Self-Boundaries
The boundary of a person’s self is defined by his hurt. When you are being violated by someone, your boundaries are being violated: you feel hurt.
Violation of your self is only acceptable when it is already being violated by yourself. Think about that. Who else would accept violations of his feelings except someone who is not caring for them. When you are not caring for your feelings, another person not caring for them will go unnoticed by you. A lack of self-care blinds you as to whether others care for you or not. Whatever hurt that you already are pushing down induces the hurt caused by the violating person also to be pushed down. The violating person, because of his self-blindness, may not even know his actions are hurtful to you. You make matters worse from violating yourself by not being aware of your feelings and sticking up for them. If you tell other people that they can violate your feelings by your example, your feelings will be violated. What do you expect? If you accept violation of yourself, others will come to expect violation of your boundaries to be acceptable and normal.
Other people frequently test and sense your boundaries. This is especially true when they are just getting to know you. As much as you allow your personal space to be violated, you can expect them to violate it a little bit more because they are in a testing and learning phase of who you are. Since you and they are continually growing, this testing and learning phase may recur at different times. This is neither good nor bad, just natural. Expect this, so you can be prepared to clearly set your boundaries. If you make your boundaries unclear, violation of them can be expected more often. If you make your boundaries clear, the average person is more likely to respect them, even though he may not understand your reasons for them.
People who respect their boundaries will be less likely to respect you if you lack respect for your boundaries. They are hurt by your self-disrespect because it takes yourself away from them. In addition, they don’t feel good about treating you with less respect than they treat themselves. Because nobody is taking the vast responsibility of your boundary maintenance, they cannot treat you with the same respect they treat themselves. You are trying to give them work that you are unwilling to do. Because you are trying to make them responsible for your boundary maintenance, they feel unfairly treated. They already have enough responsibility themselves! If they take responsibility for you, they will feel a need to control you. The controlling feeling comes from the responsibility you have given them for yourself. Remember, freedom comes with responsibility, so that if other people are responsible for you, they also need freedom to control you. Your responsibility is not theirs, and it is much too great a responsibility to bear while also maintaining their self-respect. When they consistently see you without self-respect and boundaries, they have a more difficult time maintaining their self-respect and boundaries, unless they see less of you.
As someone who lacks self-respect, you are not able to accept others as themselves because you do not respect that within yourself. This leads people who respect themselves not to want to be around you because you reject their self which you deny in yourself. But you wouldn’t want to be around them anyway, just as you don’t want to be around the part of yourself you reject. Every time they stick up for and make known their selves, you are reminded of how you do not do this. You might even falsely perceive their self-caring as self-centered and stuck-up because you feel like they should be caring more about you. However, you are the one who is not caring enough about yourself, and because you do not, you need the world around you to care more about yourself and your feelings. You are the one who is self-centered, selfish, and unable to care for your and others’ feelings.
Protecting your boundaries is good not only for you but also for others. When you stick up for yourself, you make it easier for others around you to do the same. You make known that it is okay with you for feelings to be respected. Other people who also respect themselves will be attracted to this norm, and people who do not will not. By disrespecting your boundaries, you make it easier for people lacking self-respect to slip into their weakness of stepping into your boundaries and taking control of yourself.
A person to whom you give responsibility of yourself will inevitably make a mistake in respecting yourself, for we all make mistakes, even in respecting ourselves. When this person makes the mistake, you will not have the pain of yourself making it; you will have the pain of him making it with you. Since the pain is not your responsibility, you are unable to grow from the mistake. Since the pain is not really his responsibility, he will not grow from the mistake. No one gets a positive reward from the mistake. Instead, you resent the other person for not being sensitive enough, and expect him to grow or change so that the mistake does not happen again. You wind up relinquishing more self-responsibility, giving up more control.
People with self-respect don't want to disrespect you by controlling you; instead, they will choose to be around other people. You may take this personally, feeling rejected and unworthy of good people, but only because first you have been unworthy to yourself. The people with whom you feel worthy enough to be around will be the ones who don’t mind controlling you. Come on! Let loose of your defenses enough to allow this logic to settle into yourself, allowing you to grow and gain more personal power. Or you can remain helpless, dependent, and out of control, and you will deserve every bit of it.
