Episode 177 - Boundaries Tune-Up
How much time and energy do you spend defending choices you’ve already trusted yourself to make? Whether it’s your career, parenting, relationships, or something else entirely, it’s exhausting to keep explaining yourself after you’ve already done the work of deciding. Good girl conditioning can make you feel obligated to defend yourself when someone questions your choices, instead of recognizing what’s actually happening in the conversation. In this episode, you’ll learn the difference between a request, a demand, and a boundary so you can get more clear about what you will and won’t participate in and build the skills to talk about it.
How long have you been putting off the hard conversation? Join Sara live for one hour for her free workshop, SPEAK UP. There’s no replay, so bring the conversation you keep avoiding. You’ll learn the Three Speak Up Skills and figure out what’s keeping you stuck.
Here’s what you’ll uncover in this episode:
The real definition of a boundary and why it often gets confused with something else
How to tell the difference between a request and a boundary
A question to ask before you make a request or set a boundary
How a demand can be disguised as a boundary
Why following through is the essential step in setting a boundary
Register for SPEAK UP: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
All right, today we're doing a tune-up because from time to time, we just need to be reminding ourselves about what skills are so we can use them effectively.
01:09
So today's tune-up is about boundaries. A client came to a session with a situation with her mom.
01:16
She had quit her job recently, and it was, quote, unquote, if you're using, you know, capitalism as your only definition, a good job.
01:27
It paid well, it was kind of prestigious, and there was a lot of room to grow and earn a lot more, and my client was also really tired, and it had taken her a lot of bravery and a lot of, um, time to decide to quit to save her mental, her emotional, and even her physical health.
01:48
And so she was feeling really good about this decision, and when she told her mom, her mom had a very different reaction.
01:57
She said she was a failure, that it was financially irresponsible, and from that time forward, every time they talked, her mom wanted to know when her daughter was going to find a new job that paid the same.
02:12
Every time she called, every time they visited, every time she texted, it was something about, "So when are you gonna get a new job? Tell me about the new job.
02:20
Tell me about your interviewing." And it was becoming, as you might imagine, a sore spot.
02:26
My client was thinking that she had done something good for herself, something that was valuable, something that she trusted herself to do, and yet every single time she interacted with her mom, she felt like she had to justify it.
02:40
So maybe that feels familiar. Maybe your version is something else. Uh, maybe it's your parenting. Maybe it's a different decision you have made or something that you know you want to make.
02:51
You know the feeling when you are going to be in the presence of someone who is going to question you, try to make you defend or justify, and so we need to talk about boundaries.
03:05
Let's define some things just so we are clear. A boundary is something that you decide you will do when something happens that you don't want to participate in.
03:21
It is 100% in your control to enforce the boundary. It's about you and your behavior because that's the only thing you control. Let me give you some examples.
03:37
"If you yell at me, I will leave." That's a boundary, right? You decide, you name the problematic behavior, and you decide what you'll do.
03:46
"I'm happy to drive you to your friend's house once your chores are done." That's a boundary because you're naming what you want and you're deciding when you'll drive.
03:56
We get mixed up between boundaries and requests. So a request is different. A request is you asking for someone else to change their behavior. A request is information.
04:13
You're telling someone what you want, and a real request contains in it a real opportunity for them to choose yes or to choose no. So, "Would you please stop bringing up my job?" That is a request.
04:31
"Can you please call before you come over?" That is a request.
04:36
"You can't talk to me like that." That is actually a request because it's not something in your control to decide how the other person talks.
04:47
If you want it to be a boundary, it has to contain what you will do if that behavior that you don't wanna be a part of is presented to you.
04:56
So a boundary would sound like, "If you talk to me like that, I will end the conversation and come back when we can be respectful." The reason that it is so important to keep these two separate and to really understand the difference is because we make the mistake of thinking that requests should be honored, and we wonder why they aren't.
05:23
And requests actually put us completely at the mercy of the other person, and boundaries do not.
05:31
Because boundaries give us a clear definition of what's going on and a clear action of what we will do when that thing happens. So use this test.
05:42
If you're trying to figure out is this a request or a boundary, ask yourself whether or not it needs the other person to cooperate.
05:51
If it does, it's a request, and if it only needs you, then it is a boundary. A couple other things to keep in mind about boundaries. Number one, some boundaries just live inside you.
06:05
You don't have to announce them. Let's say that you've decided that you do not answer the door after 8:00 PM at night.
06:13
That's your boundary, and if a delivery person knocks on the door and wants to deliver something, you don't owe them any explanation. Some boundaries just go without saying, right?
