Establishing boundaries with friends

[Trollvaaken]

I have been in an enmeshed relationship with my mother for all my life.

I have realised that because I am bad at setting boundaries, it has affected two of the most important friendships in my life.

One friend with whom I was really close, was invasive for many years. If she disapproved of my behavior I would know, she was controlling too. There was a period in our friendship where I rebelled and fortunately, our friendship has now been redefined and she respects my boundaries (or maybe I just started respecting my own).

I also have this other friend, who for many years was my best friend, but it felt like our friendship was too "fusional", so much in fact, that when I was offered the possibility to move to the same town as her I rejected it. I don't feel like I can disagree with her. I feel like I go through these phases of intense friendship where we share everything and spend all our time together and our identities fuse together and we even start to idealise one another and then, if one wants to change, you feel trapped, almost as though you are betraying your friends.

I know that friendships like all relationships change throughout life, but I definitely recognise a sort of cycle of idealisation and fusing of identities and then feeling trapped which I don't feel with all my friends and I wonder if it is because I didn't set boundaries and the only way I managed to loosen those ties, was by physically moving away.