Healthy Boundaries = FREEDOM!

Have you ever felt trapped by your own inability to say "no"? In this powerful conversation with boundaries coach Barb Nangle, we explore how setting healthy limits can transform your life from constant people-pleasing to genuine freedom.

Barb shares her remarkable personal journey that began when she invited a homeless man to stay in her home during a snowstorm – a seemingly kind gesture that quickly spiraled into feeling trapped in her own space. This crisis point led her to discover 12-step recovery programs and the profound concept of "reparenting" herself. As she explains, many of us grew up in environments where dysfunction was normalized, leaving us without models for healthy boundaries.

The conversation delves into practical strategies for developing an "inner loving parent" to counter the harsh inner critic most of us carry within. Barb introduces the transformative concept of "info, not ammo" – using self-knowledge as information for growth rather than ammunition for self-criticism. This shift from judgment to curiosity creates space for genuine healing and empowerment.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is the honest examination of how uncomfortable boundary-setting can feel initially. Many people describe feeling like they might "die" when first establishing limits, especially if they've spent a lifetime in enmeshed relationships. Yet as Barb powerfully states, "Choose your difficult – do you want difficulties to last forever and get worse over time, or do you want to go through a very difficult time for a brief period and then have healing on the other side?"

Whether you struggle with people-pleasing, feel responsible for everyone's happiness, or simply want more freedom in your relationships, this conversation offers practical wisdom for building the boundaries that will transform your life. Subscribe now and discover how emotional intelligence can become your greatest asset and key to success.

Barb's links:

Free Boundary-Building Starter Kit: boundariesstarterkit.com 

podcast: fragmentedtowhole.com 

https://higherpowercc.com 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbnangle/ 

https://www.instagram.com/higherpowercoaching/ https://www.youtube.com/@higherpowercoaching https://www.facebook.com/HigherPowerCoaching

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Reparenting and Inner Critics
• 2:01 Barb's Journey to Recovery
• 6:05 Breaking Free from Victim Mentality
• 10:01 The Boundary Building Process
• 18:20 Setting Boundaries and Finding Freedom
• 36:51 Final Thoughts on Enforcing Boundaries

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

So it could be that you had super dysfunctional parenting. It could be also that you had decent parenting, but there was some dysfunction here and there. Sometimes the dysfunction doesn't come from the actual parents. Sometimes it comes from other environments or a little bit later in childhood, maybe a school experience or something like that, but frequently it's intergenerational family dysfunction, and so and this is not about blaming our parents, this is like our parents did the best they could.

Speaker 1: 0:29

And also, just because you grew up in dysfunction doesn't mean your parents don't love you, so you can be in a loving home and suffer intergenerational family dysfunction and relational trauma, which is the kind of trauma that I'm talking about, which is different than like blunt trauma of being like attacked or in a hurricane or something like that. So reparenting yourself is it's a really wide continuum of behaviors, but it's most basic. It's that you're good and loving and kind to yourself, because most of us have this internal critic that just rakes us over the coals.

Speaker 2: 1:16

Welcome to the podcast Emotional Intelligence your greatest asset and key to success. I'm your host, dr Jamie Carlaccio, coming to you from the Greater New Haven, connecticut area, as an emotional intelligence or EQ coach. I'm committed to helping people develop both emotional intelligence and mental fitness. That is, you'll come to regard problems as situations that help you learn and grow. Eq is a way of being and doing in the world that enables you to develop and sustain. Eq is a way of being and doing in the world that enables you to develop and sustain a positive relationship with yourself and others, at home, at work and everywhere in between. Please subscribe to this podcast and tap the like button so more people can enjoy the benefits of EQ. And now here's the show.

Speaker 3: 2:02

Hello and welcome everybody to the podcast Emotional Intelligence your Greatest Asset and Key to Success. I am extremely thrilled today because I have with me a boundaries coach. We are going to talk about boundaries and the woman you are going to hear from today is Barb Nangle. Hi Barb, hi Jamie, so good to see you. It's good to see you.

Speaker 1: 2:26

It's been a minute, yeah, and it's really a pleasure to be on a call with somebody that I actually know because many podcasts I'm on, I've never met them before.

