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Episode 143: How to Set & Hold Boundaries with Melissa Urban: 

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This was one of my very favorite episodes and so I copied a lot down. I try to write as little as possible, but there were so many things from this episode that I did not want to forget. 

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Melissa starts off saying: I didn’t grow up with boundaries being modeled for me. In my family the sort of unspoken rule and often spoken was if we don’t look at it didn’t happen. When people would get divorced, when someone would get cancer, when things would happen, we just wouldn’t talk about it and if we didn’t talk about it was almost like it didn’t existed and that was how I grew up.

Because before we get into things, I want to talk about what does idyllic mean? If you’re in a family who’s choosing to bury things all the time, who’s choosing not to look at hard things, who’s choosing false peace of a family over the peace of the child, how is that idyllic? What do we mean when we say that?

it, I knew things needed to be different and I didn’t know how. My life had become so small at that point. I was so scared to talk to anyone about how I felt, to advocate for my needs. I felt like any sort of expression of my feelings or even letting people know that I wasn’t okay would just push everyone away and I would become isolated again.

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There are three parts to boundaries: 1) identify, 2) set, and 3) holding 

 

Identifying the need for a boundary.

The easiest way to identify is where are there areas in my life or in my relationships that just make me feel like hmm, I don’t want to? It’s a sense of dread before an encounter or around a person. A sense of anxiety, if you notice resentment around a certain person, and this can also include around a conversation topic. If you feel like you can’t show up as your fullest self with that person, like you have to hide pieces of yourself in that relationship, a boundary is needed. If you leave thinking, I don’t like how I feel when I spend time with that person, that’s a really good sign. If you leave the conversation and you run through all of these things in your head, I should have said this, I should have done that, why did I do that, and you’re beating yourself up for all of the things that you could have or should have done, that’s a sign that a boundary is needed. If you’re always wondering where you stand with this person, you never quite know, that’s another fantastic sign.

 

(This is what I have a problem with- why is it sooo bad to give more than you get- should everyone just  be on the receiving end?? )

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Being attentive to where your energy is going and engagements that feel like you are giving more than you are getting back is a huge sign, a huge red flag for a boundary.

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Yes. Again, this is so important for the conversation because boundaries are never about telling the other person what to do. Boundaries are not controlling other people. They are about telling people what you will do to keep yourself safe and healthy.

Both things are uncomfortable. The setting of the boundary, it’s uncomfortable. I get it. It’s hard to express our needs. It’s hard to advocate for ourselves. It’s hard to feel like we’re disappointing someone else. I understand that. Also, what you are doing now, swallowing your feelings, putting everyone’s comfort ahead of your own, not advocating for yourself, taking on more than you are capable of handling, that’s uncomfortable, too, and that path doesn’t lead you anywhere.

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It’s just that idea of being bold enough to cause an outer conflict instead of always choosing inner conflict.

 

Do as little as possible to have the maximum effect. I kind of color code my boundaries green, yellow, red. Green is the gentlest, kindest language. You are assuming that the person didn’t know you had a limit and wants to be respectful and healthy in your relationship. You’ll share this green language and see where it goes. Yellow is okay, this person is either forgetting or unwilling or reluctant to respect my boundary, now my language needs to be a bit more direct. It’s still kind, but it’s more direct and impactful. I may share a consequence here, like if we can’t change the tone of this discussion, then I’ll be leaving the room for five minutes so we can take a break. The red level boundary is if the behavior continues to escalate, this is the boundary, this is the consequence, this is the action that I am going to take to keep myself safe and healthy, which is I’m going to interrupt you. The way you are speaking to me right now does not feel okay to me. I’m going to leave for an hour and when I come back we can resume. That’s your red. Occasionally I throw a fuchsia in there for the people that really deserve it, but we go green, yellow, red.

 

You set the boundary that you need for your own healthy limit and this boundary is going to help the relationship. It’s not helpful or really kind for you to just swallow it, not say anything because you don’t want to be impolite, but then be resentful and mad the rest of the day because your house smells like smoke and be angry with him and he doesn’t know why. That’s not particularly fair. The kindest thing is to set the boundary and then how that person reacts to your clear, kind, healthy boundary is not your business and it’s not your responsibility. If Uncle Joe says, “Okay, I just won’t be visiting anymore.” All right. That is your responsibility. That is your business. I cannot and will not try to control it. They’re allowed to be mad about your boundary. They’re allowed to have feelings about it, absolutely, and you can acknowledge those and you will disappoint some people with your boundary. I often say that setting a boundary often means revoking a privilege that that person was never meant to have in the first place.

It can feel like you’re taking something away from them and that can make people mad and I understand that. They’re allowed to be mad and also, this is my healthy limit.

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Question:  how do you know if your boundary is reasonable or not? 

