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124: The Art of Holding Space

Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica, and I'm in Burlesque Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development. It puts it in context for you as well. So, you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you what to do about each one. Sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode or know someone who would find it useful, please forward it to them. Over time, you're gonna get sick of hearing me read this intro as well. So come and record on yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the intro and I can't wait to hear yours.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast! Today I want to return to a topic we’ve visited before, and that’s the topic of boundaries. If you haven’t already listened to the conversation with Xavier Dagba from a couple of years ago then you might want to start there. That episode is linked in the show notes. This episode is also going to weave in content from a book that was published last year by Nedra Tawwab called Set boundaries, find peace: A guide to reclaiming yourself, as well as things I’ve learned about boundaries from Heather Plett whom I interviewed in the episode on holding space. I did read another book that sounded really hopeful called Boundaries: When to say yes, how to say no to take control of your life but at the end of chapter 1 the authors mentioned that “this book aims to help you see the deeply biblical nature of boundaries as they operate in the character of God, his universe, and his people” so if that fits with your worldview then you may find it helpful as it references a lot of scripture. So one thing that this episode does NOT draw on is peer-reviewed research because despite quite a bit of searching, I couldn’t find any on this topic. Neither of the books on boundaries contain ANY peer-reviewed references at all, and it’s a difficult topic to search because the word “boundaries” is used in so many different fields and contexts. I couldn’t turn up anything at all even when searching alongside phrases related to interpersonal relationships. So if you’re an expert on boundaries and you’ve published work on this then please do reach out because I’d love to see it!

So in this episode we’re going to look at why we find it hard to set boundaries with people who are close to us, and how we can even know whether we need a boundary, and if we decide we do, how to go about setting that. One of the central ideas of this episode is that we’re pretty crummy at even knowing we need boundaries with our family, and at setting these when we do, but we have too many boundaries between us and the people in our broader communities. So part of this work is also seeing how we can break down the boundaries between us and people who are further out than our immediate family. Keeping us all separate has enormous benefits in a capitalist system where we all need to buy our own stuff, and we’re lonely so we buy stuff to compensate for that, and we’re overwhelmed so we need to spend money to cope with that. I haven’t really seen this discussed anywhere else people are talking about boundaries, so I want to push at the edges of boundaries a bit, as it were. One thing I also want to acknowledge is that lack of boundaries tends to be a massive problem for parents who feel triggered by their child’s behavior. I’m thinking of a time when I coached a mother on a group coaching call for the Setting Limits workshop that I ran last year. The mother’s toddler was resisting Dad when he tried to do diaper changes, and it seemed like Mom was the only person who was able to get them done. Mom was looking for tools to change her child’s behavior and make him accept diaper changes with Dad. It didn’t take very long for us to dig below the surface of what was happening here and realize that this actually wasn’t about the child’s behavior; it was that the mother was so uncomfortable setting a boundary (which might have looked like “I’m not going to change your diaper right now; Daddy’s going to do it for you”) that she couldn’t do that. She had grown up in a family where it wasn’t acceptable for children to set boundaries; she was expected to do what she was told when she was told, and even though her parents had her very best interests at heart, wanting her to do well in school and get good grades and get a good job, the real lesson she learned was that she needed to please everyone else before considering her own needs. So when her son said: “I don’t WANT Daddy to do it! I want MOMMY!” it was poking at the exact wound that her parents had unwittingly created so many years ago. It was as if her son had said: “I don’t care what you want to do; that’s not important to me. My needs are most important, and I want you to change my diaper!” And of course, her instinctive response in that situation is to go to him and to meet his needs, because to not meet another person’s needs is too scary.

And when that happens, we often get a triggered feeling. Even if our parents were by all accounts “good parents,” these repeated interactions where we learned that our needs were not important represented a kind of trauma. And like this parent did, it’s easy to assume that the thing that needs to change is our child’s behavior and that if our child wasn’t demanding that we do diaper changes instead of Daddy, that things would be fine. But of course, that isn’t the case. We might be able to get our child to accept diaper changes with Daddy in the short term, but in the long term, they’re still going to ask us for things. They’re going to ask us for a LOT of things over the years, and it’s our job to learn how to navigate that.

If you’re feeling triggered a lot of the time by your child’s behavior, then I want to mention that my Taming Your Triggers workshop is open for enrollment right now, until Wednesday, February 23rd. In the workshop, you’ll learn the real sources of your triggered feelings, just like the parent I coached realized that her child’s behavior wasn’t the thing that needed to change, and that she needed to heal from what she had learned about boundaries as a child. You’ll also learn new ways of being in relationships with your child (and your partner if you have one, and your mother, and your in-laws!) so you can collaborate with them to find solutions to the challenges you’re having where the only way out right now seems to be to change their behavior. So many parents have taken the Taming Your Triggers workshop and gone from feeling completely out at sea by themselves with their huge reactions to their child’s difficult behavior, to understanding why these reactions are happening and being able to create space to respond to their child from a place that’s aligned with their values. I know that one of the reasons why people don’t sign up for the workshop is the guilt and shame they feel at needing something like this. I’ve heard of parents who find out about it and wait…and they see me offer it again in six months and they wait, because just the thought of admitting they need help is so scary, and it seems like they must be the only ones who haven’t figured out how to stop yelling at their children. Then they sign up and have their first big insight when they see hundreds of parents introducing themselves and describing their triggers and their intentions for the workshop and they realize they are NOT alone in what up to that point had seemed like a huge secret that should stay hidden.