People will manipulate you through your dependent need of having others maintain your boundaries. You will feel abused and helpless, being even more needy for someone to save you while dealing with these uncaring people. The person you need is yourself. Perhaps you believe you never had learned to care for yourself, and are still looking for someone to care for you. Stop looking and do it yourself. Stop feeling sorry for your unloved self, because now you are the one who is not loving you. Take responsibility for loving yourself, so you will not need others to do this but can simply enjoy whatever love others have for yourself. If you do this, you will still experience hurt in your life, but you will be empowered. This hurt, no matter how it feels, is not as painful as if you choose not to take responsibility for yourself. For whenever another person hurts you while you are not taking self-responsibility, you have additional hurt from you abandoning yourself.
-How are you commonly violated?
-What part do you play in that violation? (There is some part; think about it until you find it, or ask a friend.)
-Are you holding in any old hurt, causing you to have difficulty perceiving and preventing current hurts?
-What boundaries do you want to strengthen of yourself?
-Why have you not begun this?
-What needs to happen for you to begin this?
-Imagine if you could live forever. When would you begin to increase the strength of your boundaries? Why?
-Now imagine if you could live only for 70 years. When would you begin to increase the strength of your boundaries? Why?
-Now imagine that you have only one year to live (by the way, this is a possibility). When would you begin to increase the strength of your boundaries?
-Explain any differences in your last three answers.
Wrong Battles
You get only a limited amount of time here on Earth, so it is important to spend time fighting the right battles. This requires you to know what is most important for yourself, and to let that be the deciding factor for the battles you choose. You also have a limited amount of energy within each day. If you fight for principles and not for helping yourself, you are wasting your time. If you need to argue with someone just because he cut you off in traffic, what does that say about the importance of the battles you choose? Are you not facing the hurt from a girlfriend but instead facing the safer minor hurt of another driver’s poor judgment? Are your battles focusing on what you want accomplished in your lifetime and what you can give to the world? Why would you allow something to take you away from what you are doing and from things that are important to you? Is your life full of important things? If not, why not? Why haven’t you filled it up? You are supposed to fill it up with what you love to give. This way you don’t get caught up in trivial matters. You have much more important battles to fight.
If a stranger treats you with disrespect, what do you do? Do you get up and fight with him, taking away the limited time you have in life? If so, you not only take your time away but also spend it with someone you don’t like! When you give him part of your precious life, you make him special. Why would you do this? Isn’t it punishment enough for that person to be himself, having to live with himself every day of his life? Do you need to punish him in a more overt manner? Why? If you do, you bring his badness into your life. You risk injury to yourself and trouble with the law. The lesson you try to teach him will not be heard. Think of the lesson you can teach yourself. Be thankful you have to live with him only for a moment. If you choose to live in someone's miserable existence for longer than a moment, you also must feel miserable. Time to start feeling good about yourself. Next time you get into such a situation, remind yourself of this truth.
You are powerless over other people. The only power you have is with yourself. Empower yourself. If you feel treated unfairly and want to express your feelings, so be it. Express them and move on. But if you need to prove something, get people to understand, or need anything from them, why? Why do you give other people that much power over you. If you need another person to react a certain way, he has power over you. Expect people to react the way they are, not the way you feel you need them to react. You are not that special, powerful, or important for other people to change. Perhaps you might be able to intimidate people for a brief period, but that is not changing them. They are not going to change for you, no matter what they may say. They can change only for themselves, just like you. They are themselves, and you are powerless over what they choose in their life. Focus your attention where it should be: on yourself and your life. Express self for yourself, and move on to your life, filling it with more beautiful things that you create.
Some people are dangerous, and engaging with them would place yourself in danger. You need to allow these people to leave your life. They are trouble, and you don't need them in your life. Get away from them as quickly and safely as you can while maintaining self-respect. Do not fill your life with their anger, which they have for anyone who crosses their path. Let evil take care of itself; it does not do a good job. Allow them to roll out of your life, so they can meet someone just like themselves: rigidly closed with old hurt of which will never be acknowledged. This way they can both deal with each other, fighting battles that truly mean nothing, draining each other’s life-energy.
If you were one of those completely closed people with old hurt, you would not have gotten this far in the book. However, it is likely that you are a person with old hurt of which you aren’t entirely open to, as most people are. Unacknowledged old hurt causes you to fight wrong battles. You create battles in the present to fight a conglomeration of unintegrated battles of the past, bringing about the feeling that you are fighting the right battles, even though they are not entirely real. You share something similar to those people who want to start a battle with you. You share old, unacknowledged hurt, yet you are more open to it than they.
