How to Build Beautiful Boundaries

Say what?

Huh?

You gotta be kidding me!?

Those are all ways of saying ‘no’. They may not be eloquent choices, but they get the job done. If you have trouble being that direct (and most of us do), there are gentler versions of ‘no’ that can be equally effective without the collatoral damage to your relationships. At any rate, one can consider the word ‘no’ as a powerful way to say ‘yes’ to yourself.

Building boundaries that empower you while encouraging others to respect you is a none too easy task, especially for the people-pleasers among us. It has been proven, however, that always saying ‘yes’ to others can lead to conditions as severe as burnout and depression.

Cyndi Dale and Andrew Wald recently penned a book called Togetherness: Creating and Deepening Sustainable Love that shows readers how to set personal boundaries that will actually strengthen personal relationships. According to the authors, saying ‘no’ helps us to figure out who we are and who we want to be in our relationships. By setting boundaries, we keep our personal identities alive — and our personal relationships honest, balanced, and intact.

To directly quote Tina Turner: What does love have to do with it? In a word, everything.

Self-love is not narcissism. It’s a life-sustaining force. The authors offer several ways to build beautiful boundaries to let love in ~both from others and from ourselves.

How you are going to say ‘yes’ to yourself today?

What Do Your Boundaries Say About You?
By Cyndi Dale and Andrew Wald
Adapted from Togetherness: Creating and Deepening Sustainable Love

In our lives — and in relationships — we create personal boundaries to define the space we call our own. We set boundaries and say “no” with our words, but even more so with our behavior and actions: we may tell white lies, come up with excuses, or throw ourselves into activities like work, working out, or volunteering — essentially creating boundaries by making ourselves unavailable.

Boundaries may sound negative, but in reality, they are very important and help to define our personal identities. For example, being the nurturer or a people-pleaser comes with boundaries that fit those roles. Being the boss or the guru comes with a different set of boundaries that keep those identities intact. In this sense, personal boundaries allow us to “locate” ourselves within relationships (or within the world) in a way that’s familiar and safe. Our boundaries help us to honor the balance between taking care of ourselves, and taking care of others.

Here are four practices that will empower you to update your personal boundaries and take ownership of your life:

Honor yourself. What parts of your life are in need of care or attention? On a daily basis, find simple ways to honor yourself. Choose three things you like doing every day, and then do them. You might pick something as simple as taking a walk, reading, or having lunch with family or friends. Whatever you choose, know that you deserve to have pleasure, so let pleasure be your guide.

Soothe yourself. Are you living the life you want to live? Or do you feel like you are stuck and don’t have a choice in what’s happening? In these moments, stop and recognize the feeling of “choiceless­ness,” check your assumptions, and acknowledge the needs and desires you’re afraid won’t get met. With practice, you will find that cultivating the awareness of choice is profoundly soothing to your soul.

Embrace choice. Every time we make a decision, we have an opportunity to determine a course of action: “Do I stay here and face the situation, or do I run out the door?” By recognizing that you have control over your own reactions, you’ll also have the opportunity to reinforce, change, or alter your boundaries.

Accept yourself and your life lessons. Shame and disappointment about our lives causes us to create false boundaries and interactions with the people we care about most. It’s important to accept who you are and what has happened in your life. When faced with a challenge or disappointment, ask yourself: “What is my lesson here? How is this challenge a way for my soul to grow?” Use your answers to create boundaries that reflect acceptance of your true self.

*****
Cyndi Dale is an internationally respected author, cross-cultural healer, and spiritual scholar with over 35,000 client sessions and trainings across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Andrew Wald, LCSW-C, is a psychotherapist with advanced certifications in Imago Relationship Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Together, they have co-authored the new book, Togetherness: Creating and Deepening Sustainable Love (June 2012).

Reaping the Fruits of Slow Family Living

Bear with me. It sounds complicated, but really, it’s not.

My e-friend Bernadette Noll, who is friends of friends of my friend living in Munich, is the co-founder of the Slow Family Movement, the idea of investing time in our families instead of the activities that keep us away from them.  It is incredibly encouraging that mainstream media outlets such as yesterday’s USAToday have embraced the idea of the power of slow in so many areas of our lives.

