08 June 2026
Boundary Setting
This year I’ve had a student that we’ll call… Talker. This darling child is a little too much like me, or maybe I’m a little too much like him? Anyway, Talker came to me with warning labels all over him from kindergarten, complicated by a mom who would send her child to school with a shirt saying, “I have a crazy mother and I’m not afraid to use her.” That was just this week! Anyway, I was instructed to keep this kid separated from half the class, but he somehow always managed to find his way back in the mix, stirring up conflict, reacting like a preschooler to imagined offenses, and vomiting anger all over us in the form of arguing, stomping, screaming, and barreling into people while dysregulated.
Well, as I find out, he’s also a high charisma Talker, very charming when in the mood, a high impulsivity Talker, giving us quite a bit of interrupting echo and calling out, and a high emotion Talker, just like me. So we have a relationship that’s very warm and pleasant at times, but during afternoon math class we’re wrestling for power in the room. Behavior charts are the bane of my existence, but I guess they’re better than my instructional time getting wasted on fruitless back and forth? Because the class squirreliness percentage this year feels greater than 50%, when Talker hooks me into an escalating verbal conflict, I lose the attention of my audience, which leads to BAD DATA later. I mean, lost student learning time is a terrible tragedy! I don’t want that for their little brains. Or my data. And I look bad. I hate that, too. I’m trying to impress somebody here!
Anyway, I’ve been working on my part of our relationship, and to his credit, Talker has been maturing appropriately for his age and neurotype, and hasn’t lost the charm all year long. When he is having trouble “attending to self” during class, I’ve tried modeling what we tell the kids to do: “Tell them what you don’t like and what you need... Tell them how it makes you feel... Say the problem.” But despite my best efforts to be a paragon of virtue, the kids do see me get frustrated, and I’ll name that for them, too. And they see me set boundaries, and do repair, and move on, and try again.
Sometimes, to dissipate my frustration, I even say things I would like to do (like take ALL your recess time away, dude!), and then describe why that wouldn’t be right or fair to do, even though I’m frustrated and want to, and then how I think maybe the student could still turn it around, so I won’t do the dire thing, just in case they’re on the verge of change. I’m particularly proud of that one because it’s effectively describing what escalating consequences might happen, and then dispensing imaginary mercy to motivate the change in behavior. Sometimes it works!
This morning Talker got mad in the hallway, about an instruction he didn’t like, and started to charge through the line to get into the classroom. I’m ready for this, standing in the doorway, seeing him getting angry, hearing him yelling, but I’m still relaxed, somehow. We’ve been doing this all year. Onegaishimasu. I meet the charging child, receive and blend, wrap around, turn and walk, drop and release, safely, softly, the whole time. Calm. I met aggressive physical contact without fighting! No anger, no shaking hands afterward, no adrenaline flood in my chest. This is way cooler than I can explain, but that’s Aikido for you. Talker, throwing his papers like confetti by the copy machine, transitioned to the care of a nearby admin, and I led the class inside and felt fine. He came back, eventually, and reconnected, and had time for a little play.
After lunch and recess, we’re reading quietly, paper books first, and after students read aloud with a teacher, reading on a digital library app on their tablets. Talker gets a case of the Big Feels again, for a variety of reasons I don’t need be judgmental about, and is struggling to use technology responsibly, and finally loses access to his tablet. No worries, he’ll be up and about the classroom, in somebody’s business soon enough. Yes, here he comes, to tell me about how someone has hurt his feelings, and I remind him that he can communicate directly about this minor problem with the other student, and he loses his marbles again. He slumps against the wall between my chair and my computer stand, effectively blocking me from what I think is my work, demanding the connection he wants, while I sit, quiet now, without reacting further.
Finally, when he’s starting to emerge from the slump and fidget again, I say, “Why don’t you write it all down? Use the vertical whiteboard. Write everything you feel, tell me just what it’s like to be YOU in school right now. Get it all out. Write it all out instead of saying it.” He did, seriously focused (and QUIET!), and it evolved into spelling practice as I transcribed his phonetic spellings into the words he told me. He wrote all his emotions: mad, sad, angry, annoyed, frustrated, overwhelmed, really embarrassed, delusional (he clarified this meant “spaced out”), super stressed, homesick, and shy. We talked about how different feelings might need different coping strategies, and he started listing those out, too. By the end, we had something to be proud of, that he wanted me to post to the class photo album, and we were reconnected, again.
That’s the good stuff right there. That’s the magic.
I would love to end the story there, because it was a lovely moment, but it had a little echo at the end of the day I can’t ignore. It is, in fact, joint therapy day, and I learned that my ex’s threat to move out July 1st is contingent on me buying out his share of the mortgage on the house, to the tune of one hundred twenty thousand American dollars (ideas???), and I would probably need a roommate to make the monthly expenses work, according the the spreadsheet he thoughtfully prepared. But he really wants to leave now, because my hostility makes him uncomfortable. We could avoid all this, he says, if I were just willing to pay “$17/hour to work out our problems in therapy,” get back together, and then I wouldn’t have to deal with this inconvenient financial burden. I didn’t make puking noises this time! And obviously I’ve always been so damaging to our teenager that they’re ready to move out to the New and Improved Den of Video Gaming and Slovenly Living, too. So he’s not just protecting himself, he’s protecting our child from me, too, me and my demands and my talking. Yes, I’m a monster. Better run. Run up a bill, and leave me with it. How well does this sarcasm cover up my hurt?
We learn about one of Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the (Relationship) Apocalypse, Contempt, and its antidote, Building a Climate of Appreciation. My legal spouse admits that he doesn’t really do “positivity”, details his complicated lifelong relationship with receiving praise, states that I often imagine that he’s contemptuous when he’s not (I’m delusional, I guess, and spaced out, sometimes… but not about his contempt), and that he has to walk on eggshells around me, because of my vitriol, especially in the last three months. Blink blink. He calls me a bully and describes his hurt feelings a while longer. The therapist clears me to respond, and I’m so proud of how slow I said this: “He’s trying to paint himself as a victim, yet he’s the only one who got physically aggressive in our conflicts. He’s the one that trespassed against my boundaries. I’m the one that felt unsafe. I’ve been walking on eggshells for years.”
After the session, I’m down in the kitchen, making unexciting food for dinner, doing my allotted duty, and he starts talking to me. “I don’t think you should be using the therapy time to bring up these past grievances…” Alarm bells start going off mentally. This is an Emotional Conversation happening in the Kitchen of Doom. Nothing good comes of this. I respond, cutting him off, softly, tone even, cooking utensil in hand, and say, “We just came out of the session. I don’t have the capacity to have this conversation while I’m cooking dinner. Do you think you could write down all your thoughts in an email or text?” He’s taken aback, but agrees and scurries downstairs. I don’t see him for the rest of the night.
It’s happening everywhere, the understanding generalized across contexts. I am changing; a part of me is changing. I can do what I couldn’t do before. I can say the problem, say how I feel, and say what I need. I’m learning!