Keith came to see me at 16. He seemed unusually bright and self-contained. He’d just ended a relationship with a disturbed young woman, felt he had been overwhelmed by her needs but also felt guilty about abandoning her.
As it turned out, the relationship and its ambivalence echoed his relationship with his sensitive, artistic mother. He said he tried to have a “professional” relationship with both his parents. He watched. He asked for help only if he had to. Yet he felt loved, enjoyed his family, had nothing to complain about. He just had periodic bouts of sadness. And anger. He wondered if he had bad character.
I asked if it was possible his mother (for example) cared too much, that is, got too involved. Since she was sensitive and loving, did an expression of his feelings generate an excess of response from her? Yes. She reacted too strongly, got too involved, made a bigger deal of it than he felt it to be. Whatever it was became a “thing” every time. He pulled back into his “professional” distance.
But where did this pattern leave him? He couldn’t just be, express his feelings spontaneously, relax. The floods of concern, love, and engagement threatened to drown him. So he held back –– and felt the sorrow of having to maintain more distance than he really wanted. He wasn’t fee to love. He was sad.
And he was angry, because he had to protect himself (he didn’t want to merge). It wasn’t fair. He didn’t want this much separation, he didn’t want to be on guard, at “professional” distance. It was hard work, and it was lonely.
We don’t notice out loud the quality of someone’s love for us. How flexible is it? How much autonomy is granted us? Does it require something from us (are we taking care of them)? Keith was still just a kid; he couldn’t be expected to understand that his genuinely loving, responsive mother was invading his emotional (energetic) space. But he felt it. He responded self-protectively. And he was sad, and angry, at the loneliness that self-protection required.
Someone being overly responsive is only one variant on the problem of poor boundaries. Someone can also take whatever you feel and convert it into whatever they feel –– which often isn’t what you meant. You’ll stop confiding in that person, too. We’re safe only if the other person hears whatever we intend and remembers always that what we feel is what we feel, not theirs to run with.
If the other person is “too loving,” we’re baffled. We have nothing to complain about; no one is “doing” anything to us. But we feel the sadness, the loneliness, of having to hold back, control our love for them, in order to honor our own equilibrium. It hurts the other person, too: they love us; they wonder why we’re always so reserved around them . . . . It’s sad.