All of us struggle with saying no to situations, people, and dynamics in our lives. Today we’re diving into developing healthy boundaries with licensed therapist and relationship expert Nedra Tawwab. She’s the author of the New York Times bestselling book “Set Boundaries, Find Peace,” as well as “Drama Free” and “Consider This.” She breaks down the difference between healthy, rigid, and porous boundaries and also gives us a great perspective on boundary setting around the holidays.
Hello Sunshine, Hey besties. Today on the bright Side, it's Wellness Wednesday, and we're diving into something we've all struggled with, boundaries. Licensed therapist and relationship expert Nidra Towab is here to help us understand why boundaries are so hard to set, how we can empower ourselves to finally draw that line, and why the toughest boundary might just be the one we need to set with ourselves.
It's Wednesday, November twentieth. I'm Danielle Robe and.
I'm Simone Boyce. This is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten your day.
Today's Wellness Wednesday is presented by Coligard. Okay, so today we are talking all about boundaries. I have had a journey with them. Boundaries have been hard for me. If you talk to my mother, she won't agree, she'll refute this. But I think I grew up in a boundaryless household, so I had to learn how to set them later in life, and I've found it particularly hard in friendship, in romantic relationships, and with my mom. Sorry, Hi Mom, I love you, but I think it's coming from this deep seated fear of letting people down. I don't want anyone to feel disappointed or unloved because of something I said, or did or didn't do.
But over time, I've.
Realized that saying yes to somebody else all the time is really saying no to myself. Simone, have you had this or have you always had healthy boundaries?
Boundaries is definitely a skill that I've had to learn. I haven't always had healthy boundaries with work, but I have started to implement that as I've gotten older and have gotten more possessive over my time. And this time of year can be particularly challenging, you know, the holidays usher in a lot of additional expectations with friends, family, and coworkers, And like you were saying, Danielle, times, the hardest boundaries to set are with our family members. Oh yes, for sure.
I've reframed a boundary in my mind as something you will tell someone that you will do, so you're not asking them to change their behavior. You're just saying this is something I am going to do, and then you stick to it.
You keep your word, which is so hard.
But it's never just as easy as that, And that's why we're bringing in an expert today. Ndra to Wob is a leading therapist on setting boundaries and the author of the New York Times best selling book Set Boundaries, Find Peace, as well as Drama Free and Consider This. She's also the host of the podcast you Need to Hear This, and she wowed the crowd at this year's Shine Away.
Nedra says one of the first steps to setting good boundaries is understanding your boundary patterns, so she's created a little quiz to help everyone do that. If you go to her website, Ndra towobb dot com, she has a quizzy you can take for free that determines whether you have porous, rigid, or healthy boundaries.
We both took this quiz and I have to say I was kind of surprised by my results. So we're going to talk through the three different boundary types and then talk about tools. How do we give ourselves the tools to set boundaries and.
Feel confident about them. So let's go ahead and bring her in. Nedra Tuab, Welcome to the bright Side. Thank you for having me. Well, Nijo, you have literally written the book on boundaries. It's called Set Boundaries, Find Peace, A guide to reclaiming yourself. And yet I have to imagine that even you were a student of this craft at one point. How have boundaries changed your life? And when did you realize you needed them?
Oh?
My gosh, as young as elementary school, middle school, high school. I feel like we've always had boundaries, But when did we know that we could utilize them. For many of us, that is young adulthood, when we start to recognize, like, oh my gosh, I have a little bit of autonomy. I'm not with my parents all the time. I can exercise some things in my life that could be beneficial. Some of us are fortunate enough to have parents who are willing to honor some of those boundaries, and you know, when they are not, we figure out a way to exercise our boundaries. I remember in high school one of my first boundaries. My mother is a cigarette smoker, and one of my boundaries was do not smoke in my room. And she would stand at the door and she talked to me from the hall and I'm like, oh, wow, one place of refuge in this home. I have one space where there's no cigarette smoke.
Wow.
It felt good that she was willing to do that and It taught me that when I ask, I receive.