One parent whom I’ll refer to by her first initial, N., had what I call a non-cognitive shift through this process – her Mom had been an alcoholic throughout N’s childhood, and had told N that she couldn’t apologize because she didn’t remember what had happened. N knew that she needed to forgive her mother, but she couldn’t do it before. She had sympathy for the traumatic experiences her Mom had been through, but not empathy. And it was through seeing all the other parents who were doing their absolute best to learn new tools in the workshop that for the first time she saw her own Mom as a struggling twenty-something parent with a lot of unprocessed trauma, and she was finally able to process this information in her body and not just in her brain. So she wrote this in our community, and gave me permission to share it: “For the first time in my life I wanted to make amends. I’ve wanted to be OK before, and I worked very hard to keep a relationship. But for me to clear this piece of my karmic path, of my ancestral burden, I needed to forgive. But I couldn’t just say it, I needed to be it. I needed to be forgiveness. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like a whole-body forgiveness. And not once in my life of learning and working on this have I felt this deep inside. But I did now. During this program.” And she went on to tell us about the beautiful text conversation she had with her Mom, who was out of town, where she offered her Mom forgiveness and her Mom thanked her and said she felt a weight had been lifted off her shoulders, and N finds that she’s able to show up differently in her relationship with her child now because the weight of her childhood isn’t there making every decision for her. So if you’re experiencing triggered feelings related to your child’s behavior and it seems like changing your child’s behavior is the thing that needs to happen but you wonder whether it might actually be related to really big, or even small traumas you’ve experienced in your life, and this is showing up in your inability to set boundaries with your child and other people in your life, then I’d love to see you there. Enrollment is open right now until Wednesday, February 23rd so we can all start as a group on Monday, February 28th. Sliding scale pricing is available, and you can find out more information and sign up at yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers.

Alright. So let’s look at what a boundary is, and what it isn’t. I think it’s really common to conflate boundaries with limits, and I know I’ve done this myself a number of years ago before I clarified my thinking on this. A boundary is something we articulate that says what we are and aren’t willing to do, while a limit is something we try to impose on someone else. So, a boundary is me saying something like: “I’m not willing to get up from the table to play with you until I’ve finished eating,” or “I’m going to do a workout today.” A limit is me saying to my child: “Please don’t jump on the couch because I hear it creaking,” or even just “Don’t jump on the couch.” With a boundary I’m saying what I am going to make time for in my life or what I’m not willing to do, while a limit is me trying to change my child’s behavior. A boundary has the word “I” at the beginning, while a limit has the word “you” or could be rephrased to start with the word “you” (as in: you may not jump on the couch). Almost all of the parents I work with gravitate to setting limits on their child’s behavior as a first-resort disciplinary tactic, probably because that’s what our parents did with us. After all, we were doing fine until our child came along and started pushing our buttons, so if we could just get our child to change their behavior then we wouldn’t have our explosive reactions in response, right? The problem with limits is that nobody likes them. Nobody likes someone else trying to change their behavior. Maybe we can even remember our own parent trying to change our behavior, and how much we resented it at the time. So, when we rely on limits as our first reaction to our child’s behavior, we’re coming in hot and heavy with a tool that gets our child’s back up right from the beginning and makes them not want to collaborate with us. Our best tool to START working with is understanding our child’s needs, and our needs, and working together to meet BOTH of those. I did an episode on that topic a long time ago with Christine King, where we walked through examples of how to do this even with young children. It’s also something we go into quite deeply in the Taming Your Triggers workshop, and that’s where I see parents start to move beyond using the script and take on this different way of being with their child in a non-cognitive shift.

I typically find that upwards of 90% of the time, it actually is possible to meet two people’s needs in a relationship. The usual reason why we can’t seem to meet both people’s needs is because we aren’t really considering how to meet needs, but we’re dealing with the strategies we’re using to meet those needs. So, when I say “I want to go for a run,” that’s a strategy to meet a need for moving my body and getting exercise. There are other ways I could meet that need – by doing a workout video, or some yoga, or riding my bike. And maybe my child has what seems like a competing need: to have connection time with me and we can’t do both. But it turns out there are so many ways to meet both of those needs. I could go for a run, and she could ride alongside me on her bike. I could do a workout video while she builds a fort on our bed and jumps out to “surprise” me in between sets, which she actually loves to do. We could do yoga together. I could read her a story and then go for a bike ride. Most of the time we’re able to find ways to meet both of our needs, and this is possible even with very young children who can’t articulate their needs yet because with a bit of practice, it isn’t that hard to figure out what need a young child is trying to meet – the bigger challenge is whether we’re willing to adjust what WE’RE doing to try to help them meet it. Occasionally there will be times when we aren’t able to meet our child’s needs. Sometimes this is because there actually is a way to meet both people’s needs but for some reason, this option isn’t available to us. I work with lots of parents who are worried about what their child is eating and want their child to eat less candy. We talk about what’s an acceptable amount of candy, and usually, that amount is greater than zero. Then we talk about when the child is allowed to have the candy, and the parent says “after dinner,” or “after school” – assuming that the child will have eaten enough food with greater nutritional content with candy by that time so the parent can feel as though they’ve done their job in protecting their child’s health. But the child wants to have the candy for breakfast! So my stance on that is that if you’re going to allow a square of chocolate each day, what difference in the world does it make if the child eats it at breakfast time or not? Usually, the parent is worried the child then won’t eat a ‘proper breakfast, but nobody’s going to get full from eating a square of chocolate or a single candy, so why not just serve it alongside breakfast?

