The Messy Middle Between Full Contact and No Contact and Somatic Boundaries

 People pleasing, emotionally immature parents, nervous system triggers, and learning to protect your peace without disappearing or cutting others off. 

There’s a space many women live in that we need to talk about. 

You’re not fully in the relationship anymore… but you can’t fully walk away either. The current relationship isn't working, but a full cut off also doesn't work for you. You are wondering how to set boundaries without feeling guilty. You are wondering how to love people who in some way are draining to you. 

In this episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast, we talk about the messy middle between full contact and no contact with parents, especially for adult daughters and mothers navigating complicated family dynamics, people pleasing, nervous system triggers, and the grief of loving someone who still deeply impacts you.

Sometimes the hardest part is not deciding whether someone is “good” or “bad.” There isn't always a victim or villain in family conflicts or ruptures. And for some people, the hardest part is the lack of conflict. The lack of rupture or even naming that there is a problem and everyone just pretending that this is okay when the family is in harmful or toxic relational patterns. 
You can see their love, understand their story, and still leave interactions feeling emotionally flattened, anxious, dysregulated, guilty, or resentful.

We unpack:

•  why family boundaries are rarely clean or simple 
•  low contact options that are healthier than all-or-nothing thinking 
•  how people pleasing, freezing, and fawning make boundaries feel impossible 
•  why conflict can activate younger parts of us around parents 
•  the nervous system side of family triggers and emotional regression 
•  how guilt, grief, and relief often coexist 
•  practical micro-boundaries that protect your peace without dramatic rupture 
•  why forgiveness and love do not always mean access 
•  learning to tolerate discomfort instead of abandoning yourself 

This conversation is for women navigating:

•  boundaries with parents 
•  emotionally immature parents 
•  low contact family relationships 
•  no contact guilt 
•  family enmeshment 
•  people pleasing and fawning 
•  difficult mother daughter relationships 
•  nervous system healing 
•  family disappointment and grief 

If you’ve ever felt torn between protecting yourself and protecting the relationship, this episode will help you feel less alone and more grounded in your own authority.

Follow the Motherhood Mentor Podcast for the rest of this family boundaries series, share this with a friend stuck in the gray area, and leave a review so more women searching for nuanced support around family dynamics and no contact can find this conversation.

If you would like 1:1 support and coaching on this topic you can learn how to work with me here. 

If you’re ready to stop living on autopilot and start leading your life with deep presence, I’d love to work with you. Book a free interest call here: Click Here

💌 Want more? Follow me on Instagram @themotherhoodmentor for somatic tools, nervous system support, and real-talk on high-functioning burnout, ambition, healing perfectionism, and motherhood. And also pretty epic meme drops. 

🎧  Did you love this episode? Be sure to follow and please take a quick moment to leave a review and send this episode to a friend. I'd love to hear from you on how this podcast impacted you, send me a DM or an email. 