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Yeah, it’s totally a thing. Gretchen Rubin calls it obliger rebellion, which is like people pleaser rebellion where you eat it and eat it and eat it and then you explode. I think that can absolutely happen with boundaries where you have held it in for such a long time that now instead of a healthy boundary, maybe you start throwing up some walls, maybe you start making them too rigid. They’re not flexible, they’re not contextual. If the boundary is I can never handle the TV at this volume, then I would gently invite you to talk about why, why is that? 

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We don’t want to just go out there and start throwing up brick walls as far and as wide as we can because that in insulates us and keeps us in as much as it keeps people out. We want to evaluate the context and how I’m feeling. Honestly, almost the first pre-step to boundaries is looking inward, taking a pause, and looking in and saying, “What do I need in this moment to feel safe, to feel healthy, to restore my energy?” That’s a piece that we’re often missing when we have trauma, when we have addiction, when we have abuse from religious culture, from diet culture, we have been so disconnected from our bodies and so conditioned to look outside of ourselves to tell us what we need or for validation or for worth that we don’t take those moments to pause and say, “But what do I need?” What we do is react to external stimulus instead of looking at us and saying, “What do I need and how can I set a boundary from that place?”

Yeah, exactly. It’s just a reframe, but the more often we check in with ourselves and set boundaries from the self, the more natural it becomes, the easier it becomes, the more comfortable it becomes, and honestly, the more authority or weight it carries. Because when I set a boundary that looks like it’s coming out of nowhere, turn the TV down, don’t light that cigarette, if it looks like it’s coming out of nowhere, it’s going to be harder for the other person to respect it. It might even make our relationship a bit more challenging because I’m not offering any sort of context or using the boundary to deepen the connection.

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Boundaries make people feel safe. Someone sent me a DM just the other day and said, “I now know why I like following you so much, you make me feel safe. I know when you say something you mean it and I know you mean what you say. I feel like you are reliable and trustworthy in that I know I can rely on you to be responsible for your own feelings and caretake your own needs, and to me, that feels safe.” I think that’s very true.

Because people pleasers aren’t safe. They’re like chameleons and you actually don’t ever know them and that doesn’t feel safe even if they’re meeting all of your needs, even if they’re caretaking you.  Are they meeting your needs resentfully or are they meeting them begrudgingly? Is they’re going to be an explosion or a rebellion? Are they holding or seething on the inside? That’s a much more difficult relationship to really get to know someone through.

 

Don’t you think it’s also true with boundaries that when we set them and they’re accepted, that we can then trust ourselves around those people? Because in some ways I feel like that’s when I often get the resentment and the avoidance, it’s like I can’t trust the version of me that shows up in the absence of this boundary. 

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When I go in first and I restore that connection with my body, I ask myself what I need, I advocate for myself based on my own needs, not based on what this other person is doing, it does feel more trusting and more trustworthy. Boundaries improve relationships across every single metric. They let you show up more freely and more openly, more trustingly, more vulnerably. They eliminate the dread and anxiety that might have come along before you have boundaries. They are so incredibly strengthening for relationships. I think we don’t set them because we think somehow that they’re just the opposite. That’s part of what I want to get across in this book.

It’s like the underneath the foundation of it is so interesting because it’s like if what we’re really trying to do is just get to know ourselves down here, be known, know ourselves, be known and not be ashamed, that’s the original plan, like go back to who we were before the world told us who to be, go back to who we were before we decided to be ashamed of every single need that we had. Setting boundaries is actually not even about the other person. It’s about figuring out who you are, what you need, and falling in love with and accepting that. 

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We are going to take charge of our own comfort and our own safety and that feels safe to the people in our lives.

the holding is the thing you describe and I love so much as dealing with the inner ickiness, it’s the ickiness that comes after when someone is disappointed in us.

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We feel this sense of guilt even sometimes before the boundary is out. We feel guilty for advocating for ourselves. There are so many reasons, particularly with women, particularly with moms, why we feel this guilt, societal factors, the patriarchy, and sexism, and stereotypically rigid gender roles have all told us, I grew up believing that I shouldn’t have needs, that my needs weren’t worthy, that everyone else’s comfort takes priority and needs take priority over mine and I should not be expressing. If I did express, I would be called selfish or cold or controlling. We didn’t grow up learning how to set these boundaries and even just thinking about it makes us feel really guilty, but it’s important to note that it’s not earned guilt. It is not guilt because I did something bad and now biology and nature is going to help me remember that it didn’t feel good and it wasn’t right and it was harmful and I’m not going to do it again.

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I really encourage people to think about, okay, I’m going to set this boundary, is this something I can follow through with? Because I think what happens sometimes is people immediately they go to the red and they think the boundary has to be I’m cutting off all communication. My mom won’t stop talking about diet or my body or weight loss, I need to cut off all communication. Or this friend continues to emotionally dump on me, I need to break up with my friend. But I encourage people to say, “Okay, maybe that isn’t the only limit. Maybe you can just limit the way you communicate, how often you communicate.” If this tends to happen over meals, maybe you socialize outside of meals. If it tends to happen on the phone, maybe you try email and text message for a little while.

