Learning to set, maintain, and respect other people's healthy boundaries is a practice we continue to develop throughout our lives. In this episode of the podcast, we explore how many of us experience emotional pain due to under developed and overdeveloped boundaries. And, also explore strategies for recognizing when we need to enforce stronger boundaries with people who refuse to respect our us.
Learning to set, maintain, and respect other people's healthy boundaries is a practice we continue to develop throughout our lives. In this episode of the podcast, we explore how many of us experience emotional pain due to under developed and overdeveloped boundaries. And, also explore strategies for recognizing when we need to enforce stronger boundaries with people who refuse to respect our us.
Hi, I'm Laura Pallatin. Welcome to the Practically Spiritual Show, where we break with restrictive indoctrination and create our own personal spiritual path. In this episode of the podcast, I am going to be reading Chapter 6 from my book, Walk in Your Own Footsteps, and I think this is an episode that will be fairly universally helpful because the chapter is , Boundaries.
While boundaries can be challenging all year long, I am recording this particular episode just before Christmas. And I think that a gentle reminder of the importance of setting boundaries and respecting other people's could not be better time. So let's listen to the theme song together and then we'll get right into it.
Welcome to the Practically Spiritual Show. Together we will learn, laugh, and grow. Break indoctrination. Rise above our nation. And so, oh, oh, oh.
Welcome to the Practically Spiritual Show.
Walk in your own footsteps. Chapter 6, Boundaries. Whether a solid block wall or a white picket fence, a physical boundary helps us protect what we value. Likewise, personal boundaries help us maintain healthy relationships with friends and family, as well as casual acquaintances. While it is important to open up and share with your family and friends, it is also very valuable to learn what to keep to yourself, especially from those you don't know well.
You are an important person, and you deserve to maintain healthy boundaries that protect your privacy. As we progress along our spiritual journeys, it can be helpful to learn new skills for establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries.
You may be a person who either shares your life and experience too readily, or maybe you don't feel comfortable sharing yourself at all. Or you may find yourself somewhere in between these two extremes. To maintain healthy boundaries, it's important to begin to define what parts of your life you choose to share and what you would like to hold for yourself.
This is a pretty broad topic and includes your thoughts, hopes, dreams, and opinions, as well as your physical time, energy, body, and talents. Some of us find ourselves sharing more with other people than they really want to know. These folks are not even aware that they just say too much. They don't have a private life or maintain inner thoughts.
Social occasions can be very difficult for people without healthy boundaries because they always face the possibility that they will open up too much to the wrong people and find themselves feeling uncomfortable and even being burned.
One person who faces this challenge in her life is Deborah. Deborah is a lovely, kind lady in her mid fifties. She loves people and wanted to open herself up to those she found interesting and showed an interest in her life as well.
She evaluated people very quickly and decided if they were a candidate for her friendship. She didn't waste any time filling them in on her most private thoughts and experiences.
Being financially well situated, she welcomed opportunities to help new friends with money needs. Part of her pattern was that she inquired about other people's financial matters, and loved to be the knight in shining armor. It made her feel good and close to people when she could help them with their financial problems.
The drawback to this behavior is that she found herself with people in her life who knew all her most personal concerns and who had received financial assistance from her. She began to doubt the true nature of her friendships.
This was not because the people she helped didn't love her, they did. However, her lack of boundaries regarding personal information and money left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. Had she taken the time to get to know these folks more slowly and had allowed them to solve their own financial problems, Deborah would've had the pleasure of enjoying the company of her friends without fears about their ulterior motives.
She also could have empowered her friends to resolve their own financial problems and honor their ability to provide for themselves. If you tend to share too much and would like to begin to enforce stronger personal boundaries, try this. While having a conversation, pay attention to how much you listen versus how much you share without interrupting or interjecting your opinion and experience.
Another idea is to only answer questions as they are asked. Each time you allow an opportunity to interject past you by, you'll begin to learn how much you can hold back. As you continue to grow, you'll find boundaries easier to enforce for yourself and recognize in others.
Deborah's issues were, specifically, boundaries with personal information and money. However, it's easy to imagine how other areas of a person's life could easily be too open and cause them to feel vulnerable and keep them from achieving their own personal goals.
A very common problem is being able to say "no" to other people's requests. Everyone knows a person who just can't say no. These folks can end up so burned out they can't attend to their own needs and those of their families. There are many good causes into which to put your time, but in order to be truly helpful, you must say "no" to other opportunities that are presented.