Transcript

Welcome To The Messy Middle

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rebecca Dollard, and today we are going into the topic about the space between full and no contact, that weird, messy middle ground that is sometimes for a season while you figure it out, or sometimes forever. And if you haven't listened, you can go back to the previous episode where I kind of introduced this series and my approach to it, where I'm coming from. But today we're really going to be talking about that messy middle, that space between full and no contact. There's a massive conversation happening right now around boundaries, around toxic family, around estrangement, no contact, emotionally immature parents. There's this huge conversation about it. But I really don't think there's a full conversation around the women, the women who are trying to hold multiple truths, multiple needs, multiple desires all at the same time. That in between, where it can be emotionally brutal to not write your parents off, to not go no contact, and also not stay full contact, to be navigating this. You can't be all this close to me, but I also don't want you to not have access to me or me have access to you or my kids. Like there's so many nuanced boundaries. And there's so many women living in the gray with this, where you're staring at your mom's text for three hours, trying to figure out what to say or how to say it, or even how to respond. There's women who are feeling that relief when your family plans get canceled, or then immediately feeling guilt. You feel guilt for not seeing your mom on Mother's Day or calling her or texting her. But reaching out still feels inauthentic. You don't really know what to say or how to say it because you're grateful for her. You see that she's a good woman, but also this is hurting you right now. This is harming you as a person, you as a mother. It's taking capacity away from your life right now. You're rehearsing these conversations and these boundaries around holidays. Holidays are so hard for people who are navigating tough relationships with their families of like, is it a full yes? Is it a full no? Are there conditions? It's not like, oh, we don't want to see you, but okay, maybe we're not gonna come to the big family Thanksgiving, but we'd love to meet you for lunch a few days later. Or hey, it doesn't work for us to do this anymore, but I love to face time with the kids. You know, there's all these in-betweens, like leaving these family gatherings or interactions, whether that's texts or phone calls with your parents or your siblings, where for days you have an emotional hangover, or you're constantly overthinking, or it creates this hyper-vigilance vigilance in you. And it's almost like they're in the room with never being in the room. There can be distance from them that feels both too far and too close. You can feel like it's your responsibility to fix things, to make it better, to soothe or appease your parents. You're maybe wondering constantly like, are you being too sensitive? Are you overreacting? Is this happening because present you doesn't want this? Or you often feel like a little kid. And so you can feel that like the problem isn't necessarily their behavior. It's that he's it's triggering these parts of you, it's triggering these responses. And what's so hard in this middle space between no contact and full contact, this space between is that you love your parents. You love your family, you know that there's love coming from them. They're not all bad or all good. They have a lot of redeeming qualities. They're not this monster. And you have so much compassion and empathy for their experience. And that makes it so hard to set boundaries with them because most of us have been taught that boundaries are around someone's harmful behavior, someone is bad, someone is a villain, someone is a narcissist. And so you have to figure out this perfect conversation or script or this line in the sand. But so often, what boundaries in relationship actually are is a living, breathing relationship. Your boundaries are a living, breathing thing that moves. It is a dynamic movement that comes from you and your body, you and your nervous system, your emotional capacity, your reality, your values, your integrity, the kind of family you are trying to build. And many women have never felt or even learned where you end and they begin, where they begin and you end. You don't feel this separation between self and other. And so boundaries feel nearly impossible because when you're around them, when you're with them, you start taking on what they're feeling, what they're thinking, their experiences, so much so that you self-neglect. What happens when you fawn or you people please for a really, really long time, you become so resentful and sometimes filled with rage, or you become massively dissociated from yourself. And a lot of times that's going to come out sideways and you'll end up pushing them away as this big global no versus these small little micro no's, these small little micro needs that you have been neglecting because you have not been taking care of you because you're so enmeshed in what they want, what they need, their experience of you, their expectations of you, that you aren't even owning and keeping clean your side of the street. And this is often the work that we need to do first before we ever move into boundaries with another person, is literally figuring out your own boundaries of self. Who are you? Where are you? Can you feel that? Can you even feel in your body, in your soul, in your person, what is a yes for you and what is a no for you? And where is the messy maybes? Where are the parts of you saying yes to them, and where are the parts of you saying no to them? We need to work with your nervous system regulation around conflict. So many women who are struggling with their parents with these no con with these boundaries. You're you're so much in a triggered fight, flight, freeze, fawn response with your parent. That's why you can't figure out what to do. You can't problem solve logically when you are triggered, when you are dysregulated by your parents, because you're having an emotional response and it's not your current self's emotional response. This is your nine-year-old self trying to navigate a relationship with their explosive mother. This