When we look at the needs involved here the child’s need is for the joyful experience of eating the chocolate or candy, and the autonomy to decide WHEN they eat it. Due to the conditioning, the parent has received throughout their own life about chocolate and candy being a reward, and something that’s eaten late in the day, and only if you’ve “been good,” there’s a whole lot of pressure on them that’s making it difficult to meet their child’s need. This particular example is more of a limit than a boundary; technically you could say “I’m not willing to get you chocolate or candy right now” but if the child decided to get it themselves, you would stop them. So really it’s a limit: “You may not have chocolate now.” And I’ve heard nonviolent communication practitioners Miki and Arnina Kashtan use language about mourning the inability to meet a person’s need: we can genuinely apologize to the child, and say something like: “I hear you want chocolate for breakfast. I’m not able to do that right now, and I’m so sorry my inability to do this is affecting you in this way.” And hopefully, these kinds of situations won’t come up too often and when they do, the work to figure out what’s going on and navigate the situation differently is almost always ours, the parent’s, to do, and perhaps over time, we can work toward meeting both people’s needs. Then there are also times when we cannot see a way to meet another person’s needs at the same time as our own, or when we’re effectively saying something like: “This need is really important to me, and I’m going to ask you to help me meet it whether or not doing this meets a need for you,” and when we do that we’re setting a boundary. The boundary is a way of communicating our need to others with clarity so we can meet our needs for safety and respect in our relationships with our children, as well as with our partner, family of origin, friends, and workplace as well. Even if we might phrase it differently, setting a boundary almost invariably involves saying “no” to someone. We might set a boundary saying something like “I want to protect my time for a workout today” but in reality, we’re still saying “no” because by saying “yes” to our workout, we’re maybe saying “no” to something that someone else wants us to do.

And perhaps you can now see why we have a hard time with this as adults, and why we have a hard time hearing our child say “no” – because we weren’t allowed to say “no” as children. Think about all the times we had to hug or kiss relatives we hadn’t seen in forever and didn’t really know and they talked loudly and scared us. Think about the times when we were forced to apologize for things we’d done wrong, even when we knew we were actually in the right and we didn’t mean a word of the apology. Think about all the times when we had a need that we didn’t even bother articulating to anyone because we knew our parent would pooh-pooh it and maybe even make fun of it and that either way our need wouldn’t be met. Our need to belong in relationships with others is so primal that we’ll do almost anything to make it happen. And when we’re a small child and our parent essentially says to us (even if it’s said in a roundabout way, or it’s only implied): “If you say “no” to what I’m asking you to do then I’m going to reject you until your behavior meets my needs,” then what are we going to do? Are we going to persist in our desire for autonomy and fairness and mattering in the world? Or are we going to shut off that part of ourselves and stuff it down into a very deep hole and cover it up and pretend it doesn’t exist so we can have the acceptance of this person whom we love more than anyone else in the world? Of course, we are. And it’s not like our parents were monsters; for the most part, they were doing this because they wanted us to fit in in the world! They saw how the world punishes people for asserting their needs and showing up authentically, so they tried to shape us gently, or maybe not so gently, so we would fit in. When our parents made us hug and kiss those relatives, we barely knew even though we were scared, our parents were afraid of judgment on themselves. They were afraid that if they didn’t make us perform in these socially acceptable ways that their abilities as parents would be questioned, and these relatives would think they weren’t good parents.

When our parents invaded our personal space and went through our things and read our diaries, it probably wasn’t because they got some kind of thrill out of it; it was because they were worried about us and had already created conditions in the family where we could never be truly honest with them. If your parent ever said to you with a look of caring concern: “Are you sure you want to eat that? You’re looking a bit chubby lately…,” they probably weren’t being deliberately mean; they were looking out at our fat-phobic world that is so harsh toward people who carry a lot of weight and wanted to protect us from that. And then, of course, there are the families who measure love by the amount of food you eat – and after that notice out loud how much weight you’ve put on… So I really don’t believe our parents deliberately violated our boundaries as a matter of principle by and large; it’s that they were afraid of the outcomes of not doing it. They were afraid of the social pressure on themselves and on us if we didn’t comply. They might have felt uncomfortable about it, or maybe it was like so many issues that we feel compelled to do because of social pressure – the pressure is just such an inherent part of these interactions that we can’t even see it anymore. So how can we even know whether we need a boundary? Well for those of you who have been following my work for a while, the answer won’t be a surprise: listen to your body. When we need a boundary but we don’t have one, our body knows. We’ve become so accustomed to ignoring our body’s signals that perhaps this idea seems very strange to you. You might want to think back to a recent incident when you felt triggered by your child’s behavior. There was an immediate event that made you snap, right? Now cast your mind back further in the day. What else happened that day? What irritated you earlier on? Maybe it was the way your child said they weren’t hungry, and then demanded you produce their breakfast while you were in the middle of yours. Perhaps your children enjoy being loud, and you’re highly sensitive to loud noises. Perhaps they reeeaaaallly want you to do imaginative play with them, and you can’t stand doing it. There’s usually something happening in your body when these kinds of things happen. You might feel irritation that you’re being asked to get up during your breakfast – maybe your jaw or your throat tightens. When your children are loud, you might feel pain in your ears or a headache. When you think about imaginative play you might feel restless or impatient, as you think of the 100 things you’d rather be doing – like cleaning the toilet – than making stuffies act out scenarios with each other.