Speaker 3: 2:37

So actually, you know, that's true, I have not met a lot of my guests face to face, but I feel like I know them. Yeah, absolutely yeah. You know, after pre podcast and and just kind of talking about things that we have in common, I actually forget sometimes that I haven't actually met them in person, unless I know they live in another country. Yeah, yeah, so for our guests who are not familiar with you, let me tell them a little bit about you, okay? So Barb Nangle is a boundaries coach, she is a speaker and she is the host of the podcast fragmented to whole life lessons from 12 step recovery, and she offers a free boundary building starter kit, and that information will be in the show notes. So be able to grab that. So, barb, at the age of 2015,. Excuse me, you're not that old, are you?

Speaker 3: 3:34

Not quite In 2015, at the age of 52, after decades of therapy and tons of self-help work in a variety of areas, barb got into 12-step recovery, and she has been in two such fellowships since then, and she has changed deeply and profoundly as a result. As a former addict and people-pleasing rescuer, I just think that's an amazing phrase, and people may want to take a moment to savor that, because I think a lot of us are people pleasers. So, as a former addict and people pleasing rescuer, she empowers people to thrive and to take more control over their professional and personal lives by coaching them to build healthy boundaries. She works with organizations in the helping professions, as well as with women entrepreneurs to avoid burnout and reduce turnover. Her specialty is working with professional women who say yes when they really want to say no and who are so focused on others that they neglect themselves, and she's coached hundreds of people using her boundary building system.

Speaker 3: 4:48

That's a lot. Yeah, yeah, it's quite so. It is a story. So actually, let's get right into the story. I know a little bit about it, but I know our listeners don't. So the first thing I want to know is what? What kind of was the straw that broke the camel's back? Or the catalyst that said something has to change in my life. This can't go on.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Yeah, I befriended a homeless man named Dan from my church right at the same time that I had started volunteering to serve on a project serving homeless people and I had felt like he was like a gift from God to help me get to know homeless people in a really personal way and that so I would be serving like homeless people, not like the homeless and I, and he actually was really helpful and we became really friendly. And two, three months into our friendship, it was a really bad snowstorm here in New Haven, connecticut, and I invited him to stay at my home instead of a homeless shelter, which I now know is not normal behavior and he did. And then he stayed another time and another and within a few weeks he was practically living with me and I soon felt trapped in my own home. So he was a self-proclaimed addict and alcoholic. I now think, on reflection, he may have also had a personality disorder. And this guy messed with my head in a way I had never experienced before and I was talking about him one day in therapy and in the middle of a sentence, jamie, I went oh my God, do you think I need to go to Al-Anon? And my therapist said yes. So, whatever, I plugged into Google looking for Al-Anon, the word codependent came up and I was like, wait a minute. I've literally been in therapy since I was 15. I've read a gajillion self-help books. Never heard this word. How is this possible? So I started going to Codependence.

Speaker 1: 6:33

Anonymous very quickly felt a sense of relief in knowing there's this. It's almost like a syndrome about me. If there was a recovery program, there's other people like me and I soon said to somebody I think I need to be reparented. But I didn't know that reparenting was an actual thing. And a few weeks into my CODA recovery I went to Cape Cod to visit some friends. One of whom had been in AA for many Alcoholics Anonymous for many years and she had always just raved about how dramatically her life was, was revolutionized and I was like you're gonna love it, I'm going to codependence anonymous. And she was like, well, let's see if we can find a meeting while you're here and we'll go together.

Speaker 1: 7:16

And she couldn't. But she found a CA meeting which I knew of as a CEO, a adult children of alcoholics. I now know it's actually adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. I think if I heard the and dysfunctional families, I might have thought that I qualified. But I went to the meeting for her, not for me, because her dad's an alcoholic. And I walk in and in the opening readings they say we reparent ourselves. And I was like what. And then they read the 14 traits of an adult child and my friend Heidi tells me I sobbed the whole meeting. I don't remember that.

Speaker 1: 7:52

But I bought the literature. I came home to New Haven, connecticut, I started going to TA and I was like this is literally what I've been looking for my whole life. I soon found out that it's a trauma recovery program where you reparent yourself and you use the 12 steps to recover. I didn't know that I had trauma. I now know that I have relational trauma and I just was really just rapidly getting amazing recovery. I was seeing recovery around me in the rooms with the other people in the meeting. I was reading about amazing recovery.