It's a good lesson to learn and one that I think we all have to find in our own way and in our own timing. NDRO.
When I read your book years ago, it was the first book I had ever read on boundaries, and we had a conversation and I remember thinking, Oh, I don't know if I can do any of this.
This all seems way too rigid for me.
And I think we're three and a half years later and I feel much more boundaried, and so I almost feel like I can have a whole different conversation with you now. Those boundaries with self, as you stated, were the start for me. But you say that most people don't come into therapy knowing they have boundary issues similar to me. So I want to start with what boundaries are? How do you personally define them?
Boundaries are ways in which we communicate our needs to others, ways that we honor our needs within our sales. It can be verbal, they can be physical sometimes, but it is an expectation that if we do not speak a boundary, if we are not living a boundary, we do not have any boundaries. So sometimes people will say, well, they should know, they should know is not a boundary right. So we have to be clear in our expectations and our desires with other people and with ourselves, because sometimes we lack internal clarity, so we can't even communicate our need to other people, and we certainly can't honor it ourselves. When people come to therapy, I tend to see lots of anxiety, sometimes depression, lots of relationship issues, burnout at work, frustrated moms, partners who have been together and now they have kids and they don't know how to co parent together. So all sorts of things sort of arrive in the therapy space as boundary issues. If there is a woman who says, my partner needs to come to therapy with me because I am the person who does all of the things in the home, that's a boundary issue. And often it hasn't been communicated, it hasn't been discussed. We have not gone through what you do well and what do I do well? What do we need to outsource, what do we need? It's just the unspoken expectations sometimes of gender roles, and it doesn't work, and then we start to fight and we feel unappreciated and so When we can calibrate our lives to fit the needs that we have and to communicate that to people, we have a lot more ease and less anxiety and less relationship problems. But sometimes people don't even know where to start, and that's why a lot of people come to therapy.
There's something that you wrote that I wanted to ask you about. You said the root of self care is setting boundaries. And you've also said that the most important boundary that you can set is actually with yourself. What do you mean by that and what does that look like in practice?
Well, boundaries are self devote It is the way that we show up with our salves in the world. Many times we think that other people have to release us, they have to honor these things, and we must first think about what have I requested? What am I showing others that I need? How am I caring for myself? If we can't do it, other people certainly won't do it. We often ask for permission without permitting our salves. So there's a lot of self advocacy that's necessary for us to be boundary people.
We have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more boundary setting. Advice that's in a moment, and we're back with Relationship and Boundaries Expert NDRA. Toob Ndra on your website, you have a nineteen question quiz and it determines if you're in need of healthy boundaries. So the result show if you have porous boundaries, rigid boundaries, or healthy boundaries. And Simone and I both took the quiz, so we want to go through our results. Simone, were you surprised by yours or did you feel they were spot on?
So I received healthy boundaries as my results. I think it's pretty accurate. I think it's something that's always fluid though and changing. Danielle, how about you? What did you get?
So?
I got healthy boundaries too, and it really made me giggle because I have never thought of myself as somebody with healthy boundaries, but I do think that this is proof that they are a muscle and a mindset because it's all fluid. I think I moved from porous boundaries to healthier boundaries. But I think when it comes to my time or work or family and friends, I have really become healthy there with these and the direct communication was a big part of that.
Yeah, I think sometimes people assume that Oh my gosh, I'm terrible at boundaries and I'll always be terrible. Well, you can improve. You have to practice doing different things. If you continue to do some of the same things, yeah, you'll have unhealthy boundaries, but with practice you can go from poorest or rigid too healthy. And like I mentioned, it depends on the area in life. For some of us, work might be the hardest area to place boundaries. For lots of us, I think family is the hardest place. Oh, that's my hardest for sure. Yeah, there's a lot of long term relationship and expectation built into that, and so people do have a hard time saying things, especially to elder sometimes to siblings. So that's typically an area where you'll see a lot of people struggle with family.
A question between porous and rigid boundaries, Will you explain what porous boundaries mean? And what does someone who has these type of boundaries struggle with?
