Where do you draw the line?

Hello, my friends it's actually turned into a pretty beautiful day here in Canterbury, I'm looking out my office window and the sky is blue with a few scattered clouds but honestly up until about half an hour ago it was grey, and it was cold, so that's how quickly things change.

This month’s theme is all about boundaries, we are going to dive into all aspects, so personal boundaries, relationship boundaries, physical, mental, and emotional boundaries. 

Our boundaries change and vary dependent on context, people, sometimes mood, environment etc. We all have boundaries but a lot of us don’t hold to them or stand up for them, we let other people walk over them and sometimes even break them ourselves without the other person even asking us to. Then we feel taken advantage of, abused, or used.

Those of us who have been taught to people please were never taught or allowed to have personal and/or relationship boundaries, why? Because boundaries encourage and support us to say ”no”, they give us agency and allow us to be authentic.

Boundaries are guidelines we have for how we treat ourselves and others and how we are willing to be treated. They are yours to choose and to change. They reflect our values & value, our self-respect and self-worth. When we stand up for them, we usually feel decisive, calm, and determined.

The purpose of a boundary is to protect ourselves; it is not to change other people’s behaviour; this difference is really important.

As an example, a boundary is saying “I will leave the room if you continue swearing at me” so the action being taken or change being made is yours to take and for your protection, as opposed to saying, “If you continue to swear at me you can sleep on the couch”, which requires change or action from the other person and is intended to punish, when we do this we usually feel, hurt, angry or self-righteous. (This is a manual or rule we have for another person, and I promise we will look at “manuals” in a separate blog at some point).

Women are socialised from a very young age to respect other people’s boundaries but not have any for themselves. If you know that you have a tendency to “people please” then this is definitely an area worth taking the time to explore and to consider the areas in your life where you can begin implementing and trialling boundaries.

As is usually the case, our relationship with others is often a reflection of the relationship we have with ourself, so when we are brave enough to begin to see where we lack boundaries and where we allow other people to treat us as “less than” or take advantage of us, it will inevitably allow us to see the way we internally treat ourselves. The lack of internal boundaries.

When I first began working on boundaries to help me break my own people pleasing beliefs and behaviours, I started by setting a boundary within the relationship I had with myself. I decided that I would no longer talk to myself in a derogatory or insulting way.  Anytime I would become aware that my brain was offering this kind of self-talk or thoughts I would interrupt it with the pre-identified statement “I would never speak to another person this way and I will not speak to myself this way”.  This is how I began to stand up for this boundary.

Through committed and consistent practice, it was surprising how quickly this changed, and now I rarely have my brain offer this type of self-talk or thinking and when it happens my new well practiced thought automatically pops up without any effort on my part.  I love it.

This is where I started, and I have come a long way since then and have many more boundaries that support my well-being, self-worth and self-respect, but I also think this is an area that will come up from time to time when life offers me an experience that triggers old beliefs and patterns of thinking and that’s ok, because now I have the skills, self-knowledge, and awareness to recognise when I need to implement a boundary for my own sake.

If you can relate to this in any way, I encourage you start by setting up one boundary for the way you treat yourself, be consistent and committed, I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how much better even this one small change will have you feeling about yourself.

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