How Healthy Are Your Boundaries? And why this should be a feature of all hypnotherapy courses.

For any of us who work with clients, we’ll understand the importance of creating and maintaining healthy boundaries. When I first started working with clients, I had little idea of what a healthy boundary was – whether with clients, family or other people. My understanding was so poor that I didn’t even know I struggled with boundaries – it just wasn’t something that entered my mind. Therapeutic boundaries weren’t discussed when I trained as a hypnotherapist and they were glossed over during my life coaching training. It wasn’t until I started my counselling training that I properly came across the term and realised that, for the prior two or three years, I’d had a very poor sense of the separation between myself and my clients, which had led to burnout, confusion, late shows and no-shows and a generally unhealthy experience of client work. If I’d known just how important boundaries were, those first few years would have been so much more rewarding (in every sense!).

For some of us, this is more of a problem than others. I grew up in a codependent relationship with my mother and, as one of five children all competing against each other for attention, I had very little idea of what constituted a healthy boundary. So when I started working with clients, being affected by what they brought to sessions and being entwined into their worlds, it was natural that I’d take what I’d already learned of the world into my work as a therapist.

Boundaries is a conversation that crops up, again and again, in client work, with friends, with students. And what I’ve noticed is that even if you’re well aware of what a healthy boundary is, putting one into place is incredibly hard. It’s as if your whole body’s telling you that saying no, refusing to take certain clients on, charging appropriately or putting your own needs first is the wrong thing to do – even when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Why this should be a feature of all hypnotherapy courses.

Some hypnotherapy courses place an emphasis on learning techniques. We’ve probably all seen the videos (which make me shudder every time) of a student volunteer collapsing into someone’s arms as the result of a rapid physical induction. But these types of course often pay little attention to how to be a good therapist. During your training you should learn how to look after yourself and your clients, and establishing healthy boundaries is a core element of this – one that should be returned to again and again.

What does a healthy boundary look like?

Whether it’s in your client work or your personal life, a healthy boundary looks and feels like a clear separation between yourself and other people. Some of us feel as if we “flow” into others, and they flow into us. We take on their emotions. We place ourselves in vulnerable positions. We allow ourselves to be treated with disrespect and don’t assert our needs. All of this happens because we don’t have a strong sense of where we stop and others start. Having healthy boundaries, then, starts from you defining who you are and where that line of separation is. It can be helpful to spend some time physically feeling what a healthy boundary is like. Close your eyes, imagine a light around your body which signifies where you stop and others start, and notice how your body feels as a result. Perhaps there’s a sense of energy or strength. Breathe into this feeling. This is what it feels like to feel a healthy sense of you.

Healthy boundaries aren’t closed. They allow people in, but in a way that maintains your separate identity and needs. You stay in control. Visually, imagining a house with a path and gate, which you can choose to open or close, can be helpful. Even just thinking about having doors and windows we can choose to lock and open is a useful metaphor. We don’t leave our houses open to anyone coming in or out. We stay in control. And often we put more effort into this than protecting our own emotions and needs.

What implications do unhealthy boundaries have in therapy?

Healthy boundaries are there to keep you and your clients safe. If you fail to protect yourself as a therapist, and maintain a clear boundary between yourself and clients, you’re affecting your professional appearance and experience. Without healthy therapeutic boundaries in place, it’s difficult (or impossible) to respond appropriately to clients when they show up late, or fail to pay for a session. If you’ve somehow slipped into friend or helper, rather than therapist role, the relationship between you and your client has become muddied, which makes it far harder to respond in a clear professional manner. We’re all there to help our clients, but if you take on too much of their energy, problems and life circumstances, without being able to separate yourself from what’s happening for them, you’ll end up emotionally drained and exhausted. And if, like so many of us, you were raised in a family with poor or confused boundaries, you might just find yourself replaying those patterns with your clients. Again and again.

Your clients are in therapy to grow and develop, and part of that work means learning to respect themselves and develop a sense of autonomy. When you allow them to treat you with a lack of respect, to ask for discounts, to act in a way that doesn’t respect your professionalism, you’re enabling them to continue the unhealthy habits of a lifetime and preventing them from gaining what they should be from the therapeutic process. You’re doing your clients a disservice by having poor boundaries. The therapeutic relationship is sacrosanct and it should be clearly defined from other relationships, such as friendships or family relationships. Poor boundaries thr

eaten this relationship at its core and by you “doing your clients a favour” as the result of weak boundaries, you’re effectively denying your clients the opportunity to grow and learn.

 

How do you set healthy boundaries in hypnotherapy?

Start off by being very clear on what a healthy boundary is. If it’s something you haven’t covered during hypnotherapy training, read up about it and spend some time writing down what a healthy boundary means to you. Do some mind body work and connect with what a healthy boundary feels like. And cover this in your own supervision or therapeutic work.

Once you’re clearer about what a healthy boundary looks like, commit to bringing this into your therapeutic work. This isn’t always easy and you might find that, the first time you turn down a client’s request to take them on, or ask for a payment for a session that they’ve missed (and which you’ve planned your day around) you feel an extreme sense of discomfort. You might feel that you’re a bad person, or selfish, or uncaring. None of this could be further from the truth, but if you’ve grown up with a lifetime of messages telling you that you should be available to people at all times, and that their needs are more important than your own, it’s very difficult to learn a new way of being. Take some time to sit with the discomfort. Don’t reply to clients straight away. Meditate on what’s coming up for you and realise that the discomfort is a way of your mind and body telling you that it’s doing something different, which feels uncomfortable, but which is a sign that you’re shifting things in a healthy direction. If you need help in establishing boundaries, discuss this during supervision or therapy.

When you have weak boundaries, things often seem fine. For a while. Until you find yourself in a situation where someone has demanded too much of you, or asked for something which encroaches on your time or space. This is as true in your client work as other areas of your life, which makes it important to establish those healthy boundaries from the first moment you learn how to be a hypnotherapist.