Boundaries......clear boundaries will set you free

Boundaries are a great container for love and growth in relationships. I love that I have very clear boundaries and part of that means putting my own needs first with self-care. If I don’t look after myself, how can I have the energy to meet my family’s needs? How can I create a safe, deep and nurturing space for clients that I coach?

So what are boundaries? Simply put, what is ok and what is not ok for you. Boundaries are flexible, we are constantly reviewing, inquiring and negotiating them as we learn and grow the skills we need to navigate the world. They are changing all the time as we change.

Our parents help us enforce them for the first 7-8 years of our lives because we are not resourced to deal with life yet. As we learn new skills to navigate life, we learn to be able to express them. In Pre-school, children are taught language to set their boundaries when they learn to say 'Stop it I don't like it”, when faced with behaviour they are not ok with. They are learning to express their Yes and No.

When someone has low boundaries they get stepped on a lot because they often do not know what their ‘No’ is, that is, what is not ok for them.  They can also rub others the wrong way by not being aware of others’ boundaries. People with really high and rigid boundaries often struggle to let others in.  They create distance between themselves and others, often to feel safe, which does not allow others to get to know the real them.

Most of the interpersonal conflict experienced by people I've coached over the years has involved boundary violations. Often without people really understanding what was going on.

How can we think constructively about boundaries?

Boundary setting is an expression of self-love and community care.  It creates healthy relationship dynamics because we are being honest about our needs.  When we honour our own needs, we are bringing our whole self to a relationship.

When we hide what we need, we pretend to be something that we are not, we are performing. When other people set boundaries with you, don’t make it about you and what you need.  Thank them for setting their own boundaries. You might not like what they say or you may not be able to meet their needs but thank them for telling you what they need. All you need to say is, ‘Thankyou for telling me what you need”.

There is a misconception that boundaries are created to keep us small, marginalise us, push us into a corner or keep us from being free.  That is not boundary setting, that is controlling behaviour. There is a huge difference between someone expressing a boundary to protect their sacred space and someone trying to exert control over your space. One is someone protecting their own wellbeing whilst the other is someone who is trying to fill their own desires with dominance over another.

A boundary is as much about what you are saying yes to as it is what you are saying no to. To quote the fabulous writer Elizabeth Gilbert. “Within you sacred space can be your time, your creativity, your loved ones, your privacy, your recovery, your values, your mental health, your joy, your heart and your soul”.

How do we get better with boundaries?

We get super clear on our desires. Many people can tell me what they don't want. But most often they struggle to tell me what they do want in their life. We bring boundaries to life when we can express our desires. When you express your desire and someone honours your boundary, thank them. Praise them. You could say “Thank you so much for……it made me feel…..”.

We work on learning to express and feel our emotions in an embodied way. When we learn to express our emotions in a grounded way, we get comfortable listening to their messages and we learn skills to self-regulate our nervous system.  This in turn helps us work through if we are ok or not ok in a situation. If we are working from a neural network that is an adult part of us, rather than one developed in childhood which is an outdated part of us, we get clarity on what our true Yes and No is.

When someone communicates with you how they like to be touched or not touched, treated or spoken to, they are expressing their boundaries. Try not to see this as a rejection of you. It is ok if they don’t want to engage with you in the way you want to engage. It is not a measure of your worthiness as a person. It is just their boundaries being expressed. Thank them for telling you.

Finally, we work through what our purpose in life is. This is a big existential question but so linked to desire and emotional expression. When we are clear about what our bigger picture is, what we want, how that makes us feel, we experience a sense of love and freedom inside. Then we are content to just 'be'. 

This is not short term work, it is ongoing, forever.

It is the lifelong adventure of learning.

The Birth of the Inner Mother

For much of my professional career I’ve worked in transition.  Firstly organisational contexts where there was large scale change that impacted on culture, then in the development of leaders within organisations and now as a coach.  Ultimately this is all about learning and with that comes change. 

Women experience many archetypal transitions as we go through our life.  One of the most well known in popular culture is maiden to mother. Becoming a mother is a hugely transformational experience for most women.  They birth their own inner mother, their inner creatrix is born. It is an incredibly expansive time for women as they discover a part of themselves that they never knew existed.  It reaches to the core of their identity. Having a small baby to look after brings you out of a more self-serving, even self-centred behaviour that you may have exhibited previously because all of a sudden you have someone other than yourself to think about and look after.

But it is not only women who have children who can experience this.  I have witnessed many women birth this aspect of themselves in the creation of passion projects.  Whether it be launching a new business, a not for profit or creative work. The inner mother is often birthed in this scenario, when the way through to completion is through un-chartered territory.

