Boundaries Are the Real Fight for Our Lives by Anastasia Higginbotham
Both of my children, ages 13 and 17, are now getting around and going further from home than they ever have, on their own and with friends. They make decisions about what they see, who they see, and how they spend their time. I have long enjoyed the stretchy, invisible thread that binds us to each other, and find them both to be reliably where they say they are and easy to find when I lose track of them or they forget to be in touch.
I don’t worry much and Prepare has a lot to do with that–my own training (IMPACT Basics 2001) and theirs. The younger one took the Bridge Teens Class, for students in 8th to 10th grade, and the older one joined a class for those closest to life after high school, which could include college, travel or paying rent for the first time, and is sure to involve lots of choices with real life consequences.
Still, I can get swept up like any parent might, imagining the worst-case scenario my kid may face as a full-on violent attack by a stranger at night when they’re “out there” alone. I can also imagine a lure in broad daylight by someone who isolates them for something truly horrible. Depending on how much sleep I’ve gotten, I can mentally go all the way there when I don’t hear back from them. But, within an hour or so, I find out that their phone battery ran out, they were someplace with no service, or they’re really sorry, they just forgot.
Reasonable. Understandable. My worst imaginings? Not so reasonable–or at least, not the most likely challenges they’ll face without me beside them.
In my own life, the encounters that left the most lasting damage have all been with close people whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt – the ones with fragile egos who I protected at my own expense and bullies who claimed to love me yet never hesitated to extract obligation from me and exploit my sense of loyalty, my desire to be kind.
Prepare classes make no space for victim blaming and waste no energy on clever comebacks – we get right to the point.
In the Prepare classes, we address worst-case scenarios by teaching physical counter attacks, and the practice with students is glorious and necessary. Students get to find and feel their body’s own strength, focus, and power. The fights can be hard, satisfying, messy, brief, explosive, and awfully fun. I teach physical resistance because I love to see people access their fighting spirit and release it full blast, breathing, scared, and still coordinated.
Faced with a level 10 threat, where violence is imminent, we show a clear, direct path to cause enough pain – facing front, grabbed from behind, or on the ground – to stop or interrupt an attack, take some action, and get to safety, whatever safety is at that moment for that person.
Boundaries. Where do we begin? Does it ever end?
The answer is “Now” and “Never.”
What the class so realistically and strategically builds to are the more ordinary scenarios that are already a part of every student’s daily life: setting boundaries with people they know.
I remind students that the most essential part of the curriculum is them and what I most want them to study, as we practice and take turns in role-plays, is their own willingness or resistance to fully inhabit a space, a moment of conflict and awkwardness, a relationship where the power is uneven. Is it scarier to strike a stranger who tries to grab you or to set a limit with a coach who’s been an important mentor to you and is now acting out of bounds, abusing your trust, exerting control, and playing you?
So while it thrilled me to hear the THWONK! on the helmet from my older child’s hip-powered heel-palm and belly-deep NO!!, it soothed my senses to witness his self-regard and alignment in a role-play with a friend who justifies making racist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic jokes.
And though my delight overflowed to behold my younger child’s loud and fierce, “STOP! IF ANYONE CAN HEAR ME I NEED HELP!!” followed by a driving forward counter attack with sharpness and vicious determination in every strike, it eased my soul to watch him maintain an emotional boundary in a role-play with a friend who’s using every kind of manipulation and persuasion to try and get him to drop it.
As the class series concluded, both told me that the boundary setting practice was their favorite and, though they didn’t feel super comfortable in the physical fights, they’re glad they got to practice those “worst” case scenarios as well.
No way am I letting myself pass enabling behavior on to my children.
By teaching Prepare classes and enrolling my teenage sons, I’ve interrupted a painful storyline. I’m replacing a generational pattern and habit of submission with a practice of tuning in and getting ready to fight. For what? Nothing less and nothing more than the breath in our bodies, the ways we like to be treated, and all the care and respect that every one of us deserve.