When you experience these kinds of sensations, that’s a really good clue that there’s something about the situation that isn’t working for you. Now it’s possible you can work with your child to meet both of your needs – perhaps you could store the breakfast cereal and bowls in a low cupboard so they can get their own breakfast if they really can’t wait. Perhaps your children would be happy to play loudly outside. Perhaps you could see imaginative play as your mindfulness practice. I’ve been doing that with play my daughter really wants to do, like when she went through a phase of wanting my help sorting gravel during our playtime. It certainly wasn’t an activity that I would have chosen, but I found that when I was actually doing it, it really wasn’t so bad. I could look for the patterns on the stones and feel the sun on my shoulders and it really wasn’t as awful as you might think it would be. But perhaps you need to set a boundary, and these might look something like: “I’m not getting up while I’m eating. I’ll get your breakfast when I’ve finished mine.” Any attempt to get your children to be more quiet is a limit, but you can set a boundary by moving yourself, or by using earplugs to reduce the noise level for yourself. And you could decline to engage in imaginative play at all and let that be something another parent does with your child, or that they can do with a sibling, or with their friends. Or you could challenge yourself a bit and set a timer for ten or even just five minutes, and try to fully engage in their imaginative play knowing that it isn’t for very long, and a timer will let you know when it’s all over. And you could see what happens when you try and do that: do you still feel restless and impatient, or does having the time limit help? What shifts in your body when you put the boundary in place?

And even more importantly, what shifts later in the day when you do this? What you may well find is that if you’re able to pay attention to the signals your body is sending early in the day, and use boundaries where these are needed, you may well find that you get to the end of the day and you’re able to cope more easily with the things your child is doing that push you over the edge right now. As I was writing this episode I took a break and was scrolling through Facebook and I saw a post on The Uppity Negress Podcast’s page. I’m going to read it to you because I think hearing things in a different way can help it to connect differently in your brain, and I’ll also put a link to it on the episode page so you can come back and read it again if you need to. And so she says,

For the longest time, I misunderstood that boundaries were things that you used to dictate other people’s interactions with you.

This is a false way of thinking about boundaries.

Boundaries are a gate. You can only put fences around what YOU own. You cannot fence around something that doesn’t belong to you.

Boundaries doesn’t look like demanding your partner doesn’t have sexual relationships with others. You don’t own their body. What they do look like is stating that if they do, they will not longer be welcomed in YOUR Yard.

Boundaries doesn’t look like demanding no one in the world is a bigot POS- it does look like immediately removing yourself from them when they present themselves.

Boundaries is the recognition that other people have their space (their own yards, if you will) and that you will visit each other. Everyone is entitled to run things in their yard how they please. What they are not entitled to is anything that is yours.

People who are different from you in what they do in their own space will always exist. That doesn’t mean you have to let them in.

Boundaries isn’t about what other people do or don’t do- it’s about how you respond and how that dictates access to YOU and what’s YOURS.

I really like the physical space analogy here because it helps us to visualize what a boundary might look like, although I think the idea of one fence around the yard can be developed a bit further (which is hard to do in a social media post). I learned about layers of boundaries from Heather Plett, whom I interviewed in the episode on holding space. Rather than letting people into the yard or not letting them into the yard, we might envision layers of space. So perhaps our most intimate space is the bedroom and in this metaphor, we might say that the bedroom isn’t necessarily a sexual space, but it is a space where we’re only letting in the people we trust with our most intimate selves. So that intimacy is going to look different for each person but in general, we trust people we let into the bedroom with knowing most of who we really are as a person.

Then there’s the rest of our home, which is a space that more people come into. We host dinners here (or we used to, when other people could come into our homes). It’s a place where we hang out and relax, but perhaps we’re not *quite* as relaxed here as we are in our bedroom. We aren’t telling the folks in this space *everything* about what’s going on for us. And then there’s the yard, where we chat with the neighbors, and our colleagues whom we don’t know especially well. We’re probably going to curate the version of us we present to these folks rather than showing our whole selves. And lastly, there’s the world beyond the yard, where our supermarket checker and mail carrier and distant relatives whom we rarely see live. We’re going to make polite small talk with them, but that’s probably about it.