So poorest boundaries typically show up as not having any clear boundaries with people, or very few clear boundaries. People don't know where you stand, they don't know what you like. You may be a little passive aggressive when a boundary issue comes up, and for other people that feels like it came out of nowhere, but you may have been thinking about it for weeks, months, or years and it just hasn't been communicated. So poorest boundaries are weak boundaries where we're not communicating many things. Rigid boundaries is when we have so many boundaries that we've built walls. This is a person who may show up in the world as I got this, or I don't need anyone to help me. I am the helper. I can do it myself. I can diiy anything. And that doesn't allow people to be in relationship with you in a reciprocal way, because either you're doing all the giving or they're not able to support you sufficiently. And we all need support. Sometimes you may need a hug, sometimes you might need a little cash. Sometimes you might need assistance with moving something around your home. But it is important for us to let people be there for us when we need something. I think the thing we need most often, especially for rigid folks, is someone to listen. And what happens when you have rigid boundaries is you're not very forthcoming about the things that are going on, and so when things happen, people have no idea they don't even know you're suffering because you haven't been clear with them.
Well when it comes to asking for help, I do wonder if a lot of this is culturally specific. It's a very Western thing to be so individualistic, to not lean on community.
Absolutely, I certainly believe that self efficacy, self awareness, everything is like self in front of it, self care, self endurance. I mean, we could go on with the selfs like it is, like it's all about me, but community care is also a thing. Community efficacy is also a thing, so we can look to others to help us because we are actually not very autonomous beings. When we think about everything we did today, it's because of someone else. You're sitting on a chair, thats someone made. You're using so many things that other people did to you. People stock the shelves at the grocery store, people open the door for you. People are all around you helping you with things and doing things, and it is okay to ask for more. Sometimes we have been praised in such a way for figuring things out that many of us just feel weak asking. It's like, I'm so used to being the helper.
I don't know how.
To be the person who needs any help. But it's very beneficial when we come into this world. We come into the world needing someone to do every single thing for us, every single thing somewhere. Some parents will let it, you know, they'll cuddle their seven year old. But there are some parents who say, you two, now, you can't sit on my lap. And that's an unfortunate thing because what we're teaching them is it's a point in time where you shouldn't need any more care. So some of us were nurtured to figure it out, to get it together. When you ask that parent for help, they may have said to you, you can figure it out, you're smart, or I think you can do it. And sometimes that is helpful to people, and sometimes you're teaching them that they can't look to others for help.
Is our relationship to boundaries molded almost entirely in our upbringing? Then is there a nature of ver as nurture component here?
I would say that so much of how we understand things is from our childhood, and we continue those patterns if we're not conscious of them. We can do some work. We can develop our self awareness, we can learn about ourselves, and we can overcome those things. Sometimes when we're still in the house with our parents. You don't have to be an adult to do it. You may notice, oh my gosh, why am I not asking my friends for help? You can start to do these things despite what you were nurtured to do. It might be uncomfortable. Now a lot of times we have to have people who are trustworthy that can help us figure out that we are safe and that these things can be honored.
What are some telltale signs that we should be setting some boundaries.
Our feelings are our guide. You know, when we're feeling frustrated, when we're feeling anxious, if we're feeling depressed in some of our interactions, when we start to physically have a response to situations, when our heart is beating faster, when we're talking to a person, when we start sweating. You know, those are indicators that your body is feeling something. And maybe it's not always a boundary, because sometimes it could be while this is really scary because it's new, or wow, this feels really uncomfortable because I haven't addressed this with this person, And sometimes it's we need a boundary in this situation. I like to look at patterns and when we have patterns with people, it's important for us to address it. If I have a client and for three years in a row, I hear this story of what happens at family dinner on Thanksgiving, I'm like, I'm noticing a pattern here. Do you think you can point out what you've said that sounds similar to twenty twenty three, twenty twenty two, in twenty twenty one, what do you think I'm hearing? Because sometimes people don't notice that they're stating the same problem, and then it's like, okay, so here's the issue. Do you want this to happen again in twenty twenty four if you do not, What are some of the things we could do?