Acknowledge the truth by being aware of the sources of your feelings. Be open with that knowledge when your battles are with people you love. This way they will know there are two battles going on (past and present) and can be more respectful to your situation.
-Do you find that people you don’t like seem to take you away from your work and love in life?
-What do you need to do to focus less on their miserable life and more on your life?
-When do you find it easiest to focus on your life?
-Why?
-How can you increase this?
-Do you have an old hurt that you haven’t integrated which they are using to control you to enter into their miserable life?
-What lesson do you need to learn to allow these people to leave your life right after they enter it?
-What are the true battles in your lifetime?
-How much time do you spend in battles that do not relate to these?
-Why?
-What does the last answer have to do with not being open to your old hurt?
Needing others to be different
When you need people to be different than who they are, what you really need is to ask yourself what needs growth or change within yourself. Why do you have a need for them to change? Why does your life stop because they are not changing? That makes your life dependent on them, powerless. Is that what you want? Other people are simply the way they are, and they will not change. Well, they may change, but that is none of your business. To make it your business hurts others and yourself. When you need people to change, you are rejecting them as they are and setting yourself up to be let down. Accept that other people do not change the way you want them to change. This means that if you want to be happy, the only one left to change is yourself.
Perhaps you feel as if an empty hole has been dug into yourself. No matter how wonderful you believe your parents to have been, your mom and dad, in their love for you, were not perfect; you were hurt by their flaws. This hurt may have remained unexpressed, digging a hole out of your heart. Over the years you may have covered the hole by believing and expecting your parents to be who they never were: parents capable of loving you the way you needed to have been loved. This cover did not remove the emptiness underneath it. Fill up the hole yourself because they will never change to fill it up for you. You must be that loving mom and dad that you never had for yourself by yourself. Take responsibility for that now. What are you waiting for, someone to save you? It will not happen!
Lose your expectation of people being the certain way you want them to be. Mourn the fantasy you have created them to be in your mind: a loving mom, dad, sibling, child, family, lover, friend, or whoever. People are just the way they are. If you have a lover and expect him to be someone he is not being, what need or emptiness are you asking to be filled within yourself? Is it that same empty hole from your parents, which never got filled? Why haven’t you looked to yourself to fulfill that need? Expect people to be exactly who they are, not whom you need them to be to feel complete about yourself. If you accept them for whatever horrible or beautiful way they are, you give yourself power not to be let down when they turn out to be themselves, again and again. Care for yourself enough to give it this power. Life is short; try living it as yourself, not as a self that has people around to hide holes.
If someone’s personality is troubling you, how can you grow to feel better about being yourself with this person? Do you need to grow out of the relationship? If the person troubling you feels entitled enough to be his rude or difficult self around you, why are you not allowing yourself to be your beautiful, truthful self around him. What are you getting from him that you fear you may lose?
Feeling content is knowing you are being most of yourself in each situation. You cannot lose when you are completely being yourself with another person. If he rejects you for being yourself, he had already rejected you. If he is not going to change, why hold yourself back for his deadness and lack of growth? Why commit yourself to be dead just because he is dead? Stop rejecting yourself! It no longer does you or anybody else any good.
If you accept yourself, at least you gain information about people’s reactions to you, enabling you to see how you want the relationships to continue. The information you gain in being yourself may tell you to stop a relationship or to accept both the other person and yourself. The latter means accepting the other person as he is and being the self you are. This means you express feelings or truth in response to your feelings when with this accepted person. The truth you speak is to be simply an expression of yourself to define yourself in the situation with him, not as an attempt to change him. You turn the relationship with him into a chance to simply be.
The people you expect to be different may have potential to grow, but they can do so only at their own choice and rate, and in their own way. Don't fill up your life hanging around waiting for them to be something they are not. If you do, you lose time, waiting for something that is not real. The sands of time of your life blow away, lived painfully in your false expectations. Your fantasy of other people being the way you want will never come true. And as they do change in their own way, who can say if they will still want to be around you. After all, it was their selves you didn't like that wanted to stick around you before. If they change, maybe their new selves will not like you.
Use your time to invest in something of yourself. This way you will always have something which you may build upon and grow from. It is empowering because yourself is there with you already, so you don’t need to wait for someone else. Your self exists. Give up hope that others will change, so you can empower yourself by yourself. Face any pain you need to face to be yourself. Be brave and take this courage.
