Healthy Boundaries
Personal boundaries are based in self awareness. When you have a strong sense of self and understand what you require from relationships, you can clearly communicate to others how you are available to be interacted with, ie. boundaries.
Getting to the point where you know who you are and what you require takes work. It takes sitting with uncomfortable feelings and understanding where they are coming from. Only you can do that, because only you can observe the feelings taking place inside you. Those feelings are messages to you telling you what you are and are not comfortable with. Until you can understand and label these feelings and what they're trying to tell you, you don't have the ability to clearly communicate your boundaries to others.
Communicating clear boundaries might sound like “I’ve been noticing that when you say this phrase it makes me really frustrated. I sat with that feeling and had a realization that when you say that phrase it reminds me of my dad. Now that I know this I’m going to talk to my therapist and see if we can work through some of these feelings that are coming up for me. But in the meantime, what you can do to help me is to notice when you say this phrase and understand its triggering for me. I don’t expect perfection, but I hope that my communicating this will help you to understand why I have been feeling this way.”
Phrasing it in this way lets your counterpart in on your internal experience. It is not accusatory. Our natural response is usually to react to the feelings we have and accuse our counterpart of making us feel this way. But if we can take responsibility for our own emotions and find the message those emotions are trying to tell us about ourselves we can share this new awareness with our counterpart instead of making them responsible for our inner emotional experience, which they necessarily don’t have access to. Sharing your inner experience in this way creates less defensiveness because there is nothing to defend against. When people are defensive they push back against accusation. They oppose it. There is nothing to oppose here. You are being vulnerable and sharing your inner experience. Now they have some agency in the interaction the next time a similar situation comes up. They know what the consequences are for continuing the same behavior. It is likely they may fall into the same behavior next time. Habits take time and practice to change. But they have the knowledge of how it makes you feel and the responsibility of your request to “notice and understand”.
Your boundaries are your responsibility to hold and ensure they are clear and also flexible. Flexibility might mean not expecting perfection in your relationships right out of the gate. For example, you may have to ask more than once, or allow someone to stumble as they try to comply with your boundary. It may take a few tries for them to create a new habit around your boundary. Especially if the current habit is ingrained in months or years of practiced behavior for them.
Ultimatums are the extreme end of the boundary spectrum. Ultimatums are useful only if you are absolutely willing to commit to doing the “then consequence”. “If this happens again, then this is the consequence.” If you find that you are not willing to commit to your stated consequence, then an ultimatum isn't the correct tool for the application. The tool is flexibility and the space for your counterpart to comply with your boundary, with gentle, or if warranted, stern reminders of your clear request.
Your boundaries are FOR you, NOT AGAINST them.
Establishing good boundaries takes self-awareness. Through coaching, better self-awareness and practice setting good boundaries can be achieved.