06:23
We have kind of social norms and a normal way of living and being in the world, so we don't have to tell people, "If you hit me, I will blank," because that's pretty clear.
06:34
There's gonna be consequences for that. Second thing to keep in mind for a boundary is if someone is going to cross a boundary, they usually have to know that it exists.
06:48
So let's go back to maybe your boundary is I don't answer the door after 8:00 PM. Let's say your mom keeps showing up at 8:30 PM, and she has no idea why you're not answering the door.
07:02
You can hope that she gets the hint, or you might have to tell her.
07:08
Once she knows, and she continues to visit at 8:30 PM, that's a choice that she is making to disregard the boundary that you've given her.
07:18
So sometimes the boundary is just something we can decide for ourselves, and we don't really need to let people know, but in order for us to hold someone else accountable, they have to know what that boundary is, and so that does require that we tell them.
07:33
So now back to my client and her mom. There are a couple of things that I pointed out in our coaching.
07:40
Number one, without a clear boundary, my client was really just depending on her mom to stop asking, and that was what was so frustrating, is her mom was not gonna stop asking.
07:54
As we talked about why her mom might be continuing to ask, my client had some hints. You know? She grew up without a lot of money.
08:04
She was very proud that my client had gone to college and had gotten a good job, and she really wanted my client to be financially stable, and she viewed this with some worry that it was going to affect my client's financial stability.
08:21
And so while there were some reasons that my client could guess at about why her mother was doing this, I suggested, "Why not just ask?" Start the conversation with this question: "Mom, can you help me understand why you keep bringing this up?" Because in order to get to the bottom of it, we need to figure out is this really just concern, or is there something else hiding here?
08:49
Because oftentimes in these type of dynamics, there is hidden obligation.
08:56
Notice my client is an adult who has not set a boundary, and every time her mother brought up the lack of job, she felt obligated to defend her decision, to tell her about the reasons why she had quit, to go over all of the symptoms and lack of sleep and the high stress in order to get her mom to stop asking.
09:20
But it was never enough for her mom because her mom had something else going on, some other kind of worry.
09:27
And so when we talked about how to have this conversation, I suggested, "Let's just start with a question.
09:33
Rather than jumping in to defend yourself, why don't you ask her, 'Mom, can you help me understand why you keep bringing this up?'" Because then she'll have a chance to be heard.
09:44
You can make a request.
09:46
If you're not comfortable with a boundary s- right off the bat, a request works, and it could sound something like, "Mom, I appreciate your concern, but it's not something I wanna talk about with you." That is not a boundary, right?
10:02
Because there's no action that my client is gonna take, but it is a request. I suggested the request first because let's just see what Mom will do.
10:13
Let's see if Mom is capable of honoring that request, and if she doesn't, then we need a boundary. "Mom, if you bring this up again, I'm going to end the conversation." That gets rid of two things.
10:29
It gets rid of any ambiguity about what's gonna happen, and it also gets rid of the obligation that we as good girls have been programmed to feel every time someone wants information from us, where we defend or we bring up all of our research or reasons why we have made the decision that we have.
10:52
And so asking a question, "Can you help me understand why you keep bringing this up or why this is something that we keep talking about, just so we're clear?" Then the request and then a boundary.
11:06
That's a really good strategy for relationships that we care about, that we want to keep because we want to use the softest tool first.
11:18
So a question so I can understand you, a request so we can see if we can work this out without bringing out the clarity of a boundary because a boundary is very clear.
11:29
"If you blank, then I will blank." Now we need to talk about how boundaries are actually used to disguise demands, and this is a common problematic behavior when someone has a demand, and they dress it up as a boundary to try and make the other person do it.
11:54
Let me give you a scenario that came up for a different client. Her husband was going through a really hard midlife crisis-y type thing, and he did not feel very good about himself.
12:06
He did not feel very good about where he was in life, and he really wanted to put her in charge of making him feel better. She did not wanna do that.
12:17
And as she pulled away from him, he tried harder to make her take care of him by framing it as trusting her.
12:28
So the more he wanted her to take care of him, the more she pulled away and didn't want to take care of him.
12:36
And because he didn't like it that she would not take care of him and she would pull back, when she did that, he would frame that as, quote-unquote, "breaking his trust." So you can see right now that the whole way that he has framed this needing to trust her and wanting her to trust him is based on putting the obligation on her to behave the way he wants.
13:11
And he would say things like, "My boundary is that you need to tell me where you are and what you're doing." So the first thing we did was talk about the way he had structured this boundary.
13:27
It wasn't a boundary, and it actually, it wasn't even a request, it was a demand. And a demand is just taking a request and upping the ante with some kind of punishment or some kind of consequence.
