Happy Monday and welcome to your mental Health mini. This week's guest is Terry Cole. And we are talking all things boundaries. When I became a psychotherapist, I could not believe how it was like an epidemic of people having no idea what their boundaries are, what boundaries in general are. And it was the same thing that I
suffered from myself. So in my own therapeutic journey, I had to learn what boundaries were because what was happening is that I was in relationships, but I found myself kind of bitter a lot of times. I was feeling in my early 20s that people were like, quote UN quote, taking advantage of me. And when I realized once I got into therapy and started figuring things out is that I was really serving myself up on a platter.
That process of turning that around in my own life really changed my relationships and really changed the quality of my life. And then once I became a therapist, I could see this happening with my clients, where every person who came in, no matter what their presenting problem was, I could sort of follow the dots backwards and it would all get to the same place, which was that they were also bitter because they had no idea how to set their boundaries.
Let's start with what are boundaries, right? I want you to think about your boundaries as your own personal rules of engagement. This is how we let other people know what's OK with us and what is not OK with us. Your boundaries are made-up of your preferences, your desires, your limits, and your deal Breakers, right? And they're very unique, but we all have a right to them.
And the problem with this is that most people who sit on my therapy couch don't really know their preferences, their limits, and their deal Breakers. Why they matter is because that's who you are sharing them with the people in your life. This is how people get to know us. So the benefit is being accurately known. You have to know yourself to be able to say, hey, that's not for
me, it's not my thing. And what happens when you're able to do that is that you have self respect and other people learn to respect you. So first you have to identify what boundary is needed, right? What is, what is happening, where you feel uncomfortable, Then you have to identify to yourself what what is needed here, what is happening, what is not working. Now you're going to come up with the words that you're going to say. And we can always start with sweetness.
We can always start with kindness. So that is sort of the steps you would take. You would figure out what needs to happen. You figure out the best time to have the conversation. You can even visualize it going well. And when I say going well, I don't necessarily mean the other person doing what you want them to do. When I say it going well, I mean you having the courage to assert the limit or the boundary with the person.
Just because we assert the desired boundary doesn't mean we're never going to have to have a conversation about it again, right, People? It's going to take a minute for people to sort of get on the bandwagon of the changes that we want. And we can't be so tender or so thin skinned that we're like, well, I mentioned it. I'm never talking about it again, right?
You're probably going to have to talk about it again, and that's OK. Now, if somebody is trampling on your boundary 50 times, obviously this is a problem after you've talked about it. If someone is what I call a repeat boundary offender, then we have to attach a consequence to the boundary if it continues to be violated. But here's the thing. We have to be willing to follow through on whatever the consequence we say is going to be right. We can't threaten a consequence
'cause that isn't effective. It's getting clear in your own mind what's an appropriate consequence 'cause I'm, I'm a big believer in taking self protective action right? We don't have to stay in relationships forever with people if they are boundary bullies or boundary destroyers. But there's such a huge space between people barely saying anything about their boundaries, which is how most people are, to people ghosting people or cutting people off from it.
When you start actually negotiating for yourself a little bit, it becomes so much easier to just say, I would really like this, or I actually don't like that, or I would like to do this instead. It doesn't always mean people will agree, but at least there's something really powerful about you knowing yourself and you going for it.
One of the biggest ways that we feel unempowered in relationships is when we give our power away, when we don't feel like we have a choice, when someone wants something from us and we do not really in our hearts believe we can say no. We feel like to hold on to the person, we must say yes to stay in their good graces. And I think that the biggest epiphany for most of my therapy clients is that even in those situations, you actually do have a choice.
And what makes you go from sort of being a boundary disaster to a boundary boss is learning to exercise that choice. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.