Other People Hate it When You Set Boundaries

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 147

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Sometimes when we're on our own personal journey of growth and transforming ourselves from endless people pleasers, we can sometimes find that other people are not quite as on board with our healing and personal generosity as we might like them to be. And sometimes it's going to hit a little bit hard. And this episode is about navigating your relationship with other people whilst prioritising your own personal growth and your own personal choices.

Because there can be some friction between your own personal journey and the way that people expect you to be. Especially if you have a personality that has been very used to overgiving to everybody else at the expense of yourself. That is how people know you as a person. That is how people expect the relationships between you all to go. So it's not surprising that other people can be a little bit put out when suddenly you're not putting everyone else's needs before your own.

And even if they think that in theory this is something that you should be doing and we should all be doing for each other, but not you, and they still want that thing for themselves. And that thing for themselves is generally your time, your generosity, your money, your cooking, your availability, your lack of boundaries... And when you start putting these things in place, your relationships with other people are going to change. Because the way that you interact with yourself is inevitably going to change the way that you interact with other people.

I know that you've probably heard this in many, many other places, and it is something that to some extent should be expected, but what I don't think we talk about enough is the fact that there can be a lot of grief for the relationships that we had and a lot of grief for the person that we had that was easily likable, when we didn't regard ourselves. It was a lot easier to be the person that people wanted to be around.

When we don't have any boundaries and when we're constantly giving ourselves to everybody else, it's a lot easier to feel like we're in favour when we're not looking after ourselves and we're putting everybody else first.

This sense of grief is all part of the journey. And quite often when grief comes up, we can think that something's gone wrong. And grief can sometimes feel a lot like rejection. And they. It's complicated here because other people to some extent may well be looking to reject you because they don't want to hang around as much because you're not the person who's constantly going to go and pick their kids up from school or constantly going to be their wingman to go out for the evening, or constantly going to be the person who drops everything whenever they're having a catastrophe. But what we're not doing is we are no longer grieving for ourselves and our lack of feeling, a sense of ownership and embodiment within our days and our time, because we're more present with ourselves and more accountable to our own needs. And we're not rejecting ourselves, we're not putting ourselves last so there's very little of us left for, for us or anybody else at the end of the day.

Learning how to hold boundaries without shutting down connections is a skill and it's something that we can practice. It becomes a lot harder if we're not aware that there can be a sense of loss as we are doing so. Grieving old patterns whilst building new ones is part of something that a complex system that we can hold together and build upon when we're aware of what's going on around us. Quite often, we do this sort of stuff in private, and so we're not necessarily used to or expect the stages that come up.

When something feels like grief or rejection, we generally process that as something has gone wrong and how can I fix it? But if we know to expect that as we are trying to put firmer boundaries in place, it becomes a lot easier to navigate.

I think that's one of the benefits of doing group work. And what we do in www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk of hearing how other people are processing things makes us be able to see the patterns and spot the patterns in our own lives where this stuff comes up for us. We can notice that the stuff that we might have been labelling as a personal failure actually is just part of the process. I think that creating healthier relational dynamics is an essential part of coming home to yourself.

Filling up your own cup and making yourself into a person who is as resourced as possible to deal with the many, many demands on us that our modern life has. You have choices about how you interact with yourself and others. And it is possible to hold space for all of it. The changing, the learning, the growing, the grief, and the rejection. And we don't have to centre ourselves, of course, because all of the bits don't feel nice. We don't get to feel like we are more of ourselves by entrapping ourselves according to other people's needs because we're trying to avoid feeling any of this bad stuff. It is by being willing to stretch ourselves and feel some of the uncomfortable emotions that come with standing up for ourselves and having our own backs, that we are able to feel more in alignment with the things that are important to us and ultimately have more time for those around us in a genuine, authentic way tor the things and the people who are important to us, and for the values and for the political issues and for the active and all of the playful, artistic, creative, fun, joyful stuff that you need around you to make you a whole and complete person and all of the facets of yourself for you to be able to dabble in.

That's not possible if you're giving everything to everyone all the time, but that growth from what we are taught to do of give everything away and put everybody else first so we can be liked to sometimes saying no and checking in with ourselves whether we want it or not before we automatically say yes; It's not a comfortable ride. But knowing that there may be a sense of grief along the ride and knowing that it's not going to be comfortable, and knowing that you're not the only one who experiences that, I think goes some way to ease the path of being able to ride out some of those scratchier edges without feeling like anything's gone wrong.

I hope that this has been a useful one for you this week, and I look forward to speaking to you next week.

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