Healthy boundaries are essential for maintaining emotional well-being, healthy relationships, and personal growth. Boundaries define what you are comfortable with and how you expect others to treat you. Without them, people often experience stress, burnout, resentment, or emotional exhaustion. Learning to establish healthy boundaries is...
In a world that often rewards self-sacrifice, being agreeable, and making others comfortable, many of us fall into the quiet trap of people-pleasing. We say yes when we mean no. We shrink ourselves to avoid conflict. We smile through discomfort, hoping to be liked, accepted,...
Have you ever entered a conversation seeking comfort and connection, but instead you walked away feeling unheard or even judged? Did the conversation feel as unsatisfying as going to Chick-Fil-A on a Sunday, only to remember it’s closed? Have you ever taken the nerve-racking step...
“Where passive communication says, ‘Your needs matter more than mine,’ and aggressive communication says, ‘My needs matter more than yours,’ assertiveness says, ‘Both of our needs matter.’”
Where I grew up, people often joked if you don’t like something, just say “oh, that’s different” and the other person will get the idea. Or at a social gathering, when someone slaps their knees while getting up and says, “well, I suppose…” what they really mean is “we’re getting bored and want to go home, so see you later.”
We all grow up in a family system. What we might not always realize is that each of us assume a role in that system to make it “work.” This can be based on birth order, needs to manage specific relationships in the family or...
For years I often heard people say that you have to go through grief and pain, you can’t go around it, you can’t go above it, you have to go through it. For years I didn’t understand what that meant. We live in an incredibly...
“It’s fine.” “Everything is fine.” “I’m fine.” Have you ever strung together these three sentences and thought to yourself, “shoot, I think I might not be fine”. About a year ago I was in a car accident that resulted in emergency surgery, a stay in...
The idea of boundaries is one that has been talked about so much in the past few years, many of us throw around the term in our daily conversations. If you need a refresher, a common definition of boundaries is: “guidelines, rules, or limits that...
I was talking with my daughter recently and she shared with me that she is teaching my granddaughter about setting and respecting physical space limits. My daughter didn’t use those specific words, but it is essentially what she was referring to. It reminded me of...