Why I had no boundaries with my wife

Note: I want to apologize for being absent from my regular blog posts because I was away on a family road trip. This blog post will be a part of a series of posts revolving around a life-changing lesson I learned recently which is “boundaries.”

In this first part of my series, I’ll be sharing how the issues in my marriage were very much caused by my not having boundaries. I will also talk about how my lack of boundaries is the result of my trauma. Ultimately, this personal story about boundaries is a window to understanding how broken boundaries show up in your life and how to reclaim your boundaries.

First off, I want to say that my wife has experienced a lot of dark and sick forms of trauma growing up. In our relationship, when things set her off, she could act emotionally and, at times, physically violent. She would apologize for her behavior, but she never addressed the deep-seated pain underlying it, so the behavior would resurface just a few months later. This pattern occurred throughout our entire relationship, especially because I had no boundaries.

Two things happened recently that led me to a full realization that something had to change, teaching me one of the most powerful lessons of my life.

The first issue is that my wife misinterpreted what I said about finances and needing space from each other as a financial threat to cut her off. My website had been having issues for about a month, and I wasn’t getting any new clients. I told her I needed to reduce the budget I allocated to her as a stay-at-home mother. Shortly after, she was lashing out at me over something else while giving me the silent treatment. I couldn’t stand being in limbo, so I told her that I temporarily wanted space since she had responded well to the last time we had space, as it forced her to confront her feelings and pain.

When I said this, within ten minutes, she went behind my back and liquidated half of our family’s savings, which we had invested in a promising stock, and then transferred it into her name. Mind you, my wife did this during the most recent market crash, which caused us to lose a significant amount of money.

The second issue that occurred shortly after involved our family’s second vehicle. This vehicle was a van that my parents no longer used. The van broke down while my wife was driving it on the freeway. We took it to a mechanic she had found, who quoted us a very high repair price, making it seem pointless to fix.

Later, my father discovered that the vehicle could be repaired for a much lower cost, but by then it was too late for my wife. She had been planning and preparing for our family’s road trip before summer ended and wanted us to buy a used van. I told her not to buy it, explaining that our money was invested in stocks for the purpose of building wealth for our family. Despite my clear objections, she went ahead and bought a used van on her own by maxing out her credit card.

These two recent events in my marriage left me feeling sad, depressed, and utterly powerless, knowing that my wife could destroy our family’s finances in an instant, regardless of how I felt.

It was then that I learned one of the most important life lessons I want to share with you: the loving power of boundaries. The interesting thing is that I discovered this lesson through a book called “Boundaries in Marriage,” in which I found while walking into my wife’s bathroom. The book was laid out on the counter, and I immediately said to her, “This is it! This is the issue with our marriage!” I asked if she had read it, and she said she had not. Other than seeing clients, I put all my business ventures aside and just focused on reading this book because I knew my life could never be well if all these untamed fires were happening in my marriage.  

I read half the book in two days and decided to set a boundary by not going on the upcoming family road trip. My life loves traveling and lives for it so it was a difficult boundary to set.

Another interesting point to add is that I used to get very angry with my wife because she had such difficulty acknowledging me, and anger seemed like the only way to feel heard. However, once I set this boundary, I no longer felt angry.

Mind you, I did talk to my four-year-old son at length about why I was not going because I needed to set boundaries. We talked about what boundaries are, which I will explain in my next blog post. I told him I needed to set these boundaries for the betterment of our family and marriage. I told him these things because it’s very important to keep your children in the loop emotionally so they don’t subconsciously internalize the unhealthy aspects of the family and marriage.

Initially, my wife reacted to this boundary by lashing out with anger and being extremely mean-spirited. She threatened to prevent our children from no longer seeing my parents. I responded by saying, “I don’t care,” because I knew that upholding my boundaries and sense of self was paramount, and nothing mattered more than that.

My wife was deeply hurt and distraught over my decision not to go on the trip. I knew that if I gave in to her, she would be elated, and everything would seem “okay” on the surface again. However, giving in would only slap a temporary band-aid on our problems while enabling this neverending cycle of problems. Therefore, I chose not to go, as I wanted to honor myself, my family, and my marriage.

Giving in to her hurtful ways would not only enable but hurt her. I read in the book that boundaries are not just for protecting yourself but for protecting the person you are setting the boundary with.

The next morning, something shifted in my wife. She approached me, asking what was important to me and what I wanted for our marriage and family. There were many things she had neglected over the years, and I had coped by numbing my feelings. We spent an hour creating what I called our marriage covenant, which included all the things that mattered to me but had been previously neglected. We wrote it down, and she signed it. Ultimately, I told her that this covenant was just about me wanting her to value me as her husband because she previously didn’t really value what I felt and wanted.

Because she made the necessary changes to finally acknowledge me, I ended up going on the trip, and I am sharing this experience with you now.

“A relationship without boundaries is like a freight train without train tracks.”

Without boundaries, the relationship will get derailed, and you will only invite chaos, pain, and suffering.

After making the life-altering realization of boundaries, I wondered why I found myself in this repeated situation with my wife to begin with. It is because my mother had no boundaries with me whatsoever. My mother had no filter. She was possessed by the fear of death to the point that it was her mode of communication with me. 

Furthermore, I wasn’t even allowed to have boundaries with her, because I wasn’t allowed to disagree with her obsessive fears of death. As a teenager, she labeled me with a disorder—ADHD—all because I wasn’t 100% fully compliant with her fears of death. She even sent me to an ADHD clinic where I received bio-neural feedback treatment and had wires hooked to my brain, all because there was supposedly “something wrong with me.”

After I had set boundaries with my wife, despite her lashing out at me emotionally, I remember one time washing my hands and looking into the bathroom mirror, saying to myself, “I am proud of you.”

This is how you break the cycle of trauma.

If you lack both boundaries and a sense of self, did your parents have no boundaries with you? In the next blog post, I will be talking about what boundaries truly are, why they are broken in childhood, and how broken boundaries lead to trauma. So stay tuned!

If you would like to reclaim your boundaries and thereby reclaim your sense of self, you can contact Michael to set up a session.