A horse’s lesson in healthy boundaries, relational safety, and staying yourself in close relationships.

Sit on a horse and you learn something about balance you can never quite unlearn. Balance is not a thing you get… and then keep. It is not a position you find once and settle into. It is a thousand tiny corrections, most of them too small to see, made and unmade and made again, breath by breath, stride by stride. The moment you stop correcting, you start to fall. Good riders do not look busy. They look still. But that stillness is not the absence of effort. It is effort so constant and so refined that it disappears.

I have come to believe that boundaries work the same way.

We talk about boundaries as if they were walls. Build them once, build them high, and you are safe. Keep people out and nothing can hurt you. I understand the appeal. But it has never matched what I actually see, in my clients, in my horses, or in myself.

A wall keeps everything out. That is all it knows how to do. And a person who has built one has not solved the problem of closeness or safety with others in this world. They have only stopped facing it.

A boundary is a different thing altogether. A boundary is not where I keep you out. It is where I end and you begin. It is my sense of myself, held steady, while you are near. And like balance, it is not a position. It is a living act, corrected moment by moment, and hardest to hold with the ones standing closest.

Here is something I have noticed about myself, and maybe you will recognize it. I can keep a clean, easy boundary with a horse that is not mine. All day long. I can be kind and clear and unbothered, ask what needs asking, and never once lose track of where I stop and the horse starts. Put me on my own horse, with my own hopes riding along, and it gets harder. The closer a thing is to my heart, the harder it is to stay myself inside it. My marriage of thirty-eight years is where I have practiced this the most, and still get it wrong the most. My grown sons, the same. The people I love most are the people I am most tempted to disappear into, or to wall off from. Same fear, two costumes.

Because that is the thing about losing your balance. It goes two ways.

Lean too far away and you harden. You become the fortress. Defended, unreachable, safe and alone. That danger is easy to see. We all know the person who has walled themselves off.

Lean too far toward the other and you disappear. You become the doormat, yes, but there is a deeper and truer name for what is happening. It is fusion. You melt into the other person, you become whatever the moment seems to need, until there is no you left in the room. And fusion is the danger we almost never name, because it does not look like a danger at all. It looks like devotion. It looks like love.

But it is every bit as dangerous as the wall, and in some ways worse, precisely because it hides so well. When I dissolve into you, there is no longer a me here to meet you. And two nervous systems with no boundary between them do not calm each other. They catch each other. Your worry becomes mine, mine feeds yours, and around we go, with no steady ground under either of us. I cannot help you find your feet if I have given away my own. The calm you borrow from me only works if I am still standing somewhere you are not. Fusion gives that away. It trades the two of us for one blurred thing that cannot hold anyone.

So both roads fail, and they fail in the same place. The fortress keeps everyone at arm’s length and calls it strength. The fused pour themselves out and call it love. Neither one has done the harder thing, which is to stay a whole, distinct person while letting another all the way in. That is why the person with no boundaries cannot actually afford the closeness they are chasing. Push them away, or vanish into them. Either way, no one is truly met. No one feels safe.

A boundary is what refuses that trade. If I know where I end, I can let you all the way in without fear of losing myself, because I know I will still be here when you go. It is the person with a clear, kind boundary who can afford to be generous. To be soft. To be truly open. I used to assume the most boundaried people would be the coldest. I have found the reverse. The warmest, most compassionate people I know are almost always the most clearly bounded. The fence is what lets them keep the gate open.

A boundary is a balance. It is the quiet, endless, mostly invisible work of staying yourself while staying close. You will lose it and find it, lose it and find it, especially with the ones you love, for as long as you live. That is not failure. That is what balance is.

The goal was never to need less of anyone, nor become one with someone else. The goal is to become someone who is solid and secure enough to be in close relationship with others, both horse and human and in this way build true safety.

~ Paul

PC – Erin Gilmore Photography