-What is it about yourself that needs to change to eliminate your need for other people to change.
-Why do you expect other people to change the way you want them to change?
-Was there something about them which led you to believe they have the potential for that change?
-What clues do you get which can lead you to believe they will not change that way?
-Why haven’t you accepted these clues?
-What exists within you to help discount them?
-Do you have any expectations of your mom or dad being different than they already are?
-What do you expect from them that they are not being?
-What gave you the idea they are capable of meeting your expectations?
-Is this realistic?
-If not, give up your expectation.
-If so, why hasn’t it happened yet?
-If you believe it has not happened because you have not done something, you need to have some sense of control over them. What are you trying to control through controlling them? Why?
-Is this helpful to you? Explain how?
-If this could be unhelpful, explain how?
-Would giving up your expectations mean you would have to feel some pain?
-Is this why you have been holding onto your expectations?
letting go
Sometimes there is power in letting go. It can allow you to lose negative energy that you bring into your life from difficult people. If you are dealing with a person trying to control you, your power is in letting go. If you lose hope of him acting differently, power is taken from him which he imagined he had. It is your expectation and need for him to be a certain way that he uses to control you. Your expectation of him being different is the string he uses to drag you. Allow him to exist as the controller he is with no control over you or your feelings.
Perhaps you have some negative feelings towards him even though you have relinquished expectations of him being different. You can accept these feelings, state the truth of what he has done, state the truth of how it makes you feel, and state that he must have been feeling powerless to have done such a thing. State this with the knowledge that you are taking care of yourself and being yourself. This will help you speak your truth from a stronger position. Then move on to something more important than his struggle for control. That struggle will always be there for him; it is his punishment for being so rigid. You don’t need that punishment; release. Know that he is punishing himself, and move yourself on through choosing not to be a part of that punishment. In letting go of the struggle with him, you give yourself control.
Don't be afraid of being hurt by controlling people. They use fear to control you. Know that life is about hurt and that you will be hurt. Expect to be hurt by them. It is in their nature to create hurt in other people’s lives. Nevertheless, give yourself control to limit the abuse from them.
If someone is trying to get you to take care of him, and you feel you are being suffocated because you don't want all his responsibility, let go. Allow him to be his dependent self, and let go of meeting his expectations. You have too much going on in your life to be dragged down by him. If you don’t have enough going on in your life, find more. His expectations are his way of trying to control you to take care of him. You will never please him; he would not allow it because if he did, he looses the control he has over you. Give up hope of ever pleasing him, just please yourself. If he is pleased with you pleasing yourself, you may choose to include him in your life. Otherwise, this person is not worth being in your life, and he knows it.
If someone is trying to engage you in a competitive struggle, you have power in letting go. Stop engaging in his struggle to be the best. He is engaging in that struggle because he is unsure of his own worth and wants to measure it against yours. Allow yourself to express itself in competition with itself, not with another person. This way you always win because you can only grow. If the other person puts you down, saying you are a loser, you can ask him if that is how he feels about himself. Let go of your need to win over him. It does not matter. Win over yourself. He is not growing, he is just out to show that he is better than other people.{2}
-List some difficult people in your life.
-In what ways can you let go and be self-empowered with each of them?
-What do you think would happen if you held on?
-Why?
-What positive things do you get from holding on?
-Is one of them that you don’t have to face your own growth?
-What positive things do they get by being so difficult?
Your Self-Acceptance Affects Your Relationships With Others
What you are willing to accept in other people is a reflection of what you accept in yourself. If you do not accept your feelings, you will not be able to accept the feelings when you see them in other people. For example, when you do not accept your anger, you will not be able to accept other people’s anger. This means you will not be able to accept other people. Being yourself is more important than just being yourself for yourself.
When you do not accept some part of your hurt, it turns inward as anger towards yourself for preventing the natural expression of yourself. As the hurt and self-anger is denied, they still seek an outlet for expression. If you have grown up in a culture that scapegoats or is angry at a group of people, you can be tempted to incorrectly associate your anger with this group. Both are already related: targets of rejection. When you see members of the group, the anger within may sense an opportunity for expression, an outlet justified by your culture. Just seeing them can remind you of your anger, bringing it forth, forming the appearance that your anger is being caused by them.
