Boundaries: Redefining Relationships, Empowering Yourself, and Finding True Connection

Welcome to the Stepping Into Meaningful Relationships podcast. I'm your host, carissa Stepp. I'm a relationship and human design coach, and this podcast is designed to help you create a stronger connection to yourself so you can transform the relationships around you, whether that be with your partner, a friend, a parent, a child or your business. We will be looking at relationships through the lens of human design, and my guests and I will bring you the tools, tips and tricks to create deeply meaningful connections with others. But first let's start with you. The most important relationship you have is the one with yourself. Thank you for tuning in. Now let's get to today's episode. Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Stepping Into Meaningful Relationships, the podcast, where we focus on your most important relationship, the one you have with yourself, so that you can create deeply more meaningful relationships with others. So I recently got back from the retreat that I co-hosted with my business partner, liz Transcend, down in Harper's Ferry, west Virginia, and we had such an incredible time with the amazing group of women that gathered. And I just want to say that if you have never been on a retreat before, particularly a spiritual retreat, I highly, highly, highly recommend it and of course you know this might seem like a biased opinion, because I do have a retreat business alongside my coaching business called Soulfire, with Liz, and we are going to be co-hosting our second retreat, evolve and Bali, in April. And while this might sound a little bit like a pitch, I just want to say that every time I go on a retreat and this was only my second retreat that I've ever really attended, that was a spiritual retreat that when women come together, it's a really unique experience, and this time, having been one of the retreat organizers or leaders, I did not expect to also receive the healing medicine that my soul really needed, and one of the things that I experienced at this retreat was learning how to not only give to the attendees that were there and to provide and to nurture them. I also received nurturing and support from the women that came, and it was such a beautiful experience where I honestly felt like my heart busted wide open. I felt safe and supported by the women that were there, while also intentionally creating a safe space alongside Liz for these women to feel safe and supported, and it became such a symbiotic flow between all of us that it's unlike anything that I've ever experienced before. I literally left that retreat feeling really sad to say goodbye to these incredible women. And that's only because we all live in different parts of the country and Liz lives across the sea in Sweden, and so the fact that I knew that we were going to be able to physically gather again like that as a group, with this specific group, made me really emotional. And I think for a lot of us, especially if we are mothers, we've gotten so used to being in a place of nurturing others, of always giving to everyone else, and then, with whatever time we have left, we try to give back to ourselves. We try to take care of ourselves, and self-care is a big part of my daily routine, of making sure that I'm taking care of me so that I can be a better mother, a better daughter, a better friend, a better partner. And even so, this retreat opened up something inside of me that literally my heart was just overflowing with love and compassion and empathy, and the relationships and connections that we all made this past weekend really feel like deep connections. And the reason why I'm mentioning all of this is because I want everyone to experience something like this, because it's truly incredible and it's very unique and it's not something that we often get to experience in our day-to-day life, especially if you have a full-time job and you have a family and you don't get a moment to really deeply connect with other women in your life. Back in the day, we lived in villages, right, and we have that saying that comes from then, which is it takes a village, right. It takes a village to help raise our children. It takes a village to get them to all of their activities. It takes a village to feel supported and have a community that gives back to one another and supports those of us that might be struggling, right, but how often do we really get to immerse ourselves in that for days on end, where we are cut off from the rest of the world? Right, and although, yes, we had Wi-Fi and we had our devices where we could connect with the rest of the world, outside of the little cocoon that we had created at this adorable little colonial home in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, we also had this environment where we would gather each morning and have coffee and have breakfast and get into these really deep conversations, and so one of the things that kept coming up in a lot of the conversations that I was having was with some of the attendees who had been in, or are enduring, unhealthy relationships, and a lot of those conversations came back to setting and enforcing boundaries, and I don't know if that's because that's something that's been on my mind a lot lately. It's something that I'm working a lot with a lot of my one-on-one clients right now, which is what inspired me to create the Empowered Boundaries Bootcamp, which content actually begins dropping