is a five-year-old trying to be in a relationship with a father who's dissociated and non-responsive to her. You emotionally in your animal body, when you are triggered, cannot feel what a healthy boundary is, let alone communicate it and hold it. One of the questions I get most when I am teaching and talking about boundaries is how do I hold a boundary when I feel so guilty, when it feels so bad? How do I set a boundary without feeling guilty? And I look at them lovingly and say, you don't. You don't stop feeling guilty. You learn how to have capacity to sit with massive, sometimes writhingly uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels like you could die levels of existential crisis within your own self when it comes to communicating a boundary or saying no or saying not right now or not picking up your animal body, you get so triggered that you can't sit with conflict. You can't be with conflict, not just within yourself, but the other person and then between you two. So we have to create some capacity in your system, not because you don't have boundaries, but because you have boundaries, but you don't have the capacity to feel what that feels like in your body. You haven't learned how to sit with anger and rage and tell the truth. Because what happens in a lot of these families, especially these good families with this good mother, this good father who did their best, is all of the hard relational patterns that are that can be extraordinarily toxic and abusive, they get swept under the rug of good and grateful. There, there's not this very clear, harmful, everyone can, everyone can say, here's where we went wrong. There's often this very subtle but powerful, unnamed but deeply felt relational pattern that says, we don't talk about this. We just sweep that under the rug of good and grateful. And when you come into the family and you start shaking that rug out, you're gonna stir some shit up, not just in the other people, but in yourself. We need to make sure your system has resource inside of it and outside of it to hold that conflict internally and externally. Because when you are setting boundaries, when you're navigating these tricky relationships with other people, you have to be able to feel yourself and be in such a grounded place that you can witness the other person in their reality, not just your expectations of them, not just who you want them to be, not just who you need them to be, who they are. You have to give them back their sovereignty. You need to stop playing God because what happens in so many of these dynamics, especially with your like eldest daughters, with your high-functioning women, you have been playing mental and emotional chess that prevents them from feeling guilty, that prevents them from feeling bad, that prevents them from taking radical responsibility, that they are grown-ass adults and they are making choices. And sometimes those choices have consequences. So frequently, women and adult children are behaving in a way to prevent their parents from having the consequences of that parent's behavior. And until you can start doing that on a micro level, you might not know what capacity your parent has. But you're so stuck in these cycles of and patterns and the role that you played in your family, and you keep playing the game that they're trying to play. They might not be doing that consciously. They might have been in such survival themselves from their spouse, right? I've worked with a lot of women who the dad was a very problematic parent who had very clear mental health issues or drinking issues, or, you know, the father was the one who had these very clear inappropriate behaviors, but they had an enmeshed mother who was a codependent to the father, who protected the father and the children from and pretended that everything was fine and everything was good. And so the mother high functioned and the mother smiled while falling apart inside and wouldn't allow anyone, lest herself, talk about the way that this was not working, the way that this behavior was not okay. She never owned it. She never took care of herself, and therefore she couldn't take care of her kids. That dynamic happened so often. This modern mother who gave everything, who either is in such burnout that she's not even taking care of herself. That so, like, she, if she's not taking good care of herself, she can't take care of you. But you sometimes are so compassionate to the experience she's having that you're not telling yourself the truth about how that's impacting you, how lonely it's made you feel. I I've worked with so many motherless mothers, and it just breaks my heart. And some of those women have lost their mothers, their mothers have died. And that has such a big grief. And especially when you're trying to navigate who she was and how she was, where she's not even there because, you know, she was your one mother. So it feels you're only allowed to miss her. You're not allowed to admit the mistakes she made or the ways that she learned hard lessons or taught you hard lessons not on purpose. But there's also this very complex grief of when you witness as an adult woman that your mother cannot mother you or won't mother you. Either she doesn't want to, or she can't, or the way that she wants to mother you doesn't work. It's not healthy. It gives her access to things and people and capacity that she can't carry. Sometimes it's not that that person is bad or awful, it's that we have to be in relationship to their reality. We have to start telling ourselves and them the truth about how they impact us. And here's the cool thing about boundaries that I want to name right here early on in this podcast series. Boundaries are often not a conversation with other per with the other person. I would say I'm not a data and numbers type person. Okay. So I'm just literally pulling this out of thin air. 95% of the boundaries that I've worked with women that I've coached them through, that we've, you know, navigated and coaching together, the majority of those are never. Occasionally, there is a defining the relationship talk where they make a very clear sign in this line in the sand or ask from this person or tell of this person. I think that's what we most often think about with boundaries, right? Is this big conversation that you have with someone, or this statement that