Speaker 1: 8:24

So that went on for about a year and I decided to let go of CODA because it just wasn't as good of a fit. And that turned out to be a like a higher powered moment, because one of the women that I was doing the 12 steps with and ACA had started sharing about her relationship with food, especially sugar, and that she started going to Overeaters Anonymous and she invited me to go and I was like, oh my God, I'm a compulsive overeater, which I didn't know was a thing, and so I joined that program. I'm now down over 100 pounds for my top weight and my like drastic change in my life has been just astonishing the way that I talk about it, jamie, is that, like all of that work I did before, recovery sort of scratched the surface of the iceberg of my life and recovery melted the iceberg of my life. And I think that partly it's because the 12 steps are such an amazing technology and I also think because of the trauma of recovery.

Speaker 1: 9:22

You know of the trauma of recovery, you know it's been just so profound and I think of my core wound as codependence and boundaries are essentially the antidote to codependence. So I learned to build boundaries through this sort of meandering, haphazard path in 12 step recovery, and so for me, learning to build boundaries just had a just really far reaching impact. They do, boundaries do permeate every area of our life. So that's part of it, but I think also because of the core wound of codependence. And then what happened for me was after I got a hold on oh, yeah, we should maybe slow down just a little bit.

Speaker 3: 10:02

Just because you said a lot in there, ok, sure, and maybe just take a moment to unpack some of that. Okay, sure, okay, yeah, because you mentioned therapy, you mentioned trauma, you mentioned reparenting and you mentioned other 12 step programs. And so for people who are saying, well, I've been to therapy, why do I need a 12 step program? Or I don't know what reparenting means, how can I parent myself? I mean, there's a lot going on in there. So just to pull one little piece out of that, when you talk about reparenting, first of all, that would assume that the parenting you got wasn't good or wasn't enough or was so dysfunctional hence the name for ACA Alcoholic Adult, children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families. So why would anybody need to be reparented and how can somebody reparent themselves? We will get to the boundary thing in a minute, yeah, sure.

Speaker 1: 11:02

So it could be that you had super dysfunctional parenting. It could be also that you had decent parenting, but there was some dysfunction here and there. Sometimes the dysfunction doesn't come from the actual parents. Sometimes it comes from other environments or, a little bit later in childhood, maybe a school experience or something like that. But frequently it's intergenerational family dysfunction and so and this is not about blaming our parents this is like parents did the best they could. And also, just because you grew up in dysfunction doesn't mean your parents don't love you. So you can be in a loving home and suffer intergenerational family dysfunction and relational trauma, which is the kind of trauma that I'm talking about, which is different than like blunt trauma of being like attacked or in a hurricane or something like that.

Speaker 1: 11:54

So reparenting yourself is it's a really wide continuum of behaviors, but it's most basic it's that you're good and loving and kind to yourself, because most of us have this internal critic that just rakes us over the coals. We in ACA call it our inner critical parent. When I first got into the program, that title didn't really resonate with me. I more resonated with the idea from OA, which is I have a disease, my disease wants me dead, and if it can't it will just settle for me suffering. So it tells me things.

Speaker 1: 12:31

Over the last couple of years I've really grasped a hold of this critical inner parent concept. But so at its most basic, you challenge yourself. When you say negative things to yourself, you turn those things around and you say good and kind things to yourself and on the other end of the continuum of reparenting it can mean that you develop this whole in your imagination. You develop this whole inner cast of characters. So we recommend in ACA that people cultivate an inner loving parent. So a lot of people are like well, if I didn't have loving parents, how can I possibly know how to parent myself? So I'll give you some examples from some of my friends in ACA. So one of my friends has chosen Big Bird and Mr Rogers as her parents, those are wonderful parents, right?

Speaker 1: 13:24

So she knows how Mr Rogers and Big Bird would talk to her. She personally doesn't know how to be a loving parent, but she's like oh well, here's the kind of things Mr Rogers and Big Bird would say. Well, I have another friend in recovery who grew up in a very violent home. Another friend in recovery who grew up in a very violent home.