next week. So November 20th is when the course itself is going to be live. However, just a little side note, little plug you can register starting today. Well, the registration's been open for a while, but you can actually just go and register today If you'd like to join us in the Empowered Boundaries Bootcamp. It's going to be a self-guided bootcamp over five weeks where each week a new module will drop, and we're going to be covering all sorts of things which I'll get into in a little bit. The point of this episode is not to be a pitch for the bootcamp, but it's interesting how maybe it's coming up a lot in my conversations because my reticular activating system is so focused and is literally looking out for all of these opportunities or instances where we're like boundaries would have reduced the conflict in this relationship, or enforcing and setting boundaries would have minimized the amount of hurt that may have been inflicted upon you or upon the person that I was speaking to, if they had done so in this relationship. And the thing is is that many of us end up in unhealthy relationships because we're not good at setting boundaries to begin with. So what I came to realize is something that I had to learn in my relationships was how to set boundaries, because boundaries were not something that I even recognized as a tool to help me create deeper and more meaningful connections with other people. You know, when I heard the word boundaries, it was like oh, I need to learn how to say no, which for me, as someone who was a people pleaser, who constantly over committed my time, who constantly felt like I had to say yes, because if I said no, I'd be disappointing someone, and I couldn't handle disappointing anyone because I always had felt subconsciously which I didn't realize at the time I had felt responsible for helping other people manage their emotions. So if they were disappointed and, god forbid, they were disappointed in me then the only way I could control that or prevent that from happening was by not letting people down, by not disappointing them by saying yes, by being the one to help them out, by being the one to volunteer time. I didn't have to help out with whatever it might have been right, and so you know, the first way in which a lot of us learn how to set boundaries is by learning how to say no, is by learning how to not always say yes when we want to say no. But boundaries really go much deeper than that. When articulated properly, boundaries can actually help us connect with others, as opposed to keeping them out. There's this big confusion around setting a boundary and building a wall, and so what's important to understand is that, if you are properly articulating your boundaries, you are actually, in effect, asking your partner, your boss, your friend, your sister, your brother, whoever your parent. You're actually asking for what you need instead, in certain circumstances. Right, because when it comes to conflict, so many of us, if we are people pleasers, do whatever we can to avoid it, and so what I would love to empower you to do is that, by setting boundaries, you are actually creating a framework to reduce conflict and confrontation, because then people know what you are willing to tolerate and what you're not willing to tolerate. It also helps your partner. We'll just go with partner here because it's just easier. You're also letting your partner know that it's safe for them to set boundaries, to let you know what they're willing to tolerate and not tolerate. And when we do that and when we're able to communicate what we need and our partner is able to communicate what they need, then the chance of conflict and confrontation dampens right. It gets minimized. So one of the things that I would like to talk about is, if you do find yourself in an unhealthy relationship, how can you set boundaries While you're in the messy middle? Because a lot of times, when we finally recognize that the relationship that we're in is unhealthy, we don't exactly know whether or not it's time to pull the trigger to get out of it. Right, maybe you know we've got children and we want to give it another shot. So maybe it involves having a conversation with our partner about the things that are upsetting us, the things that are hurting us, which maybe we've never spoken up about before. So by setting boundaries in the relationship, you're giving your partner the opportunity to rise to the occasion and either respect you right, respect what it is that you need. It allows you the opportunity to maybe finally feel heard and feel seen in your relationship, because that can't happen if you're not speaking up for yourself. And so many people pleasers out there are not comfortable doing that because they again are afraid of the conflict and the friction that that might cause. But sometimes we need a little bit of friction in our relationships in order to move forward and get to a place where we can feel safe again, where that friction kind of opens up the lines of communication. There are many different ways in which we can craft and assert our boundaries, but we need to know how to do that effectively and it doesn't just come down to saying things like when you said that you made me feel this, right, that puts somebody on the defensive. That's not setting a boundary. And so many times people kind of get the first part right of telling the partner what it is that they did wrong, but they're not so good at explaining how they felt and what they needed