you make, or this giant line in the sand that you draw around yourself or your family. And sometimes that happens, sometimes that is needed. And I would say the majority of the boundaries that happen are within yourself, are within what you do and don't do and how you do it, and the truth-telling that you have to start doing first to yourself and then to another person. Let's say your mom calls you, and every time she calls you, she just vomits on you. It's just like this emotional vomit, or this it's this gossip, or she tries to triangulate you with your father. The boundary might not be, hey, mom, don't call me anymore. That could be a boundary. The boundary could be you block her number. The boundary could also be when your mom calls you in the middle of a work day, you don't answer the phone. You wait until you have capacity. Or the next time you're on the phone with her, you say, Hey, mom, I really don't want to talk about that. I'd love to talk to you about, I'd love to talk about something else. Hey, mom, I don't want to talk about your relationship with dad anymore. Let's change the topic. There's so many different options between full yes and full no, of I'm just gonna keep answering the phone and taking it. In that circumstance, your mom is not breaking your boundary. You're the one breaking your boundary. You're the one answering the phone when something inside you says, no, I don't want to talk to her, or I don't have the capacity, or I don't have the time. Stop answering the phone. Call her back at a different time. Text her. Say, hey, I'll meet up with coffee for you once a month because you know what? She's better in person than she is on the phone, or she's better on the phone than she is in person. You get to side, you are a you are a grown-ass adult. You get to decide what you do and don't do in relationship to your parents, but you have to be able to feel that power dynamic. You have to be able to start witnessing the relational patterns that you are a part of because you can be the one that interrupts those. Sometimes your parent doesn't have the capacity or the language or the emotional intelligence to be able to end the pattern, but it doesn't necessarily make them toxic or terrible or a bad person. It's just that this doesn't work for you anymore. So it's those in-between. So these boundaries, they get to be responsive. It doesn't have to be permanent to be real or effective or healthy. You are allowed to just take a break from them for a little bit. Hey, I'm gonna be really busy for the next couple months. So you probably won't hear from me. I'll check back with you in June. Hey, we have a really full summer, and let's set a date for August to see each other and give yourself a break from that person. Stop, get off social media, stop, like figure out a way to give yourself a temporary break or to shift the dynamic. There's you can also do shorter visits. You cannot answer immediately. You can take a temporary pause instead of having to like declare this permanent no contact. That's not your only option. There's a lot of women who think they want to go no contact, but they what they really needed was a longer break to heal some of that enmeshment stuff, to heal their own wounds or triggers. Like maybe you're dealing and healing with some stuff that like isn't your current parent's thing. Like your current parent is healthy, but you're dealing with some past trauma stuff that either they had a part in, or even maybe that like they didn't have a positive response to. Sometimes you just need a little space, you just need a little breathing room, you just need a moment or a month or a few weeks, or you need less contact, not just no contact. Or maybe when you're around them, you stop being the emotional mediator, or you stop problem solving for them, or you stop being the family therapist. You're allowed to build boundaries that are responsive and not just reactive. You you can build these things in response to momentary and seasonal things. So I just want to encourage you, you're you don't only have the choice of no contact and full contact. You are allowed to love people who are hard to love, who are messy. I have seen so many reels or memes that are like the only people who don't want you to have boundaries are the ones who benefit from you not having any. When someone disrespects your boundary, they're a narcissist, they're toxic. Anyone who triggers you, you need to cut them off to protect your peace. I'm sorry, those are such emotionally immature responses. Now, I'm not saying we don't set protective boundaries around you. I'm not saying we don't listen to what you need to create peace and safety. And at some point, part of relational healing, part of trauma healing is helping you and your body and your whole system recognize not just I'm okay when everything and everyone else is okay, is I'm okay even when there's relational rupture and conflict. I can be with and sit with anger, disappointment, guilt, grief, whether it's my own or another person's. Because otherwise, you're gonna have to go live in a bubble. Because I don't know about you. My toddlers don't like my boundaries, and I certainly don't like them. Some of my hardest boundary work has been with my husband, who is a wonderful, incredible person, who loves me, who deeply loves me. And some of my shit was exactly that. My shit. The way that he triggered me was not just his, was not just his behavior. And there's there's been some times where it's like, okay, this behavior doesn't work for me, or this doesn't feel good. And some of the time, that was like my capacity or my triggers for my past wounds. It's not my husband's fault that I've had abusive partners in the past. He does have a responsibility when he's a person who loves me and who's in a relationship with me to do his best to be respectful, but it doesn't matter how good he did that. He he still would trigger me with things that were meant for good or positive. And like, yes, he did so much that helped me repair and heal those things. And some of those what felt like boundary violations were not between me and him. It was between me. Me and me, me and old me, me and past me, like building new relationships and responses and things in my body. That happens so often with your parents and your family. You feel these younger parts, you feel