There are some in between ways to hold the boundary, but you have to be willing to hold it because if you don’t, a couple things happen. Number one, if you set the boundary and then don’t hold it in the face of pushback and pressure, that person is just going to be even more convinced that their needs are valid and they’re going to double down the next time you try to say it. But most important, you have just taught yourself that you can’t trust yourself to advocate for yourself. You have just taught yourself that maybe my needs don’t matter as much as somebody else and that is such a profound message to absorb in your body, this idea that I set this healthy limit and I did not hold it. I need you to keep that promise for yourself because your needs are worthy, your needs are valid, they matter just as much as anybody else’s. You deserve this perfectly reasonable healthy limit and I want to help you hold it.

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When you are thinking about the boundary, you have to think about is this enforceable? Is it something I am willing to do? If I’m not willing to go quite that far, are there other ways that I can advocate for my own needs and set this limit in a way that works for both of us, but isn’t perhaps going beyond what I’m willing to hold?

My integrity doesn’t allow this, integrity meaning I need to be the same on the outside as I am on the inside. Isn’t a boundary what we do so we can maintain sameness on the inside and the outside, that the needs and emotions and feelings I’m having on the inside are going to match what I say to you on the outside, so that we can have an actual real relationship where I’m not acting?

Absolutely, that’s exactly right. I think people are nervous or scared about boundaries because they feel like they might be selfish, they might be advocating for your own needs. But really, you’re not saying only me, you’re just saying me too. You’re saying me too and what I’m experiencing on the inside will be communicated to you clearly and kindly so that you don’t have to guess, you don’t have to wonder, you don’t have to worry that you’re going to show up and I’m going to be quiet or weird and you don’t know what’s going on and I’m not going to tell you.
I’m going to be super upfront about it and transparent, which means I’m getting in touch with my own needs first and sharing them with you. I am prepared to navigate your discomfort, your displeasure, your anger or your pushback in this moment because I know that this is the right thing to do not only for me, but for the health of our relationship. I think it’s so important to remember that how other people choose to respond is not your responsibility. It is not your job to fix your mother-in-law’s feelings when she’s mad that you said you have to call before you come over. You can’t just show up on the doorstep. That does not work for my family, for our family. She might be mad about it and you might have to navigate that, but it is not your responsibility to fix that.

It is going to be hard, but that is not your first step. Your first step is saying, “Barbara, as a family, it is too disruptive for you to come by and expect to be greeted and entertained. We’ve got kids, we’ve got work, I’ve got a new baby,” whatever that looks like, “we just need you to call first. Give us at least an hour’s notice.” That’s not hard.

two, I think we build up these conversations in our head where we’re like, oh, I’m going to say this thing and it’s going to go so poorly and everyone’s going to be so mad at me. Then we say it and they go, okay.

I am someone who sets and holds boundaries because I am someone who takes her mental health, energetic capacity, and worth seriously.” That is how-

I think everyone can change their thinking about boundaries because it isn’t about calling out someone else’s bad behavior. There might be no bad behavior happening anywhere around you. It’s about taking your mental health, your energetic capacity, and you’re worth seriously enough to give it a voice in your own damn life.

 

This is unearned guilt. We did not earn this guilt. There’s nothing about this that says we have done something wrong or we harmed another person. We are simply advocating for our needs. 

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Episode 67: How to Get More Joy with Martha Beck: 

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Martha reminds us about how to return to our wild and with a little more integrity, meaning integrated. That is so outer lives and our inner selves are the same thing. We are trying to figure out how to get back to that knowing how to live the life that we were meant to live. 

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In this episode they took questions from callers:

1) first question was asking is selfishness was real. When is it important to priortize other people's needs, wants, and feelings, and when is it okay to prioritize yours? 

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Martha Beck replied:  Selfishness is a thing and it happens when someone is starved of self.  So the people who are very selfish are being mean and awful because that person's self is being stifled to the point where they cannot things about anything else. So for example if you drink, its probably because you've lost yourself and you need to anesthize the pain because the separation from self is unbearable. 

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So first thing is restore your understanding of self by pouring as much nourishment into your true self as possible. Once you prioritize yourself you an start breathing freely again and you see other people and want to give things to them. So when you are starved of self, you are the first priority. You'll feel a little more energetic toward others every time you give your self something it genuinely needs. Google maps is like your navigation system. You need to pay 99% of your attention to it, to your internal self. Once you've internalized it, your entire life will become selfless. You will go from feeling completely selfish to being completely selfless,  So first always get your breath back, and always navigate by checking inside first. 

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People who live as martyrs are always the most bitter and angry because they are starved of self and desperately needing it. 

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Women think they they can just get to themselves at the end of the list. They can do everything for everyone else, but that means that the energy with which were doing things for other people is actually angry energy, tired and exhausted. 