A friend of mine named Rebecca, found herself with so many opportunities to be of service that she rarely had time to spend with her family. Rebecca is blessed with many attributes that bring opportunities to help her community as well as her family. A lovely woman, Rebecca looks like TV's Wonder Woman with long, dark hair and well proportioned facial features, including kind blue eyes that contrast beautifully against her olive skin.
In addition to being physically lovely, Rebecca is blessed with many gifts, including a powerful singing voice, a talent for cooking, artistic abilities, and a graceful manner that helps others feel very comfortable in her presence. As you can imagine, Rebecca was in demand at her children's school, at her church, as well as with her group of friends because everyone needed her help and enjoyed her company.
Because raising her children and spending time with her husband were her primary focus, she began to realize she was losing sight of what mattered to her in favor of other people's priorities. She shared with me that one day she took a hard look at her life and made a crucial decision to let go of all the activities that didn't support her personal goals.
When asked how she managed to say "no" gracefully, she explained, "I never say no. I just say, Oh, that won't work for me." I know that sounds very simple, but it allowed her to turn down opportunities to help and maintain the focus that she had set for her own life.
This is a phrase that takes all the ownership of saying no onto Rebecca and enables the person making the request to feel good about themselves. It is perfectly fine for people to ask for help. Rebecca does not wanna punish people and make them feel bad for asking.
She responds in this way so that the responsibility for whether she helps or not is placed on herself, not the requester. People are not being rude or intrusive to ask for help. It is up to the individual being asked to decline, if appropriate, in a kind way.
Many people find themselves with an abundance of opportunity to do wonderful things. Sometimes they're related to our work, our children, our church, or they speak to our own interests. When opportunities begin to conflict with your own core goals and aspirations, it's time to set a boundary and enforce it.
Steps for defining your core goals and suggestions for enforcing personal boundaries are: Reflect on the list you made of what you consider important in your life. Formulate a phrase that you can use to politely decline an opportunity that does not support your personal goals. Reflect back on your list and reaffirm that you still want to move in the same direction and eliminate activities and commitments that are not supportive of your priorities.
If, on the other hand, you are a person who finds it difficult to share what's really going on with you, you may feel isolated and alone, even in a crowd. Overdeveloped boundaries can feel like a brick wall that separates a person from the rest of the world.
Because these folks don't let others in, it's very difficult for them to make friends and enjoy social situations. Brad was in this situation and has shifted his life to bring more openness and joy. Brad had felt different, as long as he could remember. His siblings enjoyed sports and physical activities, while Brad loved reading and learning.
It seemed to Brad that everyone he knew was into riding horses and playing sports in the small town he grew up in. He was the smartest kid in most of his classes and because he was socially awkward, he suffered from teasing from the other students.
With every tease and every taunt Brad raised and thickened his boundaries to keep himself safely walled off from the world. This had the benefit of keeping him from being hurt, but it also made him feel very isolated and alone. As a teenager, Brad discovered the genre of science fiction and he became completely enthralled.
He enjoyed reading books as well as watching programs on TV. He even saw people who looked different from one another all getting along. He also loved the fact that intelligent people were valued and rewarded. Brad kept his keen interest to himself as he knew it would only bring more conflict with the people in his life.
When Brad completed his graduate work, he was thrilled to receive a job offer from a large casino in Las Vegas. As a computer analyst, he had a very interesting career and loved the energy and diversity of Las Vegas .
But because he maintained his carefully guarded boundaries, he didn't make any friends. He was beginning to feel disappointed in his prospects of the future when a science fiction convention came to his hotel. He decided he would be open to meeting a friend among the other people who shared his interest in science fiction.
While he was in line for a presentation, he met a guy who He later learned had a very similar experience growing up. The two men spent time visiting while in line and agreed to meet up later at another presentation. Brad found that, a little at a time, he was able to open up and make friends. He eventually translated his newfound ability to meet and be comfortable with people to the rest of his life, and he now enjoys many meaningful relationships.
Sometimes it's hard to know what can be the turning point toward new life patterns. The important step is to allow the change to take place and be willing and open to new experiences.
If you are a person who feels isolated by your personal boundaries, here's an exercise to begin to let people in. First, select one person who you feel you can trust. Then begin to let them into your life a little at a time. Usually people enjoy talking about themselves, and you can begin by letting them open up to you.
Eventually, when you feel more comfortable, you can share your life experience with them. As you build trust and familiarity, you will naturally allow the other person to get closer to you. This can be a lovely bonding experience and begin an enduring friendship. In this chapter, we've looked at three ways people do and don't enforce healthy boundaries.
