“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
We all have barriers to protect ourselves from emotional harm. These barriers, or boundaries, are important and necessary to keep us safe. Sometimes though, we build our barriers a little too high. Maybe we have been hurt before and so to protect ourselves from further pain we put up a barrier between ourselves and others (or certain others) to avoid it happening again. For example, if as a boy I was repeatedly teased and bossed around by an older sister, I might hold myself back from romantic relationships with women as an adult.
Counselling and psychotherapy can help us highlight where we are putting boundaries up and with whom. Together we can explore whether our boundaries are in the right place i.e. not too close to us so that they are over-exposing (we wear our heart on our sleeve… ) and not so far away that nobody has any chance of ever getting close to us. A therapy goal might be to find boundaries that keep us safe enough whilst still allowing trusted others in.
If you live or work within reach of Brighton and Hove and my approach to counselling and psychotherapy interests you, please contact me via email or telephone 07585 910742 for more information and to arrange an initial consultation.
Image courtesy of sirikul at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
