Our Boundary Blueprint-3 discoveries as to why boundaries feel difficult and what you can do about it.
"Care what other people think, and you will forever be their prisoner." Lao Tz
I love this quote because it provides such truth. We really are prisoners of others when we give our power away to what they think. But I also recognize the difficulty and the uncomfortable feelings that arise when working toward embodying this quote and speaking your truth.
Women ask me all the time, why is it SO HARD TO SET HEALTHY BOUNDARIES?????
Well, there’s a good reason and that is what this article is going to help you understand-the 3 discoveries you need to realize about why setting boundaries is hard and WHAT you can do about it.
Discovery #1: Understanding our hard wiring
Our minds were not naturally created to care about healthy boundaries. Say what? Let me explain.
We humans from the beginning of time were hard wired for connection. We are not solitary creatures, we are similar to herd animals. Back in the caveman days, we needed a hive or a pack because we were more powerful when we were together.
If we didn’t lean on our tribe, we were eaten by a saber tooth tiger. We were built to care about others, to rely on others, to let others watch out for our safety and for us to watch out for them too. Staying in our herd, our hive, our pack, our tribe is how we stayed safe. And it worked!!!!
The generations behind us saw danger and they went into fight or flight. Because our bodies are so beautifully designed to do this-they made it, they survived! The ones who didn’t-stepped outside of the hive, the tribe and were eaten.
Once they knew that a saber tooth tiger was bad news, it became programmed into their brain and it was always bad news. And that precisely is who we come from.
We are literally dealing with brains that are wired for our survival to run or fight saber tooth tigers (I am not suggesting here you ever try to actually fight a saber tooth tiger, word on the street is that you won’t survive).
Our brains are wired to focus on what’s bad and to stay safe from it. I always like to say our brains are like velcro for negativity and teflon for positivity.
So what I want you to understand using this framework is that if our tribe was important to us, because it literally was back then (remember-it was for our survival). If your pack wasn’t happy with you back then, you were outta there. Your tribe is what kept you alive and so the human brain learned, “Oh we must keep people happy with us and then we get to live.”
So if you struggle with people pleasing, I hope what you will understand from this is that we come by our people pleasing instincts naturally. They are quite literally part of our survival set up. It is part of being human. It is perfectly normal to have the urge to people please.
Wanting to serve and please others is a perfectly good and often wonderful thing. The problem with people pleasing in today’s world is when we don’t have good boundaries to go with.
Our brain today says-let’s do whatever keeps the tribe happy. Let’s do whatever we need to, to be part of the gang. Most of the time that looks like acquiescing, going along to get along and doing whatever we can to “not upset the apple cart.”
As children we are gaining information and data from all types of sources around us-our traumas, personality, health status, our race, ethnicity, gender, family of origin, our class, economic status and more! Each one of these alone comes with a handbag of rules that instruct us how to behave, act, what to think and what to say. Our poor mind has to put all of these pieces together somehow in a way that makes sense and keeps us alive.
Discovery #2: “The Rulebook”
In essence, our sweet mind creates a sort of rule book in terms of what will keep us safe. We start to notice from the time we are quite small, that if our people are not happy with us, we do not feel safe. We start to notice this in our bodies, our feelings, the look on someone’s face, the tone, what is NOT being said, the iciness of the room.
When we are children, we are 100% dependent on our caregivers. They are quite literally everything to us. Remember the tribe, the pack, the hive that I talked about earlier? Well, to our little toddler minds, they are our first tribe. It is our caregivers job to mirror to us who we are in the world. And hopefully with healthy caregivers, we are shown that we are loved, cherished, important, worthy, important. We learn our worth and our place through our caregivers. This is what creates our self-esteem. This is what relays the message to us that we matter.
This gets written into the rule book or the rolodex file of our little child brain.
However, many folks did not grow up this way. Those of us who may have grown up with caregivers who were harsh, unloving, absent, unpredictable, neglectful and even abusive, the little sweet mind will record a whole different set of rules into the rulebook of life.
It may sound something like, “I am not loveable, I don’t matter, I’m a nuisance, “ I am a bother,” I should never take up space.” It might sound like, “I’m loved as long as I'm good, or performing, or agreeable.”
(Please note: much of the time parents are doing the best they can with the skills and tools that they have in their awareness at the time. However, to our innocent little childlike selves, it simply wasn’t the message that we needed. The message was misconstrued and we wound up feeling as though we somehow did not matter).
