Boundaries

K now i’m starting to get impatient. For this freaking baby to come any day now! I’m mostly annoyed cause last night we did a hard core clean up of the house in prep for her to come today. And still nothing. Argh. I really hate cleaning up “for nothing”.

For some reason, in the past 24 hours, I just keep thinking that todays blog should be about boundaries today. Not sure why or how it applies to dropping the mom guilt exactly but maybe we’ll figure it out as we go ;)

So the way that boundaries are taught at The Life Coach School is a little different than people tend to think of them. no surprise there i guess. Boundaries are used to protect ourselves physically or emotionally. If someone is threatening our well-being than we can put our own system in place to keep that from happening in the future. We decide what we will do if someone else does something. So if someone starts swearing at me, I will leave the room. I will keep myself safe. If someone is going to hit me, I get away. The focus is on what I will do to keep myself safe. It’s not about trying to control other people and they don’t even need to know there is a boundary at all. We just need to be committed to our action in response to someone else’s. So if we have grown up children that won’t move out, we can decide that if they don’t pay rent this month, i’ll pack their bag for them and change the locks. If we have toddlers that like to bite or scratch, we get away from them when they do, we don’t “sit there and take it”.

We can communicate the boundary to the person before hand if we want to just to inform them of what we’ll do but it’s never in an effort to manipulate them to change. We make a request, not an ultimatum because we always understand that the other person has their agency and will do what they will do. But we can control what we will do in response. Boundaries are not to try to change someone else’s behavior but just for us to empower ourselves to have options for if and when they do what they do that is not good for us.

So that’s the basic idea of a boundary. You’re welcome to whoever someday needed to hear that. There ya go. Let’s see if we can relate it to dropping the mom guilt… hmm… well, you could definitely have the possibility of feeling guilty after following through with a boundary Especially in that grown child example. So if you’re thinking something that makes you feel guilt over upholding your boundary probably it’s because you’re thinking that you’ve caused some sort of inconvenience for that other person with your actions. So maybe to alleviate the guilt in those cases, you could think about how you need to take care of yourself also and not just everyone else all the time and that actually taking care of yourself is the most loving thing you can do for all involved. Your oxygen mask first, right? And it teaches others that you are important and shows by example how they can take care of themselves also.