Dr. Nicole Cain teaches the House of Boundaries exercise: draw a house with rooms (front porch, living room, kitchen, bedroom) and place people by how close they are to you. Those in inner rooms give you emotional energy, called spoons. People move between rooms by earning or losing your trust.
Chapters
Consider the following tips. One, create a good exercise called the House of Boundaries on a piece of paper. The House of Boundaries. You wonder. I love this exercise, and we're going to get into it together today. The House of Boundaries is a visual representation of your personal limitations. And so I like to draw the house. You could draw it however you want, but I like to use several rooms. One is the bedroom. And then so that's a bedroom with a bed and a dresser, just so you know. And then we have the kitchen. So that's my kitchen. We have a table. We have counter space. Very nice. And then we have the living area. And so we'll draw a very nice couch here. It's a sectional. And then we have the front door and the porch. Right? Porch, living, kitchen, bed. Okay. As we go deeper into the house, the intimacy becomes greater. So think about the mailman. Mailman comes up to your house. Think about the kind of relationship that you have with your mailman. Maybe this is a little bit different for you because your mailman is your father or your brother, but kind of think of just like someone general soliciting at your front door. These people, they stop at the door. They don't get to come in. They're casual people. They're people that you don't know intimately well. They're people that you don't share intimate secrets with. You wouldn't give them your cell phone password or your bank account information. So this is casual people. And it could be strangers, right? The living room, that represents people that you can hang out with, watch the super bowl with. They're people that you can just have a general kind of a relationship with. Maybe classmates might be living room people, although some classmates may be front porch people. But this is kind of like casual connections that you go out of your way to see. So I would say this is like closer, casual friends, not strangers. Right? And then the kitchen. The kitchen represents people that you're sharing life with. These are people where you sit down over a meal and you talk about things. You talk about what's going on, highlight maybe a couple of difficulties. But you're not getting into the soul. Stuff like you're not getting into your deepest, darkest secrets. These are people that you know much more closely. Maybe like your parents, if you have people that are parents in a good relationship for you. Or it could be siblings. If you're close to your siblings, it could be your best friend. And so I would say these are very close friendships. So we'll say very close. And then the bedroom is the deepest place. And sometimes that place is just for you, or you and a higher power, or you and your partner. But this place is incredibly sacred. And so this place is the place where you get into giving your spoons away and having soul connections, sexual connections, deep connections, intimate connections. This is a very, very sacred, special place. And so I would say with sacred space. And so when we're thinking about the spoons, a way to understand how to give away spoons, how to prioritize spoons, is that people in your bedroom are giving you spoons back. People in the kitchen are going to be giving you spoons back. Living room, maybe not so much. And then front porch, don't expect any spoons from them. And so as you're trying to figure out how to interact with people, start thinking about how. How you want each of your rooms to be. And then start thinking about the people in your life and start to kind of categorize people based on their room. If somebody, for example, is in your kitchen, but then there's a major betrayal. We might need to put them down on the front porch for a little while. People don't get to go from the porch to the bedroom. They have to work their way up by earning your trust and earning that sacredity.