Speaker 1: 13:45

His inner loving parent is Jed Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies, if people are like my age and he needed Jed Clampett because Jed Clampett has a shotgun and he needs an inner loving parent with a shotgun because he grew up in a violent home. There were a lot of like knives and stuff in his home and he felt like a shotgun is way better than a knife. So it's whatever you need to like love yourself in the ways you wanted, needed and deserved to be loved. That weren't, you weren't fully loved. And so the other thing, like I would say at minimum, is not just an inner loving parent, but you connect with your inner child and everybody has one. You may or may not be aware of it. I was not aware of it, and then at first I was like I'm aware I have an inner child and that's where it stops. But the way that I was first taught to connect with my inner child is through non-dominant handwriting. So I'm right-handed, my dominant hand is my right hand, so I would write to my inner child with my right hand and then I would use my left hand and maybe even a crayon, my non dominant hand to write back. And there's something about that process that allows us to tap into our inner child. Now, I don't know how it works, but I also don't know how electricity works, but I know that it does. So I learned to do that and I would say you know, over the first seven or eight years in ACA that I did that maybe 10, 12 times, mostly when something really bad was happening or when I was in an ACA workshop and I was astonished at, like, the stuff that came out, that it's like I'm me and there's a part of me that was holding on to this information that only got revealed. The last couple of years I have really made consistent, conscious contact with my inner child without there needing to be something wrong, and I have built a relationship and now it's like she's and I actually have multiple inner children. They're all me now and I have a full blown relationship like an inner family.

Speaker 1: 15:49

And you know, I was talking to a friend the other day about this and there are some people who may think this is crazy and you go ahead and think that it is ridiculously healing for me. I cannot express how deep the healing has been for me. So your reparenting journey could be. You just stop raking yourself over the coals and you start treating yourself kindly and say good and kind things to yourself, and it can be all the way up to developing this entire inner cast of characters and having interactions and, like one of the things I've done, that's been super healthy, is and super healing is.

Speaker 1: 16:27

I had several incidents as a child that were very traumatizing to me and I brought my inner loving parent with me in some cases to explain what was going on, because a big part of my trauma is I never knew what was going on, like emotionally, psychologically, factually, and so she explained things. I also had her like step in for me and like block what was going to happen and stop it and like take care of me and pick me up and nurture me and it does something like I literally feel like my DNA has changed from doing that.

Speaker 3: 17:09

That makes a lot of sense actually, and and there's definitely research on there about changing your DNA. But I want to step back just a little bit Because in talking about the inner critical parent versus the inner loving parent, you know, as an emotional intelligence coach and a positive intelligence coach, I talk about this a lot. The judge and my judges the size of the Lincoln Memorial, but the judges is often that inner critical parent, or that inner critical voice that we hear, because I call it a ventriloquist, because it has my voice.

Speaker 1: 17:44

Oh, that's a good one. I love that.

Speaker 3: 17:47

And so I think of it as so.

Speaker 3: 17:49

I used to believe it's lies, because it was my voice when I finally realized that was just a judge and that I could tell the judge to be quiet, and I learned to reframe or say oh, that's just my judge talking, that's actually not me and it's actually not true. And when you can change the judge out for, or at least bring in, the loving parent to be the loving voice, the truth is the love, the lie is the criticism, the lie is the denigration and the cutting down, and so I really like that you brought that up, because when we talk about emotional intelligence, the first thing we learn is how do we replace the saboteurs that are dogging our every step? And we'll get to the people pleasing one in a minute. But the judge, this, the, the avoider, the, the people pleaser, the hyper vigilant, the hyper rational left, the controller right, all of those kind of step in at any one moment to sabotage our lives, and we I consider you and I in the same group here are incredibly lucky to have found the kind of recovery that wasn't available to our parents or they didn't have access to it, they didn't hear about it.

Speaker 3: 19:12

But one of the key points about a parent, a loving parent and a loving higher self, you know, if we want to bring a higher power into it and a loving higher self. You know, if we want to bring a higher power into it and a higher self is empathy. Yeah, right, it's that. Hey, you're okay, yeah, you're okay.

