Where do I end, and where do you begin?

Recalibrating the somatic experience of boundaries in personal and collective space.

Jun 16, 2025

The sense of personal boundaries is grounded in somatic experience. While often interpreted as a psychological construct, it is fundamentally an embodied awareness: a felt sense, a gesture, a tone, a presence. Boundaries are formed where the body senses and responds in the expansion or contraction of the diaphragm, the lifting or softening of the shoulders, the tightening or release of the voice. The boundary breathes through the body. When the body is fully present, the boundary is present too. As somatic presence fades, the felt sense of boundaries begins to disintegrate.

The self-space functions not as an abstract idea about who we are, but as a somatically organized perceptual field: a living terrain in which we experience our presence, sense our place, and distinguish our rhythm from that of others. This field remains in continuous transformation, shaped by the current state of the body, the capacity of the nervous system, and our ability to remain internally held while navigating relational dynamics.

A somatic boundary arises as a perceptual turning point. It takes shape in the moment when the body can sense both itself and the other - when there is a simultaneous recognition of I am here and this is not me. This dual awareness of presence and differentiation enables a real boundary experience. It stems not from conscious control, but from neurophysiological processes - a felt sense rooted in the body’s inner states. Its foundation lies in interoception, the capacity to perceive internal somatic signals (Craig, 2002; Damasio, 1999).

When our connection to the body becomes disrupted, the clarity of the self-space begins to fade. This erosion often goes unnoticed, as familiar absences rarely register as something missing. Still, the body signals. A collapsed posture, tension caught in the throat, a retreating gesture. Each is a subtle echo of impaired relational orientation. This orientation depends less on cognitive insight than on affective and neurological sensitivity: the ability to sense where we are in relation to ourselves, what we experience in connection with others, and when the body begins to register a rhythm diverging from our conscious intention.

The relational orientation field offers more than the possibility of self-expression. It includes the ability to sense when we’ve moved too close to something that does not hold us, or drifted from something we remain deeply connected to. In such moments, it is not the boundary that disappears, but the neuro-affective support that becomes insufficient to sustain it.

In this essay, I aim to map the somatic, neurophysiological, and social organization of relational boundaries. Boundary experience involves more than individual psychology. It is a historically embedded, felt pattern, shaped by survival strategies, cultural norms, internalized oppression, and the body’s capacity to regulate presence in relationship.

This text does not propose fixed rules, but opens sensory horizons. It offers ways of perceiving and attuning to boundaries not as defenses, but as refined ethical responsiveness - a bodily way of engaging in the world.

The Somatic Reality of Boundaries

The body expresses boundaries in every gesture, breath, and micro-adjustment. With each shift in posture or change in muscle tone, we communicate not only that we are present, but how we are present. The body becomes the first space in which the perception I am here gains substance. As somatic presence fades, the boundaries fade with it. We begin to disconnect from ourselves—often silently, subtly, and without conscious awareness.

The self takes shape as a dynamic, bodily process, continuously adjusting to internal states, sensory input, and relational context. I become someone through the body. When this connection falters, the sense of self begins to fragment. I may lose touch with what I want, how I feel, or where I stand in relationship. Contemporary neuroscience and phenomenology describe the self not as a disembodied construct, but as a lived, embodied state, shaped by affective tone and the regulation of the nervous system (Damasio, 1999; Fuchs, 2018; Siegel, 2020).

This embodied self develops through relationship. Early interactions determine whether we feel entitled to exist, to take up space, and to access internal signals (Schore, 2003). When the relational field provides either excessive intrusion or chronic neglect, the formation of boundaries becomes unstable. The self-space then remains underdeveloped: a field of blurred or rigid contours that restricts more than it contains.

Boundaries emerge through the felt coherence of the nervous system. They require interoception and proprioception—the ability to perceive internal physiological signals and spatial orientation. These capacities form the sensorimotor foundation of self-perception (Craig, 2002; Mehling et al., 2012). A tightening in the chest, a shift in breath, a muted voice—these are not neutral events, but somatic imprints of how the self-space is functioning.

As the body regains presence, the self reorganizes. This presence does not fix itself in static form, but continually recalibrates to internal rhythms and shifting external contexts (Fuchs, 2018). When I feel this process somatically, I do not simply know who I am—I sense it. I move from reactivity to participation: engaging with the world through my own rhythm, my own boundary, and my own voice.

The body carries identity not as a passive container, but as its perceptible terrain. This is the space where the self begins to take form, and where the boundary becomes a lived experience of where I end and the other begins.

Boundary perception and the embodied self

The body expresses the boundary through every movement, shift in muscle tone, and change in breath. With each adjustment, we communicate whether we are present, and how we are present. The body becomes the first space where the perception I am here gains shape. As embodied presence fades, the sense of boundary weakens. Disconnection from the self often unfolds silently, unnoticed.

