Boundaries

[cgerrand]

Do boundaries work with COPD? It seems to me that no marriage tools work with OCPD. The more I look for strategies to make him less controlling they just don't work. The only thing that seems to work is to work on decreasing his anxiety by pretending and lying - yes I love you, etc etc.

[square]

It's difficult but extremely worthwhile to truly come to understand that boundaries are not about changing or controlling anyone else.

Boundaries acknowledge what is yours and what is not yours. His controlling behavior is not yours. His anxiety is not yours. You can leave those to him.

This does not in any way mean that you just have to take it. Your health, your peace, your freedom, your autonomy are yours.

It's not easy and it's not clean. You do not have unilateral power to heal this relationship. You have control over your own behavior, not his. So let him own his stuff.

Boundaries might look like:

- Leaving the room or house if he rages
- Refusing to JADE and maintaining MC
- Setting down the burden of trying to please someone who has no sense of balance
- Letting him deal with his own feelings and not rushing in to fix things
- Accepting that some of his ideas are warped and no longer feeling required to take them seriously
- Making your own choices
- Securing your privacy with passwords, locks, etc.
- Leaving him if you are unsafe, leaving him if the relatiinship is broken

I also feel strongly that boundaries rately if ever need to be stated with a person with maladaptive behavior. Forvbalanced individuals, stating a boundary can be quite useful and cooperative, as the other person often wishes to honor your boundaries.

With PD, the problem is precisely that the normal human cooperative desire to deal fairly with others is broken. So no need to announce "I am going to get a coffee and calm down if youstartvraging at me," just do it. Otherwise they will happily try to attack your boundary (because they are really ok with that), and tell you that calmly stepping away from abusive behavior somehow makes you weak, selfish, immature, or whatever.

It takes a while to really understand boundaries, and itbtakes time to let go of the idea of trying to fix or control others. But it's a very worthwhile effort.

[LemonLime]

I don't know who said this, so I can't properly give them credit.  But it's helped me so much:


"Disordered people, whether they're Female or Male, experience Accountability as Abuse, and Boundaries as being Controlled."

[1footouttadefog]

How he feels is his problem.   You cannot change the underlying personality disorder.

You can only try to change how you are treated. 

Alot of OCPD is about controlling g people and environments.  You can decide you are not a variable that gets to be controlled.  He won't like it but with time and perhaps after extinction bursts will move on to new things to control.