Shark Cage: Identifying and Protecting yourself from unsafe relationships

Have you ever wondered why you keep getting into unsafe relationships? There is nothing wrong with you and of course you are not going around asking to be mistreated.

Imagine that the world is an ocean. It has lots of beautiful, harmless fishes, but there are sharks too! These are dangerous and we need to be careful. In order to protect yourself, you need to have your own strong Shark Cage. Once the bars are in place, sharks will bang against them and find it difficult to come up and bite you.

Where do we get our Shark Cage from?
Shark Cages do not come automatically and people are not born with one. It is usually the people around us when we are little that helps us build a Shark Cage. Our caregivers and other people whom we meet affects what kind of Cage we are building. Each bar represents a boundary, or a basic human right. For example, we may have been taught that it is not okay to throw things at someone, that becomes one of the bars in our Cage.

Sadly, not all of us are fortunate enough to have the experiences we need growing up to help us build a good enough Shark Cage. For instance, some of us may have someone mistreating us in our childhood. Trying to build a Cage when it has already become normal to have sharks biting us can be really difficult.

IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO BUILD A GOOD SHARK CAGE!
Building a Shark Cage
It important to know how to build a good cage and what bars to put in. Each bar represents an important boundary for physical, emotional, and sexual safety. Some of this may be about personal space, physical touch, not being critical, limiting what to share, having a safe space to share our emotions, respecting time, thoughts, feelings, use of money and other possessions.

• Building a Shark Cage is a work in progress and needs constant maintenance. Having a good Shark Cage means having healthy boundaries such as
• Valuing own opinions
• Knows personal wants and values and communicates them
• Doesn’t compromise values for others
• Sharing personal information in an appropriate way (not over or under sharing)
• Accepting when others say “no”
• Learning to say “no” if necessary
• Having the right not be mistreated
• Sharing feelings without being criticised and not to be isolated from others

The essence is that healthy relationships are based on MUTUAL RESPECT.

Benstead. U. (2011). ‘The Shark Cage’: the use of metaphor
with women who have experienced abuse. Psychotherapy in Australia, 17(2), 70-76.

Therapist Aid LLC. (2016). What are personal boundaries?
Types of boundaries [Worksheet]. Therapist Aid.
https://www.therapistaid.com/worksheets/boundaries-psychoeducation-printout.pdf.