The self arises as a dynamic, bodily process, constantly adjusting to internal states, sensory input, and relational context. I become someone through the body, and when this connection frays, the sense of self begins to fragment. I may lose clarity about who I am, what I need, or how I inhabit relationships. Neuroscience and phenomenology describe the self as a lived, affective, and regulated presence, rooted in the nervous system and shaped by embodied experience (Damasio, 1999; Fuchs, 2018; Siegel, 2020).

This embodied self takes form within relationship. Early interactions determine whether I feel entitled to exist, to occupy space, and to access my inner states (Schore, 2003). When the relational field is misattuned - marked by over-involvement or absence - the self-boundary forms inconsistently. What emerges is often a distorted sense of self: a field of either fluctuating or rigid contours that limit rather than support expression.

Boundaries arise through the felt coherence of the nervous system. They rely on interoception and proprioception - the abilities to perceive internal signals and spatial orientation. Together, these form the sensorimotor foundation of self-perception (Craig, 2002; Mehling et al., 2012). A held breath, a tight chest, a muted voice, these are not neutral occurrences. These mark how the self is organizing, how it orients and protects itself.

As the body regains presence, the self begins to reorganize. Presence does not settle into stillness. It recalibrates in response to inner rhythms and changing relational fields (Fuchs, 2018). When I feel this reorganization somatically, I move beyond cognitive clarity into embodied knowing. I sense who I am. I do not simply react, I engage, with rhythm, boundary, and voice.

The body carries identity as a perceptible terrain. This is the space where the self takes form, and where the boundary becomes a lived experience of where I end and the other begins.

The boundary as historical imprint

The experience of boundaries develops through adaptive bodily responses to early relational environments. Rather than reflecting innate traits or personality, it emerges from the body’s ongoing attempts to remain connected while navigating risk and vulnerability. The body does more than record the past. It replays it rhythmically, through tone, posture, breath, and presence. The availability and attunement of early caregivers shape our capacity to sense boundaries and determine whether the experience of saying no became possible without threat or consequence.

In childhood, boundary expressions - refusals, differences, or autonomous gestures - often came at a cost. Saying no could endanger connection, evoke shame, or result in emotional withdrawal. These costs were not only felt but stored in the body. The nervous system learned that maintaining attachment took precedence over self-perception. This created a form of embodied knowledge, a physiological imprint that still governs how the body reacts when boundaries are expressed, even in adult relationships and new conditions.

Children who met punishment, exclusion, or relational loss in response to autonomy learned at a somatic level that self-assertion was unsafe. The nervous system adapted accordingly: muscles braced or collapsed, breath shortened, and the quality of presence tilted toward hypervigilance or numbness. Boundaries no longer arose from internal sensing, but from survival logic.

Relational boundary styles reflect these adaptive somatic patterns. They are not diagnostic labels, but rhythmic schemas that express embodied histories. Four primary patterns help describe the sensory organization of these responses:

Underbounded: A soft, open body with low muscle tone and shallow breathing. Presence remains vague, and the nervous system remains overly porous. Saying no carries a sense of danger. The body leans toward accommodating others, often at the cost of self-contact.

Overbounded: A body held in rigid posture, marked by closed gestures and internal contraction. Breath is inhibited, muscles are tight. Closeness feels threatening, while protection relies on withdrawal. Saying no becomes a defensive necessity, while saying yes may evoke dread.

Pendulum: A fluctuating pattern of tone, presence, and breath. The nervous system swings between opening and retreat. Both intimacy and distance feel unstable, and boundaries fail to consolidate into coherent expressions.

Incomplete: A fragmented and context-bound presence. The self appears and disappears depending on external expectations, unresolved loyalties, or internalized authority. Boundaries are not perceived somatically, but organized through adaptive compliance.

These patterns represent the body’s wisdom in disorganized or controlling relational fields. Rather than pathologies, they are protective intelligences of the nervous system. And the body, through its neuroplasticity, remains capable of transformation. With adequate safety and somatic support, new boundary experiences can emerge, ones that link protection with connection.

The boundary carries a historical rhythm: a lived trace of our relational past. This rhythm cannot simply be understood, it must be felt anew. We may ask: How does my body still carry past relational fields? What learned movements shape how I show up now? And what kind of relational atmosphere allows for reorganization?

The social and ideological imprint of boundaries

Boundary experience is never purely individual. Its somatic structure, perceptual texture, and internal rhythm unfold within historically embedded systems of power, normativity, and identity. The capacity to sense, regulate, or express boundaries is not only relational or affective, it is also a socially structured field, where the body becomes a direct site of ideological inscription.

