Boundary work with clients is key to feeling safe in psychology, and developing healthy client therapist relationships, or any other relationship for that matter. Inside the popular continuing education (CE) course for therapists with Jules Shore titled Experiential Therapy Techniques: A Neurobiological Appraoch to Self-Compassion Therapy, we explore together the many ways we can consider psychological boundaries, their importance to our clients’ lives, and how to help our clients strengthen boundaries in a healthy way.
The following notes were given by Jules as part of her most popular course. We offer them here as a free resource to support your therapy practice. We hope these insights, and other insights offered freely in our library of online articles + resources for therapists, helps you strengthen your therapeutic skill, help more people in the world, and grow your clinical psychology practice.
Enjoy!
Feeling Safe Psychology: Compassionate Empathy
One of the push backs I get from clients around the creation of a psychological boundary is, “But won’t a psychological boundary leave me cold? Won’t a psychological boundary leave me to not care as much as I do, to not feel as connected to other people as I do?”
For a lot of people that I work with, I’ve noticed they imagine having acceptance of space between us equals disconnection. I share with them this research, which is vast and comes from a lot of different spaces. If you’re really interested in an in-depth neuroscience heavy summary of it, I will turn you to Sapolski’s book. His name is Robert Sapolski, and he wrote a book called “Behave”. In that book, he takes a deep dive into some of this. I will offer a summary.
Compassion vs. Empathy, Psychological Boundaries in Therapy
When we’re empathetic with someone, we really feel with them. One of the things that happens when we feel with them and only feel with them, staying in that feeling-with-them space, is that our limbic brain in the subcortical system starts to get a bit hotter. It starts to fire what’s called excitatory neurochemicals, which will make that lower brain move a lot faster and with a more painful and larger sensation awareness.
So when I’m in empathy with someone else, even if they’re feeling joy, I’m going to start feeling joy in my body. That expansion is going to be an excitatory neurochemical dump in my lower brain. That’s great. What the research says is actually that when I’m in a ton of empathy with another person, particularly if they are in pain, the most likely response I have is actually to push them away.
It is surprising, but this is our experience.
How the Limbic System Responds to Empathy with Pain
If I stay in empathy with someone in pain, then my limbic system riles with them. Now my fight or flight might get triggered a little bit or maybe even my social defense system, which is just a little bit less big than our fight or flight.
I’m going to start pushing away because there is a wise recognition that staying in this deep attuned sharing feeling space, it’s creating issues, it’s creating discomfort in my system. I know the source of the discomfort, it’s the other guy.
So if I stay in too much empathy for too long with someone, I’m probably going to push back and maybe move into a space of judgment of them or nervousness about being around them. I might even anticipate being uncomfortable with them. I’m not going to want to share space with them anymore.
Will our psychological boundaries make us cold and rigid?
What if I go too cold? What if I’m lacking empathy? If I don’t let myself feel with them at all, then I have too rigid of a psychological boundary. I’m not taking in their energy and information flow, not even the stuff that is true, or the stuff that’s about me. Then, I will be distanced from them.
The Key to Healthy Psychological Boundaries is Compassion
As far as we know, compassion is the thing that calms down the parts of our brain that process pain, the meaning of pain, and fear. So, if what we want is to help calm down the hurt and calm down the scared feelings, compassion is key.
When we think about compassion, we can think about the larger process where the empathy does come first. We do feel with someone, we begin to enter into that resonance with them and their pain, and then – whoop! – we are going to jump into more of a compassionate space. That compassionate space does have distance.
Compassion is where I can create a space between you and me, see that pain is happening out here in you, and connect to different moments in me where I’ve also had pain. It’s not about leaving people, it’s actually about allowing ourselves to come back together.
Compassion and compassionate action create good psychological distance, healthier boundaries.
What Sapolski does really well in his book “Behave”, is he does a good job of interweaving and synthesizing all of this vast research that leads us to this thinking. The end point is that, people who are compassionate and who follow that compassion with compassionate action have good psychological boundaries. Those who back up their felt sense of being touched by someone else’s pain with actually doing something about someone else’s pain, what they have is a psychological distance between themselves and the other person.
Healthy Compassionate Boundaries = Protected and Connected
If what we want is to act altruistically, having psychological boundaries is essential. It’s what I call protected and connected. I got that language from Terry Real. When he said that, it hit home with me. I remember being in a training when he said, “It’s protected and connected,” and all these different pieces of neuroscience research came into my brain like at the same time – it was this moment of synthesis for my mind. I said, “Oh yeah, because that and that and that.” Which is part of why this course on client boundaries for therapists came into being.
Join Juliane Taylor Shore for a FREE 90-minute webinar
Experiential Therapy Techniques: A Neurobiological Approach to Self-Compassion Therapy
During the webinar, you will learn:
A practice to increase self-compassion towards yourself as you do your work so you can both embody and benefit from self-acceptance.
The neurobiological difference between empathy and compassion so you keep use them judiciously in practice.
How to set up experiential practices so clients can discover and experience self-compassion.