And here’s the thing: there’s no specific requirement that any particular person be in any particular space, or that you do any particular thing with them in that space. That’s entirely up to you. You can even more people into and out of different spaces very consciously, and you don’t always need to tell them you’re doing it. Maybe your partner is usually in the bedroom space but you go through a difficult stretch with them. Maybe they often try to initiate sex with you and you put them off. You’ve already put up a bit of a boundary, but maybe being more explicit will bring some much-needed clarity. So instead of doing the nightly roll-over, you could say something like: “I want to feel close to you and I don’t right now. I don’t want to have sex until we’ve made some progress on what’s between us.” And in future, as you work through things going on in your relationship, you might decide to shift the boundary again and invite your partner back into the bedroom as it were. The same goes for relationships with people we aren’t so close to – perhaps you have a friend who is a “welcome into the home” kind of friend, but who betrays something you told them in confidence. You might decide to move them to an “out in the yard” kind of friend for a while. And you could do this without even mentioning it to them, just by not telling them things that are important to you for a while. Or you could explicitly tell them: “What I told you wasn’t meant to be shared. For right now I may not tell you everything I once would have, and I’m hoping we can rebuild trust between us in time.” Now if you’re as out of practice at using boundaries as most folks are, these thoughts and conversations might seem really strange to you. One of the things I like best about Nedra Tawwab’s book is the section on thought patterns that stop us from setting boundaries. She describes nine potential reasons why we find it hard to set boundaries, and I want to spend some time with these because I think that addressing them is critical to our ability to do things differently with boundaries.

The nine reasons are:

1. You fear being mean

2. You fear being rude

3. You’re a people-pleaser

4. You’re anxious about future interactions after a boundary has been set

5. You feel powerless (and not sure that boundaries will help)

6. You get your value from helping others

7. You project your feelings about being told no onto others

8. You have no clue where to start

9. You believe you can’t have boundaries in certain types of relationships

Now just looking at that list as a whole, if you’re a female-identifying parent, perhaps you can already see the big underlying reason why setting boundaries is so hard for us? You might remember from the episodes I recorded with listener Brian Stout and Dr. Carol Gilligan that patriarchy is about power in relationships, and a woman’s role in a family system is to keep the peace – and pretty much every item on that list is related to keeping the peace. When we’ve been trained our whole lives not to be mean, not to be rude, to keep everyone happy, not to have power in relationships, that saying ‘no’ to someone will cause them to be upset with us, is it any wonder that we struggle with this stuff? If we’ve spent our whole lives being taught that we shouldn’t have boundaries, and even further, that our power in our family comes from helping others, and doing whatever other people need us to do to make them feel better, then how could we possibly go out into the world as adults and know how to set boundaries with other adults and with our children? And on the flip side, if you’re a male-identifying parent then you learned all the opposite lessons! You weren’t taught to be afraid of seeming mean or rude. You probably aren’t a people pleaser, and you don’t feel powerless in relationships. You don’t get your value from helping other people in a relationship, and if anything your boundaries may well be too high for anyone to get inside your home, never mind your bedroom. I’m generalizing, of course; I know there are men – and I know some of them – who developed insecure attachment relationships with their primary caregivers and who absolutely fear boundaries and in fact feel so unworthy of love that they think they’re fortunate the other person wants to be with them at all, and that if they were to ever set a boundary in the relationship that the other person would probably just leave. But generally speaking, girls and women are socialized to be the people who look out for other people’s feelings at the expense of our own, and men are socialized not to feel anything, and to keep people out.

Nedra Tawwab has advice on what to do about each of these nine topics. On fearing being mean, she says we’re assuming something that may not happen because we don’t know how other people will perceive our words. Instead, we should assume that people will understand what our boundary is and the reason we’re setting it, rather than that they will go some extra step and think we’re being mean. On being rude, she says that if we reach a breaking point and can’t communicate a boundary without yelling or cursing then clearly we’ve waited too long. It isn’t rude to set boundaries using respectful language and a respectful tone. And of course, this is especially difficult for people pleasers, who always want to be liked. It is possible that other people won’t like us as much if we set boundaries, but the person they’re liking right now isn’t actually us. It’s a version of us that gets walked all over because we’re too afraid to set boundaries, and doing that is causing us an enormous amount of psychological damage. It’s almost like we have two selves: the public-facing self who is always nice and helpful and good and who says “yes” to everything, and then there’s the real us underneath who feels ugly and hurt and never good enough and unlovable. And people pleasers never feel really able to show their full selves because how could anyone love someone like them? And so rather than show anyone that ugliness, they show the sanitized version who says “yes” to anything and who would never dare set a boundary because nice helpful good people don’t set boundaries. But you can help and still set boundaries. You can state what you’re willing to do and what you’re not, and that doesn’t make you a bad or unlovable person. If the other person isn’t used to you setting boundaries and is uncomfortable receiving them (as many of us are, given our history), it’s possible that things might be different for a while. You can talk about that if it’s a person you’re close to if you’d like. Tell them what you’ve been learning and how it’s been helping you and encourage them to try setting their own boundaries, even with you. Or if it’s a person you’re not so close to, just be in the relationship in the way you want to with your new boundaries. The other person may push back and if it’s a person who has steamrolled you for most of your life you might need support from a partner or even a therapist to navigate this.

