HEALTH by DR. LINDA MOORE
Boundaries are Essential for Healthy Relationships – So Pick Up Your Socks. Pick up your socks is a metaphor for reflection on the “ingredients” for healthy relationships and an example of necessary boundaries. I learned the significance of such a specific example of boundary challenges from a client. Here’s a woman’s sock story. I’ll call her Helen. She came to therapy anxious and angry with her husband because he refused to pick up his dirty socks and underwear. Obviously there was far more to the story. Regardless of her requests and frequent complaints, he simply discarded worn items in both the bedroom and master bath. After asking multiple times for a change in his behavior, she was now so angry she could hardly talk to him. However she was still picking up the dirty clothes and washing them. My suggestions for constructive ways to talk to him failed to be useful. She was not talking, and she refused to consider asking him to join her in my office to see if we could get to the bottom of what was really going on. Consequently, we needed some form of an action plan. She agreed to the following: She made a final statement: “If you will put your dirty clothes in the laundry, I’ll wash them. Otherwise I’m not doing your laundry any more.”
SPRING 2020 | TODAY KANSAS CITY | 73