I often coach women in leadership roles when they come back to a role either from parental leave or major sabbatical and they have experienced the birth of their inner mother.  The expansiveness they embody, the implicit understanding that they are fundamentally different beings than before they left, is front of mind and acted out in how they navigate the world now.  However, often what they experience is ‘oh you are back thank goodness, we need you back to how you were before’. Sometimes it is explicitly stated and sometimes it is implied. Either way it causes massive internal tension for almost everyone subject to it.  For most people, when you have had a transformational experience, you don’t want to go back to being the old version of yourself again. Sometimes the individual puts the pressure on themselves to be the old version of themselves, to be dynamic, on top of everything and in control.  Other times it comes externally, I have heard remarks over the years of ‘she’s lost it’. My response is often actually I think she might have ‘found it’.

When nurtured appropriately, the inner mother has an expanded capacity for listening, for inquiry, for connecting and caring for others, for guiding and developing others, for working collaboratively with others and co-creating solutions.  I’m always puzzled as to why you would not want someone to show this aspect of themselves; these new skills and talents they have. These capacities are the backbone for healthy relating. It is often what I end up working on with individuals on as a coach.

As they continue to grow, learn and transition toward midlife, many women start to awaken to the true essence of who they are.  This shows up in many different ways. Often it is an increase in confidence and a decreased concern for what others think; maybe she is more confrontational.  Or she may be rebelling against patriarchal constraints, the ‘glass ceiling’, pushing back when her boundaries are infringed upon now. Challenging issues at work, like lack of wage parity or inadequate childcare. Most of this is healthy behaviour of course depending on delivery of the message. It is showing a concern for often bigger societal issues at play, bigger systemic problems to be solved. The purpose is often about nurturing of society. Many women at this stage become very purpose driven in their interests and where they channel their energy. Again this new emergent purpose driven self is often criticised or disregarded.

Ladies there are many rites of passage we go through; these are only two.  There is nothing wrong with you, as humans we have the capacity to keep learning, growing and changing forever.  Embrace learning, embrace your body changing, embrace the wisdom in your body, embrace your expanded view of the world. Revel in it.

If you would like to read more about female archetypes and the different passages we grow through I can recommend ‘The Women’s Wheel of Life’ by Elizabeth Davis.

Resilience

There is a lot of talk about resilience now and I see many workplaces putting effort into helping people understand how to be more resilient.  It is generally around play to your strengths and it is pretty cognitive in its focus. That is, a very logical, rational approach to being resilient.  In my experience as a coach when most people struggle with resilience it is their emotions and feelings that they have, that they are struggling to deal with.  Those emotions they are experiencing are either disconnected and unconscious so not being expressed, or, they are so intolerable they will do anything to avoid feeling them. I’m not just talking about the yuck emotions like guilt, disgust, anger, shame.  I’m talking about exalted emotions to; joy, ecstasy, love.

I’ve done a lot of training in working with trauma somatically in the last two years and it has really expanded my view of resilience. For me resilience is growing our ability to be able to be with all our emotions and experiences in life and that includes discomfort, feeling weak, struggling and being challenged.  It is being able to tolerate and embrace positive experiences like connection, amazement, joy and love. It is being able to let yourself feel your emotions in your body and be totally aware of where you are feeling them.  So my focus is on helping people I coach, little by little, be able to have experiences where they may feel weakness or vulnerability or be filled up with joy and be with it in their heart, their body and their mind. Without trying to make it right or wrong.  Just experience it and be with it. So it is in learning to be with anything and everything, whether it feels like it is a good or bad experience, that builds our resilience.

Just like the tree in this picture above, that is thousands of years old, it has weathered, severe heat, storms, floods, insects and animals all over it, viruses, humans creating buildings in the middle of the place that it lives, we learn to be with the experience as it has and keep on growing and learning.  When we are able to be with everything that we experience, we become less reactive, experience a greater sense of safety in our body, we make more considered decisions, we act in greater alignment with what is right and true for us. We are able to pay attention to what might be going on for others under the surface and act from a place of compassion when they may be struggling.

How do we do this?  Our emotions are energy they want to move through our body.  So learning to be with them and experience them in a grounded way, not repressing or over-dramatising them.  Using our breath or movement to help them move through our body and experiencing what is on the other side of them.  We have a common misconception that mindfulness has to be stillness and quiet. This is a very masculine view of mindfulness; growing consciousness through stillness.  We can use techniques like breathwork, somatic movement (yoga and pilates), dance, to work with the energy of our emotions and really connect into the felt sense of them in our body.  Journalling is a great technique to articulate what you are feeling and for those people I coach who hate writing I encourage speaking into a voice recorder app just to get it all out.  There are so many tools and strategies you have to work with. The key is going slowly taking small steps as you push the boundaries slowly of what you can tolerate and be with.