What is some effective language that we can all follow when articulating our boundaries.
The best way to phrase boundaries is I want, I need, I expect, will you can you?
Yes?
And no?
Those are all wonderful starter phrases for opening up the communication of boundaries. A thing that I would love for people to shy away from is stating the problem without giving people a boundary, because us humans love to do that. It's like, there's no bags in this garbage? Did you ask them to bring bags? So sometimes we do a lot of problem noticing without showing up with a solution. The person with the boundary issue may not know what a boundary should be. They're not even violating the boundary because they don't even know about it. So to have a boundary violation, they have to be aware of a boundary. So if you haven't communicated it, they're not violating anything. And this idea that oh, well, common sense says, well, everybody doesn't have common sense. We were all raised in different places. It doesn't mean that you know we're bad people because we don't think the same, but it does mean that we're different.
We got to take a quick break. We'll be right back, and we're back with Relationship and Boundaries Expert Nedra to WOP. We source some questions from our listeners, so we'd love to run those by you. I know that our bright Side besties could use your expertise navigating the heightened expectations that come during the holiday season. Here's the first question.
Hi, my name's Elizabeth and I have a holiday party every year and we invite a lot of people. And last year my girlfriend came and she brought her three kids, and there were a lot of Shenanigans, and it wasn't great to have them there. And this year they're fishing for an invite again, and I'm really struggling with how to say no.
What do I do?
Since this is a party and it's your party, we can have a preference for adults only, and that could be clearly stated on the invite if there's an evite, If there's you know, even a formal invite, that can be stated this is adults only, no children allowed, or you know, if you want to say that through text. If that's the invite. It's not personal because it applies to everyone coming to the party. And this could mean that your friend is unable to come because maybe they don't have a sitter. But there is a different experience with adults only versus adults and kids. And because it is your party, you get to determine what the experience is. So, you know, letting someone know up front, just very clearly this is an adult's only party. I think that's a good way to say it, to have it on an invite so they don't feel like it's a personal attack toward them and their children.
So good. Could not have said it better myself, Okay, here's the second one. NDA.
So, my mom is obsessed with Christmas, and every year I go to her house for Christmas my entire adult life. And this year was the first year that I told her I wasn't coming, and she is just heartbroken and I.
Feel so guilty.
But I really want to stick to my guns, and I really want to do my own thing with my family this Christmas. So how do I navigate this?
Well, the guilt is a sign that you care, You're concerned about her feelings, and that's a beautiful thing. I don't want us to get to the point where it's like I don't need to feel any guilt to set a boundary, because what the emotion is saying is I care about this person, I care about their holiday experience, and I need to do something different in this situation for myself. Your mom will have to figure out what her holiday experience can look like.
I don't know.
Maybe that looks like her coming to your house. Maybe that looks like her getting together with other family members. Maybe you all start a tradition of going to her house on Christmas Eve and you all spending the day at your house where she's included, or perhaps not included, so figuring out something new it's par for the course of becoming an adult. Many of us don't do the same thing we did as children around the holidays because we create our own experiences and you are entitled to that as well. And your mom will have to reconfigure what her experience looks like and perhaps in some way you can be a part of it, but it will not be in the way that it has been in the past. So very clearly communicating that to her, and it sounds like you've done a good job of doing that, but sticking to it, and as she brings it up, you can let her know that, hey, this is really hard for me because I know how you feel about it, and I also want to honor new traditions with my family. So you can honor what she's going through and still do your thing and feel bad about it. Is not like you have to feel great about this boundary. You can feel bad about the boundary and follow through with it. Because it's sounding like you're to the point of not wanting to do it anymore. So we want you to show up in a festive spirit and who's ever home you will be in And it sounds like it will be your home this year.
That is such a tough one.
I really like the idea of sharing how hard it is, so it's not like you're an unfeeling robot.
That's a great thing.
Yeah, okay, here's our third one.
Hi.
My name is Kelsey.
So my family's a little estranged and the holidays are tough because you know, we just we don't always get along. How do I invite some of my family over for the holidays and not others?
Like, how do I exclude people.