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Ideal of self sabotage:  this concept really hit home to me because I do this.  Martha said that if you're not free to follow your nature, you will start to do dysfunctional things to sabotage the program that is taking you out of your nature. 

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Self denial is your true nature trying to trick the system into letting you be free. Self-sabatoge is the truth trying to get you out of the cultural matrix that has taken your freedom. It's like I'm going to do what I loathe all day long because I am a good person, and then I'm going to drink... because its like screw you world. So don't want till it kills you, start doing what you want to do now. 

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2) How do you decipher between your knowing that you should listen to and what is fear that you just need to breathe though and heal through? 

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Martha replies that we abandon what we know about ourselves when we are pressured to do things by sort of socialization and by trauma. She says to go into the trauma, find the place inside the trauma where you were actually okay, and start building on the part of you that you knew were okay. And you will find it. 

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A way to feel ok is a simple breath exercise: Breath in and allow everything in the universe to be the way it is right now. Now as I breathe out, I'm going to drop all my resistance to reality being as it is right now, not in five seconds but now. So you breathe in and you allow things to be as they are right now, you breathe out and you stop resisting. So you breathe in and you breathe out, and you surrender and allow, and surrender and allow. And then this moment becomes the haven that is okay, just this moment. And from this you find your way into the trauma and this moment is always here for you. Its not easy to find the happiness but you can learn that every moment of your life is okay. 

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3) How do you find and trust your knowing when there are so many other voices in your head, or how do I make the right decision based on my own truth and not just based out of fear? 

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Martha says that if your fear and your longing conflict, choose your longing no matter what everyone else says. So always go with our longing no matter how frightened you are, and you'll always find the right path. 

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4) talk about decision making/ knowing. Caller had a lot of trouble with decision making because she could always see every side and feels paralyzed. When she finally made a decision, she struggled with regret. How do you make big decisions, and how do you access your knowing and differentiate if from feelings that can be fleeting or misleading? 

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This is me!  I have a huge trouble with decision making and always can see every side!  

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Martha says that the something else will feel manic and then something will always feel peaceful.  When your heart, your mind, your body, and your soul all are saying the same thing this when you know whats true. Its like puzzle pieces clicking or locks coming into alignment. 

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The thing that made most people feel a sense of true knowing was this statement: I am meant to live in peace. 

If you’re not free to follow your nature, you will start to do dysfunctional things to sabotage the program that is taking you out of your nature. 

 

When this beautiful Carrie Anne says, I can always see every side of a question, that’s coming from cognitive stuff, that’s the head, and it’s her mind because she’s taking different perspectives. The problem is, if you’re taking all the different perspectives, they’re not anchored to anything. They say the mind is a wonderful servant and a terrible master. So, the mind sees every side and then drop down. 

 

So, okay, here are all the sides, they’re in your head, now drop into the body. What feels like peace? What feels like calm, what feels warm and free? All the things we’ve been talking about. And what makes you, here’s something that happens when you get to the right choice, you will notice your body spontaneously go. And if you really watch, it’s so interesting, I’ll be messing around trying to make a decision, and then suddenly I hear it myself. And my mind is not what makes it happen because the body, there are more nerves going from the heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart, and they’re giving information. So, yeah, take all the perspectives, and then go by yourself and drop into your body and feel what’s warm and free and at peace. And you’ll always find the right answer.

 

This Podcast is all about breaking free from cultural pressures,

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Episode 66: How to Come Home to Yourself with Martha Beck

I was going through my mind, my monkey mind, of all the reasons why it couldn’t happen. And you said to me, “I need you to get back into your body and I need you to tell me what feels warm.”

 

For people who are listening right now, how do people get back to this guide inside of themselves when they’ve been living their life by consensus, permission, outer voices? How do we tap into the self inside that some people call knowing, some people call north star, spirit, whatever you call it, how do we get back to that compass?

Martha Beck:

The single sign that we’ve lost ourselves is suffering. It’s so simple, and it’s a gift. I used to hate it… I don’t like suffering. But now I actually really value and prize suffering because I’ve come to understand that it’s always telling me that I’ve lost myself. I’m not coming to my sense. I’m coming to some kind of consensus.

So the more we accept consensus and it goes against our natural way of being, so the culture takes away our nature, the more we suffer and the world feels toxic and horrible, and we don’t feel like we have a sense of purpose and our relationships don’t go well, and we often get addicted to things. And at a certain point it gets so bad that suffering won’t let us continue to abandon our true selves.

 

And that is its gift. It’s always a friend. It’s always an ally. And if we stop and say, “Okay, this hurts so much, I’m going to go in my room by myself and figure out how to let go of what hurts me,” that usually is the only thing that starts the process for people, because the desire to fit in is so overwhelming that to break free requires an equal and opposite force, and that is intense. It’s not fun. But to be set free by suffering is usually the way it starts. 

