From People Pleasing to Belonging: Healing Codependency, Boundaries and Childhood Trauma

The Belonging Podcast by Elev8 Villages |Episode 024 | Kathleen White

What happens when your need for love, acceptance, and belonging leads you to become a people pleaser?

In this powerful episode of the Belonging Podcast, Melissa Kaye sits down with Coach Kathleen White to discuss codependency, toxic relationships, childhood trauma, boundaries, self-worth, and the journey toward healing.

Kathleen shares her personal story of growing up in a dysfunctional home, navigating unhealthy relationships, and discovering how to break free from people-pleasing patterns. Together, they explore why so many people struggle to say no, seek validation from others, and lose themselves in relationships.

You'll learn practical insights on setting healthy boundaries, building self-confidence, overcoming codependency, and creating genuine belonging in your life.

Topics Covered:
- Codependency and people pleasing
- Childhood trauma and emotional healing
- Healthy boundaries
- Self-worth and self-respect
- Toxic relationships
- Foster care and belonging
- Personal growth and recovery
- Learning to say no
- Emotional healing and resilience

If you've ever struggled with self-worth, unhealthy relationships, or feeling like you don't belong, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Kathleen White:

Facebook Business page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573485023496 
Instagram Business account: https://www.instagram.com/whtkthln 
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@PhoenixRisingLLC-e7y
Website: https://phoenixrisingllc.org/

This podcast exists because we believe belonging is not a luxury. It’s a human need. Every story shared here helps us imagine a world where no one has to walk alone. 

