Boundaries and Why I Cannot Speak Spanish with My 4-Year-Old

Trying to explain boundaries to my four-year-old brings the complexity of social and personal boundaries into vague and fuzzy focus. Consider this my attempt to improve resolution. The context of my conversation with my daughter was this; My daughter spoke only Spanish in the home for the first 2 years, so it is her first language. She speaks and understands Spanish fluently and makes the same grammar mistakes in English that Spanish speakers make. I speak Spanish at the level of a first grader and from the beginning, she has been clear,

“dad, don’t speak Spanish. I don’t like it”.

Even Spanish children’s books which I am more than capable of reading, she insists I translate on the fly (great practice) into English.

???????????The conversation that inspired this essay on relationship dynamics and the resulting boundaries went something like this:

“Baby, necesito aprender espanol porque mi esposa y mi nina hablar mucho”

“Dad, no, don’t speak Spanish, I don’t like it”

“Ok, posible, necesito un maestro de espanol, y voy a mejorar y entonces, puedo hablar contigo?”

“Dad! (then she makes this startling assertion) No, it’s not fair to me.”

This respectable but somewhat confused boundary assertion inspired more thought than I expected. My daughter, being four requires a lot of conversations around boundaries. That involves, what she has a right to demand, when her parents need to impose their will and when things can be negotiated based on everyone’s needs. When her baby brother picks up a toy, she often takes it from him, insisting she meant to play with it, and “he took it from me”. Explaining these situations dredges up a lot of complexity that adults unconsciously navigate?but we don’t realize how very confusing it might be to a 4 year old.

“Dad, he can’t play with it, it’s my toy!”

She has one point – since she is the oldest, most of the toys originally belonged to her, though her brother has inherited them. From her perspective, she merely noticed a toy in action, had the impulse to play with it and asserted her ownership.

Her parents, of course are attempting to manage several truths creating boundary complexities. We know that her narcissistic toddler tendencies must be managed and slowly socialized or she will grow up insensitive to other people’s rights and, in fact, confused about what is her right. We also know that if we use a strictly authoritarian approach and impose our will because we are older/bigger/more powerful, she will grow up to attempt to assume roles of power to unfairly control others, or she will become a people pleaser, unable to defend her boundaries or assert herself when necessary. We infuse the situation with all that context, but she has no idea nor is it her responsibility to understand.

In addition, a 13-month-old (her baby brother) is not responsible for understanding ownership, sharing, taking turns and in fact, sometimes, her parents will even be slightly unfair to help the baby calm and find something to do besides attempting to climb in the toilet or stick his fingers in a light socket. The imbalance of responsibility between a baby and a toddler, as well as her parents’ need to problem solve the baby’s entertainment sometimes, can be discussed, but feels inexplicable and unfair to her.

This had been an ongoing negotiation, a socialization, a navigation for a couple of years this morning when I attempted to better explain to my daughter when, where and why she has a right to push for control of a situation or of other people’s behavior. I tried to start with simple scenarios.

“Baby, if someone wants to give you a hug and you don’t want to be touched, you have a right to say, no, I don’t want that. Because your body belongs to you. Only a few situations, if something dangerous or unhealthy is going to happen, mom or dad will choose for you.”

At this point, my daughter is silent, with her eyes slightly unfocused. This is an intense state she enters when she genuinely is trying to wrap her brain around the information provided.

“What if dad is reading a bedtime story to you and you don’t want me to read it in Spanish? You can say ‘no dad, not in Spanish’, because your bedtime story belongs to you, it is for you, and it is a gift your mom and I give you. You can decide how I read it. You can ask for silly voices, or no silly voices, you can ask for Spanish, or English right?”

She nods (She always understands when the situation entitles her to what she wants).