There are many other manifestations of boundaries and therefore examples of how they are enforced. While the Possible situations are as diverse as the human population.
These simple steps can be interpreted to help address the two main root causes of distress due to boundaries, both being too open and too closed. Setting and maintaining healthy boundaries is important to everyone. People feel crowded and uncomfortable by those that don't respect others boundaries and stand too close or share inappropriate information.
Likewise, people with overdeveloped boundaries can feel isolated and lonely. Whether you are beginning to rein in your over expanded boundaries or let people closer to you, Setting and maintaining healthy boundaries is an important component of a balanced life. Walk in Your Own Footsteps is a workbook, and at the end of every chapter, there's a section called Bringing it Home.
And there's a list of prompts and then blank lines for writing. So I'm just going to read those prompts now. Bringing it Home.
1., carefully evaluate the relationships in your life. Start by thinking about those in your immediate family, then friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc.
2. As you think about each person, check in with your feelings about that person. Do you feel that your boundaries with them are healthy for you?
3. On a lined piece of paper, make two column headings. On the left side, write, Good. On the right side, write Needs Work.
4. Now, carefully considering each person in your life. Check in with your feelings and notice who you feel you have healthy boundaries with, and which relationships need work. Write each person's name under the appropriate headings on your paper.
5.. As you encounter each person in your everyday life, make a conscious effort to enforce boundaries with those people you identified as needing work.
Remember that enforcing boundaries with people is not only vital to your well being, it's also important for the other person. We are always role modeling with our own behavior. Other people are looking to us to help them decide what is okay and what is not.
This This chapter is particularly interesting and timely for me because I was having a conversation with a friend of mine today about boundaries and about how very challenging it can be to set and maintain boundaries, especially with people in your family. With family members, we start out virtually with no boundaries, right?
I mean, as a newborn baby, uh, you have no privacy, you have no expectation of privacy, and even as you're growing up, those begin to come into play, but usually parents don't have boundaries with their children in the same way that they do with people in the outside world.
So as we grow up, we have to redefine what those boundaries mean and what's important to us and how we set those boundaries, how we maintain them and how we also, respect our parents boundaries. As we get older and our parents begin to need our help, the whole situation shifts again. So, it's, it's not a one and done. Boundaries are, are extraordinarily challenging.
The friend I was talking to today told me that he has a three strikes rule when it comes to boundaries with people. And he's had just a few instances in his life where somebody pushed past that.
And he had to just completely eliminate them from his life. I had a situation fairly recently in my life with a friend who I enjoyed so much. We had so much in common. For whatever reason, they would not respect my boundaries.
So I just had to end that friendship. And there's going to be people in your life, and you know, you can decide how many strikes that you're going to have, but, but that's entirely up to you.
I guess I just want to remind you that people do tell you who they are.
They will show you who they really are. And if you have people in your life who you cannot trust, and then you continue to go back to that person, you know, you're setting yourself up again and again. And you're causing yourself pain that you do not need to cause yourself.
So I hope as you look at the people in your life, regardless of your relationship with them, that you begin to set strong, healthy boundaries and enforce them. I also want to ask you to notice other people's boundaries and be really mindful of them. And I hope this episode of the podcast is helpful.
Um, this is an issue that I think we all deal with on an ongoing basis. It's, whoo, it's part of our, our relationships with other people. And. And you'll know people that are good at it because they've got lots of friends and you'll know people that are not because it's a real struggle. And I don't want you to be one of those people that struggles with it because relationships are great and they help us build community.
And that's part of being a healthy person is having a loving community around us. Well, that brings us to the end of another episode of the Practically Spiritual Show. I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope that you heard something there that's helpful to you. If you have any questions or comments or if you'd just like to reach out to me, I'm on Facebook, instagram, TikTok, and Threads. I have a website for The Practically Spiritual Show, that's the whole thing run together, ThePracticallySpiritualShow. com. And I also have a website, uh, LauraPallatin. com. So either way, you'd like to reach out to me. I'm Working on building a community of people who support one another in breaking with our religious and cultural indoctrination and embracing a life path that works specifically for us.
So I'm collecting email addresses to start a mailing list. And I'm open to other ideas, like how you would build a community of like minded people that want to support one another. So, I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, take care of yourselves and remember, there is no them, there really is only us.
Thanks for listening to The Practically Spiritual Show. Thank you so much for sticking around to the end. It means so much to me. I love you. See you next time. Bye bye.