Survivors' Voices: Boundaries
The word “boundary” is used a lot in conversations about abuse - sometimes in helpful ways and sometimes in really problematic ways. (I can’t tell you how many people I know whose sexual abuse was minimized as a “boundary violation” by church authorities!)
So, I thought it would be helpful to ask our Survivors’ Voices Panel to offer some reflections on the topic. Their responses were certainly insightful:
I didn't have a good sense of boundaries at the time. People-pleasing was a winning formula for coping with previous abuse, and the priest who encouraged me to let him become my spiritual director took full advantage of it. In the beginning, he love bombed me with praise, setting up a greater desire to try to please him. He asked to know intimate details of my life, and then shared info about his own sexual experiences. This eventually moved to "his thinking was the only acceptable thinking,” screaming at me, and threats of violence (using the old abuse that he questioned me about in the beginning as a guide). Like a frog in a slowly boiling pot - I was trapped. When I tried to leave him as my spiritual director, he abruptly pulled me off parish projects, then put me back on them two days later, saying, "Don't you ever try to leave me again.”
As a little girl, my body, nervous system, and soul put up as many boundaries as possible to protect me from the damage of childhood violence, including sexual and spiritual crimes. As a forty year old adult trying to figure out what was wrong with me, I would discover that I was fairly boundaried without knowing it, except in religious settings. There I would slip in and out of reality, unable to function well, PTSD constantly being activated. A priest took responsibility for my healing. Highly activated and with unexpected bouts of shame, panic, and confusion, I handed my health to this priest. He stripped me of the boundaries I did have until my only resource was him. And when things went haywire, it was others, including this priest, who built boundaries to keep me away. It was only after the damage was done did I begin to understand how church almost requires boundaries to be dropped, replaced by trust in the institution, in the catholic god, and in catholic leadership/priests, etc. Free-will was taken from me as a child, then taken further as an adult. Bottomed out for the umpteenth time, I took life second by second, then minute by minute. The damaging experiences eventually set me on a course to healthy boundaries, and fine tuning them constantly. At first I needed many boundaries and had trouble maintaining them. As time progressed, and through self-awareness, training, and kind-hearted friends, holding and maintaining boundaries became second nature to me, and as a result, I have been able to guide others in this beautiful, self-nurturing work of maintaining balanced boundaries. And, when self-made boundaries become stifling, I open a door and step beyond my boundary.
When I was a child, I did not understand the concept of boundaries. The priests who repeatedly raped me for years had no boundaries. Violation of boundaries is part and parcel of the abuse process. Raping a child is a criminal act, by anyone’s standards. But I didn’t know that what was being done to me was a crime. The priests used endless boundary breaking tactics to get me to cooperate. I was told I was specially chosen by God; that not complying would disappoint Him; that it’s our little secret and telling no one would be respecting God’s wishes… and those were the NICE statements. They facilitated the grooming process because I believed them all without question. When things escalated, the rage and violence, and the threats of killing me or my family if I did not comply, were the ultimate violation. To top it off, I was heaped with guilt, shame, and blame if I showed any resistance, or even questioned what was happening. Boundaries inherently require respect. Criminal acts of abuse are devoid of respect. They violate trust. And they break every rule that Jesus stood for. It’s bad enough for a common criminal to molest or rape a child, but it breaks the heart of Jesus for His representatives (priests, ministers, etc.) to use their positions of trust to commit such heinous crimes. If one cannot trust a priest, who CAN they trust?!?
The Sisters who abused me were big on “boundaries.” They taught classes on how to set proper boundaries and made all of us read the book "Boundaries" by Cloud and Townsend. They told me I didn’t know how to set proper boundaries (and they weren’t wrong). But they also ran roughshod over any tentative boundaries I tried to put in place to protect myself. When I protested that something I was in trouble for wasn’t my fault, for instance—trying to put a boundary in place that preserved my sense of self—it was turned on its head and made clear that it was actually *only* my fault; there was never any scenario where they were at fault. So at the same time that I was trying to learn how to set proper boundaries (and getting yelled at for not setting proper boundaries), the very people who were teaching me about boundaries consistently violated my boundaries. It was incredibly disorienting and it’s made “boundaries” a fraught topic for me.
A priest with whom I was sharing my experience of being groomed and abused as an adult shared some powerful wisdom with me. He said, “When I was novice master, I taught the men early that the priest must be the one who sets safe interpersonal boundaries. If the priest doesn’t set boundaries, no one does.” The priest normally has all the authority, because as Catholics, we’re taught to concede our natural autonomy and self governance to clergy. This institutional grooming is a pillar of Church corruption. I’m hopeful in the changes that are being developed through the synodality movement, but it’s still an imbalance of power that gets routinely exploited. The weak set boundaries at the peril of being excluded or shunned. Too often those without ordained authority are coerced to choose between participating in faith life and emotional or bodily autonomy. Whether overtly or subtlely, boundary setting is resented or angrily rejected by a powerful abuser.
Thank you to each person who shared a response on this subject, and to everyone who is taking the time to read. I will have more to share on this topic next week.
If you have experienced any form of abuse by a Catholic leader and would like to share your own thoughts on this or future topics, I would be grateful to include your perspective. You can find information about joining the Survivors’ Voices Panel here: An Invitation for Survivors.
Thank you,
Sara