#254 – Do inter-personal boundaries make you uncomfortable?

When you equate attention with love, boundaries feel like an attack.

Yesterday, exploring how setting my personal boundaries made me feel, I thought about my father. Whenever he found me "in my world," absorbed in thought or doing something on my own, he worried.

"What's wrong," he'd ask, and no response would convince him unless I stopped doing what I was doing and flashed a big smile at him.

Then he'd ask me to do something with him: sit down to watch TV, go to the kitchen while he ate a snack, tell him what I'd learned in school...

He effectively taught me that if you love someone, you need to pay attention to them whenever in their presence, be available for them, for whatever they want/need – otherwise, they'll feel bad, and you don't want that.

This was, of course, a trait of the family's codependency: we made one another responsible for our feelings. If you felt bad, someone had had to cause it.

We didn't hold people (or ourselves) as naturally creative, resourceful, and whole (a tenet I learned in Co-Active coach training).

The people-pleasing was both a way to get attention (re: love) and a way to show it.

But standing on the principle that people are enough as they are, taught me that we're all responsible for our own feelings. Thus, I don't need to adapt my behavior to other people's preferences and needs. I can trust that if they need something from me, they'll ask.

I can stop trying to save people.

What did you realize when you stopped trying to please others?

Love,

Carolina