in that moment instead, right. So let me just kind of give you a little bit of an example. Say, for example, you had a rough day at work and you come home and you wanna talk to your partner about it and you start sharing about this terrible day that you had, and your partner jumps in right away and starts to try and fix the situation for you. Right, they're giving you suggestions of, like, what you should do next time or how you could have handled it differently. Or they're trying to reframe, maybe, what happened so that you don't feel so bad. Right, they're trying to fix you or rescue you from feeling the pain of the situation. Right, that's not really helpful, because sometimes we just need to vent, we just need to express and share, like, what happened and process how we felt about it by speaking it out loud, and we just need someone to really be a sounding board for us. So in that instance, instead of saying to your partner when you said that you made me feel worse, you made me feel like I am incapable and that I can't handle this and that, but I did was wrong, you made me feel like I was wrong for feeling this way, or you made me feel like I was wrong for handling it the way that I did. Right, nobody wants to feel that. No one wants to feel judged, and that's kind of what happens a lot of times, when our partners kind of come in and try to fix something or rescue us from this pain that we're feeling. And so, yeah, like they have good intentions maybe, right, they might have some good intentions around that because they don't want to see you upset, they don't want to see you hurt. But what you would need to do in that situation is set a boundary and say, listen, when I come to you and I've had a bad day, what would really make me feel supported is you just listening to me and you empathizing with how I feel, instead of telling me how I should feel instead or what I should have done instead. Or sometimes some partners can actually get you more riled up because they might be like, oh I can't believe they said that to you, or oh, I can't believe that happened, that's awful. And they might get you more emotionally dysregulated as opposed to helping you feel like you can ground back in right when you can feel safe, just sharing how you feel without being judged or criticized or getting more excited or anxious over the situation. So where I'm going with this and I'm sorry this is taking me a really long time to kind of get to the point is if you know that you're in an unhealthy relationship, meaning that and the way that I'm gonna define this is like you don't feel emotionally safe in the relationship, and there could be multiple reasons why you don't feel emotionally safe. It could be that there is emotional and psychological and verbal abuse happening in the relationship. It could be that every time you try to share something vulnerably with your partner, they either pity you or they make you feel worse or they use it against you in some way. Again, that's all pointing really towards emotional abuse. There are ways that you can set boundaries in that relationship so that you can start to discern for yourself whether or not you want to try and stay in the relationship and fix it which, by the way, you cannot fix anyone else. The only person you can quote, unquote, fix, is yourself. And let's be clear you're not broken or damaged and you don't need fixing necessarily. But there may be things that you need to heal, there may be things that you need to recover from. There may be limiting perceptions of self that you hold that are getting triggered in your relationships, that need to be resolved in some way. You might be getting into arguments with your partner and these things might happen over and over and over again, you continually finding yourself triggered and it's because they're triggering this limiting belief that you hold and this is gonna be very subconscious, so this might be something that you're not consciously aware of that points to you not being lovable, or that you are not, that you don't belong, that you are not worthy, that you are not important, that you are not valuable in some way. And so those are the things that you can really work on healing within yourself so that you're not getting constantly triggered in your relationships, and then you can work on creating emotionally safety around that. Once you're able to create emotionally safety within yourself, to feel your emotions and to understand with awareness what it is that's getting triggered within you and how you can down regulate yourself so that you're not so emotionally dysregulated in your relationship, where you're constantly arguing and fighting with your partner, maybe over the same things over and over again. So what can you do in your relationship if you're not feeling emotionally safe? Well, one of the things you can do is what we call gray rocking, and when we talk about gray rocking, what we mean is you respond to your partner in a very non-emotional way, and your responses are as uninteresting as a gray rock. Now, why does this? What does this have to do with boundaries. Well, that's where the boundary comes in, right. So, in other words, your partner comes home from work. You've had a really terrible day. You have learned through an ongoing pattern of sharing your bad days with your partner, where you never feel supported when you share about your bad day, because maybe your partner comes home and their day is always so much worse than yours and then you feel