Why we collectively have issues with boundaries and consent
On infantilisation, the origin of consent (and consent breaches), and why Saturn and Neptune in Aries are forcing a reckoning we've been avoiding since birth
The first few years of human life is a time period in which which we have no vote.
We do not choose the body we are born into, the household that receives us, the temperament of the hands that hold us, or the emotional state of the room we are born into. We do not choose to be fed on schedule or on demand, swaddled or left loose, soothed or left to cry it out. We do not choose our name. We do not choose whether we are wanted.
(well, on some level, we do not choose this — but from the doctrine by which I live by, I believe the Soul does consent to this choice).
This is infancy: total dependency, zero authorship. And it is here — before memory, before language, before anything we would recognise as a “self” capable of saying yes or no — that the entire way we realte to boundaries and consent is laid down.
I don’t think we fully acknowledge or reckon with what that means.
The Complex Before the Self
Jung gave us the language for this, even if he wasn't writing about consent directly. A complex, in the Jungian sense, is not a memory — it is an emotionally charged cluster that organises itself before the ego has enough coherence to observe what is happening to it. It doesn't get filed as an event. It gets absorbed as architecture. It becomes the lens rather than the thing seen through the lens.
What happens to us in the first years of life is not stored as “something happened.” It is stored as how things are. Not a wound we can point to, but a floor we didn’t know we were standing on — the baseline sensation of what it feels like to have a body in the presence of other people’s will.
So when a boundary gets crossed at thirty-four — a partner who reads silence as yes, a mother who still walks into your room without knocking, a boss who assumes your evenings belong to the company — the charge is rarely proportional to the event. That’s because you are not only responding to the adult in front of you. You are re-meeting the original arrangement: the one in which you had no vote, and no one thought to ask if you’d like one.
This is why boundary work so often feels less like assertion and more like excavation. We are not learning something new. We are trying to remember that a “no” was ever structurally possible.
Civilisation's Oldest Transaction
Marcuse called it surplus repression — the extra measure of instinctual renunciation demanded not by survival itself, but by the particular social order we happen to be born into. Some restraint on the pleasure principle is unavoidable; reality requires it. But surplus repression is the excess — the shaping of desire, spontaneity, and bodily autonomy specifically to produce a compliant, productive, governable subject.
If you desire to read the full article and to understand how the Astrology of now — particularly the transits of Saturn and Neptune in Aries — are orchestrating us to take a good hard look at this particular theme in our lives, please become a paid subscriber to unlock my paid writing content.