 

How do people who… Okay, so if we’re in the suffering, right? And we’re in the strain and we’re in the consensus, I just want you to talk us through, what are the actual ways that we return… We’re in that bedroom where you just talked about, and we know there’s more to life than this. We want to be free. We want to have joy. We want to feel like whatever the eff you just said. We want to feel like that. How do we start? Where does a woman who’s got three kids who need her to get out of bed and get to school and a job that she doesn’t feel like she’s playing at.

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So this is how you do it. You push yourself to the point where you can’t do it anymore. Then you go in your room, get out a piece of paper and you say, “Here is what I am fucking sick of. Here is what I will… I fucking hate this. I hate it.” I call it liberation through pain and rage. “I fucking hate this.” And you write it all down. Yeah. And then, that’s what consensus is making you do because the rage inside you is the wild animal saying, “No.” 

“I cannot go on. I cannot move. I cannot stand this.” And then that’s the wild animal. Okay. So you let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, and then you express it and write it down. Write it all down. The most forbidden things, because the forbidden things you’re thinking are the things that consensus has shoved on you and told you never to think. And the natural response is to fight that, or to go completely inert and say, “Well, then, I’ll just die.” That was my response. “I think I’ll just die.” And, yeah, I did. And then I was still alive and I was like, “Well, now I don’t really give a shit what anybody thinks of me because I’m dead. 

Buddha used to say. “Wherever you find the ocean, you can know it’s the ocean because it always tastes of salt no matter what it looks like.” Wherever you find enlightenment, you can know what it looks like. It’ll take all kinds of forms that look weird to you, but you will know it’s enlightenment because enlightenment always tastes of freedom. Always. So it may hurt. It may make your family hate you. It may terrify the crap out of you, but it will feel like freedom. 

 

In The Way of Integrity, you said write down all of the rage, write down what you hate. I feel like that was such an important chapter for me and something that I’ve always known to be true, which is that this compulsive fake positivity, like we’re told what will help you is if you just keep saying it’s great. If you just keep saying, “I’m so grateful, this is fine. I am happy and whole. I am whatever.” We think that will set us free, but- its really

Soul murder.  What actually sets us free is to tell the freaking truth. “I hate this. I won’t take this anymore.”

 

So after you say, “F.. this, I hate you all,” or, “I’m dead and I don’t care.” Then you say, “Here’s what I would like you to say. Here’s what I want you to do. Here’s how I want you to treat me. I want you to treat me like my opinion matters. I want you to treat me like I’m free to become whatever I want.”

You just write down what they should be doing. And then you go up to the top and you cross out their name and you put your own name in, and it becomes a letter saying, “Here’s what I should be letting me do.” And you do it even if they don’t like it. 

 

The instructions are there. They’re there inside the rage. They’re there inside the dejection and the limpness and the suffering. The suffering is teaching you the instructions for your life. And here’s the cool thing. Nobody else has them. The only way you’re going to ever find them is if you go in and get them from inside yourself. Your instructions are nowhere else but inside you.

 

I feel like I’m a chef who has all the ingredients of a really lovely meal. So I have all the parts of life that should be creating this beautiful, beautiful life, but yet I have this anger and resentment and really short fuse about everything. 

 

What you’ve described is a life with no freedom, with no sense of freedom, so it can’t be enlightenment, right? And you’ve got resentment and anger, which are your best friends because they’re sharply pointing you to the places where your freedom is most constrained. And that inner self knows that it’s wrong. Your mind is socialized to say, “Well, I’ve got to do all this stuff, so how do I give myself enough bubble baths and time with trashy novels to restore me so that can be an absolute drone servant of the human consensus again?”

Martha Beck: You go into the deepest resentment and you start to dig yourself a tunnel. In The Count of Monte Cristo, this guy’s falsely imprisoned in a dungeon, but they give him a spoon and he spends 14 years burrowing throughs solid rock with his spoon. He actually gets out, and the reason he doesn’t go insane is he’s always digging, right? And the digging is what keeps him sane. 

 

If somebody wants to begin, what do they do today to return to their wild? 

Martha Beck:

This very day, you make a list of things you have to do. You see which one makes you most upset. Then you make another list of things that make you genuinely happy. And then you replace 10 minutes of the thing you hate with the thing you love.

 

And you do that every day for a week. And then you move 10 minutes again. And you just keep doing that. And I call it one degree turns, and it’s like flying a plane 10,000 miles and you just turn one degree. Nobody even knows. You don’t even notice. But if you do that every week, you end up in a totally different place.

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Episode 61: Are your Friendships Draining or Charging You? with Luvvie Ajayi Jones

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Luvvie defines a friend as: A friend is someone who you feel responsible for their care and someone who you trust yourself with, your truth with, your imperfection with. A friendship is an action, that person is a charging station for you. A friend who has to show up. Actions that are substantive. Someone who you will show up for in a moment of crises. 

