Boundaries keep all our relationships healthy; our personal relationships and our business relationships. Unfortunately, if you have someone who constantly wants to invade your boundaries, it is difficult to engage properly with them. Similarly, people will have difficulty engaging with you if you overstep your boundaries.
Is there always someone who pushes your buttons, whether they’re family members, friends or work colleagues? Equally, you might find that people are also irritated by the way you interact with them sometimes. It’s important that we each take responsibility for our own behaviour.
When you lose your temper, you may feel like lashing out, and this leads to a situation that could have been avoided. As humans, we all have our days when we are irritated by every little thing, but it is important to remain in control of our actions as we can ruin our relationships by doing and saying things that we regret in the heat of the moment.
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The first way to help keep your relationships healthy and happy is to establish healthy boundaries. These boundaries should help yourself and others know when you need to pull your head in, as the saying goes, or when you are overstepping the mark to a point that it could interfere with someone’s life, hurt their feelings and even lead to you being hurt in return.
Second, you need to realise that we will make mistakes and most likely you will hurt people’s feeling at some point in your life. It is therefore important to take a mental note and learn from your mistakes. An example may be when you jokingly say something that you find funny but it unintentionally offends someone else. You can learn from this and not do it again.
Third, it’s important to respect the other person’s feelings. Respect is one of the most important factors in a healthy relationship: if one of you doesn’t respect the other, it can lead to all sorts of arguments and to one of the people involved feeling hurt. The best way to make sure you are being respected is to make sure you are heard and that you engage with people who value your opinion. It is disrespectful if someone makes fun of you, even as a joke if it’s too often. It is disrespectful to put other people down. An example of this would be in a group of friends where one person is always looked at as the “dummy” and joked about. That is not friendship and makes for a bad relationship.
It is also important when it comes to your personal boundaries to remember that you need to keep a balance between family, friends and work colleagues. We cannot ever keep everyone happy and, if we try, we may find that we sacrifice our own happiness and become lost in the process. So investigate if the people you interact with show you the same thoughtfulness and respect that you show them and, if they don’t, then perhaps some new, healthy boundaries need to be put into the relationship.
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It’s often difficult to face reality when it comes to other people and how they feature in our lives. However, if we turn a blind eye to boundaries and invade those of others, or let them invade ours, relationships becomes enmeshed in unhealthy ways to the point where we often lose ourselves and don’t know what we really want in our lives. Healthy boundaries provide us with the independence we need to lead happy, fulfilled lives making our own decisions and holding ourselves accountable for them.
If you have trouble with your boundaries being invaded, or you know that you become overbearing sometimes and over the top, help is at hand. Go to see a therapist who can help you change your patterns. They could be a counsellor, an NLP practitioner, a hypnotherapist or someone similar who will help you learn to be firm, handle your stress and become the person you want to be.