If this conversation resonated with you, please follow, rate, or share the show with someone who might need it today. To learn more about the movement we’re building (or to get involved) visit Elev8Villages.org.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Belonging Podcast by Elev8 Villages - where belonging becomes a place we build together. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the Belonging Podcast by Elevate Villages. I'm your host, Melissa Kay, and today we are joined by Coach Kathleen White. She has spent years navigating relationships where people pleasing and unmet needs have become the norm. So through healing, she learned how these patterns developed, and she's here today to explore with us how this relates to our need for belonging. Coach Kathleen, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Thank you so much, Melissa. I'm very excited to be here. I love what you're doing at Elevate Villages, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Well, um, I would love, let's, we can bring that into this podcast a little bit. I think it relates a lot with a lot of work you've been doing. Take us back to the times in your life when perhaps you didn't feel like you belonged. Tell us about those relationships or what brought you to saying, wow, I need to learn how to stand better in my power.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Absolutely. I was raised in a dysfunctional home, as many codependents are. And at the time I didn't really recognize, I didn't understand dysfunction or codependency, any of those buzzwords. I just knew that I never felt like I belonged in my own family. Like I didn't feel like I fit in. And I think all of this stems now I know, looking back, that as a child, I was raised with a very rigid, very disciplinarian, very um harsh father and a very critical, hyper-critical mother. So there wasn't a lot of um overt love or nurturing in the household. It was more uh a kind of a situation where you walked on eggshells and you were always waiting for the hammer to drop. My father was very much a disciplinarian. We didn't get a lot of um affirmation, not a lot of compliments. If you did something right, well, of course you did, why wouldn't you? You should, you know. But if you did something wrong, it was like the end of the world, and it was just very much a disciplinarian kind of household. And so never really felt that sense of love or value, didn't feel I was really worth attention. So when you were raised in a household like that, mine was more verbal abuse, emotional abuse, which at the time, when you're growing up, even into my adult years, I didn't really recognize that as abuse. But if you're raised in a household, it kind of boils down to having those emotional needs left unmet. The need for love, the need to be affirmed as a human being first, but as a child and understanding who you are, because children develop their identities early on, obviously, in that foundational family of origin. So if you don't know, if you're left kind of floating and not understanding foundationally who you are, and you're left to try and figure out how to get those unmet needs met, typically it comes to pleasing other people. So we make ourselves very useful. We want to be helpful to people in hopes that they will give us what we need, which is again that love and attention and affirmation. And so that develops this cycle of this constant chronic people pleasing. So when you don't get the love you need as a child, you look for that everywhere else. You've heard that saying that you're looking for love in all the wrong places, but it's very true. Because as a child, living in a household where there's any kind of abuse or trauma, you learn how to become very small. You don't want to take up space. You're taught that your opinion, your feelings, what you want doesn't matter. And in fact, you have no right to even ask for those needs. So as a child, you learn not to speak up because when you do, you're punished, you're mocked, you're ridiculed, whatever the case may be, or even just ignored. And so to try to find some way to matter, we do that through relationships and other people. But that sets us up for manipulation, coercive control, abuse, all of those things when we're a chronic people pleaser. So we don't really learn how to set those boundaries because we're never allowed to as a child. We were told, my father was a Marine. So we were told what to do, when to do it, how to do it. You know, we never were told the why. We were just it's because they said so. So we learned very early on to take orders from others. We were followers, we never learned how to set those boundaries. And so that sort of carried with me through all of my life, through friendships, even work relationships, um, but more importantly, in romantic relationships. So I ended up uh being married to a uh man with narcissistic personality disorder. And so that is where I really began to completely lose myself and any little bit of identity that I had gained over the years. And I got so beaten down, I just didn't even know who I was. Because we're, as codependents, we work so hard to make everybody else happy. We keep everybody else happy. But what happens is we start to lose ourselves piece by piece until there's not a whole lot left. So at that point, just beginning to understand that there's there's an issue, there's something wrong. But the common denominator in all of these painful relationships was me. So I began to recognize it's easy to play the victim a lot of times when you have a partner who is abusive or who cheats, but I began to realize there was my part in this, that I was choosing these partners over and over. And it was a chronic pattern of unhealthy relationships. So I thought, my gosh, what do I need to do? There's clearly work for me to do in order to heal. So I sort of started that journey. I wanted to figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix it. I had not really understood or heard the word codependency necessarily. I thought it had mostly to do with drugs and alcohol. So I had gone to a series of therapists and I did some support groups. And that's where I learned that I was codependent. And I began to understand what that really meant. Which really all that is, is the chronic need to find love and value and worth as a human being, as a person. And so we don't have those needs met. So we're we're trying to meet them through other people. And that's what leads to that people-pleasing behavior, the lack of boundaries. So I'm learning all of this. But in the course of this, I began to understand that I was codependent and kind of how I got that way. And this all made sense. But I was a little frustrated because no one was telling me, okay, what do I do to fix it? I need a plan. I need, I'm the person, I need a blueprint. Give me the plan. How do I recover? And I finally found a really good therapist who introduced me to this recovery workbook, if you will. It's it's a 12-week healing course. And I went through that with her and I began to heal. I began to change. And other people noticed it, which was wonderful. It's very affirming. So I began to understand that healing was possible, that there was hope for me to be different and have different relationships. So that was really exciting for me. And that's where I really, it really literally changed my life. So things began to transform in me. I worked to some with some human trafficking survivors. And in the course of that, I began to realize that they were deeply codependent as well. And that's sort of how I have found that in some cases, the foster care system tends to be a breeding ground, if you will, for traffickers. They find a lot of their victims there. I worked with a few different survivors. Um, but the story we hear a lot of times is they come out of the foster care system or they come out of abusive situations. And so the one gal that I worked with the longest had been in foster care for a number of years. She was picked up by her first pimp, I believe, when she was 13. And that's what led me to sort of uh become interested in the foster care system and how this all plays a role. Because I feel like the underlying issue is that codependency, because it is that need. I need to belong somewhere. Where do I fit in? Where do I find a place, a safe space for me to just be me, uniquely me, genuinely me, authentic me, and still feel valued, loved, and affirmed. And that is what is lacking so much today for many kids, many, you know, youth and adults, to be honest. Um, if they're not self-aware enough to understand their own codependency, they'll continue through life like this. So that just became one of my passions is to help other people find that healing that I found.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Thank you for all that. There's so much in there that I want to unpack. A lot to unpack. A lot to unpack there. So let's first focus on your experience. And then I want to talk a little bit more about your observations with what happens when kids don't feel love. I'm imagining a little child at home, and my experiences were a little bit similar to yours. And I think this is all you've experienced. So that's what you know to be normal. And then maybe internally you know you want more, and so you're reaching out and you're asking for more and you're being shut down in one way or another. We all have that need for love and connection. What are the ways that you can start to heal? How did love and connection look different for you after you started healing?