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Can black and white women be friends? Yes, if white women know how to be in community. Black women have deep community and so their friendships are deep. Black women approach friendships with whole heart and whole body, with full vulnerability. White women may have to over prove their friendships because in the past white women have undermined them 

 

Episode 60:  Telling the Truth of Who We are with Luvvie Ajayi Jones

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Luvvie says to "give yourself permission to fail."

 

Have hard conversations with full vulnerability. Start the conversation by saying how hard it is to have the conversation and that you hope you receive it in the heart it is intended. Gets the person ready to hear something difficult and the fact that you say you don't want to do it tells them that it is necessary. Practically, whenever she needs to have a tough conversation she writes it down first. I will come into the conversation with my own bullet points I want to make so I don't become derailed when I get emotional and just focus on one issue. Say let me read it to you first so I get to it all, and then lets talk it through. I come with notes and then we talk. This is how I'm feeling...

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Amanda says that a big reason why we don't share is that when I tell you how I feel you turn it back to me in a way that is unrecognizable in a way that I feel in my bones, and there is nothing lonelier than that.

 

Luvvie says that what is important is how you end/ repair an argument. That's what important. The repair is how you finish it, how you button it up, at what point did it end with I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, I'm sorry I did this thing that did not honor you, sorry I did something that made you feel unseen, unheard, unaffirmed.

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Episode 57: Walking our People Through Hard Things With Kate Bowler: 

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When someone tells us something painful that has happened in their life should we start the next sentence:  "At least..." Never, Never, it is a horrifying cruelty. In the end you have just relativized someone's pain. 

 

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Episode 56:  What to Do With our Short, Precious Life with Kate Bowler:  Where there is joy there is almost always sorrow.  Grief is almost always tucked in the shadow of joy. We need to allow ourselves to have a thousand different feelings about the same day in the same day. Apparently the only acceptable emotions are joy, happiness, optimism. Love holidays, and random bake a thons because life is so hard - so the second you can get a moment of joy, take it. Pain has scooped out something in us that joy can fill. Go out of my way to get excited about the dumbest thing, because the next day might be the day I don't have the chance to do that. We celebrate because we are so sad. If we can get joy just for a minute, we need to take it, just take it! The world tells us that you can always fix your life in any area, life is just a series of choices just add them up. The big lie is that we are masters of our destiny, but truth is most things happen to us. 

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Episode 51: Forgiving and Finding Peace with Ashley C. Ford

 

The beginning of my healing journey, I guess, was not identified to me as a healing journey. It was just me in a place of searching for something. Trying to feel better, trying to feel good, trying to feel peaceful, and realizing that all of the things I’d been told to try didn’t work. And I am just not the kind of person who has to do the same thing over and over to figure out that it’s not working. 

 

So from a very young age, I realized that the adults around me did a lot of things that they said were the right thing to do, and none of them seemed to ever get the results they wanted or be happy, ever. And so it was clear to me that something was not working, and that not trying new things wasn’t working. So I just wanted to try something new. If I had been taught my entire life that talking about how I feel, telling people how I feel, letting them see who I am was putting myself in danger, and was exposing myself or was seeking attention, because those were the only two ways this was going. Either your feelings are real, and because they are real you need to hide them because people will use them to hurt you, or your feelings are not real and you are just saying that because you want someone to look at you.

Ashley Ford:

But I also knew what was going on inside me. And it was undeniable. I couldn’t deny me. I could try. I could keep trying to deny myself, but it hurt. It hurt to keep denying myself. And so I just thought, “I’m going to try something different.” I’m going to do things that my mom has told me not to do. I’m going to do things that my grandma told me to be scared of. I’m going to do things that I’ve never seen anybody like me do. I’m going to give them a try, because the worst thing that could happen is that it doesn’t work, just like everything else hasn’t worked.

And I could not make that feel right in my body. I tried and I tried and I tried to make that feel correct. I felt so guilty about the fact that it didn’t feel correct to me. And I had been taught to distrust myself so much that all I could do with those feelings of discomfort, or that inkling that something about this isn’t right, is turn it into a reason to dislike myself. To hate myself, to mistrust myself. So I had to find something that was different than what I’d been taught, because I could not survive within what I’d been taught. I was not surviving in that frame of mind. I needed something new. I didn’t want to lose my family, but I didn’t want to lose myself more.

There was always something. This little kernel of something that I can’t explain that was like, “But maybe it could be better than that.” Maybe you could be happier than that. Maybe you could get what you want. And that was … Even as I felt it, it terrified me. It still sometimes terrifies me.

 

Stories were where I figured out that there were all kinds of voices and that I could be one of them that got to tell the story, and got to decide what happened next. And that sense of narrative power, of narrative control, realizing the power of narrative in culture, in community. I could never, ever, ever pretend that I hadn’t found that. There are so many things you can deny in yourself. You can deny that you saw that, you could deny that you felt it, that it meant anything. But there is something about the stories in books, to me, that are undeniable proof about the power of storytelling, and of narrative. And that undeniable proof just felt like something that I could latch onto. Something that I could use.