these patterns, these things that are happening. And there isn't always someone to blame. There isn't necessarily a villain or a victim. It is witnessing how old you are, where you are, when you are, and what is the appropriate response. Not underacting, not overreacting, but being in relationship to your And then to other people. Because if you just cut off everyone who makes you feel vulnerable, or anyone who triggers you, or anyone who accidentally or even purposely breaks your boundaries, you're going to be so lonely. And that is not me saying to stay in relationship with harmful or hurtful people. Forgiveness and love do not always mean access. I'm going to say that again because I want everyone to hear this, especially the people who were taught to appease and please people when them or their behaviors are harmful. Just because you love someone or just because you forgive someone does not mean that they are allowed access to you or to your children or to your life. That's also healthy, appropriate relationships. Not giving access to people who are going to be harmful or hurtful. But guess what? At the same time, some of the people we love most in this world, some of the healthiest, most wonderful people, are going to sometimes accidentally harm us. I know on a regular basis, as a good mom who loves my kids, I do things that don't match what they needed. I overreact. I underreact. I miss things that I should have seen, that I could have seen. And you know what? I am human. And one of the most powerful lessons that I have worked learned working with all of these women, these moms who are working on their relationship to their moms or to their parents, or sometimes to their in-laws. I don't aim to be a perfect parent for my kids. In fact, I think it's very important that I make it known to my kids that I am a messy human who is figuring it out. And sometimes I do the wrong thing. Sometimes I have all the positive intentions, and the impact of it is still harmful or hurtful to them. And I own that. And they're allowed to tell me how things impact them, how it felt to them, how it does or doesn't work. This is a relationship. And yes, there is a power dynamic because I am their authority. But I want my type of authority that I parent my kids with that gives them their authority too. I don't want to break the will of my kids. I want them to get out of this stage and still have their will fully intact, which means that I constantly have to go through an ego death of witnessing when I am asking them to do things that I'm not willing to do for myself. I'm holding them to standards that I'm not holding myself to. If I want their respect, I better be respectable. I better be a person of integrity who says what I mean, who tells the truth, and owns when I made a fuck up. Maybe small, maybe big. I need to own when I treat them in a way that was disrespectful. I need to own my tone. I need to own my timing. That's leadership. That is healthy relationship, even with my husband. It's not making right or wrong or villain or victim. And there are circumstances in our lives where there is a villain and there is a victim, where there is a power dynamic. But that's why we need to start talking about it and thinking about boundaries in this much more dynamic way. Not just yes and not just no, not just bad, not just good. You often need boundaries with the things that are good just as much as the things that are bad. I need to perfect example. As a mom, I have to have very healthy boundaries with my kids, or I can become very easily enmeshed. And when I am enmeshed with them, they their emotions trigger the crap out of me. Because when they get out of control and then I start feeling out of control, now I can't parent them effectively. So I have to be able to feel the separation between what is me and what is them. I have to be able to feel that separation in order to keep a healthy connection. The same goes for you and your parents. I want you to hopefully feel the connection to your parents. And I know that for so many of you, if you're listening to this podcast series, that connection is complicated because it's not all bad and it's not all good. There's love and compassion, but there's also grief. There's also disappointment so deep that it feels brutally lonely. It feels like one of the deepest, hardest, most soft, vulnerable spaces inside of you. And it feels like it takes all of the breath out of your body. Feels like you can't breathe. You're so disappointed. There's so much desire, there's so much need, there's so much want, there's so much complex emotions and behaviors and aspects of this relationship. But I wonder if you stop putting you or your relationship to them in this yes or no box, and you start feeling this active posture of relating first to self, feeling who you are, when you are, where you are, what matters to you in this season, that is so important for you to understand. What are your hills you're willing to die on in this season? What are your hills you're willing to die on as values, as your mission, as your purpose in life? Because once you know that, once you feel that, once you have embodied that with a posture, when you are centered in yourself, it is from that place of being so centered in self. Now you'll be able to figure out what does healthy relationship to them look like. But you can't figure that out when you're not centered in yourself. So boundaries, especially these really complex, tricky ones where it's not necessarily a yes or no or a very clear, hard line in the sand. It's this weird, messy in between. You have to be able to start feeling boundaries and not thinking of boundaries as this band-aid that you just get a slip on things. It's like, yeah, we need band-aids, and they work great for certain needs. But like, that's not always what's needed. I hope this episode and this series is starting to give you some language and tools to be able to see yourself and these relationships and these complex boundaries that you're navigating in a much more clear way, even if somewhat of the clarity is like bringing more mud in. Because again, we're shaking out that rug of good and grateful, and we're saying, yes, things are good, and we're so grateful. And we need to start telling the truth about what else there is. Because once we tell the truth, we can be set free. And