The Importance of Boundaries

We had a participant in Healing Hands that arrived on her first day without her boundaries. Did she leave them at home on that particular night? No, this was a woman who may never have known the power of boundaries at all. With a simple suggestion and some light imagery, her life changed!

This was a wake up call to all of us in the group and one of our members in particular had a great outlook from her years in Al Anon. Here is her lesson on boundaries.

Living with Boundaries:

• Know yourself deeply.
• Know where you stop and some else begins.
• Ask the questions, "What belongs to me? What are my responsibilities in a situation, in a relationship?"
  This gets muddy when dealing with children but you can still do it.
  With teenagers, you have to do it for them to survive. You have to give guidelines.
  With adults, we should have clear boundaries at all times.
  Comes with an understanding that we cannot do something to someone or between certain people. None of that is going to have anything to do with what another person does.
• For example, in a movie I saw where the woman said, “Do you want to help me with the dishes?" The man responds, “Why would I want to do that?”
  We spend a lot of energy wishing these things and neglect to speak the truth about what we want.
• I love you but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do what you want me to do all the time or just because you want me to.
• Basically each person can meet their own needs.
• Know that the creator loves them more than you ever can.
• Al-Anon says: “I get in his way because I try to make things right for him. I’ll become responsible for him and God love him more than I ever will.
• Guilt is something that should be between us and God not us and another person.
  If someone else creates gilt for us, that’s different. Also, we don’t have to accept guilt.
• Guilt can destroy our boundaries because it puts us in a dependent relationship with another person because its manipulative and we’re allowing it to happen.
  For children, for example, indecision is confusing. So we want to get straight to the point. Be kind and loving.
• When facing verbal abuse – realize you don’t have a perspective on this, so you're not going to react to this person unless someone else is with you.
• Ask what am I feeling guilty about and why am I feeling it?
  Knowing Yourself Deeply.
• I’ve Looked back at my life and relationships and figured out what responsibility I had, in the sick part of myself, in relationships. Al-Anon calls it “Making Amends”
  Do it with another person, a disinterested third party or a good friend who will call you on your stuff.
• See patterns of how you behaved also patterns of how people treat you. Take all that information and sit with it for a while. Then, do something about it.
  Talk to those people directly and say “this is what I did. I don’t want to do it anymore and this is what I intend to do from now on.
  Example of an interaction with my brother – psychologist “wow, you Al-Anons really get right down to the heart of it.”
• The reason you make amends is for you and not the other person.
• Go when you’re not vulnerable.
• Even if they haven’t heard you, that’s ok because its for you to realize who you are.
• Also, it stops you from going through additional situations like that one.
• Or just begin doing things differently. With my kids – I just stopped doing old habits – started doing new things.
• I stopped listening to critical thins and simple stated “that’s not true.” Need you to know that I’m feeling a little insecure in our relationship. I’m not feeling that you’re doing anything wrong but I just feel a little…" See how I put that all in the first person? I didn’t try to elicit anything from him.

Assignment – Decide what you want to work on or pick one item of contention from this list and just do one small thing.