My morning started with an angry demanding text from my mom to “answer her!” It was 8:30am so I was getting Magnus ready for school and hadn’t looked at my phone yet.
Then it went down hill from there. She had decided that she was going shopping at Banana Republic and wanted me to be available for her texts to give my opinion on what she was buying.
Monday mornings are the busiest mornings of my week, I and told her that this wasn’t a good time for me and gave a few other days that I could be available.
She drove to the store anyways and sent picture after picture of clothes and asked for feedback.
Boundaries have been an ongoing issue in my family of origin. Like a lot of us, I set boundaries, and they get challenged or ignored, or pushed relentlessly.
My mom laughs at me and says, “I’m your mother, I can do what I want.”
I grew up in an alcoholic home which included the daily micro traumas and the big violent traumas that went along with it. There are probably generations of trauma from my parents before that, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what I am doing now.
I have spent most of my life working on boundaries. First by learning how to listen to the voice inside me, and then using that voice.
If you experience discomfort with setting boundaries, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, or that you shouldn’t be doing it. I still feel uncomfortable or upset at times when I set boundaries. Boundaries can be really tough, especially if you are stepping into the role of a cycle breaker.
The discomfort comes from the conflict between what you want, and the part of you that’s really old (like when you were a child), and wants the approval of others. When you were young, this was approval was really important to feel safe.
As Glennon Doyle says, “Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”
We need to learn to seek the approval of ourselves.
To have the courage to listen to the voice that says, “I know what I want here,” and act on it.
As Dr. Becky Kennedy says, “It’s not about convincing other people that the voice is right. It’s convincing yourself that the voice is enough.”
We are cycle breakers. We want different things for ourselves as women, for our family’s, and for our world, and it’s not always going to be understood or supported. That’s okay.
Trusting that voice inside is enough.
If boundaries are something you’re interested in, we do A LOT in the Soul Strategy Sessions and it will be starting again in January.
Love and Light,
t