EP16: From the Heart | Boundaries, Consequences, and the Fantasy of Potential

Why do we stay in cycles that hurt us? In this episode, we explore the true catalyst for transformation: the moment the pain of staying in a destructive pattern finally becomes greater than the pain of making a change. I share my personal story of recovery, highlighting why "loud" consequences were the necessary factor in my shift and how we often accidentally hinder others by shielding them from their own natural outcomes. 

We also dive into the "Potential Trap"—the danger of holding onto a fantasy of who someone could be instead of believing the person their actions are showing them to be today. We discuss why a boundary without a consequence is just a bunch of words, and how to stop teaching people that you are available for mistreatment. 

Finally, we look at what happens when you are the one who changes. When you choose to grow, it "changes the dance," which can be triggering for those around you who are still doing the old steps. Tune in to learn how to navigate the honest, messy, and necessary cost of growth with more grace and deep clarity. 

Chapters

• 1:04 Why We Change & The Power of Consequences
• 11:00 The Potential Trap & The Reality of Boundaries

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

There are moments in life that split us open. Quiet unravelings, sudden frames, or truths we didn't know we needed until we had no choice. This podcast is about those moments. It's about the turning points that change us. The things I wish someone had told me that I only understand and looking back. Come on in. You belong here, and we're gonna talk about all of it. I'm your host Natanya, and this is what I didn't know. Before we begin, a quick note. This podcast explores themes such as mental health, addiction, trauma, and recovery. While the stories here are honest and heartfelt, they're not a substitute for professional advice, therapy, or medical treatment. Please listen with care and pause anytime you need to. Take whatever resonates for you and leave the rest. Every so often I sit down to record something just for you. A short reflection, no script, no guest. It's where I share what I've been thinking about lately, straight from the heart. Alright, today's episode, we are gonna talk about the concept of change. And specifically, we're gonna talk about it in three different parts. The first part is when people change, what causes people to change in the first place. People will change when the pain of staying the same, of continuing the pattern of whatever they're already in that is is not going well for them is greater than the pain of change. I'm gonna say it again. People will change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. So whatever that looks like, you know, everyone has a different rock bottom. I have seen just the largest spectrum ever of what causes people to hit that point of low. And there's been many people at different points in time where I thought this has to be it. Like this is so bad. What whatever this awful thing is, this has to be what causes him or her to change. And it doesn't. And one of the things is to consider in whether or not someone's gonna change is what are the consequences of what they're going through. Again, they're different for everyone, and some even consequences, I've seen really bad consequences still not cause people to change. And that's why I want to be clear in my repetition of the fact that this is individual and what everyone's rock bottom is is different. But for whatever's internally, whatever that pain point is for them, is when that shift will happen. Um, an example I want to give is in terms of consequences. You know, a couple years ago, I put myself in the hospital twice, two different times from substance use. And the first time was um, you know, something happened. I ended up in an ambulance and in the ER, and very few people knew about it. And the people that knew about it were very supportive and kind of kept it to themselves. And when I got out of the hospital, I took, you know, a couple days maybe, and then went right back to what I was doing. There were no consequences for me to face. Nobody really knew about it. Um, nothing changed in my world, and I had convinced myself that this wasn't a problem, and so I could just make a couple shifts and go back to what I was doing slightly differently and would be fine. The second time that it happened, I again, ambulance, hospital. And the second time was a lot louder. I had more repercussions. I had physical, you could see on my face that I had been in the hustle. I did not look good for several different reasons. A lot of people knew about it, and I couldn't, I couldn't hide from it. And so for me, somewhere in the difference between the first incident and the second incident, which were very similar to each other, the real difference was the consequences that I had to face, which was that everybody knew about it. I couldn't hide it anymore. And I had been hiding something for many things for a long, long time. And so this was sort of like a someone shining a flashlight on you and saying, Hey, like we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about this. And so in that space, I made a different choice on round two versus round one, and that was that this was gonna get worse. It had already gotten worse, and I had been around enough other people that had had this experience before that um, you know, my ex-husband was in the hospital several times for substance abuse, and I watched him for years get worse and worse and worse each time he went into the hospital. And I saw what happens, especially when when you are in denial about a thing and you don't want to face it, and then you go back to the thing that you were doing, it it doesn't go away, it just gets louder. And so for me, this was my experience of it had gotten louder, and I was really not interested in seeing what a third time might look like. And so, with that consequence that was louder for me, I made a different choice. And in that choice, I drew