Michel Foucault’s work reveals that power functions not only through external discipline but through internalized regulation. The body is trained to move in acceptable ways, to control its impulses, and to conform to invisible boundaries. What seems like personal restraint often reflects deeply learned somatic compliance. A disciplined body does not push back: it adjusts, anticipates, and silently adapts to expectations that were never consciously chosen (Foucault, 1977).

Pierre Bourdieu adds that doxa - the unspoken assumptions of the social world - operates through the body itself. Social order is not simply obeyed, but embodied in posture, tone, and gesture. Whether I speak up or remain silent, whether I take space or yield it, these actions mirror learned structures of class, gender, and belonging (Bourdieu, 1990). The body carries not only a personal narrative, but a social location, one that shapes how boundaries are sensed and expressed.

In this light, boundaries reflect not just internal states, but ideological permissions. They delineate who is authorized to perceive, to express, to resist, and to what extent. The edge of the self often mirrors the edge of systemic entitlement. Marginalized bodies - women, racialized minorities, the economically oppressed, those with complex trauma - frequently inhabit boundary fields narrowed by cultural devaluation. Their felt sense of space becomes filtered through what is socially allowed to be felt.

Somatic compliance does not always appear as visible submission. It often takes the form of internal walls (patterns of numbness, affective withdrawal, or muscular inhibition). These are not simply defensive reactions, but physiological reproductions of structural violence. The body learns that full presence is risky. It retracts, compresses, or fades, not to betray the self, but to survive within systems that do not hold it.

Where perception disappears, we find not only trauma, but ideological erasure. The loss of affective attunement - disconnection from heartbeat, breath, or tension - signals a learned adaptation: the body internalizes what can be sensed, and what must remain hidden. Boundaries, in this state, do not emerge from embodied presence. They follow external scripts: what is acceptable to feel, to ask, to protect, to refuse.

Reclaiming boundary perception, therefore, is a social and ethical gesture. It is not only a psychological restoration, but a reorientation of presence within collective space. Each breath that reconnects the self to sensation, each gesture that reclaims internal rhythm, contributes to a new relational culture, one in which perception is not policed, but upheld as a form of truth and integrity.

Restoring the felt sense of boundaries

The disintegration of boundary perception reflects not personal weakness but a somatic–neurological survival response. In states of overstimulation, freezing, or relational fusion, the contours of the self become blurred. The body no longer turns inward, but outward, toward the other’s tone, gaze, and expectation while its own internal rhythm drifts outside the field of awareness. These states - fusion, overwhelm, detachment, or immobilization - signal nervous system conditions in which the experience of boundary collapses.

Restoration begins when the body becomes perceptible to itself again. This transformation does not arise from instruction, but from micro-perceptions that redraw the inner map of self. A breath that completes its arc, a hand that retracts gently, an internal space that becomes inhabitable again. These are somatic learning points. They offer real-time feedback: I am here, I can feel this, even when another is near. When this perceptual clarity stabilizes in the presence of others, the body begins to connect without merging, and a new boundary rhythm begins to emerge.

This is not an isolated practice of regulation, but a form of relational learning. Boundary perception refines itself in safe relational fields: environments that are attuned, patient, and honor the body’s timing. Co-regulated closeness, shared presence, and affective safety allow the self-space to become felt. Not as a mental construct, but as a sensory truth. In this unfolding, functional resistance becomes essential: the capacity to say no, feel no, and hold that no within the nervous system. Rather than an inherited trait, this is a learnable somatic skill, that consolidates only when resistance no longer signals danger or loss, but anchored presence and contained connection.

In self-knowledge groups, this process manifests in countless unique forms. One person might reclaim their space only after physically outlining it - using a rope on the floor -before they could anchor it in imagination. Another reentered their self-space by tracking sensations in the abdomen: a field of strength that countered their habitual collapse. A third experienced the shift as emotional expansion. A boundary traced from the inside out, revealing how often their presence had been given away. These are not symbolic acts. They are somatic reorganizations in which the body, regaining rhythm, enters a new relationship with itself and with others.

A restored boundary is not a static state, but a deepening capacity. The body relearns how to be present, not by defending, but by holding itself from within. A boundary is not a wall, but a liminal space: a field in which I feel what happens to me while remaining in contact. This capacity is a rhythmic recalibration shaped through gestures, breath, and responsiveness. And each time it refines itself, I do not simply recognize where I am, but I inhabit that place more fully.