SPEAKER_01 9:34

The first thing that I noticed was that I was okay being alone. I began to like, to learn to like me, like myself. So I wasn't so desperate for a relationship to define me or to find a relationship where I could feel loved or valued. I began to find my value in myself and my relationship with the Lord. And that changed how I viewed other relationships.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

When you said you learned to like being alone or to like yourself, can you define that a little bit? What does it mean to like yourself? How did it look when you're in a relationship and you're loving somebody? What's different when you're alone? And give us a picture of what the difference is.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Oh man, that is such a good question. I love that so much. Um, it was more where I didn't feel, I didn't feel lonely when I was by myself. I didn't feel like I had to fill the silence. I didn't have to fill the activity with someone who was there making me feel good about myself. I had learned to start feeling good about myself, just in and of myself, that as a human being, that alone, I am worthy. I'm worthy of love as a human, as a woman, you know, as a daughter, all of those things, all of those roles that we play, I realized that I have value as a living, breathing human being. And I began to want to treat other people that same way.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

When you took time to be alone with yourself, like were you still hanging out with friends, or were you like, wow, I'm just gonna take time to be alone, read a book, think, walk? What did it look like that you think you might have been uncomfortable with earlier? Because I think people who are stuck in this, they have lots of reasons. Oh, well, I'm an extrovert, or oh, I just want a relationship. Oh, it's that time.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

But I feel like I've lived my adult life, half in relationship and half not in relationship. And I don't always know if people that are constantly in relationships one after another after another understand what it means like what it means to like yourself and to like your own company. And I'm not, I'm just trying to dig down to figure out how how could how we can explain that what kind of words can we use so that somebody could go, huh? Well, maybe I could try this and see how that feels.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Right. Because I think it does feel uncomfortable at first, just sitting quietly and finding peace. I know after my divorce from my um narcissistic husband, it was you have kind of that nervous energy when you're always walking on eggshells and your body's kind of in that fight or flight mode chronically for a long time. It's hard to release that. But once you get to the point where I was realizing, okay, I'm safe. No one's here to badger me. So who am I now? Who am I without this other person as a person alone? And what do I like about myself? And that's one of the things we did in this exercise in this workbook, writing down and saying out loud things that are good about me, things that I like about me, and think, oh, okay, you know, not just what other people say, but what I, what do I really think about myself? And so I like that exercise. I like that. I and so you begin to change your mindset. So if you're saying some negative things about yourself, beginning to use new language, more affirmative, more positive language really helped me. Like sometimes if I did something wrong, I might say, oh my gosh, you're an idiot. You know, why would you do that? I was so stupid. And then I would replace that with, you know what? Boy, that was sure human, wasn't it? You know, you made a mistake. How are you gonna fix it? Oh, okay, you're a life human being and you're, you know, you're fallible, you're allowed to make mistakes. It doesn't make you a bad person. So a lot of self-talk was involved, especially in the beginning. Just trying to reprogram my brain to think differently. Because when you've been told you're worthless all your life, or it's been demonstrated that you have no value, it it begins to be a loop in your brain. So you have to change that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

And I think like if we go over back over to the youth, they're usually at a relatively young age when they're taken from their home. And so obviously there's already trauma in the home for them to be taken out.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

So now they're taken away from their original caregivers, and then they're set into a group home or they're set into a foster home, and that foster home then can change and change again and change again. So even if the individual foster parents are exhibiting love or trying their best to create a safe space for children, what happens to their sense of self, to their sense of belonging as they're growing up being moved from home to home to home?

