Let’s say you have a beautiful rose garden. You have cultivated and nurtured this garden for months, choosing just the right colors of blossoms, fertilizing them, trimming them, watering them. Yet much to your dismay, each morning you find your rose garden has been the local deer’s midnight snack. Eventually, you decide to put up a fence around the garden to keep the deer out. Do you confer with the deer first? Do you apologize? Do you leave a note explaining your reasoning, and beg for forgiveness? Of course not. You understand the reasons for the fence, and do what you need to do take care of yourself and your roses.
Granted, our loved ones and acquaintances are very different than deer, but the concepts are still the same. Often I hear clients lamenting the reactions they get when they set boundaries. “But she doesn’t like it when I say no”; “But he gets mad when I say I don’t have enough time”; “But she wanted me to…”. The fact of the matter is, often other people don’t like the boundaries we set. It keeps them out, or denies them something they wanted. So it’s perfectly ok for them to have a reaction, or not like the boundaries.
Boundaries are everywhere. Boundaries to keep us in, boundaries to keep us out. Boundaries to keep other people out. Boundaries are an absolutely necessary part of life. Without them, roles would be confused, relationships even more complicated, and many things would be unsafe. Boundaries you set for yourself are just that; they are for YOU, not the other person! I say this to my clients and they look at me as if to say, “Yes, duh, I know”. But the point I am trying to make is this: if you are setting boundaries for YOURSELF, to protect yourself, to respect yourself, then why are you spending so much time worrying about how the other person is reacting to your boundaries? If we were to base our boundaries on how other people respond to them, then we’d either a) have no boundaries b) have boundaries that didn’t feel very good to us, or c) a very crooked fence!
Whatever it is, your body, time, energy, money… boundaries you set about these things are for yourself and no one else! The trick is to learn how to tolerate the reactions of those who are kept out by our boundary. Let others have their reactions to your boundaries. Notice them. Understand them if possible. Then take a nice, deep breath and move on, knowing you have done the right thing for yourself.