Anxiety Support Group
Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...
personally, i prefer rigid walls, reinforced with clever sarcasm, moats, barbed wire, ramparts and armed guards, but i am working the leap of faith that boundaries are healthier than reinforced isolation. works in progress. . . today's read from "hope for today" is resonating loundly enough to feel worthy of the reinforcement of sharing.
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one of the most valuable skills i've learned in therapy is to discern acceptable behavior and to set limits with others. setting boundaries helps me take care of myself in relationships and keeps me from being a victim. responses to boundaries help me evaluate the quality of my relationships.
nevertheless, i still feel some trepidation when i set limits. i fear the other person may become angry and end the relationship. i experienced different forms of abandonment in my dysfunctional upbringing and it's not a feeling i relish reexperiencing. sometimes dread prevents me from setting limits. other times i state my boundaries in overly rigid terms, hoping i'll never have to deal with the problem again. my best success comes when i set my limits one day at a time.
for example, my spouse watches television late at night and often unintentionally wakes me when he comes to bed. depending on how my day went, sometimess this bothers me and sometimes it doesn't. i no longer set a global, black-and-white boundary with my spouse. instead of saying, "from now on when you watch tv after 11 pm, i'm going to sleep in the guest room," i ask him, "are you going to watch any more of that show?" if he responds affirmatively, i tell him i'm going to sleep sleep in the guest room and bid him a pleasant evening. in this way, i care for myself and i don't set myself up for resentment. i leave options for both of us, which makes our relationship run more smoothly.
thought for today
boundaries don't help me when they're too loose or too rigid. if i set them flexibly --one instance at a time-- they can help improve my relationships.
therapy taught me the difference between walls and boundaries.
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why does life have to be so complicated? walls would be so much simpler if not for those pesky psychoticks that result from isolating.
sigh. . . onward through the leap of faith.
open discussion
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It's going to get hotter here with Thursday being the hottest. It's noon and 75f feels more like 80 or more.I've been cleaning up the deck in this morning and cleaning the windows outside. Then I cut up a pallet in half, I've decided to call it quits now because I went a bit light headed. Joanne, some drugs we take have an effect on us in the heat, I know a couple of mine do, maybe yours...
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Learning the difference between walls and boundaries is a unique experience for everyone. Once I learned a major peeve of mine that immediately put up a wall so thick that you could walk across the top, I worked to find a socially acceptable response that allowed me to move through the painful moment at my own pace without setting off explosive fireworks.
Thanks for sharing this!
hmmmmm. . . now ya got me thinking on that "socially acceptable response." that triggered a yellow alert among the cadre at arftonimo bay. man the ramparts ! ! ! "social acceptability" still feels unobtainable to me, near as i can tell, social acceptance means i'm going to prison, at last. it is my family's alma mater, after all.
writing this out has helped in the appeal to the commander of arftonimo bay. stand down, commander. ^it^ is just a group therapy discussion.
sigh. . .
the person who was setting boundaries for sleep was the anonymous author. in my personal realities, i am the one who needs to respect other people's boundaries for sleep. i believe i am sleeping well these days, but remain quite far from the listed norms. i sleep like a dog, napping whenever life gets boring and ready to run at the first sniff of action. life is a 24/7 proposition in my serenity, but there are quite allot of folks who don't enjoy my barking at the patio door.
so i tell myself. . . i don't care to count how many experts disagree.
In my mind with this particular relationship (family member) I just thought I was pushed to the brink and was merely articulating I had had enough. It was that too of course but I remember very clearly speaking out loud what my boundary was directly to this person. The minute it came out of my mouth, it was like I grew 8 feet tall, and all that internal tension and sick to my stomach feeling just melted away. That moment of, I don’t know, liberation maybe., was absolutely palpable in the moment. It was like I discovered a sort of super power.
Now I realize we set boundaries every day. Some are articulated directly, some are just subtle acts where other people are none-the wiser. For instance, with some people, I just observe rather than actively engage. That’s a boundary to me even though the other person has no clue.
Even with my husband where there is trust and closeness, I still sometimes have these little moments of setting limits and it’s actually probably healthy for both of us.
I also have boundaries for myself, like when my inner critic is all consuming. I just sort of try to step away mentally and tell myself, um… nope.
Ain’t gonna lie; I love the topic of boundaries, haha! It‘s because the benefits of setting them can truly be life changing.
finding words for ^it^ just might be the greatest benefit i gain from psychotherapy. the first time i heard the word, "boundaries" was in the context of, "you don't set boundaries. you set military fortifications." and to think. . . that was before i joined the army. it was an army shrink who helped me understand the diff between walls and boundaries.