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Well, I think when you're raised in a household that's dysfunctional or abusive, that's all you know. That becomes kind of familiar. So healthy, normal relationships are uncomfortable in the beginning. You have to really begin to process what that means. So when a child gets taken out of what they know, particularly if it's traumatic or abusive or whatever, coming into something they don't know can be terrifying, right? So they may go from one abusive situation to unfortunately a foster care system that isn't the best. So they've already been, most likely, um traumatized in some way. They probably don't have a really good sense of self or who they are. So they're used to making themselves small or they may be used to acting out. So when they get into this foster care situation, they don't know what's coming. It can just be that can be an attack on their nervous system. They're gonna be very wary, they're gonna be um at high alert because they want to see is this safe, is this not safe? And if it isn't safe, then of course that is going to trigger all the things, all the negative things. Even if it's safe, though, it's very hard sometimes, I think, for children just to all of a sudden say, oh, okay, I'm safe, I'm fine now, and let that guard down, right? Right. So they're still waiting for the shoe to drop and they may not trust that for a good long time. So hopefully if they get a good understanding, well-trained foster parents, they will be patient with that and understand that the acting out a lot of times is just, hey, I want to see if you really mean it. Are you really gonna be here for me? Can I let go? Can I release my fear and my, you know, being at a high alert situation? So I think it's very unsettling. It's just the whole sense of, will I belong here? Maybe I didn't fit back there, but will I belong here? Will I fit here? But then they do some self-fulfilling behaviors where they act out and it tells them, okay, yeah, you're right. You're, you know, you're a bad person, you're a bad kid, you don't fit. So it's just very difficult unless they have really um uh astute foster parents that can address that.

unknown 16:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

And unfortunately in the foster system, for our listeners who may not know, even the best foster parent, fostering is set up in short, relatively short intervals. So there can be something that changes in the foster parent's life that necessitates now the child is moved, or you know, maybe a new baby's coming in, maybe there's a divorce, maybe a change of jobs, maybe moving, all sorts of things. So I know that the youth that we're working towards building villages for, these are youth who have now turned 18, 19, and the system is no longer responsible for them. But these youth, Kathleen, these youth have been in, on average, if you age out, on average, you've been in 20 to 30 different homes or different placements.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

It's heartbreaking. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

So I can like it's the youth that I talk to right now and we're working with what I see more than anything is their shrinking of themselves. Like they just try to be invisible. You know what? If I can just find a little corner that I can be in, it might not even be great, but it's mostly safe and I know what to expect. I'm just gonna be so quiet and so like in the background.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Small.

SPEAKER_02 17:45

So that nothing changes because it's only been change and change and change. Um so talk to us about as we're bringing these youth into the villages, what are some really important grounding practices that we can sort of imagine together that might be a ritual that we do with the village to remind the youth that they're grounded here. They belong here. There's no end date. This is up to them. They're gonna have their voice now.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Right. Well, I think, and it may sound somewhat silly, but I think it's a very important practice to help them verbalize those affirming statements out loud and say, look, you know, even just telling them, you could tell them, yes, you're safe here, but how do you demonstrate to that to them so that they really know it and believe it? So if they do make a mistake or if they raise their voice or if they lose their temper, how we respond to them as they're being their traumatized selves is gonna make the difference to them and how they feel safe, how they feel heard. If someone is saying, yes, I'm hearing you right now, I hear the pain in your voice, I see that you're struggling. How can let me come alongside you and support you? I'm not gonna vilify you. We're not gonna, you know, crack down on you with your anger issues. We're gonna walk with you and we're gonna show you new ways to behave, and we're gonna show you that this doesn't serve you anymore. This behavior no longer serves you because you're in a different environment. We're gonna demonstrate that for you. So I think that patience and that consistency, they're looking for consistency because they don't really have a foundation of identity. So help them find their identity. They don't even know what they like and don't like in a lot of cases. I got to that point where I didn't know what I liked and I married anymore. I didn't even know who I was. So when you don't have that foundation, you're desperate to figure it out. You need to know who am I and where do I belong?