like, well, I guess my day is not as bad, so I'm just not gonna talk about it anymore, right? You don't feel emotionally safe to even bring up the things that you're struggling with, because it seems like your partner's always struggling more than you are. Now, that may not actually be the case. That may not actually be the truth, because maybe their day really wasn't worse than yours, but your partner has manipulated you in some way or gaslit you into believing that your bad day is not nearly ever as bad as their bad day, for whatever reason. So in that instance, your partner comes home from work, they start telling you about their bad day and instead of sharing maybe what's going on for you or what maybe you're struggling with as well, you just gray rock them, right? It's just, I'm sorry to hear you had a bad day. That really stinks and then that's it. Right, like you, just you're responding very non-emotionally, you're acknowledging that you heard them, maybe you're even extending a little bit of empathy towards them, but you're now not going to share vulnerably what happened in your bad day, because they might use it against you or they might minimize your experience and amplify theirs as a way to keep the attention on them. Because if this is an unhealthy person and really when I'm talking about unhealthy people, I'm talking about someone who has a lot of narcissistic tendencies right, they need all the attention all the time. They need to feel like they're in control. They need to feel loved and admired and adored, right To support their self-worth. And so, with gray rocking, you're not explicitly setting a boundary, meaning that you're not saying to your partner when I share with you what I'm struggling with, I would love to feel like I'm also being heard and that what I'm going through is also important and I don't want to feel minimized in this relationship. Right, that would be the setting of a healthy boundary with a partner that is healthy. With an unhealthy person, you can't do that because, like I said, it's going to get used against you, they will find a way to take your vulnerability and use it against you. So that's where gray rocking comes in and it's an implicit boundary, right? This is a boundary that you're setting internally with yourself saying, okay, I'm no longer going to be sharing emotionally vulnerable things with this partner or with this person, because they've proven to me that they're not a safe person. They're not safe for me to share these things. The other thing is is that if in this unhealthy relationship, there has been any kind of coercive control. Coercive control is where someone tries to use their influence, their power right, their position of power. There's often a power imbalance in the relationship. When this happens, they are using financial control to get you to behave or to do certain things that you really don't want to do, but you feel powerless or you have to succumb to this power dynamic where they hold all the control and you don't have any. So in that instance, if you have a relationship where there is coercive control, you may want to set boundaries around, maybe physical touch right, because maybe that coercive control even bleeds into bedroom dynamics where maybe you've been left to feel as though you're just like a means to an end and they're not taking into consideration what you want or what you need. It's all about serving them and their needs. So maybe there needs to be boundaries, and this would be more of an explicit boundary around physical touch and it might even extend into a boundary around sleeping arrangements. Right, maybe you need to separate yourself physically from them at night, when you're going to bed, because maybe that's when some of these dynamics are coming into play. So maybe it's you feeling like, okay, I need to now sleep in a different room. Right, I need to go sleep on the couch and removing yourself from that and setting a boundary around it. Or maybe you're asking them to sleep in another bedroom and obviously, depending on the relationship, will depend on whether or not you intuitively can feel into whether or not it's safe for you to ask for them to sleep in a different room or, more likely, maybe just be willing to move into another room yourself or sleep on the couch. Maybe you'll have a physical boundary around. You're not really feeling safe with a hug or even a kiss, because it always leads to something else and you feel coerced into having to give in to that, and that's okay. Maybe it's an explicit boundary around finances if you are earning an income and they are earning an income and maybe there's some sort of dynamic where they're the ones that are controlling how the money is spent. Well, maybe you need to start setting boundaries around how the money gets treated. Maybe it's you getting more involved in how the money is spent or how the money is saved right. So there's a lot of things that you can do when you're in that messy middle of trying to figure out, like do I want to continue staying in this relationship and settling for something less than you deserve, or do you want to stay in it for right now while you get your ducks in a row so that you can safely exit this relationship? It does take courage, it does take clarity, it does take confidence to pull the trigger and get out of a relationship that maybe you've been in for decades, or a decade or more than a couple of years. Right Like, I'm not gonna say that one is worse or better than the