Learning to set Boundaries

Last time I spoke about internal strength and how to build it. Boundaries are intimately connected to this.  Boundaries……….we all know the word but few understand how much this impacts us when they are either fluid or non-existing. Setting boundaries are a way in which you take care of and protect yourself. We need to be able to tell people when they are acting in ways that are not acceptable to us. We have a right to but also the duty to take responsibility for how we allow others to treat us. Understanding what feels right and what feels wrong and be able to articulate the feelings in connection to this is much more difficult than allowing others to cross our boundaries get upset about it but never saying anything. Why? Well for the simple reason that we are repeating patterns. And if there were fluid or no boundaries in our homes well then how are we supposed to know?  We may not know but we can learn.

We all have a right to our feelings and to state them out loud and say, “I feel” is the most powerful communication. However, very often we sabotage ourselves by saying “I am angry, I am hurt, etc” and this way we become the feeling. Quite the reverse happens when we use “I feel”. Then, we are affirming to ourselves that we have a right to our feelings and we take responsibility for owning both our reality and ourselves.

Learning to set boundaries is to love ourselves and be a friend to ourselves. It is our responsibility to take care of ourselves – to protect ourselves when it is needed. We are co-creators of our own lives. It’s vital for us to have a loving relationship with ourselves and when we do, everything changes. As we start naturally and normally to set boundaries with others; speak our truth; own our right to be alive and to be treated with respect and dignity.

To learn how to set boundaries and assert ourselves, without changing the core relationship with ourselves, will ultimately not work in the relationships we care the most about.  It is relatively easy to begin to set boundaries in relationships that don’t mean much to us – it is in the relationships that mean the most to us that it is so very difficult. That is because, it is in those relationships – family, romantic, etc that our inner child wounds are the most powerful. The little child within us does not feel worthy, instead feels defective and shameful, and is terrified of setting boundaries for the fear that everyone will leave.  The other extreme of this is those of us who throw up enormous walls to try to keep from getting too close – and sabotage any relationships that start getting too intimate – to try to protect the wounded child from being hurt yet again. 

With boundaries, as in every area of the healing process, change begins with awareness. I had to hear about boundaries, learn the concept before I could realize, that I didn’t have any.  I had to start getting some gleam of an idea of what boundaries are, and how to set them, in order to understand how hard they were for me – and how absolutely vital they are to learning to love myself.  They say in the airplane that we have to put the oxygen mask on ourselves before we put it on our children…………..the same is true for us as parents, partners or friends. We need to take care of ourselves before we can care for others.

To have healthy boundaries teach us to be discerning in our choices, to ask for what we need, and to be assertive and Loving in meeting our own needs. However, many of us have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for us to have needs.

We need to start becoming aware of what healthy behavior and acceptable interaction dynamics look like before we can start practicing them ourselves – and then demanding proper treatment from others. We need to start learning how to be emotionally honest with ourselves, how to start owning our feelings, and how to communicate in a direct and honest manner.  Setting personal boundaries is a vital part of healthy relationships – which are not possible without communication. 

The first thing we need to learn is to communicate without blaming. That means, stop saying things such as: you make me so angry; you hurt me; you make me crazy; how could you do this to me after all I have done for you; etc. These types of messages many of us got during childhood and they have distorted our perspective on our own emotional process.

I grew up believing I had the power to make my parents angry. I thought I was supposed to be perfect, and that if I was not, I was causing the people I loved great pain. I grew up believing that something was wrong with me because I was human. I grew up believing that I had the power over other people’s feelings – and they had power over mine. In my codependence I learned to be enmeshed with other people – not to have healthy boundaries that told me who “I” was, and that I was a separate person from them.  I had to become hyper vigilant in childhood.  I learned to focus on trying to interpret what my parents and other authority figures were feeling in order to try to protect myself.  As an adult, I unconsciously tried to manipulate people – by trying to be what they wanted me to be if I wanted them to like me, or trying to be either intimidating or invisible if that seemed the safest course. I had no real sense of being responsible for my own feelings because I had learned that other people were responsible for my feelings – and vice versa.  I now had to start to define myself emotionally as separate from other people in order to start learning who I was.

I was not able to see myself as separate in a healthy way because I had always felt that I was separate in an unhealthy way – shameful and unworthy until I began to finally see that I had been powerless over the behavior patterns I had learned in my childhood.  Since my behavior patterns and my behavioral and emotional defense systems, had developed in reaction to the feeling that there was something wrong with me. I now had to learn to start taking power away from the toxic shame that is the core of this illness. Toxic shame involves thinking that there is something wrong with whom we are. GUILT – involves behavior, while SHAME is about our being. Guilt is: I did something wrong; I made a mistake. Shame is: I am a mistake; something is wrong with me.

But that shame is toxic and not ours – it never was.  We did absolutely nothing to be ashamed of – we were just little kids. Just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, and their parents before them, etc., etc. This is shame about being human, which has been passed down from generation to generation. Let’s break the generational pattern!

No need for blame here, there are NO bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts. Begin loving yourself today!

Have a beautiful Sunday.

Love Christina