“However, if I want to take Spanish lessons, or speak Spanish with mom or to practice with you, that is my right to choose how I want to use my voice”. The only times we get to choose other people’s behavior, is when they are hurting us, they are forcing us to do it, they are taking something that belongs to us or hurting someone else (I made this up on the fly). You might not like it when I speak Spanish, but it is my choice to practice and to get better. You understand?”

She looks confused now, so I attempt a clearer example. I point to a man jogging along the beach path.

“You see that man? What if, in my head, I think wow, how that guy runs looks really funny it bothers me. I don’t like how he is running. Can I tell him to stop running or to change how he runs? I cannot, because he is not hurting me, he is not forcing me to run that way, and he is not hurting anyone else. I can have the thought in my head because my thoughts belong to me, but he has a right to run how he wants to run. Does that make sense?”

My daughter, “Dad. My head hurts”

“Did I talk too much?”

She nods.

“Ok, I’m going to be quiet now. I hope you feel better”

My spur of the moment invention of the “rules” of boundaries – does it hurt us, are they forcing us to do it, are they stealing from us, are they hurting others – reminded me of the many many conversations I have around boundaries with couples, families, and individual clients. This set of boundary rules might sound reasonable but truthfully, the above rules do not solve anything in real relationships because we can endlessly debate whether someone is being hurt, whether someone is having something taken away, etc. Consider the following boundary explorations.

Sidenote, I am not arguing a particular side with these examples, I am just using them to demonstrate that these “rules” can be interpreted and argued endlessly from different viewpoints.

?Pro-lifers can argue that a baby’s life is being stolen and the baby is being caused pain by abortion. A pro-choicer can argue that there is no baby’s life, there is no perception of pain, but that a woman’s rights to her body are being stolen and harm and pain is being inflicted on her by stealing her right to control her body. Both positions respect the rules of fair boundaries from each side’s perspective of what is harm, what is theft and what is not.

A CEO of a powerful corporation who lobbies congress to pass laws that favor their corporation can argue that creating wealth and success contributes to the well-being of their employees and society and that restricting the corporation’s right to thrive imposes suffering on the employees and steals the social benefits that come from the corporation’s success. Farmers or communities being displaced or having their water drained from a water source by that corporation can argue that their right to basic life necessities (water) and their right to thrive without trying to compete with an impossibly powerful business entity is being stolen and they are being hurt by the laws that favor the corporation.

These are the boundary conflicts that a democratic society will navigate endlessly. No one party will ever be entirely satisfied and there will always be situations that are unfair. A democratic society succeeds when it struggles to mitigate the inequities, especially to those who are disempowered.

This complexity translates into individual boundaries and dynamics. A couple who argues over whether the room temperature should be 66 degrees, or 70 degrees is never going to resolve this issue, because there is no absolute objective standard. Use an even more extreme example. One partner could insist that things would be healthier with an sexually open relationship and the other could argue that this is disloyal and destructive. We can all have our opinions, but it is a matter of whether people feel hurt or not. In many cases, there are no absolute moral standards.

I have learned, working with couples and families, often there is little to be gained by focusing on compliance with boundary rules. Boundary rules are abstract constructs and can be redefined ad nauseum by anyone. True progress comes when we focus, not on paying lip service to the rules, not even when we sincerely attempt to satisfy the rules, but when we focus on creating, what is difficult to define, but what anyone observing can identify has a healthy relationship between people or various individuals. We do not succeed by attempting to avoid rule violations or codified boundary violations. I have found focus on healthy dynamics in couples or family work far more effective than focusing on the “rules” and how to avoid violating them.

Having been silenced with a reasonable boundary request from my four-year-old, I silently thought through the various dynamics I observe that make relationships strong, healthy, that bring vitality to the individuals participating. I start with the most vital and beneficial to all parties, down to those dynamics that harm everyone, including bystanders. These dynamics are:

·?????To be in communion with one another.

·?????To have empathy or understanding for one another

·?????To be sympathetic, I feel what you feel and therefore we both want the same things.