SPEAKER_02 19:43

What's some ways that our listeners, if they're feeling like, wow, you know, I do know I'm a people pleaser or a rescuer or I have poor boundaries, my self-esteem isn't where it should be. What are some exercises that they can do to start the process of healing and coming back to themselves and really understanding that they are worthy and they do belong and they do have value?

SPEAKER_01 20:10

I am a big proponent. I I think therapy is really important just to help us kind of understand, identify, articulate what the issue is, right? But then understand a path to recovery. Um, in my case, I found someone that had this wonderful workbook, and that really changed my life. I've gone through that workbook with others and in the groups that I lead, and it really is very healing. So if somebody else is listening to this and thinks, hey, what do I need to do? Support groups are wonderful, but again, they're very, they are supportive and they're good for emotional support, but they don't actually help you find the steps to recovery. One of the things that I had to do early on is learning the art of saying no, learning how to say no. What I had to do was I had to find someone who was emotionally safe for me that I felt really comfortable with. And I actually told her, okay, this is what I'm going through to do as a people pleaser. I need to practice verbally saying no in safe situations. And it might just be something ridiculous. So she would ask me things and I would say no to her. And it felt so foreign, so uncomfortable at first. It was very, I felt I had a visceral reaction, like a physical reaction to telling somebody no. Because we have that fear of rejection, right? That fear of abandonment that the person's gonna leave and never want to, you know, talk to us again. And because relationships are so important, that's terrifying for a codependent. So we don't learn to say no, right? So I had to practice, and it sounds crazy, but I gained to practice in very safe, mundane things. You know, if someone said, Hey, you know, we're watching a movie, can you get up and get me a glass of water? No, I believe that's something you can do for yourself, which I mean, you want to be not obviously you would if you're getting up, you're gonna get a glass of water. I'm just saying we need to practice saying it out loud. Because the problem is when people ask us to do things, we say yes. Even it's if it's to our own detriment, it could actually harm us and hurt us, and we're still trying to please the other person. But we have to start somewhere. So start small with a safe person and just practice saying no. So I had a gal I was working with and I told her, I'm just gonna like periodically, I'm gonna ask you to do ridiculous things. You know, really ridiculous things so that you can just practice saying no. So I would text her and say, hey, come over and do my dishes, because she was my neighbor. And she would be like, Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, sorry. You're just gonna say, no, that doesn't work for me. That's all you're gonna say. Don't explain it, don't justify it. So then I would say, Hey, give me $100. No, that doesn't work for me. Okay, cool. So it took her a while to it takes us all a while to stop apologizing and over-explaining why we can't do something. So it took a lot of practice for me to say no and just sit in that and be comfortable at that and have peace with my no. So that was something simple that had a huge impact on me.

