How to start building your personal boundaries

Without having healthy strong personal boundaries your chances of being happy are poor. So how to start rebuilding them?

By starting saying ‘no’. 

But I have to warn you: it is as significant as it is painful. For me it was one of the scariest and most excruciating processes in my life. But you cannot truly know who you are if your boundaries are not solid. 

At first it will be frightening. You will experience a lot of guilt, shame and fears to be left, rejected, abandoned. And you probably would. Because you can’t simply explain or convince or talk about your personal boundaries. It’s a subconscious process. In most cases you will face resistance, anger, frustration. Or sometimes people can say ‘yes – I understand, I will do what you ask’, but then they will again try to break your boundaries.

As I repeated many times, personal boundaries are deeply subconscious, for us and for people who break our personal boundaries. So it’s very difficult to explain them.

In my case, I was at war with my own family: conversations did not work, explanations did not work, nothing worked. So I had to cut our communication at all for some period of time. Because I finally saw clearly that they claimed my life and everything I achieved as theirs, and unless I sacrifice everything that I cherished for them, they would not be happy… My biggest dream that I made reality could be taken away from me by the same people who were supposed to love me. That they wanted my sacrifice in order for them to be happy. And I could not do any sacrifice anymore. There was a clear choice for me: my personal happiness or the sacrifice of my life for the happiness of my family. And by then I already knew that making them happy is a task that is not within my power and that it did not matter what I did- they were never happy and demanded for more. 

And in fact, by saying ‘no’ to them I was saying ‘yes’ to myself, finally.

Was it worth it?
Oh yes. I gave myself a chance to be happy and live life on my terms. 

Here is a beautiful text about our personal boundaries by Jeff Foster (I could call him a spiritual coach, but the word ‘spiritual’ is a bit compromised nowadays, so I just call him “someone who did his ‘homework”):

A boundary
is not a NO
to someone else’s existence.

It’s a YES to yours.

To your voice. Your delicate heart. Your truth.
Your path, however uncertain you feel.
Your way. Honouring it. What you need, what you feel. What you don’t.
What feels right, and what doesn’t.

It’s not an attack on the other
(even if it feels that way to them).

You can’t control their feelings.
But you can honour your own.
(And you can understand
their disappointment and hurt too).