Show Me Your Boundaries and I’ll Show You Your Relationship Health

During my weekly #ConnectionSession I am positive I have mentioned something about boundaries in almost all of them. In every workbook and journal on my website, boundaries are addressed. Why though? Why do I insist on talking about something that is so obvious to healthy relationships? Because, having boundaries may be a give, but the true detection of your relationship health is around the type of boundaries you have and your understanding of your boundaries. 

Before I start getting too wordy, let me just say this; we all like to think that we have healthy boundaries. Unfortunately, this perception is not the relationship reality. So before you skip this article thinking you’re airtight in the boundaries department, keep reading. You will definitely be doing some self-reflection.

 Tell Me Your Boundaries

There are generally 3 types of boundaries: rigid, loose/porous, and healthy. For the sake of reflection I’m only going to speak on the unhealthy forms.

Rigid boundaries are boundaries that are designed to keep others at a distance, reduce closeness in order to protect. It’s like a brick wall trying to cross this space, the phrase “why are you so guarded” usually pops up a few times. What makes this type of boundary unhealthy when it’s put in place to protect? Protecting yourself is healthy right? The unhealthy part is ensuring that there is no closeness between you and another. Not allowing someone into an emotional space generally means there is no vulnerability. Connection is created in vulnerability, vulnerability grows with trust, and trust is fostered by healthy boundaries. (You see where I’m going with this?) When you’re closed off like a maximum security center, there is no way possible for people to get close to you, specifically those that you want to be close to. 

Here are a few ways to explore if your boundaries are rigid: 

1. Do you often feel isolated and misunderstood? 

2. Does being alone bring some form of emotional safety more than sharing your space and time with others? 

3.  What is your view on trusting others? Have you kept your feelings, thoughts, and plans to yourself as a form of protection? 

4. Do you show any emotions besides the general socially acceptable happiness and anger?  

Loose boundaries are boundaries that can be nonexistent or easily crossed designed to preserve closeness. This type of boundary usually comes from a “nice” person who prides themselves on being a “good (insert relationship role)” to ensure that they have good relationship with the person. They are always present and available for people, while sacrificing something that is important to them, be it time, money, space, and voice for the sake of maintaining the relationship. Some will call this being selfless or a giver. So why is being selfless and a giver in a relationship unhealthy?

It’s unhealthy because you’re sacrificing so much of yourself that you have nothing left to care for you. These actions are generally done to keep the peace in the relationship, to soothe internal fear of loosing the relationship, to close a disconnection gap. All of these are acts of preservation, not acts of mutual connection. If there are connecting results or the good deeds are not received well, then resentment grows. Resentment is a destroyer of connection, it’s a silent harboring of frustration and pain that seeps out in everyday interactions. Resentment comes out in passive aggressive behaviors that slowly tear apart relationships. It’s a vicious cycle to be stuck in. 

Here are a few ways to explore if your boundaries are loose: 

1. Do you feel like you give so much to others yet there is no one willing to give to you?  

2. How do you address conflict? Do you try to avoid conflict at all costs but when the stress becomes to much all of your issues are addressed at once?

3. Do you ever feel guilty saying “no” although you know you have nothing to give, so to relieve the guilt you say “yes”? 

4. Do you do “nice” things for people and feel unappreciated, so much so you have to remind them of the things you did and the sacrifices you made to do such nice acts? 

How hard has this hit you? If any of these boundary types sound exactly like how you’re living your life schedule your consult today.   We can get your boundaries to a space that feels productive and healthy for you.

Look, I’m not here to say if whether or not these boundaries are good or bad, I’m here to point out how the boundaries impact you and your relationships. I know you’re tired of the distrust and loneliness that your boundaries have created and I know they were created this way for good reason. But Love, they aren’t helping you right now in the emotional and relational health departments of your life. So if you want to be in a healthier and happier place let me know. 

Remember “Connection Starts With You” so start your healthy relationships journey by exploring and understanding your boundaries. Then make the necessary adjustments where you see fit.   

Other articles you may find helpful: 

How To Build The Self-Awareness Needed To Reach Your #RelationshipGoals

Your Loneliness Is Keeping You Lonely

How to Build the Self-Awareness Needed to Reach your #RelationshipGoals.