Speaker 1: 19:29

I love you, yeah, yeah and yeah, and compassion, yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think you know one of the phrases I learned really early in recovery that helped me to build a bridge from self-judgment to compassion was this phrase info, not ammo. So when I learn things about myself, it's information for me to learn, integrate and grow from. It's not ammunition to beat myself up. So what what I'm talking about is curiosity. So I love curiosity. Curiosity it's neutral and that helps you build that bridge from from judgment to compassion.

Speaker 1: 20:07

And I always thought I like myself, I have high self esteem, and when I got in recovery I was like, oh my God, I'm literally like scanning the horizon all times looking for reasons to beat myself up, but I didn't even know it Right. So when I heard this info not ammo, I really internalize that I'm like, okay, this is info, not ammo. And so for me, what am I going to do? Like, typically, it's what can I do differently. You know, rather than why am I such a piece of crap? But because when you ask a crappy question like that, you're gonna get a crappy answer. But if you ask what could I do differently, you start realizing wait, I have options. So you come out of victim mentality, you stop victimizing yourself, yes, and when you realize I have choices by asking what could I do differently, then you start to actually see choices, that you have options and you can make different decisions.

Speaker 3: 21:08

Yes, okay, so info, not ammo I love that and I hadn't heard that, but I'm keeping it.

Speaker 3: 21:14

And the second thing is, since you mentioned victim, I want to say a word about that, and that is that one of our saboteurs is a victim, and as soon as you're a victim, you're powerless. Yes, you know you have no agency. But if you can say, like you were saying, I'm not a victim here, this is just information, and how can I do it differently next time? Or what did I learn from this that I can take away? Or what, what area did I just grow in? Where did my opportunity for growth just come in?

Speaker 1: 21:43

Yeah, yeah, and I will say, jamie, that for me personally, the biggest paradigm shift of recovery was coming out of victim mentality and I am not the quintessential victim, I'm not the like.

Speaker 1: 21:55

Woe is me, the world is against me. I can never win my victim mentality way more so. So mine was like, well, if only he would fill in the blank, then everything would be okay. And I first saw that when I did my relationship inventory in ACA and I saw literally every man I ever dated. I thought, if he would just so. I started to see like, oh, this is me acting like I have no influence on the status of any of my relationships. Well then I started to see, oh, it's also true at work, in my family, with my friends, basically everywhere. And I think I have I think it's nine episodes about victim mentality, because literally every time another layer comes off, I do another episode about it. And what's interesting is, since you're a PQ coach, I also do PQ and I have a zero score on my victim saboteur. Like that is how far I have come. It's the only one I have zero on, by the way.

Speaker 3: 22:54

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Yeah, my my top score. I think People Pleaser was one of my top scores, and Avoider was up there too, because one of my survival strategies was to avoid conflict, and so I had to learn how to avoid. But, as you know, and for those of you listening or watching when you are always walking on eggshells or looking for where the next landmine is, you learn how to be a good conflict avoider. You learn how to be a good people pleaser. You learn how to be hypervigilant, and those served us. They did help us survive.

Speaker 1: 23:37

Right, we're alive, so we know they worked.

Speaker 3: 23:39

Yes, but now we don't need them, and so now I call them paper tigers. It's like when you see a tiger, our brain wants to say real tiger, run, get out of here and do something.

Speaker 3: 23:52

But if it's a paper tiger, you can say oh, thank you for helping me, you've really gotten me this far, but I don't need that anymore. I'm empowered, I have a self-determination, I'm a good person just because of who I am. I don't have to do anything special. I don't have to open my home to an unhoused person, I don't have to run every church bazaar event and I don't have to be a philanthropist and open up orphanages in developing countries. Mm-hmm, yeah. So in that light, with regard to, say, boundaries, now you came to a place where you said, okay, wow, people pleasing and this going all out for other people, without even realizing what you were doing. What made you get into boundaries coaching?

Speaker 1: 24:53

what made you get into boundaries coaching. So I was working full time at Yale University when I got in recovery and about two and a half years into recovery I got laid off and just by a series of serendipitous events I found my way into the world of entrepreneurship, startups and innovation at Yale and New Haven, started my own coaching and consulting business. I started my podcast actually very quickly because I was like there's all this wisdom and recovery I want to get it out. There Never occurred to me it would have anything to do with my business. It's now the number one way that I get clients. So I'm just sort of generally coaching in the beginning and then, as I got to know more about entrepreneurship, I realized you have to have a niche of some kind. And it just made sense for me to be a boundaries coach because I was really good at helping, like my fellows in recovery and like every client I ever had needed help with boundaries.