SPEAKER_02 22:56

Yeah, it doesn't sound simple, but it does, I mean, it it is simple and it's I can see how difficult that is. Yeah, very hard. But I love that. Yeah, like you're that friend you know you're safe with and doing these ridiculous asks as like the entry point to where you and and not apologizing. That's a huge one. Not, oh, I'm so sorry I can't, or even necessarily explaining. I mean, still obviously do with kindness, but no, that I like what you said. No, I think you can get up and get your own water.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Like, you know, I mean, it's just, and you don't even need to even say that. Just say, no, that doesn't work for me. That's my go-to now, isn't that work for me? Yeah. And even sometimes now, like in fact, I actually use this recently. I use this a lot, actually. I have when someone isn't accepting my no and they keep pushing, I will be very nice. I'll be very proud, I'll smile and I'll say, Are you having a hard time accepting my boundary? Or why do you think it's hard for you to accept my no? And they backpedal so quick. Oh no, that's fine. Okay, no, I don't have an issue with your boundary. You know what I mean? Because to them, it's putting it back on them. So I always try to put it back in their life to explain themselves rather than me trying to explain my no. And it works every time. I've never not had it work.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Wow. Yeah, great advice. Thank you. So, Kathleen, your coaching practice is called Phoenix Rising. Tell us how you came up with that name for your coaching practice.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Because, you know, I have been doing this for years with groups of um people from my church, and now I'm going online so that more people can access it. But after I did a group session, I would ask them to do reviews just of the class, what we could improve, what was better. And the term that people kept using the most was life-changing. I heard it over and over over the years. This transformed my life, this changed my life, this was life-changing. And so that got me to thinking, how do I get this? People kept saying, you need to take this. Like I have a friend in Las Vegas, I have a cousin in Michigan, I know somebody in Minneapolis. So I started doing it the last couple of semesters. I did it online. And then more people were able to join us remotely. And I realized this healing journey, these workshops are so transformative that I my passion now is to get as many people to take them and to heal as possible. I want everyone to have the gift of healing that this therapist gave me. And so I want everyone to have access to that. So I opened it up online. So do you work with groups or individuals both? I do groups. I still use the same workbook, and those are live interactive groups. So everyone comes together, there's a lot of support. Somebody wants to have a little more support. I do one-on-one coaching sessions specific to those types of issues. So yeah. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Let's get into belonging a little bit in the last segment. When we think of codependency or being in an unhealthy or toxic relationship, not having boundaries. How can we create belonging for ourselves so that we can now create belonging for other people? Like I think trying to jump in and belong to someone in a relationship or to belong to a group or to belong to a church, I think that happens a lot because people don't feel like they belong. So, how can we belong to ourselves first and then extend that circle outward?

SPEAKER_01 26:26

Well, I think it's important that we honor ourselves and we honor our own authentic self and that we're okay being ourselves. So if I'm in a relationship with somebody, whether it's a friendship, whoever it may be, if I feel like I cannot be myself, I can't say what I want to say, express how I feel, then to me, that's not a genuine relationship. So I want to be able to be comfortable being who I am and recognize, okay, these are my opinions. This is what I want in a relationship. This is what I feel like I deserve when I'm interacting with other people. So once I get comfortable with that, I can translate that to other people. So if I find other relationships, even in work relationships where I feel like I'm not able to be who I need to be, then that's not a healthy relationship for me. Right. So I need to learn how to um enforce my boundaries, but in a healthy, positive way that also honors the other person. What is that? Um yes.

SPEAKER_02 27:29

So I want to go to the boundaries a little bit because it's such a, I'm gonna say it's like a buzzword now. Everybody's, oh, there are boundaries, they're boundaries. Where do you where do you so I I sometimes feel like boundaries are so overused now? Like if I just don't want to be kind to you, then I'm oh, that's my boundary.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

So where like how do we walk that tightrope between honoring ourselves, knowing how to say no, setting those boundaries, and yet also still being a human who's gonna open our arms wide for other people to create belonging for them without, as a people pleaser, sliding down that slippery slope of just trying to make people happy. Because a lot of us who are recovering people pleasers are wonderful people. And people love us because we make them feel they love us. We're so whole and sweet and we're easy. And on the flip side, you can have so many boundaries that now we all live in our own little ecosystems, right? Which isn't healthy for us as humans. Right. So where, okay, so maybe this is my question. Where does codependency end and co-humaning begin?

SPEAKER_01 28:47

You know, that's a really good question. And I like it because it kind of falls into motivation, right? The motivation in the relationship. So boundaries are for me, they're not for someone else. I can say this is my boundary, and if you violate that, then I decide what I'm gonna do. If I'm gonna remove myself, if I'm just gonna speak up, how, what we're gonna do with that. I can't impose my boundary on you. I can simply say, This is my boundary, this is how I will respond to this. But I think people do, this just happened recently, actually, where somebody had brought home a new partner. And that particular woman, she felt the need to tell the host, the the, it was the parent, let's just say, who whose son was bringing home the new girlfriend. And she felt the need to tell her that what she didn't like about her house. And of course, the woman was like, well, she was so taken aback. And she said, Well, that, and she was very honest. She said, That feels disrespectful. Like, why would you say that to me? Oh, I'm just being honest. Well, there's a difference between being honest and being rude and hurtful and demeaning and that kind of a thing. Being honest is if I get a haircut and I say, Hey, what do you think of my haircut? And you say, You know, I really prefer your hair longer. That's being honest because it was, she solicited, someone solicited your opinion. But when you go into somebody else's sphere and you just volunteer a criticism that nobody asked for, yeah, that's rude.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