These targeted groups might be of a certain race, economic level, sexual preference, gender, fashion, or other group identifier. The group you select for targeting depends on your culture and what group most closely represents your denied hurt. Groups in weak positions can easily be related to your hurt, for both the hurt and groups are weakened states to exist in. Groups that vary greatly from your culture can bring out uncomfortable feelings within you (for you don’t know how to act, what is appropriate, and can easily misinterpret behaviors), reminding you of hurt that you struggle to deny. When you see members of these groups, you feel the hurt and anger and target it at them to keep your denial intact, maintaining concealment of the true sources of your hurt.
This process of hating others who remind you of yourself also is what happens between nerds and bullies. Nerds (high dependent character types whom bullies pick on) have been hurt and deny their pain, causing it to turn inward as anger towards themselves. The self-anger makes them feel bad, destroying their self-esteem and causing them to feel deserving of the hurt that was inflicted upon them. They live in guilt.
Bullies (high controlling character types) also deny their hurt, though they do so somewhat differently than nerds. Like nerds, bullies have stored up anger which cuts down their self-esteem; bullies, however, deny pain by perceiving others as responsible for it so also sanctioned targets for their anger. They try to dump their anger on safe weak people who most remind them of their hurt. Unjustly venting their anger on strong people, who don't want it, is too difficult and painful for bullies, so they vent their anger on nerds who feel deserving of punishment.
Even though nerds may give signals that it's okay to punish them, the bullies outward expression of anger is harmful to the bullies’ selves. By not taking responsibility for their pain, they continue to feel out of control and do not grow. Even though their defenses tell them that other people deserve it, their venting actions make them feel bad for being so hurtful. Yet this feeling of badness can appear fleeting, as their defenses kick in again to blame it on others.
-List what you dislike, find difficult to accept, or perceive as weird in others?
-Why do you think you have such a difficult time accepting these things in other people?
-Do you notice a part of yourself that is similar to this?
-How so?
-How are you different than these other people?
-In what way does your dislike or lack of acceptance define who you are?
-Have you ever resembled these people?
-How did that feel?
-What did you do with your feelings?
-What changed so that you stopped resembling them?
-What about in times when you feel weak and vulnerable, do you become more like them?
-What keeps you from becoming like them?
-What makes you like them?
-If the answer was nothing, what do you think could make you like them?
-What would people close to you say they dislike, find difficult to accept, or think is weird about you. Why?
-Have you ever been considered a nerd by people?
-Why is this so?
-Have you ever been considered a bully by people?
-Why is this so?
-If you only have been considered either a nerd or bully, why are you considered only one and not the other?
-If I was sitting next to you, how do you think I would answer this about you?
-What groups of people do you hate or dislike?
-What feelings come up in you that you dislike?
-When have you felt these feelings before?
-When have you felt them before about yourself?
-What was going on for you to have felt this way?
-Was someone hurting you?
-Who?
-What did you do with your feeling?
-How do you deal with these feelings?
-How can you deal with your feelings so that you can accept yourself more?
-Why do these feelings come out with that particular group?
-Now answer the last question so that it has nothing to do with the group bringing out the feelings and everything to do with yourself being reminded of feelings you have denied from another time and source.
-What is the difference between the last two answers?
-Explain the difference.
-Which answer do you believe to hold more truth?
-Explain what positives and negatives you get from this belief?
Self relationship
When you are in a loving relationship with another person, you need to care for his feelings as if they were your feelings. If you cannot care for your feelings, you will not be able to care for those same feelings in another person—you will be used to avoiding them. Because you don't care for your feelings, even strong attempts to care for another person’s feelings will fail. Your feelings are what give you clues as to what the other person is feeling, so if you are not caring for your feelings, you will not know what he is feeling to be able to care. When you do not have open access to your feelings, you are insensitive to when and what the other person is feeling and to the depth of the feeling. A person with limited access to his feelings has limited capacity for love and caring, if for no other reason than simply because love and caring are both feelings.
Since your feelings are vital for any loving relationship to have potential, you must first establish a loving relationship with yourself. You have a loving relationship with yourself through having a loving relationship with your feelings. If you do not love your self, that self will not have the energy love requires to love other people back. Furthermore, the parts you do not love in yourself also will not be loved in other people.
When you do not love parts of yourself, the other person's love for these parts is be wasted. Because you don’t value all of yourself, you don’t bring your full self to the relationship. Since your full self is not brought to the relatio