Speaker 1: 25:39

And other thing, jamie, is that like once I got a handle on boundaries because again I learned boundaries there's like a haphazard, meandering path in recovery I decided to go and read about boundaries and I retroactively understood oh, this is what was going on both before and in the building process and while I was doing the readings, I would do these visual drawings to like visually depict the principles around boundaries, because I'm a pretty visual person.

Speaker 1: 26:06

Well, those drawings turned into handouts, which turned into a workbook which is the backbone of my boundaries coaching program and I just over time, just created, you know I have this multimedia curriculum on boundaries and there's 12 modules and it's based on my understanding of the principles like that I retroactively understood, of the principles like that I retroactively understood and it just. And the other thing is that because boundaries permeate every single area of your life, like learning to build healthy boundaries can clean up so much in your life, and then also because of my core wound of codependence and the you know to me boundaries being the antidote to that it just for all these reasons it really made a lot of sense for me to be a boundaries coach.

Speaker 3: 26:57

That does make a lot of sense, and I can say that you and I have known each other for several years and I have always respected your boundaries, I've respected the fact that you have them, and I say that because when I was growing up, I didn't have any boundaries because it wasn't safe to have a boundary, and so I never knew what. Where I ended and somebody else began, I often would let people walk all over me because I didn't know how not to and I didn't know that it was safe to do that, and I also felt this was my, my kind of my sixth thinking, if you will, my unhealthy thinking, was well, if I, if I just say yes, you'll like me. If I just say okay, if I just go along with it, versus, this isn't good for me, this doesn't serve my higher self, or maybe it doesn't even serve your higher self or your highest good, and I can say no and still be okay.

Speaker 1: 27:59

Yeah, yeah, but it's quite the journey to get there because, when I started building boundaries first of all I didn't even know that was what I was doing, but the like not even saying no. First of all, I didn't even know that was what I was doing, but the like not even saying no, thinking of saying no, made me feel literally like I was going to die, like my, my life was under threat. So that is not uncommon for people and it's because, if we've grown up and matched the idea of unenmashing feels like death, because it is the death. It's the death of an identity which is I'm you and you're me. And so for me, I think I don't think I understood until a couple years later how important being in that 12 step group with other women was in terms of me being able to build boundaries, because I needed their support and their affirmation. I needed them to say things like you are not a bad person, barb, you deserve to do this, you know, this is the right thing to do. They also said things like keep your hands away from the keyboard, like don't respond to that email, and also I don't know if you really want to say it like that, barb, you know, or that might have been a little bit too harsh.

Speaker 1: 29:14

And speaking of which, the first time I don't remember what it was, but the first time that I remember knowing like this is me setting a boundary. This was me. Wham, ooh, way too harsh. Now, jamie, if I had known that that was going to be way too harsh, that's not the boundary that I would have set, but I didn't know because I had never done it before. And so, yeah, we have to, we have to experiment when it comes to boundaries, because you don't know what your limits are, because you've never had them before. And so it's a journey. And this is why info, not ammo, is so important, because can you imagine if I was like wham, too harsh? Oh my God, I'm riddled with guilt and shame. I'm a horrible person. I'm never going to set boundaries again. Where would I be? I'd probably be dead by now. To be perfectly honest with guilt and shame, I'm a horrible person. I'm never going to set boundaries again. Where would I be? I'd probably be dead by now.

Speaker 1: 29:52

To be perfectly honest with you, with drugs, alcohol, food, people that I was hanging out with I mean, I wouldn't be surprised I definitely would not be the happy, joyous and free person that I am carrying the message of recovery to those who still suffer, for sure.

Speaker 3: 30:06

Right and just I want to say a little more about about the harsh boundary at first, and the info versus ammo thing, because like you said, when we're experimenting with a new are and they're different for every interaction yes, and instance and person yeah, so you're going to have a different boundary with your significant other than you are with a parent or a sibling, or a friend or a co worker, or even the person you just bought your coffee from Right, right, yes. Or even the person.

