Shame prevents you from setting good boundaries.
A while back, one of my clients said, “You deserve what you tolerate.” Another way of looking at this is that we teach people how to treat us. If you tolerate bad behaviors towards you, they are bound to continue. If you set the expectation that people in your life should treat you respectfully, you are much more likely to get that.
Think about an unhealthy relationship you’ve been in or are currently in right now. Think about how at some point in the beginning of the relationship, your boundaries started to get broken, either because you weren’t clear about them or because the other person broke them and you didn’t enforce them. Did that stop, or did it get worse?
If you have the issue of being a people-pleaser, you don’t think you can say no, you don’t want to offend anyone, and so on – the problem is that you ultimately make other people more important than you. What they want/think/feel/do is more important than you. You would never tell someone that you are more important than them, but you ARE telling people (by your actions) that they are more important than you are. This is fundamentally wrong.
When you allow someone to break your boundaries, you devalue yourself. If you’re listening to old messages that tell you you’re not good enough, that you shouldn’t ‘rock the boat’ or you should just ‘go along to get along’, you are believing messages that set you up to be used and victimized. If you are a parent, you are demonstrating this example to your kids. This is probably not the example you want to set for them if you want them to grow up into confident people!
Having good boundaries doesn’t mean you have to be rude or aggressive. You can politely say no, ask someone to stop, and so on. You can politely disagree. It’s not rude to say, “I don’t agree with you.” It’s not rude to say, “Please don’t do/say that.” If that person is respectful, they will, hopefully, respect that boundary. If not, you don’t have to put up with it. They may not understand why you set that boundary. Heck, YOU might not understand why. But – if they care about you, they can still respect you. If they WON’T, is that a person you want to spend time with?
I emphasized “won’t”, as in, they won’t respect a clearly stated boundary, because that is a choice. You get to choose whether you tolerate the behavior. They get to choose whether or not they continue the behavior. It is a choice. It isn’t because they have some disorder, dysfunction or disease – it is because they choose to continue, and that is disrespectful. On the off chance that they have Tourette’s, they will likely explain that they are cursing because of Tourette’s. That’s not disrespect. That also has about a 0.1% chance of happening, so it’s most likely a boundary issue!
There are things that I don’t like and I have no explanation for it. I just don’t like them. I have good explanations for why I don’t like some things, but others I just don’t like and some things I have an immediate, gut-level NO reaction to that I can’t explain until later. I have learned to listen to my gut reaction, because my instinctual reaction is usually right.
The problem is this:
You won’t say no until you value yourself enough to believe you deserve better.
If you are still believing ‘not good enough’ shame messages from your past, it’s time.
Time to deny them.
Time to embrace your true value.
Time to say NO!
Thanks for reading, and please share this if it has been of value to you.