Love Yourself by Setting Boundaries
Hey there! How’s your month going? Are you taking care of and loving yourself any differently? Last week I talked about self-care and gave some examples of ways to incorporate basic self-care practices into your daily life. Today I’m going to talk about boundaries and how setting good boundaries is essential for loving and taking care of yourself.
What are boundaries?
At its most basic, a boundary is a place where one thing ends and another begins. When we apply this to people, it’s the understanding that we are each individuals with our own thoughts, feelings, goals, values, etc. I am me, and you are you. Boundaries can be loose, rigid, or somewhere in between. I used to think that boundary issues were a characteristic of specific relationships in a person’s life so that most relationships might be “normal” but that they might be co-dependent within their marriage or with their mother, for example. But now I think it’s much more common for someone to bring their boundary issues to all their relationships, but they might just show up more prominently with certain people.
Today I’m mainly going to focus on strengthening boundaries that are too loose or nonexistent because this is the most common boundary issue I see in my office. Loose or non-existent boundaries might look like some or all of the following:
Feeling overly responsible for the feelings of others
Making others comfortable at your own expense
Feeling extremely affected by another’s feelings or mood
Going against personal values to make someone else happy
Difficulty identifying our own thoughts, feelings, values, beliefs
How do boundaries and self-love go together?
I think having good boundaries is an indicator that someone values and loves themselves. If you think about it, when you love yourself are you going to let others violate your values or walk all over you? No! You’re going to value yourself enough to put a stop to that kind of behavior. You also won’t violate your own boundaries by constantly putting everyone else’s comfort over getting your own needs met. To have good boundaries, we need to have the mindset that our needs are just as important, if not slightly more important, than the needs of others. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, then that would be something to explore within yourself and could be an indication that your boundaries need some work.
As I discussed last week, caring for ourselves well is a way of showing self-love. But what happens when others’ needs or wants bump up against what we need to do to properly take care of ourselves? This is when we need boundaries. For example, let’s say that you’ve decided that your bedtime needs to be 10:00 in order to be at your best the next day. Now, what if your friend calls at 9:30 to vent about an issue she is having at work. If you had poor boundaries you might let her go on and on about this situation until it was way past your bedtime. But you have good boundaries, so you listen and support her for maybe 15 or 20 minutes and then at an appropriate moment in the conversation you tell your friend that you need to get off the phone and go to bed and that you’d be happy to talk to her more about the issue tomorrow if she still needs support.
If you’re new to setting boundaries, this example may have you feeling sweaty or anxious or thinking that you’d be cold and unfeeling if you don’t let your friend talk as long as she needs to or worried that she will be mad at you if you end the conversation before she is totally done. All of those are perfectly normal feelings to have. Setting boundaries is often uncomfortable but it does get easier over time.
If this is new to you but you want to try setting firmer boundaries for yourself, start small and simple. Try and identify one or two things or people you want to have better boundaries around. Maybe it’s your bedtime, or listening to endless gossip at work that really brings you down, or maybe it’s a certain relationship that is causing difficulties. Whatever it is, make a plan in advance for where you want your boundary to be and then let other people know. If it’s going to be a big change that affects other people, you might say something like “I know in the past I’ve allowed xyz to happen, but those things are no longer ok with me, so from now on I’d like you to do abc.”
Again, I’m not saying any of this is easy. When I’m working with clients on this kind of stuff, I will remind them that it is normal for people to get upset when you set a new boundary. This is often because they have benefited in some way from you not having boundaries. So, to them, any way that you assert yourself and your needs can feel like an attack on them. You know that you are not attacking them, though. You know that you still love them but that you are now also trying to love yourself better. Remember that dwelling on or taking on the feelings of another person is a sign of poor boundaries (see above!) and also that changing this pattern of thinking in yourself will take time and allowing yourself to sit with the discomfort. It really won’t kill you, I promise! And I also promise that if you sit with it often enough and long enough, it won’t be uncomfortable anymore.
You can do this. I know you can. I love you and I’m cheering for you. And if you want help, reach out via email or schedule a free call in the scheduling tab.
Until next week, take good care of yourself!
Meghan