are reduced dramatically as a result.
  • Mental privacy can be created through structured meditation, something you can do anywhere around anyone in any circumstance. It is an excellent skill to develop that will see you through all of life's challenges. You can always close your eyes and go to a beach in Hawaii.
RESPECT
Always accord respect to the people you live with, especially mates. As mates you are both deliberately choosing to live in the same home.
  • Treat your home with respect.
  • Treat each other with respect.
  • Treat your body with respect.
  • Treat your self with respect.
  • Never ever take each other for granted. ​
CONSIDERATION & GOOD PRACTICES
  • Make the other person's life a little better whenever you can.
  • Get adept at adjusting to changing conditions. Swap private times. Move your chores around to help your mates.
  • Never say anything you will regret later. If the steam has built up and you just have to burst, think of bursting as a teapot instead of flinging your exasperation at those you live with. A link to an article on responsible anger management is below.
  • Clean up after yourself. Do not procrastinate about chores. This is even more important when living in close quarters. 
  • Exercise, deep breathing and structured meditation are life savers in reducing any kind of stress. Exercise and breathing sessions should be included daily in the family schedule. Begin a structured meditation practice now and you will come to love the quiet time you end up having with yourself.
  • Accomplish something every day. It doesn't have to be big. It could be polishing a locket. The sense of achievement that comes with accomplishment reduces indoor stress.

These ground rules help us establish what our own physical boundary needs are. It turns out that clarifying personal boundaries is a wonderful way to introduce health and well being. Most of the problems humans have with communication arise from those who have improperly developed limits.

The Significance of Personal Boundaries: It's trouble without them.

A lack of clearly defined personal boundaries is a common element to many chronic personality disorders. This provides a crucial key toward successfully handling these often uncomfortable relationships.
  • Bully behavior.
  • Abuse in any form: Substance abuse, sexual harassment and/or abuse. Elder abuse. Child abuse. Obesity.
  • Codependency.
  • Inferiority/superiority complexes, egomania.
  • The Victim Personality/The Do Gooder.
Substance abuse deserves special mention: The essence of substance abuse is overuse of the substance. If you consistently eat more than your body wants, you do damage to the natural integrity of your body's limits. In effect this means that you damage your natural boundaries by time after time not respecting your body's response. It has far reaching consequences. Addiction not only damages the body's integrity, it also damages the existential concept of yourself. Healing from addiction is necessary on the spiritual level as well as the physical and emotional level, one reason it is such a tough nut to crack. 12 Step programs have had some success with this process as they aspire to heal the spirit while dealing with the abuse.

Boundary dysfunction describes some behaviors that are admired.

Being able to say "No" is essentially insisting on your own boundary. When you are unable to refuse others, even when your own well being is affected, it is a symptom of an unbalanced relationship with poorly conceived boundaries.

The person who always needs help.
The person who always rushes in to rescue.

The Victim Personality: This is someone who is in constant trouble, often of their own making. Overwhelmed with real life dire emergencies, this type of person is always needing help. Their ability to do for themselves is damaged. The line where they stop and someone else starts is ambiguous. Someone chronically needy will often be:
  • Constantly overwhelmed and asking for help.
  • Always in an emergency.
  • Advice is not usually taken.
  • You never hear whether the last emergency was resolved.
  • Events lead to more and more out of control situations.
  • Someone who acts this way will usually be able to find someone else who wants to "rescue" them (the Do Gooder for instance), doubling the imbalance and ill health results for both people.
The Do Gooder: A person who always wants to help those less fortunate. Charity is one of the highest ideals but it is not always caused for healthy reasons. In spite of the good intensions, some people invade other's space to take over and heal troubles. There are several objections with this approach:
  • You rob the recipient of their ability to take responsibility.
  • You damage that person's boundary. They may well have invited you to do just that, in which case it is a trap. 
  • You now have a relationship which is out of balance with the person's problems still unsolved if not worse.
  • This kind of imbalance is the essence of co-dependency. Children of substance abusers are often co-dependent. 

Manipulation of others' boundaries.

Toxic personalities provide a potent example of what can happen with boundary damage. Some people are simply poisonous: people who do not understand healthy relationships, probably because of abuse they themselves have had to endure in earlier years. Toxic situations gnaw at you. Toxic people just get your goat. Regardless of the cause, if possible just ignore those toxic. Do not let them have a presence in your life. Sometimes that is not possible, especially if it is a family relationship. Understanding how those toxic use boundary invasion helps to teach us how to create a meaningful and strong boundary to keep ourselves safe from abuse. Basically, if you have to be in a toxic relationship then learn how to protect yourself and keep yourself disengaged from the toxicity. Establishing clear boundaries goes a long way toward doing that.

Throughout this entire process, another health technique is badly needed. We need to get better at the skill of grounding ourselves. We live in such a hyper reactive world right now that it is important to connect ourselves to reality from time to time. A lack of boundaries and clear rules for communications leaves us exposed to viral elements of our current challenges. Grounding is a wonderful steadying process that helps so much to reduce tension and anxiety. "Getting Grounded" describes what is entailed.

Published September 1, 2020