Often this gets passed down generation after generation.
So now are you starting to understand that the mind’s idea of boundaries is to do whatever it needs to do to keep you alive?
Perhaps when you were little, if you were constantly told to be quiet, that you were too loud, too much or to simply go away, then the mind created a belief that came into agreement with this. A rule was filed away that it was better to not disrespect your elders and continue to be loud or to take up space.
The problem is that of course this is nonsense (you were just being a sweet and normal child) but you never questioned the rule. You questioned Santa Clause, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy. Your mind at some point was able to realize that those things just couldn’t exist. Yet, you never stopped or questioned your rules or beliefs about yourself. You wrote those things in the rule book as absolute truth.
Your mind doesn’t care that you are older now and that the situation is different now. To the mind a rule is a rule. And remember what happened to humans who questioned the rules and survival? They didn’t survive!!! We came from the rule followers! We came from the bloodlines of those who chose safety and to allow their mind and rule book run the show.
Let me tell you a little bit about my own rulebook. Several years ago, I was deeply terrified of what other people thought of me. Growing up in a small town, it was written in my rulebook that all eyes were on you. Boundaries were one of my biggest struggles because it meant breaking free of the people pleasing pattern in order to speak my truth. First of all, having struggled with codependent patterns, I didn’t even know what my truth was. I struggled with low self esteem and didn’t know what my values even were. I didn’t know what mattered to me or what my needs even were.
What I did know was that I needed people to like me, to not talk ill of me and to think of me in a certain way-nice, kind, giving, good.
I couldn’t excuse myself from a phone conversation. I couldn’t end playdates at the time I needed to even if my kids were throwing a full blown temper tantrum. I couldn’t remove myself from a conversation that made me uncomfortable because of the topic. I laughed at jokes that deep down I found offensive. I agreed with others opinions because I either didn’t know my opinion or if I did, I didn’t feel confident sharing it. I talked incessantly because silence felt unbearable. I couldn’t even be on time, because I was rushing from one activity to the next, just trying to show face and that I was doing my part to be the nice girl and make everyone around me feel good.
Speaking my truth was so uncomfortable that many years ago I actually had a 7 hour coffee date. Yes-you read that right. A SEVEN HOUR COFFEE DATE!!! Now, I didn’t WANT a 7 hour coffee date. The idea was come over for 1-1/2 to 2 hours, chit chat a bit and move on with our day.
However, this woman arrived promptly right after the kiddos left on the school bus in the morning and was still there when they got home on said school bus at 3:30pm. Some of you might be thinking, “are you serious, that’s pretty extreme.” Serious as a heart attack my friend.
I can recall the massive headache I felt because I wanted so badly to ask her leave and tell her I had things to do but I couldn’t.
I remember the constriction in my throat that wanted to scream, “don’t you get it lady??? I have things to do!” But I couldn’t.
I remember that I never invited her back again despite the fact that she was a great gal in many ways. I was clueless in how to handle these situations, so my answer was to cut the relationship off and now move forward by avoiding her.
At the time I was a young mom with a husband who worked long hours, and I often felt lonely. I wanted so badly to connect with other women and be a part of a community and I thought the way to connection was through self-abandoning any of my needs so that I could focus on appeasing what other people in my life needed.
This was all written in my rulebook. Needless to say, all of this worrying about what others thought and not wanting to upset anyone, caused me severe stress, anxiety and overwhelm. I was trying to function on fried adrenals and walking on eggshells. I was unhappy and it showed up in my relationship with my partner, my kids and mostly the relationship I had with myself. But there was something always driving me to keep pleasing, keep appeasing-and that leads me to our next discovery.
Discovery #3: But why do I always feel so guilty?
Why do we feel so darn guilty when we try to set a boundary? Well anytime we step outside the rulebook, the mind pushes a great big huge alarm bell. Our mind is literally fighting for our survival. It doesn’t care about anything else. Remember-our mind thinks that this is a rule created for our safety. I share this because hopefully you can start to relax and realize that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. The mind simply is perceiving danger.
From time to time, I forget to turn the fan on over our indoor grill. Inevitably, the fire alarm will be set off. It’s one of the most annoying sounds ever!!! But I always have to remind myself-It’s just doing it’s job. And thank goodness right?