How many #RelationshipGoals have you developed but find yourself in the same disconnected rut? Many of us have this vision of the partner, friend, parent, or spouse that we want for ourselves, yet for some reason that vision starts to feel more like a daydream. Sustaining, maintaining, and fostering a lasting connected relationship is difficult. I mean just think about this, focusing on your day to day life and emotions, while attempting to care and support other's emotional experiences and life. Do you get the visual of the person on the unicycle attempting to balance the dishes all while some lucky person just throws on more dishes? Well I do! 

Despite the difficulty it takes to foster and keep lasting connected relationships, it can be done. The first step is taking an internal assessment and build a connected relationship with yourself. The relationship that you have with your emotional creates a deeper and lived understanding of connection.  This lived understanding gives you the courage, knowledge, and strength that is needed healthy lasting relationships. When building a connection with yourself, the skill of self-awareness is developed. This is the foundation needed to reach any of your #RelationshipGoals.

In order to strengthen your ability to be self-aware pay attention to the list below. Use this list to reflect and evolve. 

1.  Be honest to yourself and with yourself. First we all know that honesty is the best policy, but if you can't be honest to you, you'll never be honest with others. Truth and trust is the glue needed to keep a relationship strong. During the process of learning about ourselves or becoming self-aware, we tend to dismiss, excuse, or ignore any qualities deemed unfavorable. STOP IT!!! Gain a bit of courage, face the qualities head on, and explore them. Which leads to the next step.
2. Explore how those qualities impact your relationship interactions. This is the time to use that honesty you acquired and think about positive and negative interactions those qualities were present. How did the qualities make the interaction positive? How did they make the interactions negative. What behaviors did you display due to those qualities?
3. Discover your instinctual/bodily responses during moments of disconnection. How did your body respond to the negative interactions. Were your palms sweaty, heart beating fast, stomach churning? These are ways that your body is telling you to run far away, freeze and do absolutely nothing, fight (physically or verbally). Many times we ignore the other messages our body is sending in order to "get over it". Unfortunately for this type of thinking only makes the response come back another time. Listen to your body. Take a moment, listen, and explore. Ask yourself "what is happening to me right now?" Then try to describe the experience in detail. I know this is not too easy right now, it will be the more you do it. 
4. Build a profound emotional vocabulary. Having the correct words for our feelings can be challenging, especially when it comes to telling someone how we feel. In negative interactions the emotions never feel validated or understood, so we either stop talking or repeat ourselves. Sometimes the issue is the emotion words being shared are not matching the current internal emotional experience. The emotions that we initially share tend to be secondary emotions. These type of emotions serve the purpose of emotional protection. Angry, mad, frustrated, jealous, and resentful all push others away from us to defend ourselves from experiencing more emotional damage. Where as the primary emotions are softer emotions that draw others in; sadness, fear, confusion, disappointment, and love. The best way to know your emotions is to name them, starting at the secondary then thinking about the primary that could be a deeper fit. Example: You're frustrated. Think about the following: What am I frustrated about? What does this thing that I am frustrated about say about me as a person or my role with this person? What feeling(s) comes up when I hear that message (think about primary emotions)? How does that message impact my identity?
5. Identify ways your responses to your emotions impact disconnection. Don't try to figure out "why" but rather "what" and "how". What does knowing that I feel this emotion mean about who I and all that I believe in? What did I do to express my emotions? How did that expression help in building connection and feeling connected?

The goal here is to understand your emotions more and to more become familiar with them. When we become familiar with our own emotions, other people's emotions won't be so difficult. Gaining self-awareness grounds the notion that the only emotions and behaviors you are responsible for are your own, no one else's. There is freedom in knowing, believing, and living this. This is called acceptance, which enables you to accept yourself and your emotions and make the necessary adjustments if you so desire. Acceptance also enables you to accept others for who they are and make the necessary interactions needed for the relationship. 

Let me know your thoughts about your experiences with developing self-awareness. I wouldn't mind hearing about a few of your #RelationshipGoals.

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Your Loneliness is Keeping You Lonely.

Let's get this straight before we go any further, physically being alone is not the same as the emotional experience of loneliness. Although they can occur exclusively of each other, loneliness and being alone can also occur at the same time, which explains why some people confuse the two. No matter the way loneliness transpires, it can deeply impact your ability to begin, sustain, and/or maintain healthy relationships. So what makes loneliness and being alone different? Being alone is about physical space, not having an actual presence around you. This can be easily altered and has less of an impact on your emotional world. Whereas loneliness is a longing for connection; a strong desire to encounter emotional closeness with yourself or others. Some people have described it as emptiness, a void if you will. This emotional event has much more of a impact on your emotions and how you interact with the world around you. People tend to make unhealthy, ineffective, and unsafe decisions just to fill the void and rid the loneliness. 