being set free doesn't always mean it's easy or that it feels good. Again, that whole question of how do I set boundaries without feeling guilty? It's like sometimes you don't. Sometimes you learn how to feel massive amounts of guilt, massive amounts of discomfort, massive amounts of grief or disappointment while you set the boundary. Because you've learned how to have emotional resilience and intelligence where you understand that you feeling quote unquote bad doesn't mean that you're doing the wrong thing. Sometimes the right choices are the hard ones, are the uncomfy ones, are the ones that we're resisting. Your resistance is a beautiful thing. And we have to learn how to listen to it. She has a message, she has a medicine, your resistance, your no, your not yet, you're too close. Those are important things for you to start feeling and listening to. This work, my goal is not to lead you to a specific destination. It is to embody you with an entirely new posture and this dynamic real this dynamic relationship to your liveness, to moving towards people, to moving away from them, to moving to the side of them, being able to work with the energetics and what is leaking your energy and capacity and attention, and being able to hold that nuance. It is building a firm, strong backbone that doesn't just make you rigid and harsh or cruel, but it actually protects and even enhances your beautiful heart. When people heal from people pleasing, when people heal from fawning, from freezing, from dissociation. When I'm working with women, I've never met a woman who wanted to be more cruel or unavailable. She wanted more capacity to help others. She didn't want to just learn how to say no better. She wants to learn how to say yes better. She wants to have more to give other people. She wants to do her best to repair this relationship to her parents. She doesn't want to throw them out. She doesn't want to just quit the relationship because it's hard. She wants to build capacity for the hard and she wants to learn when enough is enough. How do you feel that? How do you know when enough is enough? How do you feel the appropriate distance and the appropriate contact and the appropriate access someone has to you or doesn't have to you? I want to teach you how to feel that, how to move that, how to how it changes, how it's alive, how to build your capacity to hold more of that and the complexities of it because that's one of my goals. I want to be able to have really rich relationships, even with people who feel hard to me or difficult or uncomfortable. I want to build my relationship and my ability to be with conflict. Conflict is not my favorite thing. I am not, I am very conflict avoidant. I have to work with that in my life. I have to work with that being conflict avoidant and this pattern in me that would rather say nothing. And by the way, high functioners can be so good at conflict avoidance because we're so good at just managing it all ourselves. We just micromanage and play that emotional, mental, relational chess game, and they don't even know we're playing it. We take on and we put ourselves in this role where we're having massive amounts of internal turmoil and conflict because we're so uncomfortable bringing it to the other person. And I don't mean conflict as in just like fighting. I mean just like for a lot of women, just telling your partner what you want and need directly, simply, you feel like you're dying. Being honest and vulnerable and raw about like how hard things feel or how messy things feel, you think you're protecting them. You just do all of the cleanup and the care yourself, and you never give them access to care and love for you the way that you deserve. You've never given them the chance. That happens. That happens in these relationships. That happens, and it's not just because the other person is bad or cruel. It's because we're self-protecting so much that we're keeping them out. And they don't even know. They might not even know. There's so much nuance and layers and levels. And as someone who has witnessed so many different things, I hope I'm bringing it the reverence and the space and the time that it needs. Um, I'm so used to this relational work being in relationship, where like it's me and a client, and we're sitting and we're working with her content and her context and her stories. And one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast series and these blogs is to find how do I take that relational work with women that I've witnessed, that I've walked with them through, and bring it to this space and place where it can support and help so many more women who like haven't even found that yet. So I hope this has been helpful and I would I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear your questions. I would love to hear your context. If you are specifically wanting coaching and support, that nuanced work of radical responsibility, boundaries work that isn't just based on behaviors. And here's the beautiful thing: here, like the heart of my work is always we're not just trying to give you these quick fix, simple tools. We're trying to create a strength in you that doesn't just work for this role or relationship, it works everywhere else. And that's one of the reasons why I do much more long-term coaching than like a program. The thing that I am best at with helping women is when we take these and build them into postures, we build them into something that becomes automatic within yourself. And it works in every season because it's tested and it's tried and it's applied. It's not just you knowing a thing because I could teach you all of the tools. I could give it to you. I, but this work, this somatic work, this boundaries work, it's not just about understanding it in your head. It's about where it's landing in your body, in your throat, in your chest, in your gut, and your present and your past. It's happening in your nervous system. This is happening in relationship with you and another person. It has to be relational. This work has to be relational. It has to be a conversation. It cannot be this one-dimensional or even two dimensional thing. It has to have this dynamic aliveness. I hope this is helpful, and I'll see you in the next episode. Make sure to follow to be able to catch the next episodes in the series, and I'll see you next time.