 

And it’s a lot of image maintenance. And yeah, we can throw a banging party. Don’t get me wrong. We will have fun. But when it’s time to talk about what’s real, people get angry and people get defensive and people disappear. And I live in that place. My brain has always lived in that place. I’ve always been an observer. I’ve always wanted to say, “Well, why is that? Well, why did we make that decision? Why did we move to this place? Where is my dad? Why is he gone?” I’ve always had a lot of questions. And I sometimes still hate how intensely I was taught to cut that part of me out of me to make other people comfortable.

 

I’ve learned that if you don’t talk about the hard things and actually deal with them, they just become future problems.

 

I think you just have to let it all be true at the same time. You have to let it all be true at the same. It’s the thing that nobody ever really talks to us about or shows us how to do, which is processing complex emotions. 

 

I’m going to work on me. I’m going to work on myself. I’m going to make sure that the things that I need and want that I didn’t get, that I still seek those things out in my life. Because even if I get them and find that my they’re not as good as I thought they were going to be, at least I gave myself the chance to find out. And I’m happy about that.

 

And you’re only responsible for the boundary you set, not for the reaction to it.

Managing people’s reaction to the boundaries is what ruins us.

It is. When you try to manage the reactions of other people, when you try to manage other people’s reactions to your boundaries, you’re doing their work for them.

 

That’s forgiveness, for me. Is just giving up on the version of my life where it was different, because it’s not different. It’s not ever going to be different. It is the way … The past is the past. I can’t change anything about the past. None of us can.

 

And I’m pissed off for the younger version of me who could have done and seen and experienced so many things with the full embodiment of herself, actually inside of her body, except for the fact that by the time she was a teenager, she was already terrified to be inside of her body. And she was already terrified of how the world would react to her, because of how the world had already reacted to her. And because she didn’t have a safe place to fully, fully be herself and not be judged for it. And every kid should have that. Every kid should have that.

 

Talk about mistreating children, and you’ll find out. You’ll see me. You will see me. You will see that part of me. You will see the part of me that takes no prisoners when we start talking about children.” Because somebody has to stand up for them. Somebody has to be there. Somebody has to be the adult who’s on their side. They need somebody to be on their side. 

 

You understand the weight of it. You understand what it means to carry it, you understand how hard it is to get it off of you. You get it. That’s my passion point. What makes me most angry is my passion point. That is where I most easily show up and get things done, is when it has to do with children. 

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Episode 42: Are your relationships alive? with Esther Perel

3 reasons why people fight

 

1) power and control: hidden message : whose priorities matter, whose needs do we pay attention to and matter:  when I bring up a problem do you always see it as a criticism of you instead of me expressing my needs. 

2) closeness and care: can I trust you and do you have my back

3)  recognition: do you value me? if when you speak, I feel you don't value me. fight is going to be about my value/ integity

 

what destroys it is when you go into categorical statements: you always do this, you never..because by definition I'm going to give you one example when that is not the case. why

1)  because you are not going to tell me what I am.

2) it is a metaphor: it is an expression of your experience. It is not a fact. It is pseudo fact. It is subjective experience, it is valid, but it is not the truth, it is not fact.  It is the truth about how you feel.

3) to know there are right times to talk.

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Episode 22: REAL TALK:  How can we begin to use conversation as a key to unlocking each other? 

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Effective communication:

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1. Don't interrupt: it is rude but also it stops the flow of the conversation. Someone starts commenting on what you are saying but are not actually addressing what you really are trying to get to because they interrupt you before you get there. People are being brave and saying what is important to them and someone else is cutting them off.  People interrupt because they feel that if they don't say it right now they will forget it. 

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Glennon says that a conversation is like a river and the conversation goes on and job is to flow down river and go where it takes you but when you have to say something you are holding on to the side of the river bank so by the time you get the chance to say what you are going to say we are not there anymore. It's true because if you are just waiting to say what you want to say, you stop listening. Just waiting for the moment till you have the oppportuntiy to say it.

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Converse: to live or dwell with. If waiting to talk and every time I stop talking I turn my back and when I think of thing to say I turn back around to say it. Rarely am I taking in what you have said. Conversation is not taking turns talking. It is a mutual surrender.

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2.  Trying to offer solutions when you don't want someone to fix the situation, you just want someone to hear you. Kids and grown adults want to figure out the solution themselves, but they may need someone to help them find the answer. Help them proces what is going on and help them find what it true  and right for them.

3. People want others to have empathy for their situation. Not just sympathy, but really understand what they are going thru. Each situation is unique and no one else knows exactly how you are feeling at this time.

4. Don't talk about yourself. It is taking over the coversation. Someone is sharing something important and you say that is just like what happened to me or so and so and you tell your story and don't listen to your friends story.

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Episode 8:  SELF CARE:  How do we identify our real needs and finally get them met? 

The consequence of the constant abandonment of our emotions, is we lose self trust.