 Here are a few behaviors that you may have done to fill that void only to feel even lonelier.  

You bend your boundaries. In order to fill the void you bend your boundaries to do anything you believe will bring closeness in your life. You do things for others that you may not necessarily want to do, like become more agreeable, suddenly become not so busy, and spend time with someone you may not actually want to be around, or give something you didn't want to give. Yet you do these acts with the hope that they bring you some form of closeness through acknowledgment, appreciation, commitment, time or attention. Despite bending your boundaries to experience the connection, you are left with the experience of disappointment, hurt, sadness, even more loneliness, and less hope in people. This emotional event drives the notion to protect your heart from the possibility of being hurt again. The possibility of connection becomes frightening. To protect yourself you decide to spend less time with others, and soon after the decision to never be as open and available again followed. But, being closed off only drives the void even more. In order to rid yourself of the void, your boundaries are bent again to obtain some sort of closeness and clear away the lonely. Maybe this time, you tell yourself "they won't do it again" so you easily forgive, or this happens with a different person. This is not to say your boundaries are at fault here, there is not fault being placed at all. I'm pointing out an emotional cycle that is as hard to get out of as Sprint contract. Nonetheless, you're in it and it just keeps repeating. Longing for connection, opens heart, disappointment, block the heart, lonely, open heart, repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat. 

You avoid taking time to be alone. As I shared earlier, people confuse being alone and lonely because they can occur at the same time, so often people avoid being alone and spending time with themselves to stay away from feeling lonely. There are moments when you've done so yourself. You decide to stay busy, taking on so many tasks that you feel utterly too drained to spend time with your inner world. I mean who has time to really get to know their emotions, right! There are times that you've gone to places where you may not really want to be, taken on tasks knowing that your plate is too full, but it beats being in a space by yourself. In a space that reminds you that there is emptiness, a longing for something that you cannot describe. You avoid this space because it requires that you feel the emotions and let them do their job; send internalized messages about how you're experiencing the world. This experience is heavy, it hurts, and it’s confusing, so its avoided at all cost. You're willing to accept the mental and physical drain of taking on too much. You're also willing to be in places you don't want to be in, and you're willing to spend time with people you may not really care for, all done to steer clear of spending alone time with your emotions. This pattern heightens internal disconnection from your physical self and your emotional self. The more disconnected you are from your emotional being the more lonely you feel, which jumps you back into that cycle of stay busy, avoid, take a break, emotionally crash, become overwhelmed, stay busy, avoid, well you get it.

You obstruct you're ability to share deep emotions with others a.k.a. withdraw. When you're stuck in the whirlwind cycle called loneliness, you've lost hope in others and can't stand to feel any type of emotion because all it does is remind you that there is a void, disconnection, no attachment... nothing. All of those behaviors that you displayed to show connection to others left you feeling worse. So you decide that it is best to not share your true feelings with anyone, just mask it with anything but vulnerability; independence, positivity, indifference, aloof, anger, sarcasm, you name it. So when someone is begging to connect, you are no longer able to do so. This reaction is out of fear, done so to protect you from the possibility of being hurt again. You've created this protective layer so thick that it has become impenetrable by others and even you. In order to feel connected with others there is a mutual sharing and caring of deep emotional experiences. Due to the fear, sharing is superficial, surface level. When another person notices the desire to avoid vulnerability, feelings of disconnection begin within the relationship begin. Once disconnection is sensed, then behaviors to fill the void and purge the loneliness begin. Only to self-prophesize that people are a disappointment and not opening up is a good idea. Then the cycle starts all over again. 

It’s my responsibility as a Relationship Consultant to get you out of the painful cycle of loneliness. I support you in confronting the hurts, the fears, the disappointments, and all the other emotions that come along the way. I help you embrace your emotional self by teaching you to listen to the messages that emotions are trying to tell you. Once you have that down then you're more grounded in your boundaries, able to spend time with you inner-self, and able to open up emotionally to those you believe to be worthy of your vulnerability. My job is to guide you to connection by simply connecting you to love.