Overly Possessive? Here’s Why...

There is a rubber on my desk at home with my name on it.

It’s not a particularly snazzy pencil eraser - it’s just a bog-standard, white, oblong thing. But the important thing is, it’s MINE. Which is why I wrote on it in biro.

I did this because I have a thing about my items - however low-value or unimportant anyone else may think they are - being used without my permission or supervision. Because when this happens, it mostly leads to that item becoming misplaced, lost, broken or taken advantage of by other members of my family.

Which, to me, is utterly enraging.

So I find myself hyper possessive over a whole range of things: from clothes (that I’ve put away carefully, ordered into sections and folded neatly in symmetrical piles), to ‘special’ items of food (that I have gone out of my way to purchase so that I - alone - might enjoy the pleasure of having enough of them to eat, at my leisure, when and if I choose to), to puzzles, videos, books or music that I have bookmarked to continue listening to or watching at a later date, to anything else that I have ‘organised’ in a way that gives me pleasure to be around - my desk, my filing cabinets, my wardrobes, my bedside table - as well as, to a lesser degree, things that aren’t mine that I’m supposedly in charge of - the dishwasher or sheets and towels, for example - and the way that these are stacked.

And that’s because order feels safe to me - it makes me feel in control of my environment and therefore calm; Whereas disorder makes me feel as though my environment is in control of me, goading me with its mess.

Knowing this about myself and not wishing to feel constantly triggered by my surroundings, I therefore find myself constantly ordering communal spaces (the living room, kitchen, my bedroom), naming things (my rubber) or hiding things (‘special’ treats) in an attempt to put off anyone else that might be tempted to disorder, touch, use or move them.

This never works of course.

I’m regularly re-arranging cushions, re-straightening tables, searching, once more, for my misplaced items around the house, or discovering half-eaten packs of treats I had hidden for myself.

This still provokes a disproportionate reaction.

But - now - I am better able to process the anger myself, without projecting it onto others, because I understand where the root cause of this trigger lies and what I need to do in order to manage it. And that’s a past lack of boundaries.

As a child, living at home, I was brought up by authoritarian parents who didn’t sufficiently respect my physical boundaries, opinions or emotional needs, and instead, felt entitled to impose theirs, without consent or collaboration.

Later, as a tween and teen school boarder, I was brought up by authoritarian house mistresses who had neither the time, bandwidth nor training to make space for individual boundaries within the confines of institutional living.

As a result, I know that my need to organise, put aside, hoard or control comes from an inner child who spent most of her life struggling to create space for herself and her stuff within both a family and then community of others that didn’t encourage individuation or the boundaries that result from that.

At the time, she wasn’t aware that she had boundaries, that she was entitled to them, or that these were crossed, so there was no barrier between her and the world.

Which is why objects that my inner child now ‘chooses’ or singles out as special, and ways of living that feel safe (organised, neat and tidy), have become boundary replacements - symbols for the way she wants things, because little me is demanding her rightful place in the world - she feels she is important and worthy of putting her stamp on it.

What then happens when others change this in some way (in the present), therefore takes little me back to how it felt to have more significant boundaries crossed in my past. And so my reactions stem from THAT age.

But not any more.

Now, when I recognise the trigger, I can appropriate it to little me and to the pain of her past.

I can get my inner parent to validate her feelings as normal and acceptable - to tell me that they make total sense given my life experience - and I can then soothe this part of me by getting my inner parent to remind her that, unlike the past, she is no longer alone, that my inner parent is with her, feeling these big feelings with her, and that she is loved and safe (even though it might feel like she isn’t).

THIS is how we create the ability to attach securely, despite the attachment trauma we may have lived through as children and adolescents - by experiencing how it feels to be co-regulated by our inner parent, in a way we should have learnt as a child with our real-life parents.

It doesn’t magic back my misplaced rubbers or half-eaten treats. But it does mean that I’m better able to respect the boundaries of my own children.

Because, through inner parenting, I have re-established the sanctity of my own…