·?????To agree on social/behavioral control (lacks understanding, empathy or sympathy and the legal system is often employed at this level)

·?????Coercion, to impose behavioral control using power or manipulation (I don’t care what you think or how you feel, you’re going to do what I tell you to do or else). The police or military are threatened at this level.

·?????Open violence for gain, an attempt to gain social/behavioral control and personal benefits (I may even take pleasure in your suffering)

·?????Open violence for the pleasure of dominating another (I probably won’t gain anything, I’m just glad you know I can do this to you any time I want) – Slavery, rape, theft without purpose other than domination, humiliation of other.

·?????The elimination of “other” thus the destruction of a dynamic – Genocide, invasion of other countries, poisoning of a groups water, air, food supply, complete displacement of a living beings’ natural habitat.

As stated above, once there is a tangible, conceivable dynamic it is much easier to intuit behaviors that build that dynamic, rather than to try to argue rules or avoid negative dynamics. ?

To be in communion does not require agreement shared emotions, shared race, politics, beliefs or behaviors. It requires that both parties have a rich, well-developed theory of one another minds, experiences, intentions, and wellbeing such that, without aligning, they can both voluntarily, with generosity of spirit, attempt to support the other person’s deep intentions and states of being. For example, suppose I had a strong antipathy towards the Catholic church based on cases of molestation. And suppose I have a friend who is deeply convinced of their faith in Catholicism. I may advocate for victims, I may refuse to set foot in a Catholic church or school, however, if my friend has a deeply spiritual experience at their church over Christmas, I will listen with genuine joy that they are able to channel goodness, spiritual health, and joy through this form that I consider so hopelessly flawed. To be in communion with other means I recognize the ineffable mystery of consciousness and the many forms by which it successfully navigates whatever this reality. Since I want the unfettered right to pursue my own joy and fulfillment, I also want my fellow conscious being to thrive in the forms that they choose. This requires deep compassion, radical acceptance, intellectual humility, love and understanding – all free of the desire to control the other in order to serve my own needs. Wonderfully, for this dynamic to exist, the other being has the same intentions, radical acceptance, intellectual humility, love and compassion towards me. We find great joy in our own existence as well as in the other, without need to judge or control.

To have empathy and understanding does not require radical acceptance though it requires the willingness to remain silent when uncomfortable or to make space for the other regardless of agreement. With this dynamic, I do not necessarily feel the deep kinship of holding the other person’s existence in awe and acceptance, but I seek to understand the other, such that I can accurately reflect what they communicate to me, so that I can see their intentions even when their behavior translates differently in my belief system. For example, as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, food and drink is not as deeply communal or relational to me as in other cultures. For this reason, I can say ‘no’ to offers of food and drink with ease, within my culture. In fact, the insistence that I share what someone else is enjoying is interpreted as slightly intrusive, as a lack of care for my needs and tastes (individualistic culture). If I participate in another culture that expects me to partake because it is a deeply felt gesture of connection and community, empathy allows me to experience the loving intentions, the act of acceptance that has been offered to me. Still, I may set boundaries, I may navigate the exchange, or I may choose to partake, even of something with which I am not comfortable. E.g. when I was in Ethiopia I consciously chose to accept the offering of warm goats milk and honey from various hosts in outlying areas, though the risk of food poisoning was high. I did indeed develop a raging case of food poisoning. For me, it was worth it to accept, in spirit, as well as in behavior, what was being offered. One can also kindly explain that this is not comfortable, understanding that this may not be understood and may be experienced as rejection. Empathy does not require alignment, only understanding, the ability to, at least, verbally honor the other person’s offered behavior or experience such that they have a better chance of feeling understood and respected.