This is where power comes into relationships, and you might doubt that you have enough power to set a boundary. If you’re conflict-averse like I am, then the easiest thing to do when someone tests your boundary is to just cave in and let them do what they were going to do anyway. It takes a lot of courage to not just set a boundary but then hold it when another person is pushing against it, and it can feel like we don’t have enough courage. The best tool I’ve found is to start small and set small boundaries and gain confidence to do more over time. I think getting value from helping others is a massive issue for many mothers. We’re taught that being a mother is the most important job in the world, and especially if we somehow stumbled on attachment parenting, we were told by Dr. Sears that our job is to respond to our baby’s *every* need. So, when we’re primed in childhood to consider everyone else’s needs above our own and then by Dr. Sears to say that our baby will be better behaved and learn language more easily and be smarter than babies whose mothers don’t respond to their child’s every need, and it’s no wonder we find we can’t set boundaries with our children either. They ask for something and we feel as though it’s our obligation to deliver it – no matter how frustrated and angry and unhappy that might make us. And so, the cycle continues into the next generation as our children learn about setting boundaries from…watching us not set boundaries. It can also be hard to set boundaries with others if WE don’t like to hear the word ‘no.’ Then we assume that nobody else likes to hear it either. If hearing our child’s “NO!” makes us flip out, it’s most likely because we were punished for saying that same NO when we were children. Now we hear the No and overreact, and we assume that everyone else feels the same way. Perhaps some other people will have a hard time with it too. But perhaps they’re also learning about boundaries and will appreciate you modeling it for them so they can see how it’s done gracefully and with care.

There are some people with whom we might think we can never set boundaries. Not surprisingly, the first person many parents think of is their own mother and I confess I find it difficult to know exactly what that’s like since I don’t have a mother or a mother figure in my life with whom I have this kind of relationship, so I have to try to imagine someone that I’m so afraid of upsetting that it’s better for me to pretend to be something I’m not than to set a boundary with them. I will say I’m not always the best at knowing when I need boundaries but I don’t think I have any relationships when I deliberately hide my needs to preserve someone else’s feelings. If there was ever any doubt that patriarchal power structures are enforced by mothers, perhaps this single fact will put that to rest. You used to challenge your mother, just like your child challenges you now. You used to say “no” and ask for what you needed and say what felt good to you and what didn’t feel good to you. We all did when we were little. But you may remember looking back and craving your mother’s approval, and that only certain emotions were acceptable to her, and that you were welcomed and her approval was granted when you felt and expressed happiness and joy and gratitude, and her approval was withdrawn when you felt and expressed sadness or fear or frustration or anger, then she was setting up these conditions. She would emotionally withdraw from you – she would *leave* you – when your behavior didn’t meet her needs, probably because she craved validation from you. When you expressed happiness and joy and gratitude then she knew she was a good parent. When you expressed sadness or fear or frustration or anger she doubted that so you very quickly learned that if you didn’t want your mother to withdraw, that you’d better only share the positive feelings. Over time, as each you kept wearing down the paths you were in, each time you repeated a behavior you learned “yes, this is how this relationship works,” and the patterns become more entrenched. You stopped showing your full self because those requests were met with her withdrawal. You learned how to read her moods because a good mood meant acceptance from her and reassurance for you. And then you translated that skill to all the other people around you. You learned to read your partner’s moods as well, and your child’s, and maybe you see yourself finding reassurance in your child’s expression of positive, happy feelings as well, and maybe they’re already learning how to adjust what they show you to gain your approval.

OK, so it’s pretty clear at this point that we probably need to set boundaries differently than we’ve done up to this point. Now the question becomes: what kinds of boundaries do we want to set? And how will we do this? I think this is where it can be really helpful to step back and look at the context that we’re trying to set boundaries within. One thing that would be really unfortunate is if we see that we haven’t been setting enough boundaries and suddenly we go around and start setting them with everyone! Everyone we know gets a new boundary! Or maybe three! So maybe we might want to start slowly and gently and see how other folks feel as we flex our new boundary-setting muscles, and also how it makes us feel, and make sure these are boundaries we really need. And the flip side of perhaps setting more boundaries is that maybe in some aspects of our lives, we already have too many boundaries. The more I thought about it, the stranger this seemed to me – we have almost no boundaries in our relationships with the people we’re really close to, but with our broader communities, we have So Many Boundaries! If we really get sick, we don’t tell people. We insist we’d feel better if nobody knew. When everything is getting on top of us, we paddle along at a thousand miles an hour under the surface of the water, but if anyone asks how we’re doing, the accepted response is a placid: “Oh, I’m busy.” It’s a badge of pride to be busy and not ask for help. And then something I saw and a conversation I had in the same week recently helped me to see what’s going on here: firstly, someone had posted in an online group for working moms saying something to the effect of “January was brutal for working moms. How are you doing?” And there were a couple of hundred comments from people saying they were just barely hanging on with young children who were sick or just not sleeping, and one comment from a parent saying something like “I’m surviving by throwing unsustainable amounts of money at my problems.”