This is also what is happening with our mind. Our mind is signaling-DANGER, DANGER!!!! From there we may experience bodily reactions-our palms get sweaty, we have a million butterflies in our stomach, our temperature rises, our throat constricts.
Our brain’s one and ONLY job is to keep us alive so it often uses guilt as a way to get us to acquiesce and once again, go along to get along.
How many times have you been invited to a baby shower or a wedding shower on a Saturday and absolutely dreaded it? You’ve worked 50 hours this week, you coached soccer two nights, ran the car pool this week and are utterly exhausted. You know you need a day to get caught up, sleep in and take a little time to yourself. But there it is…guilt lurking around the corner, “What will aunt Betty think if you don’t show your face at Cousin Amy’s shower?”
That guilt pushes on you, making you feel as if you are doing something wrong. So what do you do? You RSVP that you will gladly be there Oh and you will also make and bring the punch.
Pretty effective strategy to get you to follow the rules right?
This is why boundaries feel so challenging. Because they are not part of our original hard-wiring. Again, we are quite literally conditioned to not take up space, speak our truth and set a healthy boundary.
So where do we start if we want to set healthy boundaries?
Understand that boundaries are first and foremost an INTERNAL JOB
We have to understand that boundaries are an internal job. Yes we create parameters and limits with institutions and people. But ultimately before we can ever do that, we have to start on the inside. This is counterintuitive to what culture will tell you. We are taught that boundaries are much like walls, if we were taught anything about boundaries at all. And quite frankly, I find that it is actually quite rare that boundaries are used in that way (this is left for more abusive type situations).
I am so passionate about this, because when we aren’t taught how to properly do the internal work, our boundaries come off as rigid castles and we are left isolated and lonely. I have been that person because I didn’t understand what boundaries were, how to set them and I certainly wasn’t going to entertain any sort of an uncomfortable conversation that looked like any type of repair or reconciliation work. I was left alone and miserable.
And while I love boundary scripts and helping people formulate some compassionate language around boundaries and communicating our needs, when we are in the moment, feeling unsafe, triggered and wanting to fight or flee-a script can often feel pretty unhelpful.
Boundary work starts within you. And as the inner work is done, and healing occurs, it organically flows into changed outer behaviors, habits and choices. We can be empowered to have loving and compassionate conversation that build bridges of connection rather than walls of isolation.
When you find yourself struggling with outward boundary difficulties, know that your struggle may be an invitation to go within
Sometimes the answers to our problems lie in unexpected places.
2. You have to realize that boundaries are in fact healthy.
If you don’t believe this then it will in fact be hard to lean into them. I hope you can make that agreement with yourself right now. Make the agreement right now, or work toward believing, that setting boundaries is healthy for you to do.
3. Understand that boundaries are not all about what you do with other people, they have a lot to do with how we engage with ourselves. In other words, know your needs.
And in order to engage with ourselves (and others) we have to first understand that there is a need. Do you know your needs? Have you ever thought about your needs? Many people don't, so if you haven’t, know that it’s not uncommon.
Start by thinking of what a "good" parent would do for their child? What needs do they help their child remember to meet? I.E. even if the child does not want to go to bed, they help them to calm down and go to bed. Start by making a list of the needs a good parent will help a child to meet.
Now when you’re done with that list, circle the needs that you are not meeting for yourself (or inconsistently meeting).
For each circled need, respond to the following questions:
How do I respond to this need?
What gets in the way of responsiveness or consistency?
How do I respond to other people when they have this need?
How would my life improve if I responded to this need?
For each need, create an intention. Focus on ONE intention a week to get a need met more fully and consistently. I know you want to do more, but remember, our mind will fight you because it wants you simply to stay safe and alive. It will douse you with that guilt working you toward acquiescing and shape shifting so let’s just focus on nailing ONE for now-keeping it simple is KEY!!!
Write out your intentions weekly by finishing the sentence stem: My intentions are:
If you’re working to build up the strength to bring more integrity to your relationships and set healthy boundaries here are some resources and opportunities that will help you feel less alone in the journey—and give you the skills, tools, and courage you need to put your needs first:
Work through my latest workbook, The Secret to Empowered Boundaries
Grab my PDF ‘FREE’-How to Stop Overreacting and live with more Peace and Purpose’ Workbook
Book a discovery call with me for private 1:1 support-these are no obligation calls, just a conversation working through your goals when it comes to bringing more honesty and integrity to your relationships and if in fact we would be a good fit in working together.
You Matter,
Krista