And set that boundary in a healthy way without creating too much drama?
Thank you?
You know, as I heard this, you know this may or may not be helpful, But I'm thinking about people are excluded anyway. I mean, if we invited the entire family, you know, we wouldn't have room for them. So maybe there are some people who think they should be included that you're choosing not to include, and that part is different. So first, recognize that everybody hasn't been invited ever. And second, you can create your holiday experience, and sometimes that might include not having certain chaotic people in the holiday experience because they don't know how not to be chaotic. That is challenging of course, and people may choose to show up and be okay with that, and then some people may say, well, I don't want to come if you don't want to invite so and so, and they have the right to do that as well. But in your house, you get to invite the people that you want to be there. I know that's really hard. I think that you know, in this season, it is filled with expectation, expectation of how we should show up in our family relationships, and sometimes we've thought about it for so long when we get to the point of setting boundaries, sometimes we've been thinking about it for years. We've been suffering through this problem for years and years, and we've finally gotten to the point where we're ready to end the relationship, change the tradition, or just have a difficult conversation with someone. It's not out of left field. It has taken a lot of thought and consideration, and it can be tough. I remember I ended a family relationship and another family member or was urging me to still be in a relationship, and I said, the only reason I was in it is because I didn't want this. I didn't want people to feel like, oh, my God, you should be in this relationship with this person. But I felt this way for a very long time. I feel free, I feel more at ease, I feel like I can enjoy these experiences. So I know that it hurts you, but it feels good to me because the way that you can handle the chaos is not the way that I handle the chaos. And you can continue to have your relationship with that person. Maybe y'all have a side gathering. I don't know, but as for my holiday gathering, that person cannot be a part of it because this is also my Christmas. You get a Christmas, you get a Christmas, you get a Christmas. This is my Christmas, and this is how I want to spend it. This is my Thanksgiving, this is how I would like to spend it. We're all entitled to the same holiday here, and we get a choice. So they can choose to come to the gathering despite people not being invited, or they may side with those people, but you get to have your holiday.
You may not experience the chaos the way I do. I really really love that that personally resonates for me in some of my family of relationships versus how my mom or brother experience other family members. Nedra, you have this ongoing hashtag on Instagram where you have nearly two million followers. It's called Nedra Nuggets where you share your knowledge and your insight on boundaries and of course relationships. For example, it'll say something like nine things to say when your boundaries are challenged or five things to consider when giving someone a second chance. And I'm wondering if you are able to share a Nedrin nu get with our bright Side besties today, whatever is on your heart for.
This talk we've had today.
You know, I'm coming back to the anks that people are having around the holidays, and as I stated, we only get this lifetime, and everybody is choosing how they want to live at our parents, our friends, everybody sort of figuring that out. And in many situations, the boundary is the thing that you've been thinking about. It is the solution to whatever this is. And if you have to have a conversation, there's peace on the other side of it, even if there's a little blow up, even if there's a disruption, there is something about getting the words out that just relaxes our shoulders. When we can just get it out, it clear up something in us that I think is a beautiful thing. And we are entitled to live our lives with some healthy relationships. Maybe not all of our relationships being healthy, but we get to have these boundaries as a way of honoring our sales and our time on this earth.
Thank you for that, Nedra. Thank you so much for coming on the bright side. You're welcome.
Thank you for having me.
Nedra job is a relationship and boundaries expert, licensed therapist and host of the podcast You Need to Hear This. She's also the author of the New York Times bestseller set Boundaries Find Peace. Thank you to our partners at Coliguard, the one of a kind way to screen for colon cancer in the privacy and comfort of your own home. Talk to your doctor, healthcare provider, or go to coliguard dot com slash podcast to see if you are eligible to order online. If you're forty five or older and at average risk, ask your healthcare provider about screening for colon cancer with coli Guard. You can also request a coll of Guard prescription today at coliguard dot com slash podcast.
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, we're talking all about self care during the holidays with creator and mental health advocate Libby Ward. Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram and at The bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and feel free to tag us at Simone Voice and at Danielle Robe.
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See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.