Speaker 1: 30:50

You just bought your coffee from right. Right, yes, absolutely, absolutely. And you know, one of the things that the women in my step group we started doing when we whether it was setting boundaries or some other new behavior where we felt like we were going to die, we would literally say to ourselves and I didn't die, and I didn't die. And we would say it over and over again and we kind of got jokey about it. It was like we're serious, like I didn't die, and we would say it over and over again and we kind of got jokey about it. But it was like we're serious, like I didn't know. It was almost like I needed my intellectual brain to keep hearing that so that it could get dumped into my lizard brain and be like look, we've had dozens of experiences where we felt like we were going to die and we didn't.

Speaker 1: 31:25

So we're going to keep doing this. And then eventually I stopped feeling like I was going to die. And every once in a while now I might get like a little sort of trickle of a difficult feeling, but it's not this giant flood of like guilt and shame, that, or feeling like I was going to die that I used to, and it just happens over time. And the way that I think of it is, you know, if you never set boundaries, your life is going to just get more and more and more and more difficult as time goes on. If you start setting boundaries, you are going to go through a difficult time, but that difficult time is finite and there's healing on the other side of it. So choose your difficult. Do you want difficult to last forever and get worse over time, or do you want to go through a very difficult time for a brief period of time in terms of the you know the the lifetime of your life, and then have healing on the other side, like picked your poison which one?

Speaker 3: 32:21

Right, right, and you know I just thinking as you've been talking. What's been going through my mind is that when we do something new and different than we've ever done before, it feels weird, it feels awkward, it may feel wrong that doesn't mean it is wrong but it's like putting on brand new clothes. Or you've decided to start wearing oranges and greens and you've always worn browns and beiges. It's going to look weird, it's going to feel weird, the fabric doesn't feel right, but you try it on, wear it around a little bit and adjust as necessary, but don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Speaker 1: 33:01

Right, you know. You just reminded me of something years ago Somebody I met in recovery said which is analogous to yours. She said it was like I was wearing my shoes on the wrong feet my entire life and when I switched them it felt weird at first, right, and when I got used to it it was like wait a minute, this is what, and it's the same thing with boundaries or other healthy behaviors.

Speaker 1: 33:27

We've never done it. We're like this is weird and awkward and then, as we kind of settle into, the new shoes were the same shoes on the right feet. It's like, wait a minute, I could have had life like this my whole life. Like this was an option to put on the other feet and I love that metaphor. I forgot all about it. I'm so glad you said that about the clothes that metaphor I forgot all about it.

Speaker 3: 33:50

I'm so glad you said that about the clothes and you know what. What I think is really awesome is that when you've lived in a dysfunction or you lived where your life was like a minefield and you didn't even know where the mines were hidden, to have some relief with regard to that is absolutely priceless. Oh, it's inescapable. It's a relief, but you know, and it's sort of like a drug. When we're used to taking in a drug, whether it's caffeine or nicotine or something more serious, you know, like abusing alcohol or an opioid or methamphetamine alcohol, or an opioid or methamphetamine, when you stop giving that thing to your body that it is so used to having, it's going to say wait a second, you're not giving me this thing I'm used to, and that's a withdrawal.

Speaker 3: 34:43

And some withdrawals they're all weird and they don't feel good. Some obviously you have to go through if you're trying to get out of chemical dependency or alcohol dependency. But some of the withdrawals are withdrawals from those negative behaviors or those unhealthy behaviors.

Speaker 1: 34:59

Yeah, yeah, In ACA we call that the inner drug store and yes, we want to trade the inner drugs of like cortisol and adrenaline for things like, and adrenaline for things like serotonin and melatonin and stuff. So we want, like we can still tap into the good inner drugstore by doing things that are soothing and calming to us, rather than things that you know that get us into fight or flight mode, which is where I spent most of my life.

Speaker 3: 35:26

Sure, I did too. So so, just as just a corollary to that, because when we start developing a little bit of tolerance for some of the withdrawal from the unhealthy release of chemicals in our system, we can start to say, oh, it's okay that I feel kind of not on edge, kind of kind of, you know, not on edge. It's okay that I don't feel excited. This is actually okay Not. Oh, my gosh, how come I'm feeling this way? It's like, oh, this might actually be okay. Yeah, and if you are having a day, if you're having a day where things aren't going the way you thought they were going to go, or you were disappointed or you're sad, that's normal and okay too. We are not always going to be up and we are not always going to be down.

