Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself

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Yeah. Well, if you are processing a cutoff, I think finding support… So that support could be therapy, it could be conversations with family members that support the cutoff. It could be with friends or mentors or whoever you find to be within your support system, and it is hard, and it is sad. It is a grieving process because it is a loss. It’s a, a loss of a relationship that if the circumstances were different, you would've loved to have the relationship. Sometimes people's behaviors are so unhealthy that it is more harmful for you to be in a relationship with them. The ability to say no to yourself is a gift. If you can resist your urges, change your habits, and say yes to only what you deem truly meaningful, you’ll be practicing healthy self-boundaries. It’s your responsibility to care for yourself without excuses.” It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.—James Clear” In Set Boundaries, Find Peace, therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab details how you can transform your relationships by learning to set healthy boundaries, which are standards for how you’d like to be treated. Tawwab explains where your boundaries come from and offers strategies for identifying and communicating your boundaries in a variety of situations.

But you talk about how one of the real challenges can be, then other family members almost take it personally. But they're like, “Well, no, you have to keep telling your sister stuff. That's how it works.”

It's interesting too, to think about how asking for help requires being a little bit vulnerable and also requires admitting that you're not perfect, and at least in North American culture, right, there's a lot of stigma around both of those things. It's, it's hard to, to be vulnerable. It's hard to admit that you can't do it all yourself, and that you can't live up to the idealized version of someone who never needs anything from anyone else. That's, those are challenges. So what I've seen is people may say, you know, “I've asked so-and-so not to call me, you know, during my work hours, and they still call.” But this person is answering the phone. It's like, well, your behavioral boundary is saying it's okay to call and you're actually not busy. And so if you're actually busy, that behavior would look like maybe enforcing your boundary by not answering, since you've already said you're not available. Not all boundary violations are equal. Some violations are relatively minor, causing only slight distress, while others are more major, causing more intense harm and requiring a more drastic response. We’ll define both minor and major violations below, and provide strategies for responding when your boundaries are violated. Minor Violations

When a major or minor boundary violation occurs, Tawwab recommends that you immediately reassert your boundary. If you’re not okay with how someone is treating you, speak up immediately. If you experience a major violation and the other person continues behaving in a way that makes you uncomfortable after you reassert your boundary, you may need to leave the situation altogether. When we're worried, our brain goes to the worst-case scenario. All of these terrible things could happen, and it's like there is no other possibility. Lots of people have their own moment of saying, “I'm tired of doing this.” Can you define enmeshment for us? Just ‘cause it's a term that I had never heard before I read your book. In this empowering guide, licensed therapist and bestselling relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab offers clear advice for identifying dysfunctional family patterns and choosing the best path to breaking the cycle and moving forward. Defensive people aren’t listening while you’re talking; they’re personalizing what you say and crafting a response. Their response has much more to do with them than it does with you. They are focused only on getting their needs met and resisting any change in your dynamic. But healthy relationships are not one-sided. The needs of both individuals are equally important.”Boundaries are expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships. Expectations in relationships help you stay mentally and emotionally well. Learning when to say no and when to say yes is also an essential part of feeling comfortable when interacting with others. As Tawwab describes, passive aggression involves doling out consequences for violations without first taking time to communicate your boundaries. It can be easy to fall into this pattern—when someone does something you don’t like, many people find it natural to sulk or retaliate. However, behaving passive-aggressively usually doesn’t help you get your needs met because the other person won’t know what they’ve done wrong or how to do better until you tell them.

According to Tawwab, boundary violations often happen as a natural part of the boundary-setting process. Even the most respectful people will take a little time to adjust to new boundaries in a relationship, and in the meantime, they’ll likely slip up and default to old behaviors. While this adjustment period can be painful, violations that occur during this process provide you with an opportunity to reinforce your boundaries, thereby strengthening your relationships in the long run. We simply can’t have a healthy relationship with another person without communicating what’s acceptable and unacceptable to us. If we aren’t proactive about this in our relationships, we can be sure the other person will set their boundaries.” I feel like many people right now are having a lot of boundaries around being overwhelmed and not meeting other people's expectations, so they're overcommitting themselves. Time is a place where we allow people to dictate what we're supposed to be doing. Ah, enmeshment is when who we are emotionally, mentally, and physically is entangled with someone else. It becomes problematic when someone else doesn't want that level of closeness or they don't want to think like everyone else. When there's one person who's trying to have some autonomy over a few people.Thoughts of fleeing-"I wish I could drop everything and run away"-are a sign of extreme avoidance. Fantasies of spending your days alone, ignoring calls, or hiding means you are seeking avoidance as the ultimate answer. But creating boundaries is the only real-life solution.