And here’s the thing. It works.

This morning our kids were calm, centered and ready for their school week. It wasn’t only because we opted to do virtually nothing this weekend. It wasn’t only because my husband and I joined them in doing, well, nothing. It was also because the kids are firmly rooted in the understanding that we want to be with them whilst doing nothing. They built a fort out of chair and blankets, then slept under them at night. They played horse on their bikes and gathered walnuts that had fallen from our tree in the yard. They were happy just being. And it was beautiful to watch.

At the risk of sounding pious (and I really don’t mean to), you reap what you sow. And lately I’m beginning to understand what Bernadette Noll means when she says less is more for families too.

I spend a lot of time with my kids. Sometimes toooooo much time, if you know what I mean. But the truth is I wouldn’t change a thing. Their time at home is limited to a handful of years. That’s all we have before the comings and goings and laundry drop-offs begin. It is a precious time of instilling how valuable they are as human beings. If we didn’t invest time in them, what would they think about themselves and the world they inhabit? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be the one to show them the way than to leave it to chance…or television and YouTube.

Investing in your relationships, whether with children or other loved ones, is the best insurance policy life can give you. It is time well-spent, or in the eyes of Bernadette and myself, invested ~ for the future is tomorrow’s present and your time is a present too.

Forgiveness: A Time to Love & A Time to Hate

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” ~ Lewis B. Smedes

Why is forgiveness such a loaded topic? Because many believe that somehow the victim has to be the bigger person, raise himself up to a higher standard than the perpetrator and make amends to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hogwash.

Forgiveness is a process that can sometimes take years. And it is the key to personal liberation.

Betrayal, violence, neglect and abuse are the themes of Helen Whitney’s book Forgiveness: A Time to Love & A Time to Hate, which grew out of her upcoming film on forgiveness, which will be broadcast on April 17 and April 24 on PBS.

Forgiveness is a vastly misunderstood theme that deserves our renewed attention. As the world’s uprisings, both natural and man-made, have recently shown us, there is no better time than now to understand the healing powers of forgiveness.

Forgiveness does not mean you have to reconcile with the perpetrator or condone their behavior. I am certain there are many who find Gaddafi unworthy of their forgiveness, for instance. But, as Dr. Jane Greer, New York-based psychologist and author of How Could You Do This to Me? Learning to Trust After Betrayal, so aptly stated in a phone interview, “Forgiveness is the resolution of your rage.” There is a time for wrath and a time for warmth. It is about coming to terms with what has happened in our lives, acknowledging our anger, releasing it to feel the depths of our despair, only to realize it has its limits, too.

Then, once felt, the gaping, lingering wounds of our years can seal.

We have all experienced some level of betrayal in our lives. We think we cannot bear the searing rod iron-hot pain so we develop coping mechanisms such as self-abuse, angry relationships and continued drama cycles. In many of the personal stories Ms. Whitney conveys, people held onto their pain for years. In the book, she illustrates the story about a fugitive responsible for the death of a policeman in the face of anti-Vietnam protests who didn’t fully accept responsibility for her acts until well after she had handed herself in to the authorities two decades later. It wasn’t until she released her anger toward the U.S. government from the 1960s that she could apologize to the family whom she had caused so much pain.

“Apology is necessary to begin the journey of forgiveness within a relationship,” claims Dr. Greer. But what happens if you do not receive that apology? In many cases, the victims in Ms. Whitney’s book did not. She interviewed people from Rwanda and Nazi Germany who experienced so much sorrow. Millions of people died at the hand of a few. It is only now that people can speak of the abomination they experienced.

Without apology relationships cannot thrive. And so how does one go about forgiving someone who does not wish to be forgiven? The relationship ends, if there ever was one. That is where self-healing comes into play.

“[F]orgiveness in no way means you have to reconcile with someone who badly treated you,” states Dr. Frederic Luskin, head of The Forgiveness Project at Stanford University and author of Forgive For Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness. “If you were the recipient of childhood abuse or are in a harsh relationship you can forgive the offender and as part of that choice make the decision to end or limit contact. Forgiveness is primarily for creating your peace of mind. It is to create healing in your life and return you to a state where you can live capable again of love and trust.”