13:44
And in the case of this client, the consequence was her husband telling her he didn't trust her or trying to control her behavior.
13:55
So in the way he had shaped this discussion, not only was it not a boundary, but it placed her in charge of taking care of him when that wasn't her job.
14:09
One day, she went for a walk and didn't mention it to him, and when he found out, he treated it like a breach of trust. Notice that hidden obligation, right?
14:22
It sounds like, "I just wanna know about your walk," but it's really about information that she was required to give him to meet his definition of keeping his trust, and it turned her going for a walk into some kind of secret that she was trying to hide from him.
14:45
And because he had framed all of this as repairing trust, anything that she decided to keep to herself thus became hiding.
14:58
Every time she didn't want to talk about something became proof that she couldn't be trusted, and any time she refused to engage in a conversation about what she had done that day made her the bad guy.
15:13
And what was really interesting was the way she asked me the very good girl, quote-unquote, question that she had, and it was this. She asked, "What is reasonable for me to share?
15:27
Where is my boundary with this, and where's his boundary?" And I said, "He doesn't have a boundary. He has a demand.
15:35
And it sounds to me like his demand is, 'I need you to soothe my insecurity by telling me everything I wanna know all the time.'" And here's the thing about demands.
15:50
Very rarely will they be satisfied when they are about making another person feel better. Think about the two clients I've told you about.
16:01
Client A with the job, her mother demanding to know when she was gonna get a job. That was never going to be satisfied until her client got a job.
16:12
Client B, with the husband who was mad about her walk, there's never going to be enough information that will satisfy his insecurity, which is his to work on.
16:25
There is not enough information that is going to fix that, and every time she gives in, she just proves to him that she will bow to his demands, and that just creates another one and another one and another one.
16:40
And that's the tell. That's how you know we're not talking about a boundary here. It's a demand because you comply and it's never enough. There's always another one.
16:52
So once we got that sorted out, I explained, "Your boundary gets to be whatever protects your peace.
17:02
And yes, learning to have a hard conversation about boundaries is part of that work." So what can you do this week to make use of this little tune-up episode?
17:13
Number one, start looking at the boundaries that you have and just ask yourself, "Is this an explicit boundary that I've set? Is it just something internal for me? How does this boundary help me?
17:25
How does it protect me and my time?" And if you can't find any, then you might need to ask yourself, "What boundary might I want to set?
17:34
Might I want to practice setting and keeping a boundary so that, number one, I start to get good at what a boundary really is, and number two, that I have the opportunity to protect more of my time, my energy by being clear and honest about what I will and will not participate in and what that will look like?" Last thing, if you wanna use a request before a boundary, I think that's absolutely fine.
18:04
Sometimes starting with a request gives people the chance to choose differently without having to be super clear about it, and many people will honor a clear request.
18:16
Just remember, good girls are conditioned to Not put anybody out, not take up anybody's time, not take up any resources, and so you might even notice that making a clear request is hard.
18:29
If that is, totally understand. Come to the free workshop that I'm doing so that I can show you why that request is hard.
18:38
There's a really specific reason, I call it the blind spot, because you can't see it, and we talk about it in the free workshop. I do it every single week. Check the link in my bio for those times.
18:49
Now, it is going to be normal to set a boundary and to feel some guilt, to hear that voice that says, "That was rude. You shouldn't have done that. You overreacted." The guilt is normal.
19:02
You were trained to keep everyone else comfortable. Holding a boundary might feel genuinely awful the first couple times you do, and that discomfort is not evidence that it's wrong.
19:16
It's the feeling of doing something new. Following through is what makes it a boundary.
19:24
If you're not gonna follow through, it just becomes a warning that people learn to ignore or something that you say that we all know you're not really gonna do.
19:33
So the follow through, holding it, is what really closes the loop on whether or not it's a boundary. And you can always hold it kindly, right? You can end with, "I love you.
19:46
I hope we can work this out. I'll call you tomorrow and talk about something else." You can be firm and warm at the same time.
19:55
So in summary, a request asks, a demand pressures, and a boundary is what you will do. Listen for the hidden obligation. If saying no makes you the bad guy, you're actually facing a demand.
20:13
And when someone questions your choices, you can skip the defense and ask a question instead.
20:20
"Can you help me understand why you're bringing this up or why you're asking that way?" You can make a request first and then keep the boundary ready if you need, then follow through even when it feels terrible.
20:35
Last thing, finding these words takes practice. That's exactly what we're doing in my free training every single week, so find that link in my bio and I will see you there. Have a great week.