If we had a friend who came with us in pain and we ran away, we grabbed the booze, we left, we said we can't deal with it, we told her to bury it, to numb it, we deny it or we defend it,  we would not have any trust with that friend anymore because in her most vulnerable moment, we were constantly leaving.   And yet, we constantly are abandoning ourselves. Everytime the vulnerable emotions like fear, anger, heartbreak, envy come to us we bury it, deny it, pretend its not there, we numb it out, those are all forms of abandoning ourselves.  So we learn over time that we are not people that will stay with us. we are alone when things are hard. and when we stay with ourselves we earn our own trust and we don't have to worry if others will abandon us.

 

We can't meet a need if can't identify a need.  I have learned that you have different selves that you can't ignore; such as emotional self, intuitive self, and mind. 

 

One thing we can do to get to the need is to learn to stop abandoning ourselves constantly. We have easy buttons and reset buttons. Easy buttons are things we do to abandon ourselves.  When we transport out of pain then we miss all the transformation. In order to become our better next self, we have to stay in the hot lonliness. How do I stay in the hot lonliness? Don't abandon myself by booze, binging, shopping..always feel worse afterwards..Reset buttons: things that help me stay with myself: drink water, take dogs for a walk, read a chapter in a book... Little ways that help me process things and that I don't have to run away.  

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Self care: having the hard discussion, setting boundaries, saying no.  What kind of life do I not need to escape from?

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Real self care is the hard things: being the joan of arc of your life. Looking at the battle you need to fight in your life and then the peace is the result of doing that hard thing.  It is the listing all the ways your needs are not being met, and one at a time, dealing with it. 

 

Women have been taught, trained, conditioned to believe that good parenting is abadoning yourself; buring your needs, dreams, true feelings, ambitions and calling that love. Being a martyr.  We wonder why don't know how to get our needs met. That we don't know who we are.  It's not our fault, but it is our responsibility.  It has been held up to us as the epitome of womenhood --the way you succeed as a women is to not have a self. Appeal to a women's need to love well.  But we can't love our people well if you don't have a self. When we pass down this idea that love is matrydome that is a brutal legacy. When I abandon myself, I am abandoning the world because I am not giving the gift of myself to my children, to the world.  When we bring our true self to table then we grant permission to others to bring their true self to the table. Self care is the best care. We can't accept any life that is less true than we want for our people.   It's peacekeeper, not peacemaker. Will not challenge this idea that I shoud just keep quiet and serve and this keeps the peace but it does not make real peace.

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Little girls are taught in every moment of uncertainty to look outside of themselves for permission, for concensious. Since you can see this conditioning happening, then we can undue it.

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Thing about needs, is that needs demand to be met. If we choose to ignore them, they will get met whether you do the work or not. It will will either benefit or destroy.

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We don't tend to our emotional self because we are trained not to.  Constantly taught smile, be accommodating,  others people's comfort is more important than yours.  Don't hurt someone else's feelings, even if it means abandoning yours. Little girls have certain emotions they are allowed to feel. Anger, jealously,  heartbreak are not feelings litle girls can show.  We learn if we are angry or jealous, it is not info, it means there is something wrong with us.  Then we wonder why later we don't know how to care for those feelings inside of us. These emotions give us so much info about what our boundaries are, what we should do in life.  The emotions are data. If the effort is to know yourself and lead a peaceful productive life full of joy, then if you understood early that resentment and jealousy were in fact just helpful data pointing us towards something that we need .. a need that we need to meet in our own lives. Emotions are helpful, instead of being shameful.  Comfortable emotions are recess. What do we do if we don't deal with these uncomfortable emotions?   We allow ourselves to be gaslit. No you shouldn't be angry, you are too emotional, that is a you problem.  There is something wrong with you, and you begin to feel crazy. You're not crazy -- you're a goddam cheetah. Gaslit of the world saying your anger means your crazy, your anger means there is something wrong with you.  When in fact, it just means something is wrong.

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How do we allow each human being the full experience of being human? 

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 Glennon says that it's a leap for a lot of people. We believe that our selflessness is what makes our world go around.  My selflessness is what makes my family function, my community function. But, if your family can step into your truth, they will find that its actually better for those around you. 

 

Glennon said she hit rock bottom when she found herself googling my one wild and precious life: asking bots and trolls if they knew what I should do with my life. When did you literally start trusting everyone else on earth more than yourself:  I had been calling friends asking friends what they would do, reading every single article, taken quizes. I realized that I have one life, and I will never live my one life if I don't figure out what I want to do. If I don't keep desperately  searching outside my life  as to what to do. If I don't quit living my life by inquiry and consenscous and permission searching for approval. Sit still you can hear an inner guide your knowing.

 

Not a 5 year plan, but the next right thing. One thing at a time. anything that feels like freedom or being alive is what we can trust. Can you tap back into that flash of freedom? 30 seconds at a time are raindrops in a desert. Not enough to fill you up, but reminders that there is something more.

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