22 - Wrap Yourself in Boundaries this Christmas

TRANSCRIPT

As a reminder: on January 1, we are changing the name of the podcast to Like Driving in Fog -- an Emotional Healing Podcast. I’m Mary Young, and I’m so glad you joined us again today.

If you listened to last week’s podcast, we were talking about not going home for the holidays. You know, everybody makes a big deal -- it’s the happiest time of the year! Home is the only place to be! But for a lot of people home is toxic, and they feel guilty about not going home, or not wanting to go home. So I talked last week about it’s okay to not go home for the holidays, and maybe you need to build some new holiday traditions.

However I also said if you do go home, wrap yourself in boundaries and so I wanted to touch on that this week. What are boundaries? Are you sure I’m allowed to have them? And how the heck do I have boundaries around my family, and how do I honor those boundaries?

I gotta be honest with you -- I was 38, maybe 40, before I ever realized that it was okay for me to have boundaries.  We don’t have boundaries in my family. In fact, one of my mom’s favorite sayings was what’s yours is mine and what’s mine’s my own. If it belonged to anybody in the family, it belonged all of us. That concept of private ownership among family members just didn’t really exist. If you had something and another family member needed it, you were supposed to share. Or maybe even to give. If that’s the kind of family you come, from then going home for the holidays just means going back into that situation.

 I used to tell people: you know, it doesn’t matter how old I am; it doesn’t matter how successful I am in my life. When I go home I am 12 years old again. That’s how they all see me and that’s how they’ll treat me. And I just gotta tell you, that is not comfortable. That is not how I want to be seen or treated. I want to be seen or treated as the successful woman that I am; as the age that I am; as the adult that I am. And that’s the kinda stuff that kept me from going home. I would go home once every four or five years.

I understand if you have less-than-perfect families. And face it - most people in the world have less-than-perfect families. That’s just how it is. part of growing up, part of becoming emotionally healthy, part of maturity, is learning to let those people be who they are without letting them dictate who you are or how you behave. So if you’re gonna go home -- and sometimes we don’t feel like we have a choice -- you need to wrap yourself in boundaries. You need to protect yourself.

How do we do that?

The first step to boundaries is very simple:  believe you deserve them. Believe you are allowed to have them. A corollary to that would be believe that you need them. We all need boundaries. We don’t all realize that, but we all need boundaries. And those boundaries go both ways.

There is behavior that I will not accept from other people, but there is also behavior that other people should not expect from me.  

So part one: believe that you deserve boundaries.

Part two: decide what those boundaries are. What is acceptable behavior to you? At what point will you disengage and walk away? For me, I started staying away from the family home. I would not sleep at the family home. It did not mean I didn’t love my parents, it meant that I love myself and I was going to take care of myself.

So figure out what your breaking point is, and make sure you have a plan to not reach that breaking point.  That’s what the boundary does. Think of it like a guardrail. That boundary allowed me to say: this is getting close to where I would break. Let me get out of here before I do.

Step number three is the hardest part.  You’ve realized or accepted that you deserve boundaries, that you’re allowed to have boundaries. You have established for yourself what those boundaries are, what behavior or words you will not tolerate and what action you will take if something comes up that you won’t tolerate. If they do this, I will do that. If they start a shouting match, I will leave. If they all get drunk, I will leave. It’s not fun to hang around a bunch of drunks.

The hard part is enforcing the boundaries. And let me tell you straight up -- they are not going to support you enforcing your boundaries. They don’t want you to have boundaries. You’ve never had boundaries before. They’ve always been able to control you. They’ve always been able to suck you into their drama, or whatever the case may be.

It’s no good having boundaries if you’re not going to enforce them. So again, decide that you deserve boundaries. Figure out what those boundaries are and enforce those boundaries.

And I make it sound so simple. Just 1 2 3. I know it’s not simple, especially at the holidays.  These are the most challenging times of the year. But I also know that you can do it, because I went from 40 years of not having boundaries, to having and honoring my own boundaries.

And if you have a hard time, and I did have a hard time at first.  But if you have a hard time, and start thinking Oh, I could just let that go. They don’t mean to be that way. This is just who they are...what would you do if they were treating your kid that way? Would you ask your child to stay, or would you find a way to get your child out of that situation?

You have a responsibility to yourself. I have a responsibility to myself, to nurture me the way that I would nurture a child. It’s part of self-care -- taking care of yourself. And if the only way that you can take care of yourself is to think what would I do if it was a small child, then use that use that, until you have learned how to nurture yourself.

There is unacceptable behavior in the world.

Some of it comes from family members.

You are not required to suffer through unacceptable behavior.

Eleanor Roosevelt said nobody can make us feel inferior without our consent.  My therapist says we teach people how to treat us. What we accept, is what they know they can do. They may have spent the last 20, 30, 40, 60 years treating you like you have no value, but that does not have to go on. We teach people how to treat us by what we accept.  

• Having boundaries helps teach them to treat us with respect.
• Having boundaries helps teach them to treat us like human beings.
• You deserve boundaries.
• You are allowed to have boundaries.
• You have a right to boundaries.

Internalize that. Paste it on your mirror so you see it every day if that’s what you need, but get that inside you, so that it’s inside your brain. Inside your heart. Inside your soul.

It’s okay to have boundaries.

You are allowed to have boundaries.

All healthy people have boundaries.

It’s okay to say stop kicking me.  It’s okay to say that is unacceptable behavior.  It’s okay to say I’m going to leave now, and then walk away. It’s okay to say I’m going to hang up now, and then hang up.

Boundaries.  They are critical to emotional health.  They are critical to you being emotionally healthy, to me being emotionally healthy. Find your boundaries. Identify them. Identify what behavior is unacceptable. Identify what you will do when faced with unacceptable behavior, and then do it.

And if you need somebody to support you, come back to my Facebook page and say hey, I just did that boundary thing and I’m just not sure, because it’s hard. And I will celebrate with you for doing the boundary thing. And I will understand that it’s hard. And I will encourage you to keep setting those boundaries, and keep enforcing those boundaries. And you will find that life gets better with boundaries, especially when you’re around people who don’t have any.

Thank you so much for listening.

Go make it a great week.