???????????To be sympathetic is a natural, possibly biological response that we all feel. However, it is the junk food, the sugary snack, of relational dynamics. It can feel deep, intensely connected, it can create feelings of loyalty, but it is doomed to fail every time if it is the only connection offered. You can think of a sympathetic state as when someone has a strong emotional reaction to a situation, and this elicits the same emotion in you. For example, a father sees his son fighting back tears after losing an important game and the father also fights back tears, feeling his son’s devastation. How can sympathy be so unreliable? For several reasons. The first reason is that often, the healthiest most caring response is not to respond with the same emotion or behavior. This was a lesson I learned early on, working with intense developmental trauma. Clients might bring up a situation which causes them to dysregulate or collapse into intense overwhelming emotion. They might sob uncontrollably, they might feel suicidal, they might dissociate. My job as a therapist is to both empathize and understand, to display kindness, but also to model regulation and to communicate that the client can be ok, even in the face or horror and suffering. In a more obvious example, a child having a temper tantrum will have a very difficult adult life if their parent also falls into a rage, feeling exactly what their child feels. The child needs a model of regulation, a sense that there is a positive way to navigate such difficult emotions.

???????????The second reason that sympathy consistently fails over the long term is that it demands that we all have the same responses to situations to feel bonded. With this dynamic, having the same responses is interpreted as loyalty. You see this go sideways in middle school or high school friendships in which young people have alignment based on feeling the same things and believing the same things. The moment one person in the friendship has a different reaction, for example, doesn’t think so and so is a complete jerk and should be cut off, and suddenly there is a feeling of violation and rupture. The friends fight and then become enemies. Sympathy is a primitive response that requires that everyone feel the same, believe the same things and model the same behaviors, otherwise people feel violated and attacked and the person with the different response or belief becomes the enemy who must be attacked.?Like a donut or junk food, sympathy is nice in small doses. As a habit, over the long term, it is toxic and destructive to individuals and to society.

???????????The next category is the tipping point where we have abandoned intention and internal moral sense and we move to something transactional or functional. To agree on social, behavioral control essentially people involved accept that they may not agree, may not feel the same, but they do not believe that they can achieve empathy and understanding or communion and act in a way the eliminates serious conflict. They resort to identifying and codifying behaviors to capture some legal code or set of social mores that is acceptable enough to everyone. This is the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. If people are unwilling, or unable to work at empathy and understanding, which requires we allow the idea of kindness, compassion and understanding to drive our choices, then we must have a set of rules that corrals people into a vague semblance of functional behavior with one another. This assumes conflict that cannot be resolved by the parties involved and demands consequences or punishment. The court system awaits in the background as proof that genuine understanding and empathy have failed.

One caveat: This is not to criticize the unavoidable need for laws, especially in cases where behavioral choices are arbitrary – e.g. at a four way stop, if everyone arrives at once, who goes first? Well, let’s just say, the person to your right. That’s not a moral choice, there simply needs to be a system on which we agree. What I am addressing are social dynamics where the rules are a replacement for sympathy, empathy, understanding or communion.

?Teacher: “Simon! We do not trip our friends who are walking across the cafeteria!”

Simon “Why not, he’s a stupid nerd who thinks he’s better than everyone else”

Teacher “I don’t care what your opinion is, we don’t trip our classmates in the cafeteria”

Simon “I’ve never heard of that before, since when is that a rule?”

Teacher “It is right now because I say so and if I catch you doing it again, you’ve got a trip to the principal’s office and a week’s detention. Are we clear?”

That whole system, the new rule, the punishments that can be leveraged, the authoritarian power are only necessary because Simon is simply not driven by compassion, understanding or even sympathy. Thus, a set of rules controlling behavior and backed by social control/threat must be established. This is the point at which society or any relationship slumps over from caring to just being organized and fair enough to not collapse into violence and dysfunction. Anyone who has been in a relationship with a narcissist (lacking empathy) knows the endless games that can be played with systems of behavior control and how this system has no real caring in it unless brought by both parties.

Wife “I thought we discussed how uncomfortable I am when you drink too much with strippers at your friend’s parties. We talked about how you and your friends act when you go to strip clubs, especially going to the private room. I told you it really hurts me and scares me”

Husband “I didn’t go to a strip club! I stopped going to strip clubs. Geez! What do you want from me?”