Boundaries as ethical and relational space

A personal boundary functions not only as a psychological or physiological pattern, but also as an ethical and social field: the zone where we somatically sense what feels acceptable and what violates our internal integrity. In this sense, a boundary is not a wall but a terrain of responsibility. It marks the space where I recognize: this is as far as I go, this is how I stay, this is the depth at which I remain in contact. It is not simply a reaction, but a stance held through embodied presence.

Autonomy, in this context, departs from the classical notion of Western individualism. Rather than withdrawing from relational obligations, it expresses a moral presence that emerges from perception and unfolds within connection. An autonomous body stays present without fusing, relates without submission, and resists without rupture. This is the state in which somatic self-regulation and moral responsiveness converge (Kimmerle & Kress, 2021; Fuchs, 2018).

The body is not only the bearer of values, but also the site of decision. Ethical action emerges not through cognitive compliance with rules, but through somatic discernment of what feels true in context. As a subjective, sensing field, the body hosts real-time moral orientations - gestures, impulses, stillness, approach - forming what phenomenology names embodied ethics or responsibility-in-the-body (Sheets-Johnstone, 2015; Todres, 2007).

Reclaiming boundaries is therefore not a private internal project. It is a communal practice that reorganizes relational spaces through felt presence and mutual attunement. The micro-boundaries I notice, maintain, and express form the infrastructure of shared responsibility. A culture that senses and honors boundaries is not founded on force, but on perceptive care.

In this view, the boundary becomes a political space. Not in the narrow sense of ideology, but in the ancient root of polis: the shared space of life. The body, as a sensing agent, takes part in shaping what becomes socially valid, relationally possible, and ethically just. This is the foundation of embodied activism as well: the body as subject, not object, of politics (Johnson, 2017).

A boundary, then, is not a dividing line but a position in the world. It does not close, it orients. It does not prohibit, it signals direction. When it arises from somatic clarity, it redefines boundaries as relational justice in motion, not as private defense.

The boundary experience as somatic knowledge

A boundary forms not through theory or behavioral instruction, but through a felt somatic competence: a capacity emerging from the nervous system’s fine-tuning, affective sensitivity, and relational rhythms. The boundary experience is the embodied sense of how long I can remain present while sustaining my physical and emotional contours. This quality unfolds not through willpower, but through attunement a somatic state anchored in the return to presence.

Somatic awareness is the field where this return becomes possible. Its function is not disconnection, but the perception and integration of internal experience. In this form of presence, the priority is not flawless performance, but the ability to sense when I have lost rhythm, and to find my way back.

The boundary style that arises from this knowledge is not an ideal to be achieved, but a dynamic capacity to relate from embodied presence. It is a somatic intelligence that adapts, learns, and orients not through control, but through internal coherence. This is what allows the body to become inhabited, rather than performed.

A boundary is both a solitary and relational phenomenon. It is the moment when inner clarity crystallizes: “Here I am. This is who I am. This is the space I am available to hold.” What carries this statement is not belief, but perception a somatic truth expressed through movement, breath, and rhythm.

This quality of embodied boundary awareness restructures not only relationships, but our orientation in the world. It opens a mode of being grounded in lived perception, rather than external command. A compass of sensation that guides us again and again to sustainable presence. To the place where a boundary becomes not a battlefield, but a space of perceptibility.

Reflective Practice – Sensing Your Boundaries

1. When do you feel that someone is too close?
▸ Where and how does your body signal this?
☐ Observe which part of your body becomes activated, tightens, or pulls back when someone enters your space.

2. Is there a situation where it is difficult to say no, even when your body protests?
▸ What are the physical signs you notice beforehand?
☐ Track sensations like held breath, stomach tension, or subtle turning away. These may indicate the beginning of a boundary.

3. What happens when someone watches you for too long?
▸ Do you shrink, freeze, or mentally check out?
☐ These reactions may signal where you need more inner space or self-holding.

4. Can you recall a moment when a simple gesture helped you stay connected to yourself in a relationship?
▸ A step back, a soft exhale, a shift in eye contact?
☐ What somatic sensation is linked to this moment?
☐ Can you access or recreate that sensation now?

5. When you imagine your personal space, what comes to mind?
▸ Do you perceive a shape, color, boundary, or texture?
☐ Visual imagery can help you enter the sensory layer of boundary awareness.

6. What happens in your body when others move closer, and when they move away?
▸ How do your breath, posture, or sense of presence shift?
☐ Track the nervous system’s response to distance and proximity.

7. How does your body respond when you are not the one setting the rhythm of connection?
▸ Do you begin to adapt, lose contact with yourself, or shut down?
☐ These shifts can reveal how you seek safety when you’re not in charge of the relational pace.

8. Where in your body do you sense a point of strength or anchoring?
▸ Your abdomen, spine, chest, or feet?
☐ Explore which area helps you remain grounded in your own rhythm.

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