Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay When I was growing up, I tried to minimise the exposure I had to any kind of negative emotional reactions towards me, having been at the sharp end of many of those from my mother. I did this by trying to be good, and thinking ahead about the consequences of my actions on her emotional state.
How that has translated to my adult life is an over developed sense of responsibility towards the way other people feel. It is one thing for me to be considerate, another to lose myself in the process. This of course points to learning about having and communicating healthy boundaries, something that was a foreign concept to me until the last year or two. I was under the impression that being in relationship meant doing things I wasn’t actually all that comfortable doing in order to make other people happy, and them doing things for me in return. Making sure other people were not unhappy with me is what felt safe for me within my body, when they were unhappy it made me feel anxious and out-of-kilter. While I have a huge capacity to do a lot for others, and a high tolerance in not necessarily receiving much gratitude, there has always been a limit to my martyrdom. Inside, I’m sure my soul has been screaming, and when this limit had been reached – albeit when I’m way beyond an already unhealthy threshold – that expresses through me in anger and resentment. Then I read Annette Noontil’s life lessons and I had lots of ah-ha moments. Annette Noontil was involved in looking after others for a large part of her life, first in caring for her father, then in nursing before having a family. Later she took what she had learned about healing and, with more research and determination, she began to share the wisdom she had gained, summed up as “your attitude is reflected in your body”. This resulted in one of my favourite do-it-yourself books The Body is the Barometer of the Soul 2 which helps people recognise the concepts that limit them, how they show up in the body and how to look within for answers and activate change. In her very Aussie ‘to-the-point’ way of describing things, here is what jumped out at me initially:
Then there were the parts that popped out and helped straighten my thinking around this issue of responsibility:
This was a bit of a wakeup call. While I didn’t have a name for it then, she also said a lot about boundaries:
From there I started to read a lot more about boundaries, Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries book was great for helping me define my boundaries, and Terri Cole’s book Boundary Boss for giving me tools and words to help communicate my boundaries and hold them in difficult situations. This hasn’t been a linear learning path, it’s been more like one step forward, two to the side, five back and finally another leap forward again. A lot of my old stuff got dragged up out of the murky waters and continues to as I react to situations, reflect and relearn. In my experience it’s often the very thing I try to avoid, or to resist, that needs to be faced in order for me to grow and fulfil my potential. Relationships that aren’t working, or jobs that are miserable, I plough on in a state of discontent, fear and anxiety. That is what it comes down to, a deep seated fear that the real me, my real needs and desires won’t be accepted. I’m trying to avoid rejection. And yet,in the process I’m rejecting myself. Eleanor Roosevelt said “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.” When I was taking responsibility for other people who gladly let me, I used to think of this quote smugly. But now I realise I was a co-conspirator in that and the quote applies equally to me. Ironically for someone with an over-developed sense of responsibility (towards others), it’s actually taking responsibility for me that matters most. Each time I come back to myself after taking responsibility for what I really need and asserting my boundaries, I wonder why I hadn’t done it so much sooner. Have you caught a glimpse of yourself anew in reading this? Are you ready to take a helicopter ride high above the canopy and see yourself from a different perspective? To see that all you desire awaits if only you can take more responsibility for your own needs? Are you ready to face your fears? If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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