Wife “But you just had a bunch of strippers over at your buddy’s house!”

Husband “that’s not a strip club! I told you I would stop going and I did! Am I supposed to have no fun at all!?” (pretending that obeying the letter of the law honors the spirit of the law)

Wife “Can’t you see that’s the same thing? You have a bunch of women who get paid to be naked, some of them will have sex for money, you’ve cheated on me before and all you did was change the location to your buddy’s house. It’s exactly the same thing”

Husband “You asked me to stop going to strip clubs and I did. I don’t have control over what my buddies do. Am I supposed to just stop hanging out with my friends because it hurts your feelings?”

As you can see, when a person to person dynamic or when a society has resorted to behavioral control, it indicates a lack of real connection or empathy. Anyone who wants to, can play word games, and claim to have satisfied the spirit of the law while violating it. I suspect there is a lot of this being argued in the American court system and it probably drives judges crazy. As mentioned before, the last problem with behavioral or social control is that it requires threat or punishment. At the macro level, this means the police or military and violence, death, or imprisonment. In a personal relationship, this means that the other person only “loves” or “cares” for you to the extent that there are negative consequences corralling them into behaviors that mascarade as love or care. You must not only struggle with the knowledge that your partner does not really care about you in any tangible way, but you must also expend the energy required to apply consequences to corral your partner into acceptable boundaries for your relationship. Your relationship is dangerously close to being based on nothing but power and coercion.

Open domination, violence, imposed social control. The only difference between this and the above is that people no longer try to pretend they have concern for one another. I want you to serve a function that benefits me, and I do not care if you receive any benefit and I do not care if you know it, as long as I have enough control that you cannot escape or retaliate. An obvious case is slavery. Another is a sweatshop or any employment situation where people do not have the choice to change jobs and still sustain themselves, so management begins to exploit them without concern for their wellbeing. All rules go one direction, if you are late, we dock your pay, if I am late, tough, I’m the boss. You do what I say, you produce what I want and if you don’t like it, go starve. The reason there are dynamics more destructive than this is that at least, the agenda is obvious. The victim of this relationship or system, at least knows the motivation of their abuser. The system is somewhat predictable. The abuser has something they want which allows the victim to be able to predict bad or selfish behavior coming their way.

Open violence for the pleasure of dominating or objectifying the other. This, as well as the last, do not require many examples. They are extreme and obvious and sadly human history has many examples from which we can draw. In the story called “Unbroken” a POW camp commander with strong sociopathic tendencies makes the men’s lives miserable at a level that speaks of a pure desire to inflict suffering that not only does not serve any purpose, but probably makes it more difficult to run the camp. A little more kindness and a little more food would have rendered the prisoners more compliant. In one of the more extreme examples, the guards raped a duck to death because the prisoners had adopted it as a pet. That is open violence for the pleasure of inflicting suffering and pain on others, without any benefit to the abuser. In a one-on-one relationship this requires a sociopath who controls and abuses their partner simply because it feels better to the abuser or is fun.

The last collapse of a reciprocal dynamic involves the elimination of “the other”. Making some living being, some subset of society or some foreign people or culture, an irritating object to be removed. Genocide follows, including abuses and malevolence noted in the above examples or simply a detached, sociopathic elimination of the other group. History gives us, the genocide of the Native Americans who were almost totally wiped out. The holocaust of the Jewish people in World War II. American slavery reflects the imposition of the last 3 dynamics, genocide, inflicting violence for pleasure, inflicting violence to serve a purpose and social coercion to control in a manner that is not reciprocal between the groups.