And then the second item was a conversation with a group I’ve convened to think through how capitalism, patriarchy, and White supremacy have impacted our parenting and what can do about it. When we were talking about capitalism one participant spoke very eloquently about the accumulation of money that has happened in his family, and how money has become a substitute for relationships. We need to save for every circumstance that might befall us and old age at the end because we can’t guarantee anyone will take care of us. We don’t have the social contracts we need to rely on other people without paying them. And because we value this kind of work so little, it’s often provided by people who have no choice but to accept low pay for difficult, exhausting work – and those are often Black and Brown women. The women who have been able to get professional jobs can only make the impossible workloads and schedules possible by relying on a network of nannies and daycare providers and cleaners and carers for our aging parents because we can’t do it all ourselves, and we also don’t help each other, so it seems like the only option is paying for these services. Now I really don’t want to shame anyone here. I’ve done these exact same things too. I was talking with someone in a group that I started for parents to contribute stories to the book I’m writing about ways that capitalism has shown up in our parenting and she said she turns to online shopping whenever she feels like she has a parenting problem. So If the baby isn’t sleeping, they probably need a new sleep sack or swaddle. If the child is throwing a cup on the floor, there must be a cup that will prevent him from doing that. If the child can’t play independently, there must be some toy we don’t have that would engage them for hours. She described it as being a mindset that whatever problem she has there must be a product or service out there that can solve it, and if she can’t find the perfect one after hours of searching, or if it didn’t help, then she gets frustrated and feels doubly guilty because now she wasted time and money as well. She realizes that instead, she could have asked: “what about my expectations or perspective do I need to change?” or “what does my CHILD really need?” rather than “what product or service might fix this problem?”

As soon as she described all that I realized I’ve done this too. After Carys was born I went to a lactation consultant because nursing hurt so much and she suggested I put my feet up on a stool to improve my posture and I went immediately to the baby store on the way home and spent $40 on a stool, even though we had a small step stool at home that probably would have worked just as well. We went through the bottle refusal phase as well, and I STILL find pieces of all the different kinds of bottles we bought to try to get Carys to accept one of them. I think the challenge here is that we do see buying things as a replacement for adjusting our expectations, and also for the kind of care we used to find in our communities. We used to come together to cook, and now each family has to cook their own meals every night because we’re all in separate houses so we buy meal prep kits to make it easier. Community activist Seeta Baumik (Sita Bhaumik) describes in Mia Birdsong’s book How We Show Up as “White supremacy of food.” We used to have less space to clean in smaller, shared spaces, and now we have bigger living spaces just for our small families we need to pay someone to clean them for us. We used to share childcare in groups but now we pay childcare providers to be 100% reliable because our job won’t tolerate anything less (although of course, reliable childcare is kind of a joke these days). These forces of patriarchy and capitalism particularly, but also White supremacy, that we talk about so often on the show have combined to create an inability to set boundaries where we need them, and artificial boundaries where they don’t help us – all to get us to buy more stuff. Our inability to set boundaries in our lives contributes to stress, which many parents say is a direct reason why they buy stuff – to soothe themselves. When we have a specific problem, we buy stuff to address it. We’re paying a huge percentage of what we earn just to have a space to live in, which commits us to a job that stresses us out so we can keep paying for the space. And many of us learn that a big house is a marker of self-worth, and a place to be proud of, so we buy houses bigger than we really need, and then we have to pay for them by working longer hours and spending more time cleaning them too, or pay someone else to do that for us.

And then we have too MANY boundaries between us and everyone else in our community. I’ve been actively working on breaking these boundaries down in my own community by meeting more of my neighbors, reaching out to folks I know are having a hard time and offering help, and asking for help when I need it. The next thing I’d like to do is get in touch with everyone on our street’s email group and ask them what their specialties are – what are they good at? What skills could they share with the neighborhood? I’d like for everyone on our street to know they can call me when they need tools or basic plumbing skills or cooking equipment or information about starting a podcast or hiking, and I’d like to know whom I can call when I want to know more about why the plants in my garden don’t do the things they’re supposed to do and be resources for Carys’ questions, and even just to talk with about these issues that were talking about today. So I really believe in this stuff and I WANT to do it, and yet it’s STILL hard! It still feels incredibly scary just to send a silly email and offer help and ask other people to reveal something of themselves. How ridiculous is that, that we have such high boundaries between us that it’s so hard for me to send an email just asking them what they’re good at? Ideally, this wouldn’t even need an email; it would just be something we know about each other because we hang out together regularly. We used to get together for neighborhood gatherings but the folks who hosted them are getting older and less active and haven’t hosted any in a long time. And of course, COVID makes all that more difficult in the short-term, at least. And those gatherings never seemed to lead to really meaningful conversation – I know my next-door neighbors pretty well, and some of the folks on the street with young children, but I don’t know anyone else beyond just saying ‘hi’ to them. So I’m not thinking of sending the email for the purpose of a services exchange; the services exchange is more of an excuse to get to know what people are interested in so we can build relationships from there. Then maybe the next time we gather we can actually have meaningful conversations with each other based on shared interests rather than just based on happening to live on the same street.

So as we move toward a close here, I’d like to offer some practices. Firstly, there are practices to help us set more boundaries with the people who are in our immediate families if it seems like we need them. And secondly, there are some boundary-reducing practices to help us be together with folks in our communities in a different way. We already mentioned that the best place to start setting boundaries is to listen to your body. Right now, you might think you don’t notice anything in your body. That’s because you’ve gotten so out of the habit of paying attention to your body that it seems like it isn’t even communicating *anything* anymore. It used to tell you what felt right and what didn’t; what felt good and what didn’t, but as you learned to cover up your expressions of your feelings you also had to cover up the sensations themselves. If you hadn’t done that, you’d constantly be faced with the discrepancy between what you knew you needed, which is what your body was telling you, and that these needs weren’t being met. It was easier to deny that you even had needs in the first place than to keep covering them up and know that they wouldn’t be met.