other, but the point is is that sometimes we don't have the courage to get out right away, and it also could be because there are children involved. So many women, I talk to stay in unhealthy relationships for a lot longer than they should because of the kids. So initially the conversation might look like I know I need to get out of this, but I'm afraid of what will happen to my children. I'm afraid of the impact this is going to have. It's not a good time. It's not a good time because my kids are starting middle school, they're starting high school, we're moving, birthdays are coming up, holidays are coming around, whatever it might be, there's never a good time to get out of a unhealthy relationship, especially when you have children, or even if you don't, it can be really hard, just like there's never a good time to have children or to get married, right, like, we do them anyway and we figure it out. And that's the same thing with getting out of a toxic relationship. But sometimes we want to have our ducks in a row. We want to have some sort of clarity as to what's coming next, because the uncertainty, that fear of the unknown can keep us stuck for a really long time. So by setting boundaries, we are allowing ourselves to feel safe enough in the meantime, while we get our paperwork in order, while we have consultations with attorneys, while we speak to maybe it's a financial advisor to help us understand the financial picture more accurately. Maybe it's while we're doing the work on ourselves with a therapist or a coach or both. Give yourself some grace. I'm not saying that setting boundaries is gonna allow you to stay in the relationship long term If you are experiencing emotional pain and spiritual pain, but it can help you get more comfortable with what the outcome is going to kind of look like. And while we don't ever have a clear picture of what the outcome is going to look like while we're in the middle of it right, we never know what the transition's gonna look like on the other side, and I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that it's gonna be easier, because I don't think transition is ever easy. However, you can take steps to prepare yourself so that you're not continuing to get hurt as you're looking to get out of the relationship. You can minimize the ongoing abuse or the ongoing emotional pain that you're experiencing in the relationship. So, because I said I would, I'm going to just share with you, real quick, a little bit more about the empowered boundaries bootcamp. We're gonna be walking through understanding what boundaries are, different types of boundaries, assessing our boundaries to see like, well, which boundaries do we actually already have and which ones do we need to improve and where are we not setting boundaries? Because sometimes what we find is we're really good at setting boundaries, maybe at work, but we're not so good at setting them in our personal life. Or maybe we're really good at setting them with our partner, but we're not very good at setting them with our children. We're gonna be talking about learning how to set clear limits by identifying what our personal values are, by learning how to set those boundaries effectively and handling resistance right, because if you're someone who's never set a boundary before, more often than not what we see is that the people closest to us, who were not used to us setting boundaries, will start to push back. They're going to resist it because they're not used to it, and a lot of times, those are the people that we need to be setting boundaries with. So, being mindful of like well, who am I feeling like I need to set more boundaries with? What am I protecting myself from? What is it about this relationship that makes me feel unsafe? And so if you notice that you're setting, or want to set, a lot more boundaries with, say, your partner, then that might also be like a red flag that maybe they're not a safe person for you, but that's a story for another day and I feel like we also just kind of talked about that a lot. We're also going to be learning how to say no with confidence, by overcoming the guilt and that fear of rejection. We're going to learn how to have assertive communication around our boundaries right so that we can again say no without feeling guilty or anxious even. We're going to learn how to navigate challenging relationships right. So how do we set boundaries with the difficult people? What do we do when somebody violates one of our boundaries, and how do we detach emotionally from toxic relationships and maintain our boundaries going forward? And then we're going to talk about, like, maintaining our healthy boundaries right. How do we have a practice around maintaining and reaffirming and reasserting our boundaries and where do we need to maybe have a little bit more self-reflection and reevaluation around our boundaries? Because what you may find over time is that you know, maybe as circumstances change or maybe as new information becomes available, maybe you need to ease up on some of your boundaries or maybe you need to tweak them a little bit, depending on the person that you're holding these boundaries with or the relationships or the types of relationships that you have these boundaries in, and we're also going to be celebrating the boundaries that you have maintained right, that have helped you foster greater growth and that make you feel more empowered. Because when we provide evidence to the mind that the boundaries that we are