Roxanne Renée, author of Laughing Again: A Survivor’s Guide to Healing Depression, says that “[t]he one who hurt me does not suffer the destructive, internal physiological effects of my sustained anger; I do. When I practice forgiveness, I engage my “rest and digest” (parasympathetic) nervous system, triggering myriad calming and healing physiological changes in my body. When I forgive, I am the one who is set free. “

In fact, forgiveness begins and ends with us.

Our misconception of forgiveness lies in our belief that we someone should ‘forgive and forget’. The truth is we will never forget, although we may suppress memories that bubble to the surface, oftentimes decades later. The pain is expressed either way. Sometimes it comes in the form of an illness. What the mind ignores, the body absorbs.

Forgiveness is not about reconciliation. We may never wish to see the perpetrator again. Dr. Luskin says there is nothing wrong with that.

“Another misconception about forgiveness is that it depends on whether or not the abuser or lying person apologizes, wants you back or changes his/her ways,” says Dr. Luskin. He cautions about making someone else’s behavior the determinant for your healing and happiness. “[Y]ou can forgive you ex spouse for their insulting speech and even for abandoning you and your children… but forgiveness in no way means you do not take the ex to court to make sure your children get their support payments to which they are entitled. Forgiveness and justice are not the same. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same. Forgiveness and condoning are not the same.“

At this point in my research, I was quite relieved to learn the distinction between forgiveness and what our religious traditions have us believe is forgiveness. Ms. Whitney’s book features the 2006 Amish schoolhouse shootings in which the parents of the children killed by the local milkman turned gunman promptly forgave him, even though he was dead. They reached out to his widow and found comfort in their God that says you will enter His Kingdom if you forgive. Ms. Whitney raises the question of whether suppressing one’s natural feelings without allowing for a certain level of unforgiveness is healthy.

There’s got to be grieving at your own pace.

But perhaps Ms. Renée is right when she says “As we vividly remember the hurtful encounter again and again (practicing un-forgiveness by holding on to our hurt and anger), we trigger the same fight or flight response that we initially experienced. When we stay angry, we keep our sympathetic nervous system constantly engaged. In this state, we are trapped in a place of unrelenting stress. Because humans were not designed to live this way, the ultimate result over time is quite harmful — systemic inflammation leading to a host of chronic, degenerative conditions.”

Many studies have been conducted about the health benefits of forgiveness, including lowered blood pressure, slower heart rates and decreased cortisol levels. Dr. Philip Carlson, author of Love Written in Stone, pointed me to one such study in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine that claimed study participants who learned to forgive experienced significant increases in blood flow within the areas of the heart where it had been previously impaired due to damaged tissue resulting from a heart attack.

Whether we choose to forgive or not needn’t be a loaded question. It is our choice whether we wish to carry the burden of a heavy heart or to nurture it with forgiveness.

Forgiveness heals. Unforgiveness destroys. When we forgive, it is much like love. We are all entranced by its power and through it, we are set free.

~~

Listen to my podcast with Dr. Frederic Luskin to learn more about what forgiveness can do for you.

De-Teching and Analogue Interaction Top Trend in 2011

 

Many thanks to @SuzanneHenry for pointing to these trends, such as de-teching and outsourcing self-control (remember my time suck Quickrr post?), to help keep us interacting with each other in the now.

Don’t Enter the Dog House this Holiday!

So I got a few last-minute Christmas gifts today. Why? It was my husband’s request. And I have to say it felt pretty good, you know? No frenzy. No worries. It was like this part of the gift hunting was gravy, like the cherry on top. There’s something to be said for holding off until the idea strikes you (of course, I’m not talking about procrastination here ~ just an ease and grace that comes with taking it slowly!).

But first, consider my conversation with my husband this morning.

(background sound ~ *Chuscha chuscha* the scrubbing of a broom. Husband is washing the tiled hallway on the top floor for the first time in two years.)

Husband: Are you going to Expert (think Circuit City) today?

