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🕯️ Boundaries
Boundaries are intentional, self-respecting choices to protect our values and capacity (our energy, time, well-being). This is a practice of being 🕯️ authentic and Self-Inclusive—by voicing our preferences, wants ⭐ Values and ⭐️ Needs, engaging with the world in a way that respects our capacity, telling people how we want to be treated. It’s a way of telling someone what we need in order to be in a relationship with them that feels good to us. This is how we attract the people who are for us and filter the people who aren’t so that we’re able to relax, to say yes to something within our Growth Zone, or just to be ourselves. It's how we ⭐ Individuate and live an aligned life.
Boundaries are an essential facet of ⭐️ Self-Care.
Keys
- 🔑 Boundaries are bridges, not walls
- 🔑 Emotional pain reveals our limits
- 🔑 Go at your pace, and our boundaries help us keep it.
- 🔑 Guilt is better than resentment, depletion, or burnout
- 🔑 Boundaries are distinct from Requests
- 🔑 If maintaining our boundaries in a relationship or saying yes to someone else’s is challenging, it’s a sign of low Compatibility, that our boundaries don’t fit one another well enough. It does not mean that anyone is bad, unworthy, not enough, or too much.
- Whether it’s with other people, technology, work, or anything else, every relationship needs boundaries.
- Accepting a person's boundaries is an act of care
- Accepting our own boundaries is an act of self care
- It’s a way we honor our differences
- Our caregivers teach us what our boundaries are. If we don’t know what our boundaries are, it’s because they were disrespected and violated over and over and over again.
- someone with high support needs has likely had their boundaries violated
- we can violate our own boundaries
- 🔑 Act from capacity
- 🔑 We build capacity by respecting our limits
Social Boundaries
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me at the same time.”
—Prentis Hemphill
Social Boundaries are a way for us to "take up space." They exist to help us feel safe and cared for in environments where we can grow and thrive—they define the relational space in which we feel happy to be with others, and they define our Window of Tolerance. We keep people as close as we want to, and as far as we need to in order to maintain our sense of self and well-being. This will occasionally and temporarily disappoint or frustrate others, and that’s okay. The only person we never want to disappoint is ourself.
When we're traumatized our boundaries are ruptured heavily and quickly, or slowly and repeatedly. If we’re accustomed to having our boundaries violated, guilt may arise even at the thought of setting them in new relationships. Boundaries are not how we change other people; they're a way we change our relationship to people in a way that feels good to us.
Fundamental to being mindful of other people’s boundaries is to 🔑 treat people the way they want to be treated.
We can set boundaries around…
- our technology use
- the kind of media we expose ourselves to
- who or what we give our time and attention to
- our transparency about what we’re thinking or feeling
- Who, or what, we spend money on, and how much
- how much emotional labor we’re willing to do for someone, and who we do it for
- what we share about ourselves and with whom
- who can be physically close to us, touch us, and how
- How do you want to be treated?
- How is it okay or not okay for people to talk to you? To other people?
- What jokes are okay?
- Is it okay for people to touch you? To tease you? To give unsolicited advice?
- Are there certain worldviews or ways of being that feel safe or unsafe?
Boundaries can be added to or adjusted as-needed. Some likely will change over time, it just depends on what nourishes and depletes us and how we feel about stuff.
We might realize some are too rigid or too fluid as we start to see the world and people as not so Black-and-White and get a better sense of what’s really important to us. They often require some experimentation, trial-and-error, and iteration—one step at a time. The good news is 🔑 many choices are reversible!
Keys
- 🔑 Boundaries are a prerequisite to compassion and empathy
- 🔑 Boundaries make healthy relationships stronger
- 🔑 We have a right and responsibility to say No
- 🔑 Don't stay where you don't want to be
- 🔑 Boundaries can require financial independence, mutual respect, and safety. If the person you're setting boundaries with is both unsafe and inescapable, they're unlikely to work.
- 🔑 If what someone calls a boundary has us feeling unloved and unsupported, we don’t necessarily have to put up with it.
- 🔑 It's our job to know our boundaries. It’s the other’s job to know theirs. It’s our collective job to communicate them.
- 🔑 Don’t sweat people who aren’t in your inner circle
- We want to know the consequence of someone overstepping our boundaries ahead of time, so that we aren’t caught off-guard having to consider it in real-time. It will happen, it’s inevitable even around the safest of people. “If someone does this, I will do that.”