Speaker 1: 36:18

Right, I mean, that's just the nature of life up and down.

Speaker 3: 36:21

Yeah, yeah, you know, it depends even on what time. Did you wake up? Did you get enough sleep? Did you have breakfast? Did you exercise? Did you do something for yourself today? Did you give yourself permission to do something for yourself? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a word, barb, and it's the title of the song I'm going to play.

Speaker 1: 36:48

Okay.

Speaker 3: 36:49

Yes, and I'm not even going to say what it is, I'm just going to share my screen. Okay, so that was freedom from George Michael, and that is that's. That's the reward. That's the reward, right, when you have boundaries and when you know yourself and you can love yourself or even just like yourself. Start with just accepting and liking.

Speaker 1: 37:32

Yeah, you can love yourself or even just like yourself. Start with just accepting and liking. Yeah, and I think you know I've thought of recovery. The greatest gift of recovery is freedom of choice and for me, the greatest freedom of the freedoms of choice is the freedom to choose what to think, and especially about myself. And learning how to build healthy boundaries is actually about learning like what are the choices I want to make, how do I want to live my life? And then what are the boundaries or the choices I make in my life to get that kind of a life? And then what am I going to do if other people don't sort of come along with me on the ride?

Speaker 1: 38:05

Because sometimes people are not going to be okay with your boundaries, and that's so. The number one question I get is how do I deal with the guilt and shame? And the number two question I get is what do I do when people push back on my boundaries and you can't? You do learn to do that as you build boundaries. And then part of the skill development of boundary building is learning like what are the consequences you're going to implement if someone doesn't honor your boundaries, because it's up to you. If they don't honor your boundaries. They're your boundaries, not theirs. Right, you are the one that is in charge of doing something about it.

Speaker 3: 38:58

Yeah, yeah, right, you are the one that is in charge of doing something about it. Yeah, and that reminds me oftentimes, when I maybe set a boundary or whatever, I have to remember that just because somebody else doesn't like the boundary doesn't mean there's something wrong with me, right?

Speaker 1: 39:07

Right.

Speaker 3: 39:07

Maybe that they've got a situation where they're not able to handle boundaries.

Speaker 1: 39:13

Yeah, yeah, I mean I remind people. There's a whole host of reasons that people don't honor your boundaries. It could be they forgot because you never did it before. It could be they don't believe you because you never did it before. It could be because they have really poor boundaries and it's almost impossible impossible for them to respect other people's boundaries, which means it's even more important for you to enforce your boundaries because they can't Right right, right.

Speaker 3: 39:39

And on that note, we cannot expect other people to take care of our boundaries for us.

Speaker 1: 39:47

Right, exactly, yes, you're in charge of your boundaries, they're not. So if you say to someone, hey, please don't put that there, and they keep putting it there and you do nothing, it's not a boundary. But you know, the first intervention would be maybe you didn't hear me I asked you not to put it there, and if they keep putting it there, like you know, I'm not sure what's going on here, but I've asked you not to put that there and you keep putting it there. What's going on? And if they just don't do it, then what are you going to do? I'm just making this up. It's a table with keys, right, and you don't want them to put their keys on it. So then you move the table or you put a rack with a hook on it. I'm just making this up. This is not the best example, but you change your. You change something. You don't just let it go and then be mad at them because it's your boundary, not theirs, right?

Speaker 3: 40:39

Yeah Right, and that is a great place to end, barb. It has been a real pleasure to meet up with you again and Barb's information is in the show notes. My information is in the show notes. You want to learn more about emotional intelligence, positive intelligence, boundaries, how to say no and mean it and feel okay about it.

Speaker 1: 40:58

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 41:00

Yes, thank you and until next time, everybody, please don't forget to like and subscribe to this podcast, because the more people who like and subscribe to it, the more people will see it and hopefully benefit from it. Thank you so much, barb.

Speaker 1: 41:14

Thank you, jamie, enjoy the day.

Speaker 3: 41:16

Thank you, bye-bye.