And it can be demeaning and offensive. And so there's a difference between, and if she's like, well, that's my boundary, I get to speak up and say my mind or whatever. No, that's not really what a boundary is. So that's kind of the excuse this gal use was, well, I speak my mind, and if you know, you don't like it, whatever. So that's not a boundary. A boundary is saying, hey, this is what I will tolerate. This is how I want to be treated. This is what I feel like I deserve. And if you can't do that for me, then I can remove myself. I might speak up and say, hey, you know what? That offended me. Did you really mean it like that? And give them the opportunity to say, wow, no, I, you know, after it came out of my mouth, it wasn't the same as I heard it in my head, kind of a thing. Give them the opportunity to relate and to communicate and have a conversation. But then you can really decide if this person really isn't going to treat you the way you need to be treated, then you decide I end the relationship or I walk away for today, or whatever the case may be. So I think boundaries, when you look at the motivation, is your boundary designed to protect you but still honor them? Or is your boundary just to hurt them? Is your motive, or is your motive to enable them? There's a difference between enabling and helping, right? We always want to help, but the motivation is different because when I need this person to like me and affirm me, because I'll do something for them to try to get that. It dishonors them when we help somebody who isn't helping themselves. If they're doing everything they can do and should be doing for themselves, but they just need a little support, a little extra help, that's help. If you're not hoping to get something out of them in terms of being affirmed and getting love or whatever you need, then that's help. But when you do it with wrong motives, like I need to feel valued. I want this person to appreciate me and tell me how great I am and that I'm awesome and tell other people, that motivation isn't genuine, right? I'm trying, I'm seeking something from them. I'm not helping them out of true motives. Does that make sense? It does.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

I like that just that difference of intention. I think our world is so fast-paced that we often just do and we don't stop and go, why am I doing this? What's my motive behind it? And even after a day to like reflect back on your day to see where I could have had a better intention or where I had a bad intention, where I showed up to do so that I could get right. Or just being so centered with who I am and my place in this world, and I know I'm showing up a hundred percent the way I need to, or the highest percent I can get to. And then I'm gonna honor other people, I'm gonna honor their journey, and come together so we can still like I it's so important for humans to belong together. Right. And so we belong together, I think right now, in so many toxic ways. And so healing from that and healing also with that intention of I'm still gonna leave myself available to create relationships in some other form, relationships that don't feel bad for either of us. Um, I think it's I I think this is uh an amazing conversation that we all need to be having on a more regular basis, not just one episode of a podcast. And um, I know there's a lot of voices out there around this, and I think it's really important because all of us have been hurt, all of us have our bad stories, all of us have the need for love and wholeness and belonging, and all of us can also give that and extend that to other people.

SPEAKER_01 33:54

So that's important.

SPEAKER_02 33:57

Yeah, extending belonging, you know, we get just in this podcast, we we talk so much about when I didn't belong or and when I did belong, and we're really trying to move into that sphere now of how do I create belonging for other people? But I can't create belonging for you until I fully belong to myself and I'm happy and healed. So I love the work you're doing, Kathleen. Um I'm so glad you're here today. I'm gonna put your information down below in the show notes so people know how to get a hold of you if they'd like to join one of your groups or get someone on one time. If they want some practice saying no.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Yes, to some really random tests.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

My pleasure to do that.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Great. Well, Kathleen, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you, Melissa. Appreciate you.

SPEAKER_02 34:47

This has been another episode of the Belonging Podcast by Elevate Villages. Thank you so much to our patron, Dee Laughlin, who makes these conversations possible. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in. Put your comments below, questions, any future guests you'd like to see on the show, please put those down below in the comments. We do read those. Thank you for being here. And let's go out there and build belonging together.