So the place to start understanding them again is in your body, and I’m going to walk you through a short practice to start doing this. You might try closing your eyes for a moment (unless you’re driving, in which case you should come back to this later) and pay attention to your breath for a couple of cycles to calm your mind and bring it into the present and out of all the things you’ve been thinking about doing today. Just try to be present here and let that stuff go for a few minutes. Breathing in and out, in and out. Now, what do you notice in your body? What part of your body is calling to you? Maybe it’s a sense of nausea, or tightness in your shoulders, or a lump in your throat. I’ve done this exercise on group coaching calls and had participants say “I have a headache and I think I’ve had it for most of the day but I only just noticed it.” Where do you notice tension in your body? That’s a useful piece of information If you pay attention to where you feel tension, you can see those signals when they come up during your day. If your child asks you to get their breakfast while you’re getting yours, check in and see what you feel. Do you notice tension bubbling up somewhere? If so, that’s a really good sign that you need a boundary. That might look something like: “I’ll be happy to get your breakfast when I’m done with mine.” If you *aren’t* feeling tension right now, notice that too. What is THAT like? Are you breathing easily and evenly? Are you NOT fidgeting or breathing shallowly or feeling tension like you do when you’re feeling tension? That’s a useful thing to know too, because if your child asks you to get their breakfast while you’re eating your breakfast and you DON’T notice a sudden increase in tension, and you continue to feel easeful and that this request is not impinging on your ability to meet your need, then there’s nothing wrong with getting up to get your child’s breakfast! I have no official position on whether you should get up during your breakfast or not…the key is how doing this feels for YOU. If you feel expansive and that you want to help them in that moment, then go for it! If you feel contraction and tension then that’s a good signal that you have a need that isn’t being met by this request. Obviously, this is a small and simple example, but you can use the same technique in any interaction you’re having to understand whether this is a request you can willingly fulfill, or whether you might want to think about setting a boundary either in that moment or perhaps in future if it isn’t possible to do it now. (You can open your eyes now if you haven’t already!)

Another practice we can look at is to understand where we might be violating our child’s boundaries right now. In our culture the idea of children even having boundaries is seen as completely bizarre – if you Google “boundaries children want to set” then at least the first three pages are about the parent setting boundaries (and actually meaning limits most of the time) on the child’s behavior. The idea of a child having boundaries is even today something that’s pretty foreign to us. We can start looking at this by understanding where our child tries to resist us. There are a lot of folks out there who say it’s our child’s job to try to resist us. I would argue that our child’s job is to advocate for their needs, and they’re only resisting us because their need isn’t being met. I’m not saying we should meet every one of their needs all the time, but that way more often than we might initially think, it’s possible to meet our needs AND our child’s need at the same time. Looking further afield, perhaps there ARE some folks outside of our nuclear family with whom we need more boundaries. There may be people asking us to do things that we really don’t want to do, and that draws us further away from meeting our needs, especially where it seems that the other person is manipulating us or taking advantage of us, and we can practice saying ‘no,’ perhaps in low-pressure situations first to see how it goes and see what the other person’s reaction is and learn that maybe it isn’t as bad as we expect it to be. Or maybe their reaction isn’t what we hope it would be but WE still feel a sense of expansiveness as OUR need is met by declining their request, and we realize that boundaries might actually be helping us after all.

Then we can also recognize where we might have TOO MANY boundaries between us and the people around us, and start taking steps to break these down. So maybe you could start by making an emergency contact list of all the people on your street, so you can get in touch with them if something happens. You can also let people know about things happening in the neighborhood that might disturb them like construction noise, or if you have a tree with extra apples to share. Of course, the list is really a conversation opener – from there you could organize a gathering for the neighbors, perhaps in someone’s yard or in a local park. When you see changes happening in someone’s life, you can reach out and offer help. You can ask for help too, which makes people more likely to want to ask you for help when they need it – even if it’s just something really small like putting your garbage cans out when you’re going to be away on garbage day. (Or rubbish day, if you’re in England.). You could put up a little free library, and if you’re in a neighborhood where people struggle with food insecurity, you could make it a little free pantry. You could hide a geocache on the street near your house and introduce yourself to the people who stop to find it. I host a monthly gathering of families who go out and explore the natural world. Mia Birdsong describes in her book How We Show Up: Reclaiming family, friendship, and community that she does a similar thing with inviting people for casual drop-in dinners at her home (which is admittedly more difficult during COVID). So the overarching message I want to leave you with here is: yes, boundaries, especially with people in our close families. Use the sensations you feel in your body to figure out when you need more of them. But also, yes, fewer boundaries. Know that we’ve been conditioned to keep big, strong, high boundaries between us and the people in our community. The reason we feel tension as we think about overcoming those boundaries is because it benefits OTHER people, and especially companies who want to sell us stuff when we stay separate. It doesn’t benefit us; it hurts us. So perhaps you’ll practice breaking those boundaries along with me?

And if you’d like to learn more about the Taming Your Triggers workshop, which is open for enrollment right now, you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers. Enrollment closes on Wednesday, February 23rd, and sliding scale pricing is available. If you see yourself responding to your child’s difficult behavior in a way that isn’t aligned with your values, please know that parenting doesn’t have to be like this, even in the middle of all the stress of a global pandemic. Healing can happen, and it can especially happen in community. I’d love to be part of your healing community and support you on your parenting journey.