setting are keeping us safe, are making us feel heard and seen and respected and are helping us to create more deeply meaningful relationships, then it inspires us to keep going, to keep doing a good job of learning how to communicate assertively what our boundaries are asking for, what we need Right, and that's just like a beautiful, beautiful thing. It helps us build more confidence to continue establishing and maintaining boundaries and protecting our emotional well-being and creating more fulfilling and respectful relationships in your life. So the Empower Boundaries Bootcamp is only $147. I personally think it's a steal because it is chock full of content, everything that I just mentioned. If this is something that you feel like you'd also like some one-on-one support with, then you can also tack on, for an extra hundred dollars, 90 minutes of one-on-one support with me. So for $247, you literally get the entire bootcamp, the five modules, which have multiple lessons in each of them, so it's probably about 14 to 16 lessons plus 90 minutes with me to work one-on-one. The 90 minutes will be broken down into one 60-minute session where we're really kind of digging into which boundaries need to be set. Where are you struggling to articulate them right? So maybe we'll be talking a little bit about scripting the boundaries, how to communicate them in some of these more difficult relationships, which boundaries might need to be improved. So a lot of times I find with clients, as we're doing boundary work, they'll get kind of like the first part of boundary setting correct, but then they kind of forget about the second part, which is the most important part, which is where you're asking for what you need. So they're very good at communicating what they don't want, what they won't tolerate and how they felt maybe, but they're not good at then communicating well. This is what I need in this instance to feel supported, to feel seen, to feel loved, to feel respected, and that's so important. And then, after that 60-minute session, we then have a 30-minute follow-up session after you had some time to put into practice what we talked about right, what you learned in the bootcamp, what we've worked on one-on-one, so that we can continue to help you maintain those boundaries right and tweak them when necessary. It's a follow-up to make sure that you are enforcing and reasserting your boundaries and giving you some more support around that, and a lot of that work will be in that one-on-one space. We'll also be around helping you work with your nervous system, because a lot of times when we start setting boundaries, we can feel emotionally triggered when they're not being respected, which is again going to happen with people that are not used to you setting boundaries. So how do we learn how to not emotionally react when we're being triggered right? How do we create more space between the trigger and our response? And that's how you're going to assertively set your boundaries right, by doing it from a rational, grounded place where you're feeling safe. So I'm going to be giving you then, in those one-on-one sessions, some somatic tools to help you down-regulate your nervous system. So it's really a very, very powerful, powerful practice. And, of course, I hope that you got something out of this episode, even if you don't join us for Empowered Boundaries Bootcamp, perfectly fine. And again, I didn't want this whole episode to be a pitch, but I feel so strongly and so passionately about how this can really have a meaningful impact on your relationships, and even just from a self-respect perspective and self-trust right. So, as you learn how to set these boundaries, you are proving to your mind your doubting mind that you are able to keep yourself safe, that you are able to get respect from other people right, that you are able to trust yourself to take care of your emotional well-being, to be your biggest advocate for your emotional safety, for your emotional well-being. That's so important. So it's providing that evidence right by doing this, by setting boundaries, by practicing and by seeing other people respond to your boundaries in a way that makes you feel valued in your relationships, makes you feel seen and heard and respected and loved, is so important. So, again, I could preach about this all day long, but I hope that this was helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a voice note, send me an email, reach out to me on social media, head to the podcast website where you can contact me in multiple, multiple ways and that's stepping into meaningfulrelationshipscom. Or again, reach me at Instagram at Karissa Step. I'd love to hear from you, I'd love to see you inside of the boot camp and I'd love to work with you 101 and help support you through this, because it really is very fundamental to creating healthy relationships, so I hope that helped. Until next week, everyone be well. If you're hearing this message, that means you've listened all the way to the end, and for that I am truly grateful. If you enjoyed this episode and found it valuable, would you mind leaving us a review? Wherever you listen to podcasts and sharing it with others? If you'd like to connect with me for one-on-one coaching or human design reading, you can find me on my website or on social media. Also, if you have a topic you'd like me to discuss on a future episode, please DM me. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of Stepping into Meaningful Relationships.