a line in the sand and was like, you know what, I think we're done with this. I have tried 750,000 ways to make my life work in and around this thing that I've been doing, and it's not going well. And the thing I haven't tried is not using that anymore. Um, and so I'm gonna go that way instead. And so far, that has gone very well. Um, but the fact that consequences pay a play a big role in that. I've I spent a couple years, some of my training when I was working in recovery was with helping coach families of people who had a family member who had a substance abuse problem. So the coaching was not actually for the person, it was for the people surrounding that person. And one of the things that was my favorite thing to coach, that's also the hardest thing to be in, is um the concept of enabling that when you when you sort of make this easier, even though it's it's coming from a place of caring, when you make it easier for someone to continue using, even if you're trying to keep them safe, it's actually allowing them to just continue the habit or to continue, continue keeping it up. So an example would be um, you know, if a woman, if her husband came home at night and he was drunk and he parked on the lawn and passed out on the living room floor, in the past she would go move the car and put it in the driveway so the neighbors didn't see, and she would get him off the floor and either, you know, put him on the couch or put in the beds. And we would coach what's called natural consequences, which is allowing someone to have the natural outcome of what those consequences would be from their actions so that they can fully feel the effect of what they're doing. So using that same example, I would coach her to not move the car and to let let him wake up on the living room floor and to feel what it feels like to wake up in that space and to go out in the driveway and know that the neighbors saw that you parked on the lawn and just to sit in the discomfort of what that might feel like because it's the truth of what you did. And a lot of, especially in substance abuse, a lot of this world gets hidden around lying and hiding and maneuvering and painting ways for people to see us that we want them to see that may not be the truth because we would be afraid of what they would think of us if they saw the full truth anyway. All right, part two is one of the traps that I have gotten into more times than I can possibly imagine, and I know several people who have had the same experience, is the fantasy of who someone could be. And it's when someone isn't changing or um, you know, is continuing a certain pattern or behavior, whether doing something or not doing something, and you you keep a whole holding on hope for who they could be if they showed up differently than the way that they're currently showing up. But the problem with this is that actions are what you want to focus on here, and if the person's actions are in fact not changing or not indicative of moving in a more optimistic direction, and their words are just telling you what they're going to do or what they care about or what they think, but they're not actually making any moves in that direction, that when people, I think this is a Maya Angelou quote. I could be wrong in my quoting, but I feel pretty confident in that. Uh, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. I have, on many occasions, whether it's romantic relationships or friends or family members or just anyone in my world, employees, coworkers, um, when you can sort of see the potential of who someone could be, if they just this, if they just did this thing, if they just stopped doing this other thing, if they just changed a little bit and you know they have it in them, um, you stay in the same situation hoping for them to change, and they don't throughout that, throughout that process, all you can ever do is make your own choices in terms of how you're gonna show up in and around this person or or um, you know, engage with this person and to remember that you teach people how to treat you. I'll give an example from a friend from a long time ago. She was trying to date this guy who lived in Australia and she lived in America, and he kept calling her at in the middle of the night because in Australia it was the daytime. And she was like, Hey, can you not can you not call me at 3 a.m. my time? You know, can we try to find a time that's in the evening or the morning for both of us? One of, you know, the opposite or whatever for both of us, so you don't keep calling or texting me at 3 a.m. because it wakes me up. And he kept doing it anyway. And so we were talking about this, and I said, Do you answer him? And she said, Well, what do you mean? I said, Do you, when he texts you and you wake up or you hear it, do you respond? And she said, Yeah. And I said, So even though you set the boundary of please don't do this thing, like I don't want you to do this thing, your actions are telling him that you're available at three in the morning because you're answering him. Even if your answer is please don't do this, you're still making time to respond to him. So he's getting a response out of texting you at three in the morning. So you're not actually upholding anything. So a boundary doesn't do anything if there's no, we're gonna go back to the same thing, if there's no consequence. So if you just say something and then nothing happens from the thing that you said, then you didn't actually set a boundary. You just said a bunch of words. A boundary will have a consequence to it. So if this, then that. So if, you know, if you call me at 3 a.m., I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna answer, you're not gonna hear from me, and I'll get back to you the next day when it's an appropriate time for me to pick up the phone. Right. So then he stops getting the fix of of connecting with her every time he tries at 3 a.m. and then has to wait for something that works for her if he wants to continue in this relationship. But she wasn't doing that. She was just giving into the thing. So she's teaching him that she