End Defining Relational Dynamics

What is someone with good intentions supposed to do with all this? Good dynamics always require two people with good intentions as well as some level of awareness and skill. Knowing when a society or individual is unable or unwilling to strive to create healthy dynamics and express healthy boundaries is vital to achieving the first two dynamics. You cannot create those dynamics when working with someone who does not intend the same. Negative dynamics must be identified to eliminate those relationships as much as possible. With definitions we can see where a country, a society, a community, or a relationship is on the spectrum and we are able to predict whether there is any chance of succeeding in building the first two dynamics.

You must watch behaviors and disregard language. Language can be learned and imitated, but over the long term, behavior always falls back to true intentions. This happens all the time in couple’s work. Two people will demonstrate coercive behaviors, malicious behaviors, disrespectful behaviors toward one another while parroting healthy statements, “I want to hear what you have to say.” “At the end of the day, we really love each other”. No, you don’t and unless there is some hidden reserve of kindness, empathy or understanding waiting to be released or learned, your relationship will not survive this state. You are here to get a therapist to sign off on your point of view and convince your partner that they are a bad person, or to convince the therapist to judge or control your partner.

To work toward or maintain either of the first two dynamics requires that we constantly invent and reinvent ways to understand and to respect others. There will be no behavioral code that will work with everyone. We must listen, listen again, reflect our understanding, accept correction, and listen some more. The first dynamic is sadly rare. To be in communion requires a deep, spiritual connection to self, consciousness, and life itself. I’m not convinced that I have this though I seek to find it within myself and to offer it to others. However, it is inspiring that it exists and you can see it in practice. If it exists in practice we can aspire to it. If you want a great example of it, read “The Book of Joy” (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29496453-the-book-of-joy), documenting the deep loving respectful friendship between the late Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. They do not share the same spiritual belief system yet their deep love and respect for one another is not sullied by any differences of which I’m sure they are aware. They were clearly in communion with one another. You might spend the rest of your life, trying to codify rules that make their relationship possible, but any child could watch them together for ten minutes and would understand what they were seeing. This is the beauty of the first two dynamics; they are difficult to define but everyone knows it when they see it.

To share empathy and understanding should be a daily practice that we improve over a lifetime. We can all achieve this at some level and a long-term successful relationship demands it. Anything less and we fail. Sharing empathy and understanding is demonstrated in cases for example where Israelis and Palestinians joined a project to learn one another’s languages to build understanding to better allow them to live in the same neighborhoods. Do they agree on everything? Probably very little. Have they solved the greater conflict? Most assuredly not, yet, empathy and understanding, as demonstrated by the behavior of learning another culture’s language, creates a real, thriving respect and willingness to make space for someone, not like you, even someone who believes things that are offensive to you.

The beauty of these relationship dynamics is that both parties benefit from the spiritual, psychological, and existential benefits that come from offering these gifts, and both parties benefit from receiving the same. These are relationships that compound goodness, health, and well-being – for both parties, for any who observe or participate, for greater human society. Again, read “The Book of Joy” and you will benefit, just from witnessing such love and devotion to a friend and the joy that this devotion brings.

Here is the lesson I seek to impart to my 4-year-old, that will take years, maybe decades – boundaries can be effortlessly invented, moment to moment, in service of a thriving dynamic based on communion or based on empathy and understanding. If you find yourself having to negotiate and renegotiate, explain again and again how someone else hurts you, then you are talking to a four-year-old or someone with the emotional maturity of a four-year-old. If you want rules for how to approach someone you do not understand for any reason; race, religion, personality, political beliefs, codifying rules is a good stop gap but indicates a failure of empathy and understanding. The path to success, to the first 2 dynamics is a slow, patient, humble respectful path of inquiry – What are you experiencing? What does your experience mean to you? Would you mind sharing your meanings, thoughts, experiences with me? I am interested in you, I have nothing to gain but connection. Can you guide me to behaving in a way that you experience as respect, care and interest?

Humility, a willingness to not know, to explore even when we think we know, awe, radical acceptance, relentless exploration of understanding – there is no other way that human society survives intact and healthy.