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In the book “Healing Developmental Trauma” by Dr Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre, from which the following list is adapted, the authors provide an explanation of why us folks with trauma have issues with setting appropriate boundaries...

Our boundaries (personal, physical and energetic spaces) buffer us from outside world and regulate our interface with other people.

An everyday example of "boundary impingement" is someone standing too close, and wanting distance from that person.

Just like skin marks the boundary between the body's inside and outside, our energetic boundaries defines our wider personal space.

Intact and healthy energetic boundaries help us feel safe and set appropriate limits on interactions.

Analogous to a cut in the skin being painful, energetic boundary impingement, penetration or rupture may feel threatening, physically uncomfortable or create mental anguish.

Traumatic events that occur before we can orient to the danger can leave us with internal sense that danger can from anywhere, anytime, making us hypervigilant.

With early development trauma, boundaries never form adequately in the first place or are severely compromised.

With compromised boundaries, we may feel easily overwhelmed, such as feeling flooded by environmental stimuli and human contact, or not knowing the difference between self and other people, or between internal and external experiences.

Individuals with breached boundaries due to trauma distance and isolate themselves from other people, as a protective mechanism.

There is a strong correlation between environmental sensitivities, e.g. to light, sound, electric fields, smells, touch, and ruptured boundaries.

People with compromised energetic boundaries tend to have compromised physical and internal boundaries too, such as leaky gut, food and chemical insensitivity and allergy.

As people heal from trauma and restore healthy boundaries, they report decreases in level of sensitivities, intolerances and allergies too.

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