Me: (considerable pause b/c I was actually headed to the gym) No.

*Chuscha chuscha*

Husband: Oh, because if you were…

*Chuscha chuscha*

Me: What do you need?

Sound abruptly stops.

Husband: That sports video game for the Xbox I bought…for our son.

*Chuscha chuscha*

Me: Okay. I’ll get it. But this year there’d better be a reaaaaaally good gift for me waiting under that Christmas tree.

Watch this video (thanks to www.latebloomerbride.com for first posting it there)!

Guess who’s watching it next? Woof!

What’s in a name?

A recent discussion with friends at breakfast got me to thinking. Why do we use nicknames?

One of the couples said they are calling their baby daughter by her name only. They don’t believe in pet names for whatever reason. I, on the other hand, use pet names to express a closeness and contextuality.

For instance, my husband is Andreas to the rest of the world. I only call him that, thereby lumping me together with said world, when I’m either mad or other people are within earshot. Otherwise,  I have an array of names to express the situation. The same applies to him. I always know he’s about to ask me something a tad tenuous when he addresses me with ‘Babu’ ~when he had a business trip to Malta, for example, he called me that (I ended up tagging along! )

My kids have a variety of nicknames as well. To protect the innocent, I won’t, well, name them here.

Words have great power and how we choose to use them makes a difference. Just looking at all the names for God gives us pause to think about the meaning of names.

I always know when I let someone into my heart ~ it’s the moment  I find a nickname for that person. It usually unfolds naturally. My dear actor friend is ‘lovey dovey’, for instance.

Words are the ties that bind. And names matter. As Shakespeare’s Juliet so rightly said, “

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”

So, what’s in your name?

In my book, everything that makes you special to that other person.

Doing Two Things at Once

This is the one time I must agree that women can task-switch more readily than men. Need a Tuesday funny? This is it!

You’re grounded!

Being grounded, not in the teenage-uh-oh-mom-caught-me-doing-something sense of the word, but standing in the delicious centeredness of the here and now, is an enviable place to be.

My husband is the most centered person I know. Little sways his oak tree solidness to the left or right. He skates through life with an equinimity I’ve never seen in another human being. He is Mr. Placid to the nth degree.

So when I find myself in the fretting hour, typically a pre-dawn angst that sometimes grabs my attention at 4 a.m. (did you remember the kids’ lunch money? Don’t forget today’s conference call!), I reach for his feet and stack them against mine.

Last night I nuzzled close because I couldn’t find his feet. At that point, after several moments of wakefulness, I reasoned that any part of his warmth would do. But as it goes, when you’ve been married for as long as we have, he instinctively offered up his flippers in mid-snooze. I immediately felt the groundedness and goodness he embodies and fell fast asleep.

Getting grounded is an important activity. It can aid in your productivity like nothing else. So the next time your world goes topsy-turvey, what grounding strategies will you employ?

Desiderata Days ~ The Unfolding

Ah yes, universal unfolding! Don’t we love it when things go well! It is easy to embrace the notion of “all is as it should be” when things are going our way. It is distinctly harder to accept this universal law when things are less than rosey.

Max Ehrmann says:

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Just this morning my daughter and I were having a conversation. Well, I was talking and she was nodding her head in that vigorous “hey, I’m ten and what you’re saying makes no sense” kind of way.

“You can shape some of how your life unfolds.  The rest is left to attitude.”

Not sure it sunk in, but she seemed to want to understand me even though it most likely sounded like gobblety-gook oozing from my mouth. How we view the world has a great impact on how things occur for us.

How’s the unfolding going for you?

Desiderata Days ~ Self-Love

In the time of self-loathing, we are due for some serious self-love. We are enough ~ we are more than enough!

Max Ehrmann says:

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

Oftentimes we feel we have to do everything at once ~ be svelt, lovely, sparkly, efficient, joyful, reliable, punctual…the list goes on and on. Celebrate your life with kindness for yourself. When you are gentle to yourself, others will gravitate to you. Remember to let them in as you see fit and on your terms. Part of self-love is honoring your boundaries as you honor yourself.