is in fact available, even though she said that she wasn't. All right, part three. This is when you have changed and others have not. I've been talking about this recently at the time of this recording, it's around the holidays. And I was talking to someone who was frustrated that going to h to family time, that the people around around him weren't respecting the fact that he doesn't use substances anymore and he was mad about it. And while I think there's, you know, many approaches to this, one of the basic things is to know that you can only control yourself and you can have conversations, you can request things, people may or may not choose to respect you. Um, and then you have choices that you can make from that place of like, cool, they didn't do that, so I'm gonna do this or not do this moving forward. And sometimes that does mean things like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go to that thing anymore, which really sucks, but it it's not a good place for me to be, so I'm gonna opt out. But what I want to say about this that I think helps give a little bit perspective, and it is not justification of how other people are behaving, but what it does do is I think give a little bit of grace and compassion for understanding the role that you've played in what you just did. And so I like to say that in a situation like this, what has happened is that you have changed the dance. So for years, you've been doing the mambo. You've been doing this step, they do that step, this is the expectation, you lean in here, and you both know what you're gonna expect, and you both know how it goes, and it always goes the same way. And everybody just keeps functioning from that same system because you've been doing the same dance. And in the context of when you have changed in some aspect, um you showed up doing the salsa. And a lot of people in that situation, the other people involved, don't know what to do with that. And you being the person that changed can often be triggering for them, especially if the context in which you used to behave was a a form of camaraderie or celebration or friendship or family connection. You know, there are many families through which substance use is bonding, right? And so if you show up one day and you're not, you're not in that that tribe anymore because you you chose to go work on yourself or do something different or look at things and ask questions for yourself, that can be very triggering to the people that you that you were engaging with that you're no longer engaging with. You know, it's like saying, um, we all go to the store and we all pick the blue, we all pick the blue markers. Every year we all pick the blue markers, and this year you show up and you're gonna pick red, and everybody goes, Well, what's wrong with blue? Like, why don't you like blue? What what's you know, and so there's it can be triggering for them, especially if they have their own problems, which I'm I'm never a you know advocate for telling people whether they have problems or not. But if they are heavy substance users also and they don't want to look at that, then you making that choice, even if you didn't ask them to change, you making the different choice choice and showing up and functioning differently is sort of a rejection of the thing that they've been doing. You separated yourself from the tribe, and whether you meant to or not, it can be confronting because people will feel like, well, what's wrong with what's wrong with me? What are you saying is wrong with the way that I do things? Even if that's not something that you directly said, your behavior can be confronting to them, especially if they're not in a space of being ready or wanting to look at that. And so while again, that doesn't justify the way that they behave, what I what it does and has done for me is it helps me to understand when someone responds in a way that's less than um less than optimal, it helps me to have a little bit of grace and to take myself out of it and to see that their response is about them. It's not about me. I've been very lucky in that many people in my life have been supportive of my choices to change in all sorts of things. Um whether it was to stop using substances or to move states or to get a divorce. You know, I I've changed a lot of things. And I've had a lot of people around me for the most part that have been supportive of that, even in even in times where they weren't sure or they were questioning, or like, are you sure this is the right thing you want to do? Um, but there have been a handful of people that did not like the choices that I made for several reasons. And I've just had to get better at choosing the thing for myself because it's good for me. Um, removing myself from situations that aren't. And, you know, anytime anyone sort of jabs at me or passive aggressively says things that suggest that they don't like the choice that I've made for one reason or another, I get to opt out of that. I get to opt out of that moving forward, you know, and there's many different ways to handle that, but it's just about I think overall understanding that like you did in fact change the dance. I can take ownership of the fact that I did that, and it helps me to have a little bit more compassion when people don't necessarily show up in the way that I wish they would. Um, it doesn't mean they can't change. I've seen that happen as well, but it just sometimes initially, if you're pushing up against their own wounds or their own stuff and they're not ready to look at it, even you just making a different choice may be triggering for them. So that was my three-part jam on change for today, and I hope you got something out of it. Thank you so much for being here. It means more than you know. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a quick rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps more people find the show. If you want more of me, head on over to NataniAllison.com and enter your name and email for behind the scenes updates in between shows. New episodes air every Tuesday. We'll see you next week.